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Chapter Text

It’s two minutes to curtain on opening night of The Nutcracker, and Sloane is pretty sure there’s a bobby pin piercing her skull. 

She pries another pin open with her teeth and wiggles it into place around her costume’s floral headpiece, its metal tip digging into her scalp. Putting your hairpiece in wrong (and losing it onstage) is one of the cardinal sins of ballet; Sloane’s never had it happen before, and she’ll be damned if she breaks that streak tonight. She gives her head a firm shake to test it once the last pin is placed, then gives herself a quick nod of satisfaction in the mirror. If that thing falls out, it’s taking half of her hair with it. 

Her blond hair is already plastered to her head with hairspray and gel, but she gives it another coat of hairspray anyway to lock down the flyaways she tends to get around her temples and the nape of her neck. She shrugs into her company warmup jacket and grabs her insulated cup before leaving the dressing room and quietly opening the backstage door so she can slip into the wings to watch Act I.

The orchestra is just launching into the overture, and Sloane lets the sound of the violins wash over her as she eases the door closed behind her. Anyone who’s been doing ballet long enough has a love-hate relationship with The Nutcracker—it’s silly, the story is thin, and the score is so overplayed around the winter holidays that it’s almost impossible to escape—but the love part is strong tonight, the way it always is on night one. She picks her way through the Act I dancers waiting for their entrances and nods to Avalynn, who’s playing the Ballerina Doll tonight. They’ll be in Act II together, but not dancing the same part—this is the first year Sloane’s been given Lead Marzipan.

Sloane finds a space in the wings where she’s out of the way but can still see some of the stage, and takes a long sip of her pre-show tea. It’s ginger peach white tea, the expensive kind that comes loose leaf in a canister, the kind she only lets herself buy once a year and saves to drink before dress rehearsals and performances. (Liam teases her about it, her little ritual, but she also came into the kitchen this afternoon to find him steeping it for her, so.) She takes another sip before setting the spill-proof cup down and stepping into first position to start warming up again.

They always have ballet class onstage before performances, but that was a few hours ago now and it’s no substitute for warming up on her own. She starts with pliés, bending her knees slowly and then straightening, gently at first but then deep enough that her heels have to peel off the floor. The muscles in her legs burn just a little on the way back up, coming back to life, and she exhales slowly on a tendu to second position. She keeps time with the violins and flutes as she works through a quick barre sequence: pliés, tendus, dégagés, and ronds de jambe, all while focusing on the key components of her technique. Turning her legs out from the hip, supporting her arms with the muscles in her back, pulling up through her core while pushing down through her standing leg to create resistance and stability. 

Sloane takes a quick glance around to make sure she has room before she moves into développés, drawing one pointed foot up to her knee and then extending it out until her leg is straight, hovering in the air in front of her. She keeps it fairly low, nowhere near her full extension, but it’s enough to get the muscles firing in her inner thighs and her hip flexors. After a moment of stillness, she lowers it slowly to rest her pointed toes on the floor before closing back to fifth position and beginning another développé to the side. 

The unmistakable Nutcracker March has begun onstage, and as she lifts her leg into arabesque, Sloane glances through the closest wing to get a look at the action. The party children—all played by students at the company’s associated ballet academy—are dancing, with the girl dancing Clara at the center in her red satin party dress. It’s every little dancer’s dream to play Clara, and Sloane remembers doing it herself when she was in Level Three, wearing that same red dress and twirling under the hot stage lights, the audience’s eyes on her. 

This year, Clara is a girl named Julianne. Sloane doesn’t spend a lot of time with most of the students at Aretia Ballet Academy, but the general consensus among the company is that Julianne has been a dream to work with. She takes correction well, and even at the age of thirteen, she has the stage presence of a much older dancer—the ability to draw the audience in, an intangible quality that can’t always be taught. Her eyes are alight now, her face glowing, broadcasting Clara’s childish excitement even to the back of the house. It comes so naturally to her: as easy as breathing.

Sloane swallows, her mouth suddenly dry, and turns away.

She’s mostly warm now, so she swings one leg forward and back, then the other, to make sure her hips are open and loose. Then she cracks her neck to each side before she gives Avalynn a quick, encouraging smile and opens the stage door again to head back to the dressing room.

Naturally, she nearly hits Xaden in the face with the door as he comes up the hallway. 

He catches it as it swings open, leveling her with a dry look. “Ever heard of looking where you’re going?” 

Sloane rolls her eyes. “Have you? You know this door opens outward. That was your fault.”

Xaden pretends to be annoyed as he slowly closes the door to keep it from slamming. It’s the same look she gets from Liam when she unceremoniously pushes his textbooks off the coffee table to put her feet up, and she sees right through it, especially when he’s in the Sugar Plum Cavalier costume. He may be tall and cut like a statue, but knowing him as long as Sloane has makes it difficult to take him seriously when he’s wearing purple velvet.

Because of that, he can’t terrorize her like he does some of the other corps dancers, and he knows it, so he drops the matter. “You doing okay?” he asks, giving her a once-over. His gaze doesn’t linger anywhere, but Sloane knows what he’s asking, and irritation rises in her gut. “Liam said—”

“Liam is nosy and overprotective,” Sloane interrupts. “I’m fine.”

Xaden raises an unimpressed eyebrow, but his tone stays calm, even. “You can be honest with me.”

“And you can believe me when I talk,” Sloane says pointedly. “It’s Marzipan. It’s not like it’s Giselle or something.”

Xaden does his signature jaw clench at her deflection. “Sloane.”

“Xaden.”

She holds his stare until he shakes his head a little, exasperated, and then sighs. “Fine. At least I can tell Liam I tried.”

“And tell him to mind his own business while you’re at it.”

“You are his business.” The “and mine” goes unspoken, but Sloane hears it anyway for more than one reason. Even if he hadn’t been her foster brother after her parents died, which apparently gives him the right to harass her constantly over her wellbeing, she’s his business in a much more literal sense: Aretia Ballet Theatre was founded by the Riorson family generations ago. Everyone knows it’s going to be Xaden’s company someday, and with Sloane being considered for a promotion to soloist, she’s more than just a dancer right now. She’s a potential investment.

Sloane tightens her fingers around her cup just to give her hands something to do that isn’t flipping him off. “I’m fine, and he needs to relax. I need to go put lipstick on.” She gives him a tight-lipped smile. “See you in a bit.”

She pivots to enter her dressing room, pretending not to hear him mutter, “Good talk,” at her back.

It’s not as crowded as it will be during intermission, so she takes advantage of the relative peace to take a seat at the long, lighted mirror and put on lipstick. It’s a deep rose color to coordinate with the soft pink velvet of her costume, which is hanging on one of the racks in the back corner. Sloane checks her teeth to make sure she hasn’t gotten lipstick on them, and as she’s waiting for it to dry so she can go back to her tea, the dressing room door swings open again and Cat steps inside, her own costume draped over her arm.

In a word, Catriona Cordella is perfect. There’s no such thing in ballet, of course—everything could always be cleaner, sharper, more elongated—but if there were, Cat would be pretty damn close. It runs in the family: her sister Syrena and brother Drake are both principal dancers at Aretia Ballet, and Cat was snatched up the moment she graduated from the Academy. So was Sloane, arguably, but it’s different for her, for obvious reasons. Xaden hates Cat, can barely tolerate being in close quarters with her, but companies across Navarre were throwing money at her when she graduated; it would’ve been unfathomably stupid not to take her just because of a rough breakup, and ultimately Xaden will always do what’s best for the company rather than putting himself first.

She’s dancing Lead Hot Chocolate tonight, and the costume is incredible: a deep brown skirt with three layers of ruffles that falls to mid-calf, and a red bodice with intricate embroidery and rhinestones. Fluttery sleeves of chocolate-colored lace skim her shoulders, matching the lace fan she’ll hold during the dance, and a large red rose is pinned to the side of her bun, just behind her left ear. Sloane tries not to stare, but Cat is unfairly eye-catching, and when she props one foot up on a stool to tie her pointe shoe, Sloane bites down on the inside of her lip.

The Hot Chocolate dancers don’t wear tights, their pointe shoes colored with makeup so they perfectly match their skin, and the stretch of leg that peeks out of the high slit of Cat’s skirt is long and tan, flawless. Sloane’s danced the corps part before, when she was still in the Academy, seventeen and fresh-faced, before she knew how much ballet could cost her, but she doesn’t think she was even considered for it this year. She looks at Cat, at the elegant, faultless lines of her shin and thigh, and can’t help but think that maybe she knows why.

She tears her eyes away before a lump can rise in her throat—or worse, before Cat can ask why the hell she’s staring—and goes to put on her own costume.

The blush pink bodice of her costume fastens with a bunch of hook-and-eye closures that she can’t do up by herself, so she holds it up over her chest and turns around so Visia, another corps dancer, can hook them up for her. While Visia works, swearing under her breath occasionally when she misses one of the tiny loops, the dressing room door opens and Avalynn steps in, already half out of her doll costume. 

“How’d it go?” Sloane asks. 

Avalynn shrugs, wriggling her arm out of the puffed sleeve. “Fine. The turns at the end were a little rough.” She gets her other arm free and then shoves the tutu down her hips so she can step out of it. “I watched for a bit. Snow is about to start.” Sure enough, the fluttering flute notes that open the Waltz of the Snowflakes plays over the crackly speaker on the dressing room wall. 

Visia fastens the last hook and taps Sloane on the shoulder. “All done.” 

Sloane offers her a grateful half-smile and reaches for her bag to start putting on her pointe shoes. She wraps her pinky toes in waterproof cushioned medical tape (the only kind that works for her, even though Visia uses blue painter’s tape like a maniac) and puts on her ragged toe pads, yanks her tights over them and pulls her shoes on before tying the ribbons around her ankles. She always crosses the left ribbon over the right—she knows, logically, that it has no bearing on her dancing, but it’s just one of those things she does. Like the tea. Little rituals that help settle her, get her into the right headspace to go onstage.

Her phone chimes from one of the tables. Normally she’d ignore a message mid-performance, but the tone that indicates it’s from Liam, so she leans over Visia to grab it as she blinks down at the text.

Dance good. love you.

She snorts a little. It’s not the most eloquent text message she’s ever received, but warmth blooms in her chest. He refuses to say “merde” like the ballet dancers do (“It’s pretentious”) but he also knows better than to say “good luck,” so here they are, their happy medium: “dance good.” 

He doesn’t need a response, so she puts her phone back down and examines herself in the mirror again. Everything looks as it should: the costume fits like it was made for her, her hairpiece is still firmly attached, and there are no runs in her tights or hairties on her wrists. 

Sloane exhales slowly, nods, and heads back to the wings to wait for Act II.

***

Forty minutes later, Sloane is hovering in the wings on stage left. Marzipan is the fifth divertissement in Act II, so Sloane’s watching Cat and Bodhi dance Hot Chocolate while she rolls through her feet again and again to keep her ankles warm and tries not to have some kind of nervous breakdown.

It’s basically impossible not to feel nervous when she watches Cat dance. Even though they’re not students anymore, not jockeying for their teachers’ attention or the highest placement at competitions, Cat’s technical prowess and artistry are impossible to ignore. The Hot Chocolate choreography takes some influence from flamenco, and the intricacies of the upper body—the arch of the back, the flick of the wrist—are just as important as pointed feet and turnout. Cat throws herself into a tour jeté in a whirl of ruffles, then steps into a piqué attitude turn, one arm curved elegantly over her head. Everything about her invites the audience in: the suggestive raise of her dark eyebrow, the proud tilt of her chin and angle of her cheekbone, the way her body says, I know you think I’m beautiful. 

And they do. Even Sloane does, albeit grudgingly—Cat’s irritating as hell but Sloane isn’t blind— and it makes her an obvious choice for roles like this. Her projected confidence is a performance, of course, but it’s not a reach. Not for her.

The dance comes to an end; Bodhi lands a double tour en l’air in a deep kneel, arm extended toward Cat, whose head is thrown triumphantly back, the stage lights glimmering on her skin. She doesn’t even look tired, which is supremely unfair. Most of the Nutcracker divertissements aren’t very long—Hot Chocolate is only a little over a minute—but they’re pretty packed with skills. In between all the flourishes, Cat’s spent most of the last minute jumping.

They exit amid raucous applause, and the woodwinds begin for the next dance, Coffee. Sloane turns away to take a sip from her water bottle and tries to shake off her nerves. Watching Cat was probably a bad idea. She’s technically impressive, and her stage presence is unmatched, and those are both good things, not things that should bother Sloane in any way, except for the fact that there are two soloist positions opening up in the company. If Cat keeps dancing like that, she’s all but guaranteed to be promoted, which really means there’s only one opening. And Sloane has to get it.

For all of the dedication and physical effort it takes, being a ballerina doesn’t really pay that well. Sloane makes okay money, considering ABT is a fairly well-funded company, but she still shares a tiny two-bedroom apartment with her brother and picks up teaching jobs whenever they’re available, and money gets a little tighter during her summer layoff period than she’s comfortable with. The pay bump that would come with a promotion would mean she could put a little more away, so Liam can focus fully on PT school and they don’t have to feel like they’re barely scraping by while she doesn’t have paychecks coming in from the company.

The water she just drank sits like a rock in her stomach. She pivots back toward the stage, barely resisting the urge to crush the plastic bottle in her anxious fingers, and chews on the inside of her lip as she glances through the wings. Every studio and company does The Nutcracker a little bit differently, so sometimes Coffee is a solo, but Aretia Ballet does it as a pas de deux, and tonight it’s being danced by two soloists, Cianna and Dain. 

Sloane doesn’t know them that well. Cianna is nice, and sometimes they’re on the same barre in company class, but Dain is mostly an unknown—he’s never partnered Sloane before. What she does know about him, she knows through gossip. Something went down at the National Ballet of Navarre about two years ago. That’s where Dain came from. His father is on the board, and allegedly, Dain was lined up to be promoted to principal, but he left suddenly in the middle of the season and showed up at ABT as a soloist at the end of the summer. His official line is that he followed Violet (Xaden’s girlfriend, who is now the marketing director at ABT; the ballet world is seriously so small) when she switched companies, but NBN has scrubbed all mentions of Dain from their website, like he was never there at all. 

People talk, obviously, because ballet is theater-adjacent and there’s nothing artsy people love more than drama, but no one really knows what happened. Violet must have pulled some strings with Xaden and the board to get Dain the soloist spot, but Sloane was finally finding her footing in the corps when he arrived and wasn’t really paying attention to much other than that. She did, however, notice that while Dain is incredibly talented, he didn’t get any roles with a lot of partnering during his first year. Some of the girls whisper that he must have dropped someone, which is probably the worst thing you can do during a pas de deux, but looking at him onstage with Cianna, Sloane is pretty sure that’s not what happened.

In fact, he’s looking incredibly competent right now. He lifts Cianna in a flawless overhead press, her back arched in a dramatic curve, and the whole thing just looks so effortless and elegant that for a moment Sloane lets herself get lost in the beauty of it, the abstract shape of their bodies, the music winding around them and through the wings like a silk ribbon. 

Then she blinks, and the moment is over as quickly as it began. 

