Total pages in book: 166
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
He kept staring, and I wished I could go back about thirty seconds and undo that confession. What was wrong with me? Just because he said I didn’t have to be in control all the time didn’t mean I needed to jump from zero to Mach one on the oversharing train.
“Did you know that I didn’t think about training today? Not once.” I blurted out the first thing that came to mind to change the subject.
“Allie—” He reached for my arm, but I sped up.
Foolish didn’t begin to cover how I was feeling. “Not once. I didn’t feel guilty about not working out, or not spending all day in the studio. It’s the most fun I’ve had in . . .” I laughed. “Probably since you used to drag me out and make me do fun things. I stopped doing fun things after you . . . it was just dancing after that, but hey, I’m a principal, so it worked out.”
“You can balance it, you know,” Hudson said, catching up as we reached the steps of our cabin. “You can be at the top of your game and still have a life. Still have days like this. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
“I don’t know how to do it any other way. But it’s a beautiful thought, balance.” It really was. I walked in ahead of him and immediately fumbled in the dark.
“Don’t move. I don’t want you to trip,” Hudson said, his hand skimming my lower back as he walked around me to his side of the bed. A couple clicks later, the lantern turned on. “There we go.” He turned and came straight back to me, his jaw ticking as he curved the brim of his hat.
What the heck did he have to be nervous about?
“I know you said you didn’t want me to respond—”
Kill me now. “Please don’t.”
“But I have to.” He cupped my face.
“You really don’t.” I glanced at the door, the wall, the ceiling, anywhere but at him.
“Look at me.” His thumbs stroked my cheeks. “Please, love.”
I somehow climbed out of a pit of mortification to meet his gaze.
“It was me.” He took a breath, and I held mine. “It was me, Allie. I was there.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Allie
OuchPouchhtr5: What a fucking liar. She’s not recovering. She’s done.
“You what?” I stepped back, and his hands hung midair for a few heartbeats before he lowered them.
“I was there,” he repeated slowly.
“No, you weren’t.” I grabbed onto the thick wooden rail of the footboard to steady myself.
He sat on the edge of the footboard and gripped the unfinished wood. “I was two rows from the back. Dead center. You saw me.”
My lips parted and my stomach fluttered straight out of my body. “I don’t understand.”
“I tried to buy the back row center seat, but I couldn’t get it. It must have gone within seconds when they put the tickets on sale.” He stared straight ahead at the closed cabin door. “I was so pissed when whoever bought it didn’t bother to show up. I saw your mom in the box with Anne, saw Eva in the corps, saw you—” His eyes drifted shut, and my nails bit into the footboard. “You were so beautiful.”
Breathe. I had to remember to breathe.
“I saw you fall to a knee at the end, a little more uncontrolled than I remembered it being when we were younger, but I didn’t question it until you screamed.” His head hung. “You screamed. The orchestra stopped. The whole place went silent when they carried you offstage. I climbed over every person in that row to get to the aisle, but they don’t exactly let ticket holders backstage to see one of the most famous dancers in the world, you know.”
“You were there?” A sweet, stinging ache threatened to crack my chest open, threatened to dig its way out of the decade I’d spent ignoring it, and expose an inconvenient and dangerous truth I wanted no part of. But I was so over being numb, over not allowing myself to feel anything but anger and sadness.
“I was there.” He looked up at me, tracking my movements with those gorgeous eyes as I slowly made my way to stand in front of him. “Of course I was there. You told me once that you needed me in the audience for that piece, remember?”
“Before the Classic,” I whispered. Mom had told me to pick something else because Lina had just been offered the role in the fall program for MBC and she didn’t want any comparisons made since members of the Company were there judging. I’d done it anyway, my first and only true act of defiance.
Hudson had snuck into the back row to watch so my mother wouldn’t see him. That part of the day was still crystal clear in my memory.