Chapter I: It Takes Two To Tango
“One, two, three… and one, two, three. With your other foot, Hannah.”
At the final pose, with no one to catch my waist and help me fall back, I just stood there, frozen.
I had grown used to seeing myself alone in the mirror.
As always.
When the music ended, the creak of the studio floor echoed under my feet.
I watched the instructors applaud us with a sullen face. “Wonderful. Keep working like this until Sunday. I can see in each of you the performance worthy of Pomerhead!”
I rubbed my temples.
Pomerhead was the most prestigious dance school in the world, and auditions were approaching.
Day after day, every minute, every second, I had been practicing so much that it felt as if the moves had memorized me rather than the other way around.
While everyone laughed with their partners and headed toward the locker rooms, I sat cross-legged on the floor.
“You go ahead, Leonardo. I’ll come later.”
Jasmine, one of the instructors, pouted her lips like me and sat down beside me.
We were alone in the studio.
“Do you want to go to Pomerhead, Amara?”
“Of course!” I said, incredulously. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Then you also know you need to find a partner by Sunday.”
I frowned. “Yes, like we’ve been talking about for a month,” I sighed.
“Amara, I’m really sorry. I wish I could have found someone suitable for you. But even the others you see here have known each other for years. They complete one another. That’s why they can so easily let their souls flow into the tango.”
I averted my eyes.
She placed her hand on my shoulder and rubbed it gently. “Look, after everything that happened, I know it took you a long time to come back to the dance floor.”
“I found just the right moment to return,” I said with a laugh to shake off the melancholy. “The competition is in a month, and the couples chosen from the club need to be ready by Sunday. I don’t even have a partner.”
“I don’t think your only problem is not having a partner, sweetheart. I know dance is your oxygen. I know how much you want to enter Pomerhead—that you’ve been working without sleep, without food, without rest. And believe me, you look perfect when you dance. But it’s as if your soul is somewhere else.”
“That bastard didn’t just fail to complete my soul, he shattered what I already had,” I murmured.
Since Kael had left me, I had abandoned the floor, only now beginning to return.
“Do you still miss him?”
I pursed my lips. A year. It was about to be a whole year.
“I don’t know. But it doesn’t feel like I’ve healed. Especially lately, since we’ve been running into each other every day. He moved into the apartment downstairs.”
She looked at me in shock. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Amara. That’s terrible news. He’s a complete bastard.”
I wiped away a tear with the back of my hand and laughed. “He even brought his stupid girlfriend with him. He shoves her in my face.”
“Classic Kael,” she sighed.
Since she had once watched us burn up the dance floor together, Jasmine was very familiar with the story.
“You told me we were the best couple,” I sighed.
His grip on my waist, the inevitable kiss at the end of every performance, the way he’d break from the choreography just for another chance to touch me…
It all flashed before my eyes.
“I was wrong,” she said softly. “He didn’t deserve you.”
As I stood up to collect my things from the locker room, she rose with me.
“The worst part is, the girl is cheating on him,” I said. “I felt sorry for him.”
She laughed in disbelief. “For God’s sake, Amara. How do you even know that?”
“Because Kael could never make anyone moan that loud.”
Once, I would have sold my soul just to be beneath him.
I hadn’t forgotten the nights I dreamed of the heat of his skin.
She covered her mouth with her hand and threw a towel at my head, and I burst into laughter with her.
“God, I forget how venomous your tongue can be.”
Before I entered the locker room, she called after me.
“Oh, and by the way, a friend said they’d be waiting for you outside. And they left you this.”
I stared at the box tied with a red ribbon she handed me.
For a fleeting moment, my thoughts of Kael were overshadowed.
“What’s inside?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t open it. It’s your gift, after all.”
Shaking my head, I stepped into the locker room.
Only then did I realize my phone had been buzzing nonstop.
I set the box aside, unlocked my locker, and rummaged through my bag for my phone.
“Who is this friend…?” I muttered.