The music fades out, the shimmering sounds of the tambourine and the bassoons drawing to a quiet close as Dain slowly carries Cianna offstage, still pressed over his head. Too late, Sloane realizes she’s standing in the wing they’re exiting into; she jolts back into her body and stumbles out of their way so ungracefully that her cheeks burn under her stage makeup. 

It doesn’t seem to matter, thankfully. Once they’re out of view of the audience, Dain sets Cianna down carefully, turning her to face him with a casual hand on her shoulder and whispering something to her. Sloane can’t hear it all, but she catches the end: “—everything feel okay?”

Cianna nods, chest heaving—Coffee is the longest divertissement other than Flowers, and she spends so much of the piece holding positions that are borderline contortion that it must be hard to breathe—and holds her fist up to bump it against Dain’s. “It was good. We’ll fix that transition tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Dain pushes a strand of sweaty hair out of his face and glances up, just in time for Sloane to realize she’s staring. It feels voyeuristic, like she’s intruding on something private, intimate. She whirls away, face flaming again for an entirely different reason. 

No, she really doesn’t think Dain dropped anybody. 

But none of that is important right now. What matters is not fucking up the first solo she’s dancing this season. She only danced corps parts in their October shows, and while she danced them well, there wasn’t the same amount of scrutiny on her performance as there inevitably will be tonight. If she wants any chance of getting that promotion, she has to prove that she can be something beyond a corps dancer. That she can be special. 

Sloane watches the Candy Canes dance from the back of the wings, rolling through her feet in her pointe shoes and chewing the inside of her lip until she tastes blood. Tea is after that, and it’s only a minute long, so as the piccolo plays the opening notes, Sloane steps into the wing she’ll enter from, followed by the four dancers dancing the corps part. She cracks her neck to both sides—first left, then right—and shakes out her hands. She can’t afford to falter, to tremble. It’s opening night and she’s dancing a solo; it has to be perfect. 

“You ready?” someone suddenly asks from behind her.

She turns. It’s Maren, one of the Marzipan corps, smiling sweetly and holding out the little golden flute Sloane uses as a prop during the piece. Sloane blinks and takes it gratefully. “Yeah, I think so. Thanks.”

“You got this,” Maren whispers. Sloane bites back her “ I hope so.”

One of the newer stagehands glances into the wing and very obviously does a headcount. It’s a bit late for that—they go on in about twenty seconds—but it’s not hurting anybody, so Sloane almost ignores it entirely. And then she hears it, spoken in the hushed tone and the unfamiliar voice of someone who knows show business but doesn’t know her: “Break a leg!”

It’s harmless. It’s just something people say.

But there’s a reason Liam won’t say it to her anymore.

Sloane’s pulse gives a sick little jump. She smooths her hands over the stiff tulle skirt of her tutu and blows out a slow exhale, trying to pretend that for a split second she isn’t eighteen again, hearing the wet crack of her own bone, the world tilting around her as she falls. She flexes her toes in her pointe shoes, feels the familiar snug pressure of the box, cracks her neck to both sides as she tries to convince her body that she is here and it is now, not then. 

She’s out of time. The music changes, applause thundering. They have to go on. Sloane rolls her shoulders back, tips her chin up like she can steal some of Cat’s confidence through sheer imitation. Hopes the audience won’t notice her fingers are white-knuckled around her little flute.

She rises up onto demi-pointe and walks onstage.

The stage lights are hot and bright on her skin, erasing the audience and turning the rest of the theater into an expanse of blackness, broken only by the red pinpricks of the exit lights at the back of the house. She can’t make out any faces, just a dark, expectant void. If she hadn’t just heard them clapping, she could almost pretend they weren’t there—but they are, and this is real, and this matters, and in the moment of silence before the dance begins, she could almost vibrate out of her skin with the fear of it all.

And then the music starts, and she forgets everything else.

The sweet, lilting melody weaves through her ribs, tugs her up onto her pointe shoes and toward center stage like she’s weightless. The choreography is so deep within her body that each move comes on instinct. Her mind goes quiet, almost. All that matters is the motion: the delicate landing of each little jump, the indulgent flourish of her port de bras, the endless reach of her lines in every moment of stillness. This is what she was made for. 

Marzipan is all precise footwork, tiny quick steps and hops en pointe, and her only thoughts are the technical notes she gives herself during rehearsal: stretch behind the knees, articulate through each joint in her feet, support her arms. Breathe. Smile. 

About two-thirds of the way through, there’s a series of pirouettes from fifth position that Sloane privately thinks are nothing short of diabolical. If anything’s going to go wrong onstage for a dancer, it’s typically turns, but with the music washing over her it doesn’t feel as hard. She pushes off the floor with the toe of her right foot again and again, balanced in passé on her left leg as she turns, looking for the faint glow of the exit sign in the house on each revolution so she remembers where the front is. She lands her final turn and opens her arms to the audience: see what I just did for you? Look how easy that was.

The dance is almost over now, and even the adrenaline rush of opening night can’t completely cover up the muscular fatigue of near-constant jumps and turns. Each breath is too warm, the air heated by the stage lights, and she can feel sweat on her forehead, the back of her neck. Sloane turns out even more, focuses on her feet, on pulling up through her core so each landing is as gentle as it can be. 

But it’s there: a flicker of awareness in the base of her skull, a tight coil just above her right shin, like her body itself is bracing for betrayal. She starts the final phrase of petit allegro and tries not to think about anything else except landing and taking off again. That’s where dancing gets dangerous: when you stop trusting your body to do what you’ve trained it to do. She can’t afford that right now—can’t get stuck in her head—but she pushes off the floor and prays that her leg will still hold her up when she comes back down.

It does. She feels the strain of exertion in her quad, but there’s no sharp spike down her shin or up into her thigh. The music reaches its climax and she pushes off into her last pirouette, floats for a weightless moment as she whips through one, two, three rotations, and lowers herself gracefully to kneel on her right leg, her left leg turned out in front of her, her hands holding the little flute just under her chin in her final pose as the orchestra strikes the closing note.

The audience erupts. Sloane allows herself two seconds of breathing time before she rises, pushing through her left heel so she can stand without putting her hands on the ground. She takes a few steps forward ahead of the corps dancers, her cheeks aching with the width of her smile, and shifts onto her right foot to sink into a deep curtsy. She did it. She danced well, she stayed up, she didn’t fall.

When she straightens back up, her knee wobbles. 

It’s not quite pain, not exactly, but it’s almost there, something deep in her fascia, her muscle fibers, telling her to back off. She smiles through the flare of bone-deep panic, lets her gaze sweep across the black stretch of the audience, and rises onto demi-pointe again to swiftly make her exit so Waltz of the Flowers can begin.

The sensation in her knee pulses with every step, lingering like an omen.

***

She’s not done dancing after Marzipan, but the worst of it is over. All she has left is the finalé, when every single dancer in Act II comes out to dance together and say farewell to Clara and the Nutcracker Prince. It’s only a few counts of eight, really, and Sloane muscles through the jumps, doesn’t let her smile drop. The energy of opening night is so electric that she can almost ignore the fact that every landing on her right leg feels wrong. 

The curtain finally drops after the seemingly endless bows—Xaden and Syrena bowed four separate times, which, while they were fantastic, feels a little excessive—and the dancers disperse, breaking into smaller groups or filtering into the halls to head back to the dressing rooms. Sloane picks through the narrow backstage hallway, steps over an abandoned water bottle and someone’s foam roller, and slips to the side to avoid a stagehand carrying an armful of props. She’s beat. She wants to get her shoes off and her sweatpants on, and then get her ass home before she has to do this all over again tomorrow.

She rounds the corner, and, for the second time tonight, displays an astounding lack of spatial awareness for a ballet dancer by nearly colliding face-first with someone.

“Whoa—careful.”

There are hands on her upper arms, steadying her, and Sloane steps back out of their reach automatically, on pure instinct. She looks up, making eye contact with—

Dain.

“Sorry,” Sloane blurts. She steps back again, clutching the places where he touched her arms as if he burned her. “Didn’t see you.”

But she sees him now. And what she sees is unfair, frankly, when her system is shot after a two hour ballet: sweat-damp curly hair, hands still hovering as if to catch her again, honey-brown eyes and a smile that looks amused, maybe a little curious. She knows his press smile—has seen it on promotional materials for the company and at galas and donor events—but this one is smaller, softer.

“Congratulations on Marzipan. You looked great,” he tells her, and Sloane blinks in surprise. She doesn’t know what she expected him to say, but complimenting her performance was not even something she considered. She didn’t even realized he’d watched. 

“Oh,” is what she says back, and it comes out as more of a breath, a surprised puff of air, than actual sound. “Um. Thanks. Coffee was gorgeous.” 

Something in Dain’s expression shifts, but she can’t tell exactly what it is. “That was all Cianna,” he dismisses. “I mean it, though, about your solo. That turn sequence is brutal. You made it look easy.”

Sloane’s stomach tightens. She ducks her head, suddenly unable to hold his calm, sure gaze anymore. “Thank you.” She has never felt more like a silly little corps girl than she does now, flustered by anyone showing her the barest amount of attention or offering any acknowledgement of her endless hours of work. Her heart is pounding against her ribs.

Too late, she realizes it’s weird to be staring at his feet, and looks up. His smile is lopsided now, one eyebrow quirking a little. 

Down the hall, someone calls his name. He raises a hand to them in a small wave of acknowledgement, then gives Sloane one last look. “See you tomorrow, yeah?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. Just turns to walk away, weaving carefully through a group of dancers still in their Flowers costumes. He’s so tall that Sloane can see the back of his head until he turns the corner toward his own dressing room.

She stands there for another second, heart skipping stupidly, before she shakes it off. Her feet hurt and she wants to go home. 

Back in the dressing room, she picks apart the knots in the ribbons of her pointe shoes and yanks them off, tossing them into her bag. Avalynn releases the hooks on the back of her costume and she steps out of it, hangs it up. Peels off tights that are clinging to her skin with drying sweat. She shimmies into an oversized pair of company-branded sweatpants (they’re Liam’s—she took the wrong pair out of the laundry and has to roll the waistband over twice so she doesn’t trip on them) and yanks on her warmup jacket, zips her parka over all of it.

“Night!” she calls over the general post-show dressing room din, and a chorus of goodnights answers her on her way out the door. 

Only as she reaches the exit to the theater and pushes out into the chill night does she dig her phone out of her pocket. She opens her messages, selects her conversation with Liam.

Dance good.

With fingers still just slightly trembling from opening night nerves, she finally texts back.

I did :)

Chapter Text

Sloane wakes up to the grating sound of her alarm.

For a minute she doesn’t open her eyes, like she can keep the day from starting by refusing to face it. She rolls onto her side, mashes her face into the pillow, and tugs the comforter up to her ears. If she could just have one more minute…

As if it can sense her avoidance, her alarm chimes even more insistently. She groans and snakes one arm out of her blanket cocoon and smacks blindly for her phone to shut it up. Instead, she pushes it out of the bed. It clatters onto the floor and keeps ringing.

Fantastic.

She gives up on pretending she’ll get any more sleep and props herself upright on one elbow, shoving her tangled hair out of her face with her other hand. Watery gray winter sunlight creeps in through her blinds and she blinks sluggishly at it as she tries to assess the state of her body. It’s heavy in that way that means she could’ve used another hour of rest, but nothing is protesting too much. She sits up more fully to roll her ankles in a few lazy circles, to flex her feet and gently wake up her calves, and then she bends her right knee.

Something hot and sharp pulses through it, just a split second of nope, and she jerks with a tiny hiss, reaching instinctively to press her palm against her kneecap as if that will make the pain go away. The actual discomfort is over before she even really processes it’s happened, but her heart is pounding with the surprise of it, edged with fear.

Well, she’s definitely awake now.

Slowly, she makes herself get up. The wood floor is cold under her bare feet, but her knee holds when she bends to turn off her alarm, as she cautiously crosses to her dresser to grab a pair of socks. It’s not happy—a little stiff, a little achy—but nothing she hasn’t felt before. She’s felt much worse. Has performed through much worse.

Sloane puts on the first pair of fuzzy socks she pulls out of the drawer and grabs the throw blanket off the end of her bed to wrap around her shoulders before she opens her bedroom door. As soon as she enters the narrow hallway, she smells food, and her stomach growls in anticipation. It’s Saturday. Liam makes breakfast on Saturdays.

She pads down the hall, stepping over her dance bag and her sneakers that she left scattered on the living room floor like land mines last night, and stands in the kitchen doorway. Liam’s clearly been up for a while. He’s humming along with whatever indie rock shit is playing from his phone’s speakers while he pokes at the contents of his frying pan with a spatula. His ABT sweatpants, Sloane notes with amusement, are way too short. Almost like they’re a women’s medium.

“Nice pants,” she says dryly from the doorway, leaning her left shoulder against it.

“I won’t take slander on my attire from laundry thieves,” Liam says back primly, not even turning around. “And I’m cooking. You should be nice.”

“You’d cook anyway.” 

“Not for you.” 

He’s lying. Even at their worst—that entire cold, bleak winter and early spring where Sloane was so wrapped up in her own pain and anger that she was barely capable of getting out of bed, let alone having a civil conversation with her brother—Liam always made breakfast on Saturdays.

He glances over his shoulder at her and juts his chin toward the foil-covered tray on the counter by the coffeemaker. “Turkey bacon.” Sloane shuffles forward and peels the foil off one corner, grabs a piece, and stuffs most of it in her mouth so she has both hands to pour her coffee. “Use a plate, you animal,” Liam scolds, but he’s focusing on his pan again.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Sloane mumbles through her half-chewed mouthful. She swallows, wraps her fingers around her mug, and comes up behind Liam, going up on her tiptoes to hook her chin over his shoulder and look down into the frying pan at the scramble of eggs and vegetables. “Is that for me?” 

“Maybe.” Despite the fact that she’s totally invading his space, he doesn’t shrug her off. “How was the show?”

“Good.” But she waits too long to elaborate. Liam turns his head slightly to look at her out of the corner of his eye. Sloane sighs in mild exasperation. “Did Xaden tattle on me?”

Somehow that makes it worse. “That implies there was something for him to tattle about,” Liam says suspiciously. He jabs the scrambled eggs a bit too aggressively with the spatula, and a piece of broccoli launches out of the pan to flop sadly on the counter. “How’s the knee?”

Fuck. “Fine.” He patently does not believe her. “Nothing happened.” 

“Liar. Get a plate, this is done.” 

Sloane goes to the corner cabinet where they keep their plates, grabs two, and shuffles back to hand them to him. He eyes her knowingly as she sinks into one of their rickety kitchen chairs. “You’re taking shorter steps with your right leg, which would imply that it hurts.”

“It always hurts a little,” she deflects. But she knows that crease in his forehead too well, and she wants to get out of this conversation before it ruins their morning. She doesn’t want to fight with Liam, especially not on a two-show day. “Come on. Tell me something about you. How’s the biomechanics project?”

Liam raises an unamused eyebrow. “You don’t care about comparative gait analysis.”

She does not. “I could pretend to?” 

He places her plate in front of her, pokes her in the back of the hand with a fork until she takes it from him with an eye roll. “Or, we could talk about something else. Like how your leg should be up right now.” Sloane lifts her right leg and dramatically plonks her heel onto the vacant chair next to her. Liam nods in satisfaction. “Better.”

