And even that rolled over me with a delicious sort of ripple. I tried to hide my smile as I moved off the wall. He watched me—supervised me, maybe—as I climbed into the expansive tub, sighed at the embrace of the hot water, then sank down into it.
“Stay there and soak,” he ordered me.
Then he strode from the bathroom, leaving me there to do just that.
The huge tub was set up on a dais, with a bank of windows splayed out before me, showing me Paris at night. I twisted my hair into an easy knot on the top of my head. I sank down as the water rose, letting it cover me to my chin. And I just...soaked.
As ordered.
I expected to start questioning myself. For the second-guessing to take me over, storming around and around inside me until it made me raw. I expected all the usual voices of doubt and worry to swamp me then and braced myself a little in anticipation.
Because it was one thing to fantasize about something and another to do it. I already knew that all too well. It was my life. Every little girl dreams of being a ballerina at one point or another. But the actua
l doing of it was something else entirely. Everybody wants the tutu. Everybody imagines themselves starring in Swan Lake.
Nobody wants the reality of practicing the same step over and over and over, day in and day out, ignoring your body screaming, your exhaustion, and all those same voices in your head forever telling you that you can’t make it. That you can’t do it. That no matter what, you’ll never get there. All that to be good enough in your local ballet school.
The reality was that being the best in your ballet school was still not necessarily good enough to make it into the corps, much less out of it to become a principal.
Fantasy was always en pointe, graceful and light like a sylph. Reality was the state of my feet, battered and ugly forever, and that kick of sharp agony every time I used them that told me who I was.
I turned off the water and sank deeper into the tub. I waited for my body to finish cataloging its reaction to what had happened, and for my emotions to catch up and wallop me. I waited for my heartbeat to tip me over into sheer horror at what I had not only allowed tonight, but encouraged. Enthusiastically.
I waited.
But it was as if his order to sit here, to do nothing but soak, and his earlier command to lose myself in what he told me to do...held me, somehow.
It wasn’t that I was numb or hiding from any feelings. I could feel all kinds of things. The silky, warm water against my skin. Every little tug here and sharpness there, each with its own story to tell.
What I didn’t feel was shame. Horror. Self-recrimination or disgust that I had crossed every line there was and, worse still, enjoyed it.
I had taken one of my deepest, most secret fantasies, made it real, and it wasn’t over yet.
And I had no urge to jump up and run. I could have, of course. There were panic buttons in every room, I’d been told. Should anything get out of hand, my intake counselor had told me what seemed like a thousand years ago when I’d rung that bell and set all this in motion. I looked around now and, sure enough, beneath the discreet panel of light switches beside the bathroom door, there was another button. It was big and shiny and glinted like steel. If I didn’t like what was happening, all I needed to do was get out of this tub, go over there and press it.
Nothing was keeping me from it. He had left me in this room all alone. I had nothing to do but consider each and every one of my options. Or even the fact I had some.
I wondered if he’d done it deliberately. I was used to the mind games of famous choreographers and my various ballet masters, who always insisted that we choose. In each and every moment, every step and every note of music, they demanded it. Choose to be here, one of our teachers liked to shout. Choose to be better than yesterday. Choose perfection.
Maybe he wanted me to keep choosing tonight, too.
I didn’t hear anything, but something in the air around me changed. I glanced over, and he stood there in the door, that blue gaze of his as intense as when he’d been deep inside me.
Again, the freedom of this felt heady. I was a little high on it, if I was honest, though I hadn’t touched anything but water since I’d arrived here. Because if he was any other lover, I might have asked him where he’d gone. What he’d done in the other room while I’d sat here, soaking. Why he’d left me in this room in the first place.
But he wasn’t my lover.
This was a different arrangement altogether. There was no reason to ask him a thing. He’d told me so himself. He would make sure I knew what he wanted. All I needed to do was what he told me to do. No thinking or worrying required.
So instead of interrogating him, I smiled. And said nothing.
“Give me a name,” he said.
I noticed he did not ask for my name. I considered. “You can give me one. Whatever you like.”
“If I wanted to give you a name, little dancer, I would.”
I didn’t know what it was about his voice that got to me, like a length of chain coiling inside me, wrapping itself around me and pulling tight. And all those tight links gleaming bright.