As the students gathered their things and filed out, mingling in the little social groups they’d formed, Keisha and Petra did a quick scan of the room to make sure there weren’t any forgotten items. Then Petra closed and locked the door. As a perk for teaching a dance class at this fitness gym, they got to use the studio for their own work whenever it wasn’t booked for a class.
As Keisha worked full-time here as the training coordinator, she tried to schedule free time right after the class they taught together.
They worked on choreography for the class they co-taught and they worked on routines for themselves. Those routines they did for themselves were, for the most part, just play. Two trained dancers not quite good enough—or just not ‘right’ enough—to make a traditional career of it, but who loved to dance. They occasionally entered regional competitions, and when they did, they usually did well in them.
But mainly, they just danced.
Keisha had built a large following on TikTok—more than half a million followers, enough to start actually earning real money—making original dance vids, quite a few of which had started viral trends. She still did those once a week or so, but she got tired of her work getting stolen by others and going even more viral, so mainly she did tutorial vids these days.
Petra had all the usual social media accounts, of course, but she was a lurker. She’d danced in quite a few of Keisha’s viral vids, but she wouldn’t even let Keisha tag her. The thought of all those strangers finding her and pulling her into the TikTok drama waswaytoo much. Far too many people were terrible to each other on the internet. The thought of being a target terrified Petra. She got enough collateral damage watching Keisha deal with it.
Petra ran the bar’s Twitter and Instagram in the voice of Gertrude Stein, and in that way she’d developed a fairly healthy following on those accounts—from the relative safety of a long-dead author’s avatar.
“They’re such a great class,” Keisha said as Petra went up to the little instructor station, which was a rolling stack of laminate drawers in the corner with a surge suppressor attached to the back.
“They are. Amateurs are so much fun. No ego, just enthusiasm.”
Keisha grinned. “I like it. That should be our tagline or something.”
Grinning herself, Petra added a side-eye. “I don’t know. You and I have pretty healthy egos.”
“Yeah, but in comparison to most dancers? We’re angels.”
“True. Failure tends to be humbling.”
Keisha’s smile could best be described as patient. She didn’t like to think of their missed dreams as failures, but as ‘redirection.’ Petra was generally a bright-side thinker, too, but despite her best efforts, she still struggled with that one.
“Hey, you want to help me out with a routine I started on last night?” Keisha asked. “I think I want to do a vid on it.”
“Tutorial or performance?”
“Maybe performance first.”
“You know I’ll help you get it ready, but I don’t want to be in it.”
Keisha sighed. “It’s getting better, you know. The trolls are ... finding their level, I guess you’d say. And I don’t get plagiarized as often when I’m not dancing alone. It’s like they think I have witnesses or something. I don’t know.” She grinned again and hip-checked Petra. “Besides, when you do appear, half my comments are people wanting to know who the snack beside me is.”
“That is not a persuasive argument. I don’t need a new avalanche of dick pics, thanks.”
“Yeah, especially now that you’re on your love hiatus.” She said it like it was the title of a bizarro reboot ofThe Love Boat. “We all get weirdos from time to time, Pet. You gotta get back to it eventually. I know you don’t want to be alone for the rest of your life and turn into one of those ladies in that movie you made me watch.”
“Grey Gardensreally traumatized you, didn’t it?” Petra chuckled. Keisha had watched most of that movie either with her eyes covered or her mouth gaping, as if it were a horror flick and not a documentary.
“Rich white people are fucked up. All I’m sayin’. Don’t become one of them. And Brett wasn’t that bad, anyway. Just meant for ... somebody different than you.”
Brett, the last person Petra had dated with any seriousness, had in fact been a bitedgybut wasn’t a bad person. Nor was she really the cause of Petra deciding to take a break. If anything, Brett had been a last straw sort of thing. Petra had simply been tired of the whole circus.
But even Keisha name-checking Brett hadn’t brought her to Petra’s mind as much more than a shadow. Jake, on the other hand, swaggered right to the middle of her head.
Several days had passed since she’d brought him home. She wouldn’t say she was thinking about him nonstop, but definitely daily. He kept popping up in her thoughts at inopportune moments, usually as a vivid memory of some moment from that single night. Usually a particularly hot moment from that particularly hot night.
She’d never had a one-night stand quite like it. Surprisingly intense and emotional. Also a surprising lack of awkwardness, considering that they had essentially been strangers.
Still were strangers, really. But she knew where she could likely find him, and that thought kept popping up as well. She’d looked it up—the Brazen Bulls clubhouse had a Sinclair station right next door. It wasn’t in a neighborhood she’d go through in the normal course of her life, but it wasn’t much out of her way, either. If she wanted to find him, she could.
But he was too young for her. Nine years was a lot when he was still within sight of his adolescence. Even if that didn’t matter, it was obvious that they were simply too different to mesh well, and she’d had her fill of relationships like that.
Also, he’d left in the middle of the night, after she’d invited him to stay. That was a pretty good indication that he wouldn’t be pleased if she just showed up where he worked.