She alternates between sips of coffee and bites of eggs while she grills Liam about his finals schedule and he grills her in return about her performance calendar. She’s already had tickets set aside for him for a few shows, since he likes to see her dance each of her roles at least once, but she can shuffle them around if he has to study or work on projects or something. He’ll come to the evening show tonight to see Snow and Marzipan, and then he’ll see Flowers next weekend, and probably catch Marzipan at least one more time before the Nutcracker run officially ends the Sunday after Christmas. 

“You’re sure you want to come that many times?” Sloane asks skeptically, pushing a piece of bell pepper around her plate. “You see me do this every year.”

“You’ve never done Lead Marzipan before,” Liam points out. He stands, gathers their plates to take them to the dishwasher. “And this is a big year for you.”

The reminder makes her last mouthful of coffee taste bitter going down. She runs her tongue over her teeth. “Yeah. Big year.”

When she stands up from the table, she pretends she doesn’t feel her knee twinge.

***

They have company class at ten, so Sloane gets to the theater at nine-thirty, wearing an unreasonable amount of clothing and still somehow shivering. It isn’t even technically winter yet, not for another week and a half or so, but the winds whipping through the tight city blocks of Aretia are bitterly cold and Sloane’s ears are numb by the time she finishes the short walk from the subway station to the theater.

She goes straight to the stage and starts ditching her layers in the wings, tucking her bag and shoes as far back as possible so she doesn’t trip anyone. The theater is so huge that it’s hard to heat, so she digs through her bag for her extra-long cable-knit legwarmers and tugs them on over her tights so she’s covered from ankle to mid-thigh. Then she zips up her warmup vest, grabs her water bottle and her pointe shoe bag, and crosses the stage to one of the barres, where Avalynn’s saved her a spot.

“Good morning,” Avalynn sing-songs. Sloane plops down beside her and opens the drawstring on the mesh bag holding her current pair of pointe shoes. They’re not the same ones she’ll perform in today—she normally rotates through three or four pairs at a time during show weeks. “How was your night?”

Sloane snorts despite herself as she starts taping up her toes. “Low-key. Yours?” The truth of the matter is that she got home, ate some cold leftovers while standing in front of the fridge, took an efficient shower, and went straight to bed, but it’s too early in Nutcracker season to be admitting to that kind of degenerate behavior, so she just doesn’t.

“We went out to celebrate opening!” Avalynn beams up at Lynx and Baylor as they walk by. Sloane must make a face, because Avalynn immediately follows up with, “We had one drink each. You should come next time! You could afford to loosen up a little.”

Sloane can not afford to loosen up, actually. She can’t afford to be messing around, to be going out for drinks when she has two shows the next day. Not during any season, but especially not this one, when every time she steps onstage she’s being evaluated. But she doesn’t particularly feel like getting into that, so she just smiles tightly and digs around in her bag for her toe pads just so she doesn’t have to say anything.

“Do you know what they’re running after class?” she asks eventually, when it becomes clear Avalynn’s not going to push the subject any further.

Avalynn shrugs as she ties her pointe shoes. “We’re spacing Flowers again. And I heard something about Coffee.” Sloane blinks, but Avalynn’s continuing before she can say anything. “Maybe Snow, since we changed the diagonal?”

“Great.” Sloane finishes tying her own ribbons and tucks the knot underneath to hide it, then pushes herself to stand, rolling through her feet to test the stage as if she didn’t dance on it just fourteen hours ago. She pushes up onto pointe and balances in parallel just to see what it feels like today, and is grateful when she finds her center easily. Small mercies.

Class begins shortly after, conversations petering out as everyone meanders over to their chosen barre spots. Devera, the ballet mistress, finishes chatting with the accompanist and makes her way to the little X of spike tape that marks center stage. She doesn’t say anything, but it’s not needed; as soon as she takes her position, everyone goes quiet, left hands fluttering to the barre in preparation for their first exercise.

“Pliés,” Devera says simply. “Two demis, one grand, cambré forward and back. First, second, fourth, fifth. Sous-sus balance, repeat on the other side.”

As plié combinations go, it’s the most basic in the book. Sloane inhales deeply and gets into first position, pressing her heels together with her toes turned out, resting her left hand gently on the barre with her right arm in a soft curve at her side. The accompanist starts to play something soft and smooth, and Sloane sinks into her first plié, the movement as familiar as breathing. She pays attention to her alignment: neutral pelvis, knees tracking over her toes as her legs bend, following the movement of her right arm with the gentle tilt of her head. Her hamstrings tingle as she bends forward at the waist for the cambré, her right fingertips brushing the floor, and she blinks against the slight headrush when she straightens up again.

Today will be fine, she tells herself as they move through second, fourth, fifth. It’s just Marzipan this afternoon and then Snow and Marzipan again in the evening. The dual role is a bit demanding, to be sure, but she’s danced it before in rehearsal dozens of times, and it’s nothing she can’t handle. The nerves she’s feeling have nothing to do with her actual capability. If she repeats that enough times, maybe she’ll start to believe it.

They move into tendus, then dégagés, first slow and then a little faster, and her body comes to life gradually, the repetitive motions warming and loosening her stiff muscles. Sloane breathes in and out slowly, engages her deep rotators to turn out from the very top of her legs, checks in every time she closes fifth to make sure she’s not locking her standing knee. Class on performance days has a different goal than it does during a normal week at the studio: it’s gentler, more about easing the muscles awake than pushing any technical frontier. Devera’s combinations are simple and easy to remember, and she gradually gets warm enough to take off her vest, though she leaves her legwarmers on.

They move through ronds de jambe, frappés, fondus, développés. At the end of each exercise, there’s time for them to balance in a position of their choice. Sloane rotates through the standards: sous-sus, with her legs tightly crossed; passé, her pointed toe resting just above the kneecap of her standing leg; then arabesque, angling her body toward the barre slightly so her raised back leg doesn’t hit the person standing behind her. Her balance is steady and sure today, every muscle held strong but not gripping, which bodes well for her turns later. Every dancer has “bad turn days,” when even years of ingrained technique can’t overcome the body feeling off-balance, but it doesn’t seem that today will be one. Sloane slowly comes down from another balance in arabesque and breathes a sigh of relief. One less thing to worry about.

They come off the barre to do adagio in the center, and Sloane keeps her legs lower than she would during a performance, focusing more on her turnout and her placement than trying to be impressive. Cat stands toward the front, as usual. Sloane doesn’t look at her on purpose, but her eyes keep drifting back to those endless legs, her foot well above her head as she does a développé a la seconde. Sloane’s own modest extensions feel pathetic in comparison, even though she knows that she’s capable of more, that she’s holding back for a good reason. 

Devera gives them a quick waltz with some pirouettes, and after they’ve all done it once on both sides, they spread out in the center again for a quick petit allegro. Sloane pivots and heads for one of the back corners of the stage. She doesn’t need to show off right now. Her body doesn’t need convincing that it can jump—it needs reassurance that it won’t have to do any more jumping than necessary. So while most of the company does small jumps in first and second, Sloane does relevés at one of the barres, rolling slowly through her feet and controlling each descent to avoid shocking her knee into some sort of rebellion. She can’t afford that today. 

Class ends after that. Everyone who hasn’t been called to rehearse scatters into the wings to get their things so they can head out to grab lunch or coffee or just generally have a quiet moment to themselves before they’re confined to the theater for nine hours. Sloane pays careful attention while tonight’s Flowers cast walks through one of their transitions—apparently there was a near-collision last night, and an apprentice got reamed out for it; Sloane’s not sure how she missed it—and then steps in when Snow is called to tighten up a few formations that changed last minute. She picks out the landmarks she’ll use during the performance to make sure she’s in just the right spot: she’s directly in line with one of the aisles, just a few inches in front of a seam of marley tape. 

When she’s dismissed, Sloane puts her sweats and vest back on and then sits down to take off her pointe shoes. Now that the stage is free, people can run through whatever they’d like. Imogen and Garrick are doing the Sugar Plum pas de deux in the matinee, and Bodhi is teasing them from the edge of the stage while he rolls out his calves: “You have to at least pretend you like him, Im.” Sloane rolls her eyes—their chemistry is fantastic onstage, but Imogen can be… difficult— and rubs her knee absently as her gaze roams over the rest of the stage. Soleil is practicing one of the difficult turn sequences for Dew Drop, and Cat is doing pirouettes in back attitude because she has a death wish or something, and Sloane doesn’t want to invite that energy into her mental space on a performance day, so she snaps her head away from all of them, and because her life is a colossal joke, the only thing left to look at onstage is Dain. 

It’s not just him, technically. Cianna’s there too, and Devera, and they’re working through the section that they mentioned fixing last night. Sloane narrows her eyes as she watches them, catches the rough bit they must have been talking about. She didn’t notice it during the performance, and to the untrained eye the whole thing probably looks flawless, but there it is. There’s a promenade in penché, Cianna’s legs in a perfect 180° split as all of her weight balances on the toe of her pointe shoe, Dain supporting her waist with one hand as they complete one full rotation. The promenade itself isn’t the problem—it’s the transition out of it into the next step. As Dain adjusts his grip, Cianna wobbles, just a hair.

They try it again, slowly, under Devera’s watchful eye. Dain’s hand is steady on Cianna’s waist, guiding her through the rotation and then back upright with a level of care that seems almost out of place for someone so strong. Like she’s a delicate flower that he could crush with the wrong movement. Like he could shatter her, break her—

But he doesn’t. He says something that makes Cianna laugh, her posture relaxing a little even as she balances impossibly high on her pointe shoe. With a gentle nudge, he adjusts the angle of her hips, and waits for her to nod before he takes her waist to try the promenade again. This time, the rotation unfurls seamlessly. Dain shifts subtly around Cianna, attuned to every minute adjustment in her center of gravity, and when she comes out of the turn, it’s like she floats away from Dain’s supporting hand by her own power. 

Sloane twists to grab her water bottle just for something to do with her hands. When she looks back up, the pair of them are speaking with Devera, Dain’s hand resting lightly on Cianna’s waist. The back of her head is just brushing his chest, the kind of casual intimacy that partners achieve after spending countless hours treating each other’s bodies as extensions of their own. 

Sloane realizes she’s holding her breath and forces herself to blow it out slowly through her teeth. There’s something tight in her chest, a pang of… not quite jealousy. Longing, maybe.

That’s what it’s supposed to feel like.

She reaches down to dig her thumb into her right quad, maybe a little more harshly than necessary. She’s being stupid. She doesn’t even do any partnering in this show, so it doesn’t matter if the image is sticking in her head: Dain, his hands supportive without ever gripping Cianna too tight, his face in an easy smile even when she wobbled, not scolding or sighing. Just steady.

Sloane pushes herself to her feet and resolutely does not allow herself to wonder how that might feel—to be held like that. To trust someone again.

***

They don’t have a ton of time in between shows—the matinee lets out around four, and the curtain goes up for the evening show at seven—but it’s definitely enough downtime to let Sloane get into her own head if she thinks too much, so she tries to keep herself moving. She watches the stagehands do prop inventory for a while, grabs her Snow costume from wardrobe, organizes her station in the dressing room, takes her bun out and redoes it (not because anything’s wrong with it. Just to keep her hands busy.). Liam meal-prepped a quinoa salad for her, so she forces down about half of it, more because she knows she should than because she’s actually feeling hungry, and then she really has nothing else to do and it’s only five PM, so she grits her teeth and goes to see Brennan, the company’s physical therapist.

The “treatment room” (which is actually a small-ish storage room that they put his equipment in so the dancers can have some semblance of privacy) is empty when Sloane gets there, other than Brennan himself, who’s doing something on his laptop. She knows him too well to be shy at this point—he’s certainly seen plenty of her in the past few years—so she heads to his foldable treatment table and perches on the edge of it while she waits for him.

“I was wondering when you’d come by,” Brennan says, shutting his computer. “How bad is it?”

Sloane swings her feet a little anxiously. Brennan is one of the few people who knows the full extent of what happened to her, what she went through. Sometimes that makes it easier to be honest with him, but other times, like now, when she’s so desperate to just be okay, she doesn’t feel like talking about it. “It’s not.”

“If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here,” he counters neutrally. “So tell me what we’re working with here, Mairi.”

“It’s just stiff,” she insists. 

Brennan sighs dramatically, but it’s good-natured. “Do you and Vi practice these lines together? ‘It’s fine, Brennan.’ ‘It doesn’t hurt, Brennan.’” He gestures to her knee. “Let’s see it.”

Sloane glares at him crossly, but rolls up the leg of her sweats to expose her right knee. “It’s—”

“‘Not that bad,’” Brennan finishes for her, rolling his eyes. “I love it when you lie to me.” 

The impulse to say something rude is strong, and Sloane bites down on it, hard. If she and Violet are similar, so are Brennan and Liam: overprotective to a fault, but also irritatingly good at seeing through her shit. And all the time Sloane spends with Violet (and Mira, since she dances for the company, though they’re not exactly close) has given Brennan plenty of time to figure her out. “I’m not— shit!”

Brennan glances up from where he’s pressed his thumb deep into her vastus medialis. “Hm? You were saying?”

“You’re a jerk,” Sloane hisses. “It is tight and I am sore. Happy?”

“No, but that was better.” Much more gently, he prods at her quadriceps tendon, then the patellar ligament under her kneecap. “Straighten it for me?” Gingerly, Sloane extends her leg, then lets it relax again. Brennan nods at it, apparently satisfied. “It’s not swollen and you’ve still got good tracking. I can massage it a little and tape it for you; sound good?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” Sloane chews the inside of her lip, then adds grudgingly, “Thanks.”

Brennan shakes his head fondly at her and gets to work. His fingers are firm as he kneads her quad and the top of her calf, and Sloane breathes slowly to keep from wincing. “Have you taken anything for it today?” he asks, probably trying to distract her when he hits a particularly sore spot. 

“No.” It’s almost a gasp.

He makes an unimpressed noise. “Take two ibuprofen after this. And keep it moving; don’t let it get cold before you go on, or it’ll stiffen up again.” 

When he’s done, he turns to grab some kinesiology tape. If this was a normal week, he’d probably use some of the fun colors—Sloane likes red, personally—but this has to be invisible under her tights, so he gets out the boring beige roll and efficiently cuts a few strips down to size. He’s just placing the last one, curving around the side of her kneecap and covering her surgical scar almost exactly, when the door swings open, a male voice calling, “Hey, Bren?”

Sloane jerks and almost fucks up the tape. Brennan makes an aggrieved sound. And Dain stares at both of them from the doorway like he’s walked in on something much more illicit than a PT session.

“Uh… I can come back?”

Brennan smooths the end of the strip with his thumb and glances back over his shoulder at Dain. “You’re good. What’s up?”

But Dain’s looking at Sloane, clearly waiting for something, and it takes her entirely too long to realize he’s waiting for her permission to stay, too. “Oh,” is what she eventually says, flustered. Smooth. “I—yeah, it’s fine.” 

Dain’s eyes linger on her for a moment longer. She watches him clock the tape, though he doesn’t seem to think much of it, before he looks back to Brennan. “Vi said you’d have Icy Hot?”

Brennan frowns. “Tell Riorson that if he puts that shit on his back one more time today he’s going to give himself a chemical burn.”

Sloane snorts, and Dain glances at her, his own lips quirking up. “It’s not for him, I swear. Imogen wants it and I really think she might kill me this time if I don’t find some.”

That’s fairly on-brand for Im. Brennan seems to agree, because he mutters something unflattering under his breath and leans down to dig through his backpack again, coming up with a half-empty tube of Icy Hot cream. It’s not Sloane’s favorite—she’s partial to the roll-on kind herself, so she doesn’t get it on her hands—and Dain doesn’t say anything as he takes it, but he looks a little apprehensive, as if he can sense Imogen planning his murder from the dressing room.

“It’s all I have,” Brennan says defensively, because he knows. “Mira took the nice one to Poromiel”—she’s doing Sugar Plum in a few shows there as a guest artist this week—“and Vi likes Tiger Balm, so Imogen can either cope or buy her own.”

But even as someone who grew up with her, Imogen can be… scary, and only a monster would send a seemingly-decent person like Dain to the wolves like that. Sloane’s reaching for her own bag before she even realizes what she’s doing. “Hang on,” she says, rooting through it, and when she surfaces with her own battered Icy Hot roll-on, Dain looks at her like she might be his salvation.

“You probably just saved my life,” he tells her. His warm fingertips brush hers as he takes it from her, and Sloane clamps down on the full-body shiver that almost elicits. “I’ll make sure it gets back to you,” he promises. “For…” He eyes her taped-up knee.

“Don’t worry about it. Im knows where to find me,” Sloane says casually. Too casually, judging by the incredulous look Brennan shoots her. “And this”—gesturing to the knee, because she can’t shut the fuck up —“is nothing. Just a tune-up.”

“Mmhm,” Brennan mutters under his breath. 

Dain doesn’t seem to notice, probably too relieved that his imminent murder has been postponed. “Thanks, Sloane. Seriously.” He reaches for the doorknob to let himself back out into the hallway. “See you later. Break a—” Then he stops himself, frowns. “Well. Don’t break anything.”

He’s gone before Sloane can respond. 

“‘A tune-up,’” Brennan repeats, mockingly. Sloane kicks him in the shin as she hops off the table.

***

She knows when she comes off from Snow in the evening show that Marzipan is going to be hard.

The muscles in her ankle and thigh are trembling from the strain of keeping her knee tracking straight, from the awkward pattern of jumping and then bracing for pain on the way down. She danced well, she knows—she was technically sharp, her musicality precise—and there isn’t pain beyond fatigue yet, but the strange warmth behind her kneecap promises that there will be. She just doesn’t know when.

So she pops three Tylenol at intermission. Hovers in the wings when Act II starts, rolling up onto pointe and back down again, bending into soft pliés to keep the blood pumping through her leg and trying desperately to pretend that she feels just like everyone else back here: tired, maybe a little sore, but definitely not afraid. 

She pretends to watch the other divertissements, but they blur by without her catching a single distinct moment. The music changes, dancers enter and exit, time passes—and then Sloane is in her entrance wing, her flute tucked between shaking fingers, waiting for the music.

You’re fine, she tells herself on an exhale. I know you’re tired, but it’s two minutes. You can do anything for two minutes. But the voice in her head doesn’t quite sound like her own, and there’s an echo of a touch on her shoulder that makes her skin crawl. She tosses her head like a dog shaking off water, like she can physically shake off the memory too. Focus. She needs to focus, because even one bad performance can mean she kisses any chance of becoming a soloist goodbye.

The Tea dancers exit, and adrenaline floods Sloane’s system so intensely that her heart pounds with it. 

The cellos begin.

Sloane moves, because she has to.

The combination of the stage lights and the live music works like a drug, humming over her skin and through her veins until she is one with them. She gestures with her flute as if she’s really playing it, beams out at the audience and invites them to join her, to dance with her. It’s like she suddenly remembers how easy it all is—she flutters through an impossibly fast pas de couru, teeny tiny running steps in which she barely touches the ground at all, and then goes up on pointe for a quick développé to the side, her toe pointed toward the ceiling of the theater and the stars beyond it.

After she’s finished her turns—after she’s done a clean triple pirouette and landed on one knee—she gets a momentary break while the corps dances and she tries to catch her breath for the final push. She’s still onstage, so the smile can’t drop, but she doesn’t want it to, because this is fun; it’s the most fun she’s ever had, being onstage, and even though her muscles are burning when she starts the final sequence, she doesn’t want to stop. She doesn’t want the music to end. She wants to be Marzipan forever and ever, until she steps into a piqué arabesque and pain rockets down her leg.

It’s not even a hard step. It’s more of a transition between an unreasonably difficult jump section and the final set of turns: she just steps forward onto pointe on one foot, her other leg coming up behind her until it’s parallel to the floor. But the pain is hot and sharp, insistent and warning, enough that she gasps and falters for just a fraction of a second.

She can’t let the audience know, can’t let the smile slip, even though her heart is in her throat and the phantom grip on her shoulder is too tight. Don’t limp. Don’t favor it. Don’t let them see. Just finish.

Sloane adjusts on instinct, pulling back a fraction on every subsequent step—smaller jumps, tighter landings, careful rotations. She grips her quad so tightly during her last set of little hops en pointe that the lower half of her leg goes almost numb. Almost, almost, almost—

When it ends, she offers her bright, fixed smile to the audience as she curtsies on her left leg, because she doesn’t know if the right one will be able to push her back up. And she’s not sure what hurts worse: the actual, physical pain, or the fear.

***

She doesn’t stick around when it’s over. Ditches her costumes with wardrobe as quickly as she can, bundles into her layers, and slips out the side exit of the theater to where she knows Liam will be waiting.

He’s holding a bouquet of yellow Gerbera daisies, and despite the faint throbbing in her knee—subdued now by Tiger Balm and Tylenol and the squeeze of her compression sleeve—Sloane can’t help but smile. 

“Hey.” He pulls her into a one-armed hug, saving the flowers from being crushed at the last moment. Sloane closes her eyes against the sudden sting of tears and doesn’t open them again until the threat has passed. “You were incredible out there. I have no idea how you make your feet move so fast.”

She laughs a little as he releases her, freeing the flowers from his grip. “You should’ve seen the first dress rehearsal. I swear the conductor sped up on purpose.”

They turn to start walking toward the subway station. Normally he’d pick her up in the car, especially after a two-show day, but the Saturday rates at the nearby parking garages are outrageous, so they take transit on the nights he’s in the audience. Sloane must be walking more slowly than normal, because Liam reaches for the strap of her duffel bag and swings it onto his own shoulder as they start down the steps. Sloane lets him, because he’s got that crease in his forehead: the one that means he’s thinking.

Finally, he breaks, with a sideways glance at her. “You’re okay, though?” he asks. “You seemed—just for a second, in the middle, your eyes…”

Sloane laughs again, but this one is artificial, shaky. “When did you become my artistic director?” She digs her subway pass out of her pocket and slams it against the scanner with more force than necessary so she doesn’t have to look at him. “Had no idea you were so picky.”

Liam hasn’t quite let it go, though. He doesn’t engage with the deflection, just scans his own card, pushes through the turnstile, and says, “I just know you, Sloane.”

She offers him a forced smile as they head toward their platform. “I’m fine. I swear.” Because she probably is. It hurt for one second, and it scared her, that’s all—there’s no reason to make him worry over a split second of half-imagined pain.

He doesn’t push her any further. She sees him think about it, but he just reaches over to gently tug at her ponytail, which is twisted and warped from being in a bun all day. “Okay,” he says, and smiles, and lets it go, and Sloane wonders if the comfort of her own denial is worth the pangs of lying to him, too.

Chapter Text

It snows on Monday morning.

Technically, this should not come as a great surprise. It’s nine days until Christmas, which means it’s only five days until the solstice, which means it’s basically winter. Sloane knows all of these things because she is an adult and capable of reading a calendar, but that doesn’t stop her from bitching internally as she trudges through the frigid morning air to the studio.

Cold is a ballerina’s enemy. Sloane remembers being little—seven or eight, maybe—and having her teacher lecture their class about the importance of warming up before stretching. “Your muscles are like rubber bands,” she’d said. “What happens if you put a rubber band in the freezer, and then you try to stretch it?”

(Sloane had gone home that night and tried it, naturally. It had snapped.)

Dancing in the heat is miserable, for a variety of sweaty, sticky reasons, but the cold is worse. It makes everything stiffer and tighter, makes her require longer warmups and cooldowns to dance as well as she does when it’s not fucking subzero outside. (It’s 22°F, but her point stands.) She’s wearing three layers right now but she still feels like all of her connective tissue has gone rigid, protesting each step up the subway stairs as she comes out into the gray light.

ABT’s building is only two blocks from the subway. In this part of the city, the sidewalks are salted and the roads are cleared, so there’s none of the gray slush that she has to shuffle through outside her apartment in her own neighborhood. Sloane turns down 30th Avenue and glances up at the eclectic mix of architecture that makes up Aretia’s cultural district. This neighborhood is all sleek glass offices and condo towers sandwiched between historic brick buildings, the streets lined with leafy planters, people flooding the sidewalks looking like they have Places To Be. Aretia Ballet is located inside a three-story building made of a warm beige stone, with big windows that glow golden in the evenings when rehearsals run long. Next to the main doors, a modest metal plaque reads simply: Aretia Ballet Theatre.

Sloane goes up the front steps and stomps the excess salt off her shoes on the mat before she slips inside and heads to the second floor. The third floor is mostly offices—Violet’s is up there, and Brennan’s treatment room—with two of the smaller rehearsal studios, while the three larger ones are down here, along with the company dressing rooms. Sloane ditches her coat and shoes in her locker, grabs everything she’ll need for class, and nudges through the door to Studio A, where people are starting to gather for class. 

She sets up at her barre spot on the far side of the room. There’s no rules or official assignments regarding where they stand at barre; it’s just kind of unspoken that everyone has their spot, and taking someone’s without asking is the ballet equivalent of murdering their firstborn child. Sloane likes her place because she can put her water bottle and shoes on the windowsill. It’s also nice that there’s always someone in front of her no matter which way she’s facing, so if her brain goes blank in the middle of an exercise, she’s not totally on her own. 

Avalynn is lying with her back on her foam roller, but she looks more like she’s about to fall asleep than like she’s achieving any significant myofascial release, so Sloane doesn’t feel too bad prodding her with her socked toe. “Hey.”

“Hey, you,” Avalynn says, cracking open one eye. “How was your day off?”

“Quiet,” Sloane admits. ABT is doing fifteen performances of The Nutcracker this year, and Sloane is set to dance in thirteen of them. Yesterday’s matinee was one of the two she’ll miss. She spent most of her free day taking a Pilates class, stretching, and icing—nothing groundbreaking, but not really taking a break, especially not by Avalynn’s standards. “I watched a movie with Liam.”

Avalynn props herself up on her elbows, looking mildly horrified. “Sloane. Baby. I understand you love your brother, and I do, too; the man is a gorgeous specimen”—Sloane pretends to gag—“but come on. You didn’t hang out with friends?”

“All my friends work here,” Sloane points out. 

“Make more,” Avalynn suggests, like it’s that easy. “Maybe make a male friend.”

Sloane rolls her eyes. Avalynn is always doing this—telling Sloane she needs to get out more, to meet new people. News flash: Sloane has met plenty of people. It isn’t her fault that men aren’t typically super comfortable with their girlfriend spending half her working hours intimately touching other guys. People don’t tend to get ballet, really. Most non-dancers she’s dated have thought it’s kind of a joke, expecting her to eventually go to college or “get a real job.” It’s not something that’s easy to explain: the fact that she has no idea what she would do if she wasn’t doing this. So she doesn’t try anymore. It’s simpler that way. 

Luckily, she’s spared from having to answer by the door swinging open again as Rhiannon and Ridoc come in, heads bent together, whispering furiously. It redirects Avalynn’s interest, too; her head immediately swivels back to Sloane as she asks lowly, “What do you think that’s about?”

“No idea,” Sloane murmurs, watching as they drift over to their normal spots (next to each other at one of the center barres) and loop the others standing there into their conversation. Judging by body language alone, the topic must be riveting, but all Sloane can focus on is the furrow of Xaden’s brow as he gets close enough to listen. Whatever it is, he’s not happy about it. “But Xaden doesn’t like it.”

Disagreements between Xaden and the board are extremely rare, but they do happen. Knowing it’s going to be his company someday typically keeps the board from doing things that will really piss him off, but occasionally, there’s an argument that Xaden just doesn’t win. Sloane wonders sort of absently what it was this time. 

Devera comes in before she can make a move to eavesdrop, so she lets it go and takes a steadying breath as everyone gathers themselves for class. It takes noticeably longer than it normally does for all the dancers to settle, though, and Devera eventually clears her throat loudly, raising her eyebrows. “Dancers.”

Sloane flushes, feeling scolded even though she wasn’t talking. She rolls her shoulders back and waits for pliés to start, but Devera isn’t done. “In the interest of keeping everyone informed, I thought it was important to let you all know that preparations for spring performances are well underway. You’re going to start seeing our guest choreographers around.” A pause. Sloane blinks, a little nonsensically surprised by that—in the blur of the Nutcracker run, it’s easy to forget that life will ever go back to normal, but there’s still over half of the performance season to go. Devera continues, “Burton Varrish will be in the studio watching company class sometime this week to start getting ideas for his casting.”

Another murmur breaks out across the studio. Sloane turns her head to scan the room, to take in everyone’s reactions. It’s hard to make out individual words or phrases, but from the general tone of the mumbling, most people seem excited—other than Xaden, who’s glaring down at his feet as if they’ve personally offended him. And, at the barre along the opposite wall, looking similarly unenthused, is Dain.

That’s… weird. Varrish has never come to ABT before, but he’s worked with the National Ballet of Navarre. Dain must have at least met him, maybe even danced some of his work. Sloane takes an absent sip of water as she turns it over in her head. Maybe Dain just doesn’t want his past following him here. He seems like a fairly well-adjusted guy; there’s no way he could have created some kind of volatile relationship with a guest choreographer, right?

She shakes her head and turns to place her left hand on the barre as everyone prepares for pliés. It’s none of her business what kind of working relationship Dain Aetos does or does not have with Burton Varrish. What is her business is pulling herself together enough for Varrish to notice her. Varrish is an extremely well-respected choreographer, known for both classical and contemporary pieces that are technically demanding, musically complex, and often partnering-heavy. He did a production of Coppélia at NBN ages ago that people still talk about, and he’s credited with launching the careers of so many of the dancers Sloane grew up watching. He’s coming here, and he’s creating an original work, and if Sloane ever wants the type of ballet career she’s been dreaming about since she was a little girl, she simply has to be in it.

Varrish makes stars. And Sloane is going to become one.

Other than her patellar tendon protesting a smidge during her first grand plié, she makes it through most of barre without incident. Her knee certainly appreciated the day off from ballet, even if her obliques and her lats are sore from Pilates, and she feels strong—capable—when she puts her pointe shoes on and steps away from the barre for center work. They do tendus, and Sloane extends through the backs of her knees, the arch of her foot, focusing on the fundamental components of her technique on each little extension before tucking her working leg back into a tight, turned-out fifth position. 

It’s not quite as turned-out as it used to be before she got hurt, especially when her right foot is in front. The vast majority of a dancer’s turnout comes from the hip, but rotating just a smidge at the knees and ankles can make fifth position slightly tighter, sleeker. But Sloane doesn’t have that range of motion in her right knee anymore—can’t rotate her tibia under her femur without something pulling. She stares at her fifth position in the mirror and contracts her deep rotators even harder, trying to make up the deficit, but there’s only so much she can do.

After tendus and dégagés in the center, they do adagio. Sloane loves adagio (mostly because there’s no jumping in it) and she focuses diligently as Devera explains the combination. There’s nothing terribly brutal in this one, so Sloane steps up to be in the first group, her hands fluttering at her sides in preparation while the pianist plays a twinkling introduction.

The first steps are easy: she slides forward on a turned-out front leg into a deep lunge, arms reaching endlessly in third arabesque, before she shifts her weight forward and draws her back leg in to close in fifth position again. From there, it’s a développé to the front. She slowly lifts her bent left leg to passé, her toe tucked right under her right knee, then even higher, straightening her leg so her pointed foot hovers in the air at eye-level in front of her. She holds it there for a second, then slowly lowers it, brushing her heels together through first position before she lifts it up behind her into a high arabesque.

“Longer!” Devera calls over the music, and Sloane tries to stretch her limbs like taffy, tries to make her bones elongate as if she could make her front arm and her back leg touch the opposite walls of the studio. She bends her back leg into attitude, lifting one rounded arm over her head, before lowering her foot and doing a pas de bourrée—a series of three little steps, back, side, front—to close fifth again. She lifts the same leg in a développé to the side, her hip flexor and her sore oblique burning, and stares at herself in the mirror for a long moment to check her positioning: all square, all straight and controlled. Cat is in front of her, her leg higher still; Sloane exhales slowly through her nose as she carefully lets her leg come down and does another pas de bourrée into fourth position to prepare for a pirouette.

Pirouettes in adagio are a bit different than the ones she does in Marzipan. These are slower, all about suspension, convincing the audience that you can defy gravity, staying up there forever and turning like the porcelain ballerina inside a music box. The number of rotations matters less than the quality, so Sloane plans for two full turns and is pleasantly surprised when she feels stable and balanced enough for three, landing gracefully in a long fourth before she rises back up to close fifth again. “Good, Sloane,” Devera praises, and Sloane feels something glow inside her ribcage as she prepares to start the combination again, this time with the other leg.

Round two is harder, for sure. Almost every dancer has a strong side and a weak side, a leg that can développé higher, a leg they prefer to turn on. Sloane’s left leg is more flexible than her right—it was even before she got hurt—and it’s also more comfortable to balance on, to support her in pirouettes. In some ways this is annoying, especially since most people tend to be more flexible on the right side for whatever reason, and Sloane has to work extra hard to get her right battements and développés to match theirs in group choreography, but it’s also probably a good thing. If she’d hurt her stronger leg, rather than her weaker one, she’d have had no “good side” left to dance on. At least now when she’s fighting for her life in an exercise relying on strength and stability in her right leg, she can be pretty confident that it will look okay in the opposite direction.

She muscles through the other side, trying not to look at Cat (or Imogen, or Soleil, or anyone else whose right leg feels like it’s flying miles above her own), and at least lands a solid pirouette at the end of the combination so she doesn’t feel like a complete failure.

After adagio, after waltzing and more pirouettes, they jump. She feels good, warm and loose, so she doesn’t feel like she has to hold back. There’s small jumps in first and second position, little changements and entrechats in fifth position where the legs beat and switch from front to back, and assemblés, where the legs leave the ground one at a time, come together in the air and land in fifth at the same time. Once they’ve worked through two petit allegro combinations, the second faster than the first, they move to the corner for grand allegro: the big jumps.

On a bad day, Sloane might excuse herself here. Might not put herself through the leaps, the tour jetés and cabrioles and the myriad ways her leg could collapse out from under her, could fail her again. But today is a good day. She’s not hurting. So she lines up with everyone else at the corner, breathes out slowly, and lifts her chin as the pianist starts playing something lively and fast. Tells herself that her bones have never splintered. Her cartilage has never crumbled. She is fine.

Today, the lie works.

***

During a break between rehearsals that afternoon, Sloane slips out to take her water bottle to the filling station between studios B and C. This week is fairly light on rehearsals: she only has short runthroughs of Snow and Flowers corps today, but she doesn’t have Marzipan until Wednesday, and they obviously can’t start anything new until the guest choreographers have arrived and casting has been finalized. Said casting, however, is eating up all of Sloane’s available mindspace, and she’s staring so intently at her slowly-filling bottle that she almost misses the hushed conversation going on just down the hall from her.

“Didn’t you go to school with Aura Beinhaven?” 

Something, a vague memory, lights up in the back of Sloane’s mind at that. Beinhaven. She knows that name.

“Yeah, she was in my year at SNB.” That’s Eya’s voice. Sloane turns her head just enough to catch sight of her and Soleil out of the corner of her eye. “She stayed on at NBN; she didn’t even audition here. But she quit two years ago, midseason.”

That’s where Sloane knows the name from. Aura was the only SNB graduate that year to get offered a company contract. That was kind of a shock, considering their class was incredibly talented, but Sloane had been only sixteen at the time and now she doesn’t remember many of the details, if she ever knew them at all, and she certainly doesn’t know anything about Aura quitting. She frowns at the water fountain and strains her hearing toward the two soloists down the hall.

“What about her?” Eya’s asking. 

There’s a moment of silence, as if Soleil’s weighing her words, before she says, “The last piece she did for Navarre—that was one of Varrish’s.”

Sloane frowns to herself. She remembers the dance they’re talking about; it was a pas de deux, contemporary, between Aura and a slightly older soloist at the company. Evan, maybe? Eric? It doesn’t matter, though, really, because Aura was so clearly the star, a sun that her partner was orbiting around, drawing the audience in to her center of gravity. Sloane remembers being grudgingly mesmerized by it, being amazed by not only the dancing but the impeccable composition, the way the choreographer had so clearly been in love with not just ballet but the idea of a ballerina, of movement of the female form. Aura had been incredible.

She forgives herself for not realizing Aura had quit after that show closed. Most of that winter two years ago is just a bitter gray blur in the back of Sloane’s mind. She’d been too busy drowning in the potential— likely —loss of her own career to be thinking about someone else willingly giving theirs up.

Eya’s words are tinged with longing when she says, “Yeah, I remember that piece. I’d kill to get to dance something like that.”

“You don’t think it’s weird?” Soleil asks. But her tone is already changing, growing lighter. “That she quit right after?”

“I mean, she went out on a high note,” Eya points out. “Incredibly high. The critics wouldn’t shut up about it. Hard to follow something like that.”

Sloane’s water bottle overflows and splatters into the basin. She swears and grabs it, pouring a bit of the excess out before she screws the top back on and steps away to head back into Studio B, nodding at Soleil and Eya like she hasn’t just eavesdropped on their entire conversation. 

Not that anyone cares what Sloane thinks, but she agrees with Eya. Every performance Aura did after Varrish’s piece would’ve been compared to it. The scrutiny would’ve been immense; dancers aren’t meant to peak at twenty-two. Sloane can’t imagine walking away from ballet voluntarily, but she can see someone folding under that kind of pressure. Can see it chasing someone away, even from a dream they’ve chased their whole life.

But Sloane will not, under any circumstances, be that someone.

***

Eight thirty finds her in a different dance studio, this one smaller and rougher around the edges than Aretia’s, but clearly just as well-loved. Sloane’s students are in two staggered lines in front of the mirror, running through the choreography they’ve been working on recently: an excerpt from ABT’s Sugar Plum solo. Sloane has modified it, of course—the girls in this class are fourteen and fifteen, and they’ve only been dancing en pointe for a few years—but it’s still tricky, and they’re looking fairly put-out by the time they reach the end.

“That was better!” Sloane calls as she grabs her phone to pause the music. She looks up from the screen and has to suppress a laugh at their dubious expressions. “I mean it! This piece is hard; there’s a reason this is a principal role.” A little bit of tension eases out of the girls at that. It’s true: even with Sloane’s changes to the choreography, this is far from easy. “Can I see everyone’s arabesque?” she requests. “Left side.”

Her students obey, stepping onto their left legs with their right legs raised behind them. Sloane walks down the line, checking placement, gently adjusting arms as needed. “Chin up,” she prompts. “Heel forward on the standing leg—there you go. And relax your fingers. The Sugar Plum Fairy doesn’t have claws!”

She comes to the front of the room once she’s looked at everyone. “Relax,” she instructs. The girls come out of their arabesques and turn to her, eyes wide as they wait for further direction. “I know the left side is harder for most of us, but you’ve got to make it look easy, yeah? Your technique is there—you just have to trust it. Look at what happens if I don’t have faith in my left leg.” She steps into her own arabesque, intentionally holding herself back and not turning out as much as she could. “What’s wrong with my position?” she asks.

Grace, a redhead at the front, raises her hand, and Sloane nods at her to answer. “Your weight isn’t over your standing leg?”

“Exactly.” Sloane resets and does another arabesque, correctly this time, though she keeps her back leg low. This isn’t about trying to impress them. “Don’t worry about the height of your leg—that will come later. If you don’t bring your weight forward, it’s going to feel like you’re trying to balance on your heel. That’s what makes it hard.” She waves a hand. “Try it again, and stop fighting your hips.”

This time is better. Their legs aren’t any higher, but their lines are easier, less inhibited. Exactly what she wanted. Sloane nods in satisfaction. “Good!” she praises. “Much better. Does that feel different?” A chorus of affirmative answers ripples across the studio. “Great. Let’s try the whole thing once more from the beginning, with music, and then we’ll cool down and I’ll let you go.”

When she dismisses class ten minutes later, she’s tired, but satisfied. This class has improved by leaps and bounds since she first started working with them in September. Teaching had originally only been a way to bring in a bit of extra money—she hadn’t expected to love it nearly as much as she does. The accomplishment she feels at their steady progress is well worth the later nights, the added fatigue. 

Sloane grabs her stuff, zips up her coat, and waves goodbye to the studio’s receptionist on the way out the door. The bitter wind bites at her cheeks and she shivers, burrowing deeper into her jacket as she turns right toward the little Thai place on the corner. It’s one of the hidden gems of the neighborhood, and also a Monday tradition for her and Liam. He places their order fifteen minutes before her class gets out and she picks it up on the way home. It’s a perfect system, mostly because Sloane doesn’t have to cook and she gets to eat noodles.

The bell above the door chimes as she enters, and the warm air of the restaurant is scented with shallots and lemongrass. Sloane readjusts her dance bag on her shoulder and looks down at her phone to double-check the order number Liam texted to her. She’s so used to being alone in here, since she always comes well past the dinner rush, that she actually jumps when the doorbell jingles again, her head snapping up as if whoever’s entering the restaurant is likely to be an armed robber rather than just a normal person who wants green curry or something. 

It’s not an armed robber, obviously. She gives the new arrival the most cursory of glances—expensive-looking sneakers, equally expensive-looking black jacket, sandy brown curls—before looking back at her phone, and then immediately doing a double take because Dain Aetos is standing in her Thai restaurant.

Eventually, it occurs to her that this is her coworker, not just some guy she happens to recognize, and she hastily arranges her face into something more pleasant than the no-doubt brutal RBF she likely had going on. He’s smiling already, though—he definitely recognized her immediately. She feels her cheeks flush.

“Hey,” he says.

Sloane blinks at him. “Hi,” she says back, hesitantly. “I, uh. Didn’t recognize you.”

Dain huffs a laugh. “Understandable. I’m outside my natural environment.” He tilts his head, studying her. She suddenly feels incredibly small under his gaze. “You, on the other hand, look like you’ve been dancing. Even though we got out at four.” 

“I was,” she says, fiddling absentmindedly with the hem of her sweater so she has something to do with her hands. She doesn’t offer him more than that. It’s small talk; he doesn’t need her life story, or the intimate details of what she gets up to some evenings to make sure she and Liam can cover their rent.

Dain raises an inquisitive eyebrow. “Practicing? I thought I saw you leave after Snow.”

A tiny shiver runs down Sloane’s spine at the idea of him noticing her, even for something as small and inconsequential as leaving work at the end of the day. “I teach,” she says. “Class just finished.”

Dain nods as if this makes perfect sense. “Ah. You do look like someone who’s been making small people hold their arms correctly for the last hour and a half.”

That startles a tiny, surprised laugh out of her. “Thankfully, these ones are old enough to mostly know where their arms should be. My Wednesday classes are a different story.” She makes a face as she thinks about her younger classes. She loves the younger kids too, truly, but loose teeth really gross her out, and the endless shouts of “Miss Sloane!” get a bit grating.

When she looks back at Dain, his head is tilted, his expression thoughtful. “You teach Wednesdays, too? How many classes?”

“Five. But I’m subbing this week, so seven.” 

“Wow.” He takes his hand out of his pocket and runs it absently through his hair, and Sloane determinedly does not stare at the way it tousles his curls. “That’s a lot, on top of Nutcracker.”

Something about that stings, feels like a judgment. She’s so tired that she barely manages to keep her tone in check as she says, a bit defensively, “Not all of us get a soloist’s paycheck.” 

She immediately regrets it. He definitely didn’t mean that the way she took it, and he’s not even wrong—it is a lot, and Nutcracker season is currently feeling less like a busy few weeks and more like something she just has to survive. But he takes her comment in stride, makes a sort of considering “hmm” noise, and then flashes her an unfairly attractive smile and says, “Not yet.”

Her eyebrows lift against her will. “Not yet?” she repeats, almost sure she heard him wrong. 

Dain shrugs one shoulder, completely nonchalant. “You have that look.”

“‘That look,’” she parrots, like a moron.

“Yeah. The I’m-gonna-outlast-everyone-here look.” His eyes don’t leave hers, and she feels stripped bare under the strength of his gaze. “People like you tend to get promoted eventually.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s not like she hasn’t heard things like that before—from mentors, teachers, PTs, even Xaden and Liam sometimes—but hearing it come out of Dain’s mouth, when he doesn’t even know her but has clearly been noticing things, been watching… Something in her chest tightens.

“You sound sure,” she forces out. Her voice is a little breathy, shaky to her own ears.

“I’ve been around the block,” he says. Sloane feels her lips quirk up slightly—he can’t be more than a few years older than she is. “I’ve seen how these things usually go. You keep dancing like you have been? You have nothing to worry about.”

Before she can process that, the cashier calls her order number. She grabs the paper bag and thanks the girl at the counter on autopilot, then turns back to Dain, feeling somehow outclassed in this conversation. Thankfully, he rescues her from herself before she can say anything foolish. “Get home safe,” he says, with another one of those disarming smiles. “See you tomorrow.”

She manages to smile back, hoping she doesn’t look completely deranged, before she makes her exit, the bell ringing cheerily above her as she steps out into the cold night. Her whole body feels hot, enough so that she can’t quite blame it on residual heat from the restaurant’s kitchen, and her pulse is quick against the inside of her ribcage: the insistent thud, thud of adrenaline. “Get a grip,” she mutters to herself as she turns toward the subway entrance. Having some kind of cardiac event over a three-minute conversation is a new low, even for her.

But she can’t stop turning the whole thing over in her mind, even as she steps through the turnstile and heads down to her platform. The warmth in his eyes, his assertion about her promotion. The way he looked at her, that made her feel like she was more than just a body.

She is being profoundly ridiculous, she knows, and she also knows she has to shake whatever this is off of her before she goes to class tomorrow. She can’t let her focus be thrown by the likely unfounded confidence Dain has in her, for whatever reason. His pretty words mean nothing when he’s not on the board, not the one calling the shots on any aspect of her career.

But the echo of his attention, his apparent belief in her, follows her all the way home, even as she can’t decide how she’s carrying it: as a ball-and-chain, or as a shield.

***

She comes to class the next morning feeling strangely on-edge. She didn’t sleep well, and there’s an unusual, anticipatory flutter in her stomach that doesn't abate at all when she enters Studio A and sees Burton Varrish sitting on a stool in front of the mirrors.

The studio is humming with a faint nervous energy. A few people are doing relevés at the barre, a few others doing gentle stretches on the floor, and people are engaged in quiet conversation, but the air feels different. Tighter, stretched thin somehow. Xaden, Sloane notices, is gripping the barre like it’s done something to offend him.

She intentionally does not look for Dain as she settles into her typical pre-class routine, swinging one leg at a time forward and back to start warming up her hips. She can’t afford to be distracted. Not today, when her future is dangling in front of her, close enough for her to touch, to taste. She will not lose her promotion because her nervous system is unreasonably activated by one of her coworkers. That would be stupid, and Sloane is a lot of things, but she is not stupid.

“Hey.”

In a betrayal of the highest order, her body turns toward Dain’s voice before she even consciously thinks about it. She takes a deep breath to try to steady herself and offers him a small, hopefully-pleasant smile. “Hey.”

He’s wearing a pair of maroon joggers and a tight-fitting black long-sleeved shirt that does things to her heart rate. His dance bag is held in one muscled arm, and he’s sifting through it with his other hand, pulling out a familiar white plastic cylinder. Her Icy Hot. “I meant to give this back yesterday,” he says. “Sorry.”

Sloane blinks, surprised, before she reaches out for it. His fingers are warmer than hers, and he holds on for just a millisecond longer than necessary before he relinquishes it into her grip. “It’s fine,” she says, her brain a blaring loop of be normal, be normal, be normal. “I… thought Imogen had it?”

The little muscles around Dain’s eyes tighten for a moment, so quickly she almost could have imagined it. “Yeah, she gave it right back when she was done with it,” he answers. “And then I forgot I had it. That”—he tilts his head toward the compression sleeve on her knee—“reminded me.”

Something about that seems a little weird, but it’s probably the part where Imogen gave one of Sloane’s things back to Dain, rather than giving it to Sloane herself. Sloane nods and tosses the Icy Hot toward the gaping mouth of her unzipped duffle bag. “Well, thanks.”

“No problem,” Dain says, and clearly means it. “Thanks for making sure she didn’t kill me.”

A small laugh bubbles out of her. “Any time.” She takes him in and forces herself to look beyond the muscled lines of his arms, noting the unusual tightness in his shoulders and asking, before she can think better of it, “You nervous?” Dain’s perplexed blink tells her she needs to be more specific, and she quickly clarifies, “About Varrish being here?”

“Oh.” He reaches up to rub the back of his neck with one hand, but the movement is stiff, and his words are equally tense as he answers, “I don’t know if ‘nervous’ is the right word. It’s a great opportunity, but—”

“Dancers!” Devera calls. The room snaps to attention much faster than yesterday, conversations ending abruptly. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

Everyone scatters toward their barre spots without even a moment of hesitation. “Here we go,” Dain mutters, seemingly to himself, and then he exhales heavily and gives Sloane a slightly strained version of that smile. “Don’t let him make you nervous. It’s just class, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she echoes softly, helpless to do anything but agree when he’s looking at her like that. 

His smile goes looser, his eyes crinkling a fraction, before he turns to head toward his own barre on the opposite side of the room. Sloane watches him go, then turns to face the mirror, trying to ignore how the studio feels suddenly warmer than it had a moment before.

Chapter Text

It turns out Dain is mostly right. Even with Varrish watching, the weight of his presence pressing down on the entire studio, it still is just class.

Sloane peels her compression sleeve off after pliés and tucks it into her dance bag. She doesn’t really need it, she reasons with herself—her knee just felt a bit puffier, a bit more tender than normal when she woke up this morning, so she wore it as a precaution. Ideally she’d keep it on a bit longer, maybe through the end of barre, but Varrish showing up means her plans have to change. Choreographers are typically not inclined to cast dancers with injuries, whether they have the cleanest technique in the room or not. Devera, along with everyone else at ABT, knows Sloane’s history, but Varrish has never been here before, and Sloane is not going to let his first impression of her be “the girl with the fucked-up knee.” 

Girls with fucked-up knees do not get cast.

Barre is pretty standard. There are some days when Devera (or whoever happens to be teaching) decides to really push them with difficult musicality or technical challenges or both, but most of this barre sequence is familiar, and Sloane leans on that familiarity as she scrupulously checks in with her technique. Rotators engaged, toes spread on the floor, core tight, elongating the backs of her knees and the tops of her ankles. This is drilled into her very cells, she reminds herself. She’s not randomly going to forget twenty years of training just because Varrish is here. Breathe. Concentrate.

She’s mostly focused on herself, but it’s easy to tell just from the energy that no one is fucking around today. There’s none of the usual shuffling through bags or stripping-off of warmups between combinations; everyone is zeroed in on Devera and her instructions. Screwing up a barre exercise is hardly the end of the world on a normal day, but no one is willing to risk Varrish thinking they’re brainless, that they pick up steps slowly. In an original work like the one Varrish will be creating, choreography changes all the time, so being a quick study is important. Idiots tend to be a burden on the choreographic process.

When they finish barre, Devera gives them five minutes to do any stretches they need and put pointe shoes on before coming out to center. Sloane holds onto the barre with her left hand and grabs the toes of her right foot, pushing her hips forward and pulling her heel up to her glute. She hisses a long breath out through her teeth as she wills her quad to relax. But it doesn’t seem to want to—she lowers her foot and feels the knot in her vastus medialis pulse a few times, like it’s laughing at her. Motherfucker. 

She takes a quick glance around before determining her next steps. Varrish isn’t looking at her, seeming fairly absorbed by whatever notes he’s taking on the tablet in his lap, so she deems it safe to sit down and try to pacify her knee before center. She arranges her leg in front of her and bends forward into something that could ostensibly be a hamstring stretch before grinding her thumb into the angry tissue and holding it there.

The muscle fights her for a moment in a flare of bright, angry pain, and Sloane breathes deeply through her nose as she outlasts it, feels it start to settle under the pressure. There’s not much she can do about pain at the fracture site itself, but when the surrounding muscles start to scream about being overworked, she can usually bully them back into submission. She gives it another second just to be sure, before easing off and reaching for her pointe shoes.

Devera calls them all to attention again just as Sloane is finishing up tying her second shoe, tucking the knot under the ribbons just behind her ankle bone. She quickly gets to her feet, running an anxious hand over the bun at the nape of her neck when Devera says, “One minute to partner up. We’ll do adagio in pairs today.”

This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. It’s not like they’ve never done a partnered adagio before, and Varrish is known for his partner work; of course he’d want to see them dance in pairs. She just wishes she’d known.  

Sloane turns toward the mass of dancers finding partners in the middle of the room with one objective: get to Cam. They pair up pretty frequently for things like this. Sloane loves working with him—he’s a good height for her, and they have good chemistry, which Sloane was honestly slightly worried she might not be capable of anymore. But most importantly, Cam is safe, has never pushed her farther than she knows she can go, and it’s that safety that has her seeking him out now, needing that familiarity.

Only Cam meets her eyes from across the studio, looking highly apologetic, and Sloane realizes with a numb sort of dread that Cat has already claimed him. 

Sloane puffs out her cheeks on an exhale. Cat’s personality is borderline intolerable, sure, but she’s a fantastic dancer, and it’s not like dancing with her requires much conversation. There’s no justifiable reason for Cam to turn her down. Cam looks pleadingly at Sloane, clearly apologizing with his eyes, and despite the trepidation tightening around her lungs like a boa constrictor, Sloane shakes her head fondly at him to reassure him it’s not a big deal. He doesn’t owe her anything. He can partner whoever he wants—or, rather, whoever he gets pressured into partnering. This particular pairing doesn’t seem like it was his idea.

She scans the room again, a little frantically, dismissing options as they arise. Garrick is with Imogen—no surprise there—and Bodhi’s been snatched up by Soleil. Sawyer’s with Rhiannon, Ridoc is muttering something to Eya that’s making her laugh, Lynx and Baylor are already standing with Visia and Avalynn. 

There’s always Xaden. He’s practiced with her a lot, especially in the strange, fragile period after her rehab when she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to partner again. Sloane sees him with Syrena, but she knows that if she were to go to him now and ask him to partner her instead, he would without hesitation. 

The only problem with that plan is that Sloane would like to retain at least a fraction of her dignity, and going to ask her big brother (in all the ways that matter, anyway) to rescue her from something she finds a bit uncomfortable feels slightly juvenile. Plus, he’s clearly harboring some kind of inexplicable resentment toward Varrish, and Sloane wants no part of that when she’s trying to get the man to cast her. She bites her lip and turns away from Xaden, and she’s steeling herself to pair up with Trager or Bragen, who are nice but slightly too short for her, if she’s being honest, when she walks right into a chest.

A muscled chest in a long-sleeved black shirt that kicks her pulse into a traitorous little flutter.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Dain says, amusement audible in his voice, his hands warm on her bare shoulders where he caught her. Sloane prays to whatever gods may be listening—though privately she is fairly confident that none are—that the flush of her cheeks can be passed off as exertion from barre, and not humiliation or anxiety or any of the other myriad emotions she’s feeling that absolutely do not include attraction.

Her thoughts are scrambled enough by Cam’s betrayal (asshole) and the collision that she just kind of stares at him, lips slightly parted for a reply that doesn’t come. Dain steps back just enough to give her some personal space, and then asks simply, “Partners?”

Sloane blinks stupidly for a moment. “What about Cianna?” she finally asks, because while they obviously don’t have assigned partners, everyone has preferences, and Dain and Cianna are clearly each other’s.

Dain angles his head toward the back of the room, and Sloane follows the motion to spot Cianna using Emery’s arm as a barre while she balances in passé. “Seems like we both got abandoned,” Dain says lightly. He does not, Sloane notes, sound too bothered about it. 

She looks at him. Glances down at his hands, which are much larger than hers, strong and capable—she has seen how capable they are, has seen him do much harder things than whatever’s going to be in this combination without faltering. Looks back up at those honey-brown eyes, clearly waiting patiently for her decision.

Ultimately, there is no decision to be made. If she wants to keep doing this, to keep dancing, she has to fucking grow up eventually. She can’t always dance with her comfort person. Casting doesn’t care about who she trusts. 

“Yeah,” she says, willing her voice to be more confident than she feels. “Sure.”

Dain’s easy smile doesn’t change. He just gestures with one hand toward a vacant stretch of floor that happens to be exactly where Sloane normally likes to be during center work: not quite at the front, not exactly at the center, but close enough that there will definitely be eyes on her. A smirk tugs at her lips and she peeks up at him from the corner of her eye as they walk over, asking with a hint of surprise, “My favorite spot?”

“I pay attention,” is all Dain says as he moves to stand just behind her. Sloane doesn’t know what to do with that, but she’s saved from having to process it by Devera starting to explain the combination.

As Sloane suspected, it’s nothing particularly difficult. A promenade, a few pirouettes, a développé a la seconde, interspersed with a few dramatic pauses and transitional steps, ending with an assisted back attitude. Certainly nothing revolutionary. They’re steps Sloane’s been doing in partnering class for nearly a decade. “Mark it once with music?” Devera proposes, and the room nods as a collective before she motions to the pianist to begin.

There’s a split second where Sloane’s body attempts to initiate something like panic, and she shuts it down with a harsh swallow before she steps up onto pointe on her right leg, bringing her left leg up behind her, bent in a low attitude, and reaching for Dain with her right hand. He’s there to meet her instantly, his arm outstretched palm-up for her to hold onto, providing just the right amount of support for her to balance while he turns them both in a promenade. There’s a penché en pointe after that, Dain sinking into a side lunge to keep supporting her as her leg rises and her torso dips toward the floor. Sloane doesn’t go as far as she knows she can; it’s only a mark, a rough run to make sure no one has questions about the steps or the timing. Showing off during a mark is wasted energy.

She comes back up from her penché and lowers her leg to coupé, her pointed foot pressed to the back of her right ankle, and Dain uses his hands on her waist to turn her in just one rotation so she faces the front corner of the studio again again, leaving him behind her. There’s a balancé, a sort of rocking step where the weight shifts from one foot to the other, and then she steps right into the développé, extending her leg straight to the side. She keeps it low again, just high enough to bring into passé so Dain can spin her in two full turns and she can bring it up behind herself again in arabesque. Her foot comes back to passé on its way forward in a développé devant, and then she slowly brings her leg down into fifth position. 

The ending of the combination is fairly quick: a few tight chaîné turns, a step-over pirouette, and then Dain catches her from behind, supporting her as she brings her leg up into another back attitude that curls around him like a cat’s tail, holding them together as the exercise ends.

“Any questions?” Devera asks over the soft murmur that tends to follow doing a partnering exercise for the first time. There don’t seem to be any urgent concerns, so after a moment, she walks over to Lynx and Visia to adjust the angle of Visia’s shoulders in the ending pose. The rest of the room takes the free moment to make any fixes or tweaks they need before they do it for real.

Sloane lowers her back leg and steps off pointe, looking uncertainly up at Dain. He meets her gaze, and the first words out of his mouth are, “Okay, what do you need from me?”

That is… not what she expected him to say. Her face must be doing something absolutely bewildering because he raises an eyebrow and elaborates, “Did you feel like you needed more support on anything?”

“I…” She just barely stops herself from gaping at him as her mind whirls. “No?”

He squints at her. “You don’t sound sure.”

“Um.” Sloane searches all of her memories of partnering since graduating from the Academy, tries to remember the last time she finished something and wasn’t immediately met with an adjustment, a correction. An admonishment. “I… no. It felt good.”

“Okay, then can I ask you something?” She nods hesitantly, bracing herself for criticism—here it comes—and picks anxiously at her cuticles as he asks, “Can you try to trust me?”

“What?” she blurts out. Her face is burning again.

Dain puffs an amused exhale through his nose. “You don’t have to try to do it all yourself. My whole job is to make you look good. And it’s not that hard of a job.” Sloane short-circuits at that—was it a compliment?—and he adds, “I’ve never dropped anyone before. You’re not going to be the first.”

“First group!” Devera calls over the noise, and Dain looks down at Sloane again and doesn’t move. Sloane realizes, with the few brain cells she has that are still online, that he’s defaulting to her again, seeing if she wants to be in the first group or wait and be second. She blinks hard to try to get herself functioning again— get a fucking grip!—and reaches out mindlessly with her right hand, because her brain knows how this goes: a tight grip on her wrist, hauling her to his preferred spot like she’s a misbehaving dog on a leash.

Only that doesn’t happen. 

Dain catches her hand in his own, warm fingers loosely wrapped around hers. “You good?” he asks, giving her a tiny squeeze, and it’s clear he means both are you good to be in the first group and are you good, like, mentally. 

She nods, and it’s half-true, because she is good to be in the first group. They settle into their opening positions, and she gives herself one quick glance in the mirror. Her eyes skim over Varrish on the way there, and her heart rate spikes, slamming her unceremoniously back into her body. This adagio can’t just be a technical exercise: if she wants to be noticed and cast she has to sell it, perform it. She tips her head to the side to crack her neck before she presses her shoulders back and lifts her chin. Sell it. 

Devera nods for the pianist to begin, and Sloane inhales deeply, lets her arms flow a little with her breath in preparation before the combination starts. Then she steps up en pointe.

The energy shift between the marked run and this one is palpable. Across the room, legs lift higher, lunges are deeper, lines are longer and sharper. But it’s not just about technique. Ballet is a story, a performance, and since they haven’t been given a storyline, Sloane chooses one herself. It’s a romance, she decides. The balcony pas de deux from Romeo and Juliet has always been her favorite, all longing glances and tender embraces, and she thinks of Juliet as she dances now. She meets Dain’s eyes as she comes up from her penché and offers him a soft smile right before he turns her, ending with her facing away from him again.

His returning smile is easy, and he picks up Sloane’s unspoken plotline seamlessly, seeking out eye contact and looking at her like he’s half in love with her already. He holds her gaze through the balancés, breaks it only when she turns away for the pirouette. She does the développé to the front, her straight leg hovering in front of her, and in a moment of pure artistic choice—“can you try to trust me?”—she leans her torso back, enough that the back of her head can just rest on his shoulder as she gazes up at him like he’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

She feels the briefest flash of guilt for not running this by him beforehand, but he adjusts his grip like he expected her to do it, and his expression is warm, fond, as he eases her back up. Heat blooms in her cheeks, her belly.

Acting, she reminds herself in the final measure, tearing her eyes away from his. They are at work, and this is acting. She steps into the final pirouette, spotting the seam between two mirror panels so she doesn’t get dizzy as Dain spins her, and lifts her leg back into back attitude when he halts her, catching her so her back is against his chest. 

In the few seconds that they hold their final pose, Sloane examines the picture they make in the mirror. There she is, her leg lifted high behind her, one arm curved above her head as she smiles to the invisible audience, her chin lifted triumphantly like she’s won something, gotten everything she wanted. And then there’s Dain, his tan fingers stark against the navy blue of her leotard where they’re splayed over her ribcage, pressing her back against him, his head tilted so he’s looking down at her even as she faces away. Like he can’t bear to look away.

“Good,” Devera calls out, and waves her arm for them to switch groups. Sloane lowers her leg and steps down off pointe, and Dain waits just that split second until she’s steady on two feet again to lower his hand from her ribs. His palm hovers over her back as they move to the side of the room, there but not touching. Sloane is stunned to realize it feels more like a reassurance than a threat.

When they’re against the wall and safely out of the way of the next group, he quietly asks, “How did that feel?”

Sloane doesn’t know how to answer. Doesn’t know how to explain that it took weeks of practice with Cam before she was comfortable enough to take risks, to perform like that. Doesn’t know how to describe the way she didn’t feel the need to lock her core like a shield every time he reached for her. How did it feel?

“Different,” she whispers eventually, because she can’t say any of that.

Dain gives her a crooked little smile. “Good different?”

Sloane meets his soft-eyed gaze, holds it, and suddenly feels so much that she ducks her head, her focus flitting to the nearest safe thing, which happens to be the floor. “Yeah,” she breathes. “Good different.”

***

She’s heading for the freezer before the apartment door even closes behind her that afternoon.

She has to nudge aside a half-empty box of frozen chicken taquitos to get to her stash of gel ice packs. That’s good, since it means Liam remembered to eat lunch today, though she makes a mental note to make sure dinner involves a vegetable of some sort as she grabs an ice pack and retreats to the couch. 

Liam is in the armchair with one foot propped on the coffee table, so Sloane flops on the couch and slings her right ankle over the armrest, draping the gel pack over her knee. No matter how well class and rehearsals go, Sloane has a routine for after work. Shoes off. Leg up. Ice on. She tips her head back against the couch and lets out a slow breath as the cold bites at her skin through her tights.

“Can you set a timer?” she asks Liam, staring at the ceiling. Her phone is in her bag in the kitchen, and she doesn’t feel like going to get it. “Twe—”

“Twenty minutes, I know,” he interrupts. The keys of his laptop click as he sets it up. “Not like you do this every day or anything.”

She rolls her eyes. “How was class?” 

“We talked about charting for three hours, so, not exactly thrilling.” Liam gives her a once-over over the top of his laptop. “How was your class?” 

Sloane swallows and refuses to make eye contact. “Good. A guest choreographer was observing, so it was a little different. Did some partnering.”

Liam hums and types something. “With Cam?”

It’s a safe assumption, and she doesn’t know why she corrects him, but she does. “Dain.”

Silence. She finally lifts her head off the back of the couch to look at him, finds him watching her with his eyebrows raised. “‘Dain’ like Violet’s Dain?”

“I don’t know that Xaden would love that phrasing.”

“Nice deflection.”

He’s grinning, unreasonably pleased by whatever he thinks he’s discovered. Sloane sticks out her tongue.  “Shut up.”

“You’re blushing,” he sing-songs.

“Because you’re embarrassing me!” She grabs a throw pillow and chucks it at him, but he bats it away before it can hit his computer. “It was work. We did one combination together. Give me a break.”

“Fine.” He types something else and then leans to set the laptop on the coffee table, jutting his chin toward her knee. “How’s it feeling?”

Sloane flexes her quad experimentally under the ice pack and bites the inside of her cheek at the dull throb. It really had been a good class, but the pressure of Varrish watching meant that she pushed herself harder in grand allegro than she normally would, especially during a performance week. She still has to do Nutcracker the day after tomorrow. And the next day. And twice the day after that. And the matinee the day after that. “Um. It’s… not horrible.”

Liam doesn’t say anything, probably because there’s nothing to say. They’ve had this conversation a million times—him begging her to back off, and her snapping that she knows her own body and she can handle herself, only to apologize later when she’s so sore that making it from the couch to her bed feels like an insurmountable obstacle. There’s no point in cycling through that unproductive pattern again, so he doesn’t initiate it. He just thins his lips and stares at her knee like he can fix it through sheer determination.

“I’m fine,” Sloane murmurs. “Honestly. It’s, like, a three.” Out of ten. There had been days, right after it happened, when her pain had hovered at an eight or a nine. Sloane barely remembers them, honestly, through the haze of drugs and delirium, but Liam does. Sometimes she wonders if those days were worse for him than they were for her.

“You should be at a zero,” Liam grumbles. “Can I at least get you some ibuprofen?”

That, she’ll take. “Sure,” she acquiesces. It’ll kill the pain enough for her to get through some light stretching, and hopefully bring down the inflammation enough that she’s not starting this five-performance weekend nearly halfway up the pain scale. “Thank you,” she adds as he heads for the bathroom.

He returns to her after a pit stop in the kitchen, dropping three pills into her cupped palm and then setting her water bottle in her lap. “This was buzzing in your bag,” he says, holding up her phone. “Thought it might be important.”

Sloane frowns and reaches for it, but Liam jerks it out of her reach. “Nope. Pills first.” 

He waits for her to swallow them and chase them with a few gulps of water before he relinquishes her phone. “You’re so annoying,” she gripes halfheartedly, snatching it from him and tapping the screen. She has four messages, all from Cam.

Come over tonight? 6:30? Dinner and games and wine. Not too many people.

I’m making that pasta you like

Then, a few minutes later, when she hadn’t answered the first two:

I’m sorry I partnered with Cat please come

Pleeeeeeeease

She snorts. “Cam wants me to come for dinner.”

Liam looks up from the dust bunny he’s busy kicking under the armchair. “Good. You should go.”

Sloane blinks at him incredulously. “I have class in the morning,” she says.

“So does Cam,” Liam points out. “And won’t this guest choreographer be back tomorrow? Cam’s not an idiot. He won’t keep you too late.”

This is a fair assessment. Cam loves a good time, but he also knows better than to orchestrate any true foolishness with casting on the line. “I don’t know,” she hedges, drumming her fingers on her phone case. “I’m kinda tired.” She glances at the clock. “Shit, and I’d have to start getting ready, like, right now.”

Liam turns abruptly away and heads back down the narrow hallway toward the bathroom. “Where are you going?” she calls after him as he ducks inside. She hears the squeak of the pipes as the shower springs to life. 

“I’m kicking you out!” he calls back over the sound of the spray. “Now come shower before the water gets cold!”

“Dick,” she mutters under her breath, flinging the ice pack off her leg so it lands in a lump on the seat of the armchair. Good. Hopefully he'll sit on it and freeze his ass off. “I’m coming, gods.”

She levers herself up from the couch and hobbles down the hall on her half-frozen leg. Liam throws a clean towel at her on his way out of the bathroom, looking particularly smug that he’s harassed her into participating in a social activity. “You’re so annoying,” she tells him, though there’s absolutely zero heat in it.

“Part of my charm!” he tosses over his shoulder. 

Sloane glares at the back of his head and shuts the door before he can say anything else.

***

She walks up to Cam’s brownstone at 6:48 with her chilled hands stuffed in her coat pockets and a bottle of wine in her tote bag.

Cam’s opening the door before she even rings the bell. “Sloane’s here!” he calls over his shoulder, reaching out to pull her unceremoniously across the threshold and into a tight hug. “I’m sorry I went with Cat,” he tells the top of her head as he squeezes her. “Will you ever forgive me?”

Sloane snorts as they separate. “I’m sure you regretted it immediately, so, sure. I forgive you.” She nudges past him to kick off her shoes into the small pile by the door.

“I did,” Cam says, a touch too earnestly. “She is a nightmare. Have I ever told you how much I love you?”

“Not nearly often enough,” Sloane informs him. “But you’re making me pasta, so that’s a start.”

Cam’s place is absurdly nice. It’s actually, technically, one of his father’s places, but his father does something scarily important for the government and is never in Aretia, so Cam gets six bedrooms and seven baths all to himself (plus a ridiculous list of amenities including an elevator, two terraces, a private lap pool, and a steam room. Money is crazy.). Soft music is floating up from the den, but Sloane has wine to drop off, so she walks through the fancy living room instead of down the stairs, trying not to slip on the immaculate hardwood floors (she has before; they are treacherous in socks). She has to pass through the equally-fancy dining room to get to the chef’s kitchen at the back, and once she’s there, she pauses in the arched doorway, raising one eyebrow at the silver-tipped braid on the apparent chef. “I thought you said you were making me pasta.”

“I may have exaggerated my involvement in the cooking process,” Cam says easily as he joins her. “And it tastes better when she makes it.”

Violet looks over her shoulder at them both. “He kept walking away from the stove and burned the butter twice. It was safer for me to take over.” She jerks her chin toward the fridge. “Drinks are in there, and then I could use a hand, if you have a second?” Cam steps forward to help and Violet brandishes her wooden spoon like a weapon. “Not from you. You’re banished.”

Cam holds his hands up in surrender. “I’ll be in the den, if you change your mind.” Violet shakes her head long-sufferingly and Cam grins, unrepentant, before holding one arm out to Sloane. “Coat?”

Sloane wriggles out of her jacket and tosses it to him. He catches in one hand, using the other to tug at one of her braids before he leaves the kitchen. He can be just as bad as Liam when he wants to be.

She jams her wine into the overstuffed fridge and frees one of the already-opened bottles to pour a glass for herself, humming appreciatively as she takes a long sip. It’s good—she turns the bottle to check the label, sees the word Reserve, and turns it away again immediately. Rich people. 

“Is Xaden here?” she asks Violet over the rim of her glass. 

Violet shakes her head, vigorously sautéing an enormous saucepan of what appears to be broccolini. “He wasn’t in a spectacular mood,” she says, though her expression is amused, fond. “I think he was going to see Liam.”

Sloane takes another sip of her wine to hide her smirk. No wonder Liam insisted on her coming over here—he had plans. “Who is here, then?” she asks as she starts retrieving plates from the corner cabinet. Visia and Avalynn are here, doubtlessly, but likely Lynx and Baylor, and maybe more, since Cam’s promise of “not too many people” probably only means “not the entire company, and only because some of them are annoying.” 

“The usuals, plus Ridoc, Rhi, Sawyer—shit!” Violet glares at the stockpot she’s evidently just tried and failed to lift. “Stupid fucking—”

“I got it,” says a calm voice from behind them both, and Sloane nearly drops her armful of dishes. How many times in one day can she be surprised by Dain Aetos being places she should reasonably expect him to be? 

Dain hefts the pot over to the sink and starts draining the rigatoni into an industrial-sized colander. Violet goes back to the broccolini, and Sloane goes back to gathering cutlery so she can pull herself together. She sets everything at one end of the counter, then murmurs to Violet, “You said you needed a hand?”

“I’ll make Dain do it,” Violet says brightly, and Dain smiles wryly at Sloane over the top of her head. “You could set the table, though?”

“On it.” Sloane takes another gulp of wine before hauling the plates and silverware into the dining room.

When there’s really not many people there—like, just Sloane and Cam and their small group—they normally just sprawl around the den with their plates, but having nearly a dozen of them in that one room does increase the likelihood of accidentally spilling pasta all over one of Cam’s outrageously comfortable couches, so the relocation is probably a good plan. Sloane lays the plates out, then makes a second loop around the table with the cutlery, and by the time she’s finished, everyone has made their way upstairs from the den and the boys are starting to bring in the food.

They end up doing some kind of bizarre conga line around the table to serve themselves, rather than attempting to pass around the million-pound bowl of pasta. Sloane loads up her plate with rigatoni—the kind she loves with browned butter and lemon and sage; Cam really is sorry—and broccolini and garlic bread, takes a seat with her bounty, and only then realizes that her wine is in the kitchen.

Before she can even get up, Dain takes the seat next to her with a knowing smile, setting her refilled glass down next to her plate. Sloane stares at it, and thinks she must clearly be a little bit buzzed already if this is making her feel the way it is. “Thanks,” she says, a second too late.

“No problem,” he says, and reaches for his own drink, and Sloane watches his fingers curl around the glass. Remembers how they felt around her ribs. 

Holy shit, she is an embarrassment. She ducks her chin and stabs a piece of pasta with her fork while she firmly reminds herself of the situation she’s in: she is a dancer, and Dain is her coworker, and she has played this game before. She knows how it ends. She will not play it again.

They migrate to the den after dinner is over, draping themselves over furniture and the floor and each other’s laps with the kind of abandon that comes with good food and a surplus of casual affection. Dain perches in an armchair to the right of the comfiest couch, which Sloane promptly tucks herself in her favorite corner of before someone can steal it. Visia and Ridoc get into a spirited argument about the merits of some pop star’s old Christmas album, which results in the playing of the most absurd rendition of Little Drummer Boy that Sloane has ever fucking heard, and the conversation devolves from there. Sloane is mostly content to listen, sipping her drink until it’s gone, and then leaning forward to place her glass on the coffee table.

She straightens up, tucking one leg under the other, but then immediately untucks it as her knee gives a quiet throb of protest. Not awful, but a whisper of careful, careful, after a long day with many more long days to come. 

Almost unconsciously, she reaches down and rubs just below her kneecap, pressing the pad of her thumb in gently to soothe the tendon. When she withdraws her hand, Dain is looking at her again.

For one wild moment, she feels like a deer in headlights. Excuses sit on the tip of her tongue, tasting wine-sour, but she’s not a great liar, especially when she’s drunk. And she must be drunk, for her face to be this hot and her body to feel this unsteady. There is no other reason for her heart to be skipping beats in her chest right now.

Dain doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t stare. He leans forward when Violet says his name, laughs at something she says, slips back into the conversation so seamlessly that Sloane wonders if maybe she imagined the whole thing. But then—and anyone not looking for it would miss it—he shifts in his seat, and nudges the cushy ottoman in front of him a few inches closer to Sloane with his foot.

She hesitates a second, but her knee pulses again, and that wins out. Casually, she extends her leg and rests it across the ottoman.

The relief is immediate. Sloane exhales, almost a sigh, and feels it when her spine slackens, letting her lean back into the cushions. Dain glances back a moment later, eyes darting just briefly to the long line of Sloane’s right leg, and exhales through his nose, his shoulders relaxing a fraction before he looks away.

Sloane tears her gaze from the side of his face, something warm and tight tugging in her chest.

It feels like a warning.

***

She arrives at class the next morning having barely slept. Her knee doesn’t hurt—elevating it apparently did some good—but her head is a mess of a lopsided smile and caramel eyes and gentle hands on her waist.

She can’t be doing this, she reminds herself furiously as she works through the routine motions of barre. This career is all that has ever mattered to her, and if she fucks it up now, she will have lost it forever. There’s no telling when another soloist spot will open up, and if she doesn’t get it now then she’ll be fighting against younger, shinier, newer dancers when the next opening comes around. She has to focus.

Barre passes in a blur, as wound up as she is in her own bullshit. She spends two miserable minutes of their five minute break before center holding a forearm plank as some kind of penance, and only comes out of it when she’s shaking too hard to have a coherent thought. It makes her brain shut up a little, and as she shoves her feet into her pointe shoes, Varrish’s looming presence at the front of the studio almost doesn’t register.

What absolutely does register is Devera announcing that they need to partner up again for adagio.

Sloane’s head jerks to the side, ostensibly seeking out Cam, but her eyes lock with Dain’s, and her disloyal body has the fucking audacity to start walking toward him without her consent.

The choice she’s making—to pass up a regular, familiar partner in favor of someone she has danced with once —is a significant one. But she goes, because her body remembers how it felt to not have to fight for every step, to be able to let go. 

And because it would be embarrassing to stop halfway across the room.

“Hi again,” Dain says, looking almost surprised. “I assumed you’d want to go back to Cam.”

Before she can even think about how to respond, she says back, a little haughtily, “You know what they say about assuming things.”

There is a moment, where Dain just looks down at her, and she’s too surprised by her own mouth to say anything else, that she thinks he might tell her to go. That he’d prefer to dance with Cianna after all. But he just cracks that amused smile and says, “I’ll keep that in mind,” and holds out his hand to her.

Sloane knows from the instant Devera starts giving the adagio that Varrish will be making casting decisions today. It’s not said outright, of course, but the length of it alone—over a minute and a half just for one side—would be enough to know this isn’t just a normal exercise for class. There are also a few more difficult technical elements that they don’t normally risk during a performance week; Varrish must have asked to see them specifically. 

The room breaks apart once the adagio is taught and they’ve marked it with the music to work through whatever sticky points they have before they do it for real. Sloane is marking the middle section furiously with her hands—it speeds up, for some gods-forsaken reason; this is supposed to be an adagio— when Dain gently closes his fingers around her frantic ones. “What’s the face about?” he asks, ducking his head so that she has to look at him.

Sloane slowly releases the bit of her cheek that’s been clamped between her molars. “How are you not nervous?” she whispers.

Thankfully, he doesn’t try to tell her again that ‘it’s just class.’ Anyone with a hint of ability to read a room would know that there are going to be major casting choices made by the end of this class. Instead, he tells her, “You can’t control his decisions. But you can control the next few minutes. What do you need from me to make this easier for you?”

Sloane blinks rapidly. “Um.” She runs through the choreography in her head and swallows. “The last lift,” she starts, haltingly, then cuts herself off.

Dain doesn’t say anything, clearly waiting for some kind of elaboration. That makes sense. The last lift isn’t technically that difficult, especially for Sloane: she has a chassé (a little galloping step) to build up momentum before pushing off, bracing both hands on his shoulders as she points one leg up toward the ceiling and the other down toward the floor, almost in a penché above his head. He has to do all the work, really, other than her squeezing her glute for dear life to keep her legs in as close to a vertical split as possible. “What about it?” he eventually asks. “Do you need me to move my hands?”

“No,” she says, more harshly than she intends. “I—” But she cuts herself off. “It’s just—”

He waits her out, even though they’re running down the clock until they have to dance this and it matters. Sloane stares at her hands, enveloped in one of his, as she desperately tries to find words. They don’t hold the position for long—it’s more of an up-and-down situation—but it’s at the end of the combination, when they’ll both be tired, and it’s her right leg that’s down, her right leg that will take all of her weight if she falls, and… “Just—don’t drop me?” she blurts.

It’s almost an insulting question, honestly. She braces herself for anger or disbelief, indignation at her doubting his abilities, or a firm reminder that he can’t do the lift correctly if she’s not pulling her own weight. “If you just pulled up, it wouldn’t have happened.” 

“Sloane,” Dain says gently, squeezing her cold fingers. “Remember what I said yesterday.”

She can’t look at him. She stares at her hands as if they belong to somebody else. 

“I have never dropped anybody,” he repeats, punctuating the ‘anybody’ with another soft squeeze. “And I’m not planning on breaking that streak today. Okay?”

An exhale shudders out of her, some muscles in her shoulders going slack. “Okay,” she breathes.

“Okay.” He runs his thumb over her knuckles, a there-and-gone touch, before he releases her hands. “I also think you should remember what I said on Monday.” Sloane lifts her chin to squint at him—she’s supposed to remember something he said on Monday? Now? While she’s also trying to remember ninety seconds of choreography?—and he laughs a little, reaching for her waist to get them both into their starting positions as Devera signals for the first group.

“‘You keep dancing like you have been?’” he murmurs to the back of her head. Sloane can just feel the warmth of his breath on the baby hairs at the nape of her neck. “‘You have nothing to worry about.’”

Sloane shivers. Straightens her spine. And when the music begins, she dances like she believes him.

Chapter Text

Sloane wants to be a principal dancer more than anything, but as she stares down the barrel of a six-show weekend, she really does (momentarily, anyway) consider filling out some college applications. 

Her love-hate relationship with Nutcracker is firmly edging into hate as the Nutcracker March blares through the dressing room speakers. Everything is starting to piss her off: her foundation isn’t sitting right, she has to redo the eyeliner on her right eye twice because it won’t behave, and the snowstorm that blew through last night left her knee throbbing with its own pulse. She has it propped up on the chair next to her as she fixes her eyeliner, with one of those microwaveable heat packs draped over it in an attempt to keep it from stiffening up. The dressing room smells like hairspray and she’s worried about Liam—the air pressure fluctuation slammed him with a migraine—and all of this would be enough on its own to drive her up a wall, but there’s also the overarching anxiety caused by the fact that casting still hasn’t come out.

If pressed, she would acknowledge that it would be insane of the company to drop casting announcements right before a packed show weekend like this. At best, nothing would happen, but at worst, it could totally disrupt dynamics both onstage and off. Shows get ruined like that. People get hurt like that. It would be dumb, and ABT’s leadership is (usually) not dumb. But knowing all of this does not equate to patience. Sloane wants the casting, and she wants it now.

She waits to put lipstick on until she hears the party scene ending. The door swings open, dancers who played party parents trickling in to change for Snow or Act II, and the dressing room is awash in a hum of chatter that Sloane comfortably ignores until she hears, “I think Varrish is here.”

Silence. Sloane’s heart does something complicated in her chest. 

“You what?” Visia asks, turning to look at Maren, who’s starting to strip out of her maid costume.

Maren reaches behind herself to unsnap the back of her dress. “I’m pretty sure I saw Varrish,” she says quietly. “In the third row, that reserved seat.”

Sloane caps her lipstick and turns on her stool to face away from the mirrors. She knows the seat Maren’s talking about—she’d swung by the box office to check on Liam’s ticket for tomorrow and had overheard an announcement that Devera needed a seat set aside in the orchestra section. That’s not unusual in itself, since it’s pretty common to pull tickets for big donors or board members, but Sloane doesn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her that the seat could be for him.

“You saw him?” Avalynn asks.

Cat makes an exasperated noise. “She just said that,” she snaps, bodily turning Maren to undo the knots in her apron ties. Maren lets her. “And it’s not even a big deal. Choreographers come to shows all the time; let’s not be dramatic.” This last part is delivered with a scathing look toward Avalynn, who rolls her eyes heartily and starts digging through her pointe shoe bag.

Sloane swallows and scrapes at the edge of her lipstick with her pinky nail with slightly more force than is likely necessary. Cat’s right, of course, but her cutting delivery never fails to make Sloane feel small. She knows, logically, that she’s giving this casting more power over her than it probably deserves, building the whole thing up in her head into a nebulous mass of pressure and anxiety, but she doesn’t need to be told “it’s not a big deal” by a Cordella. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Visia says quietly to the side of Sloane’s head. Sloane looks sharply at her, stung, but Visia raises a knowing eyebrow. “You know what I mean. Don’t let this change how you dance, Sloane.”

Sloane can’t have this conversation. Can’t tell Visia it’s not that simple—that of course fear changes how she dances, changes how choreography sits in her bones. “I know,” she says with far more confidence than she feels. Ruminating won’t help her nerves; either Varrish is here or he isn’t, and either way, her dancing needs to be perfect. She wishes Maren hadn’t said anything, honestly. Desperate to change the subject, she holds up her costume. “Help me with my hooks?”

Visia complies, and Sloane is saved from having to continue that cursed conversation.

As soon as the curtain drops on Act I and the stagehands have swept up the confetti “snow”, Sloane heads out onto the stage to check the marley. Weather can change how the flooring feels underfoot, and it’s better to know if it’s slippery or sticky before having to do a triple pirouette in front of an audience. She runs through a few phrases from Marzipan, tries a few turns in which she’s half testing the floor and half testing herself, then shuffles into the wings to practice deep breathing and await her entrance for Act II.

When she was younger, she used to pretend things when she was nervous. Nothing crazy—her imagination was never that strong. Her go-to fantasy was usually just that this was all just a dress rehearsal and it was okay if she made a mistake. She watches Hot Chocolate with a racing heart and wishes it was still possible to delude herself into that state of manufactured calm. 

Cat, infuriatingly, seems as unbothered by Varrish’s potential presence onstage as she did back in the dressing room. Her turns are solid, her jumps high and powerful, and she flirts effortlessly with the audience, her lips set in a perfect seductive smirk as she twirls across the stage. You already love me, her face says, as if it’s an inevitable truth, and they do. 

Hot Chocolate ends in a whirl of skirts and a burst of applause, and then Coffee is on. Sloane’s pulse quickens again for an entirely different reason, and she feels it pounding between her collarbones as she watches the lights glimmer off their costumes, off the sharp lines of Dain’s nose and jaw, the cords of muscle in his arms and back. He lifts Cianna like she weighs nothing, and Cianna lets him, and Sloane’s mouth goes dry at the memory of the security of his hold. The way his hands gripped her firmly, but without pain. The way he looked at her and said, “I have never dropped anybody,” and her body knew without him having to say it that he wouldn’t drop her, either.

She shivers nonsensically, despite the heat of the stage lights she can feel even in the darkness of the wings. And then she hears, in a hushed whisper somewhere behind her, “Cianna is so lucky.”

Sloane glances back over her shoulder to see who spoke. It’s generally frowned upon to refer to any part of a ballet dancer’s career as “lucky,” even though so much of it is: knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time, having the right look and the right build and the anatomical capability to do the things ballet requires. Her gaze settles on the same apprentice from earlier, Nicole, who’s mumbling to Bragen as they stand at the back of the wing, and Sloane strains her hearing over the sounds of the oboes and the bassoons to catch, “They’re saying he likes blondes.”

She looks away quickly before she can be caught eavesdropping, knowing immediately that Nicole’s talking about Varrish. It’s not unusual for companies or choreographers to prefer a certain appearance—a redheaded acquaintance of Sloane’s only got a company contract after going brunette, for example—and while Sloane has only seen some of his work, she can acknowledge that Nicole probably has a point. Most notably in her memory, Aura Beinhaven was blonde, when she danced in that final piece before inexplicably ending her career. And while it’s a bit harder to tell under the moody, bluish lighting they use for Coffee, Cianna’s golden hair makes the line of her fair neck look even longer as she arches back, arms stretching above her head.

Sloane purses her lips. Cianna is in a good position to be cast, even disregarding her blondeness. She dances strongly on her own, of course, but has also shown off her partnering abilities with both Emery in class and Dain here onstage. She’s versatile, technically strong, and an excellent performer with years of experience. And, of course, she’s already a soloist—she’s already proven herself to be successful outside of the context of the corps. Sloane picks at a loose sequin on her tutu and tries to suppress the flare of jealousy she feels. Cianna earned everything she has: her ability, her job, her roles. It’s not fair to her to imply that if Varrish casts her, it comes down to something as trivial as her hair color. 

(Besides, Sloane thinks a little selfishly, this preference thankfully can’t hurt her own chances too much.)

Act II carries on while Sloane rolls through her feet, passes her little flute from hand to hand, and tries not to anxiously gnaw off her lipstick. Maren and the other Marzipan corps are talking through a transition, since there’s a swing on tonight, but that doesn’t impact Sloane’s solo at all, so she tries to stay out of their way while they tiptoe through formations. She can’t quite tell how she feels, the finer points of her emotions feeling stubbornly half out of reach, so all she’s really processing is a deep, instinctual kind of panic. 

She knows she has to pull herself together before she dances, especially if Varrish is actually here. Fear can manifest differently onstage, but she has one vivid memory of a ballet competition when she was sixteen, when her muscles were shaking so badly from adrenaline that she rolled her ankle just walking onstage to her opening position. The solo itself hadn’t been much better, and Cat had beaten her soundly. Sloane cringes at the memory. That hasn’t happened to her since, and it will not happen today. She won’t let it.

The trilling flute notes of Tea end, and Sloane steps into her wing, her cold fingers white-knuckled around her flute. She rolls her shoulders back, cracks her neck. Exhales long and slow, even as her pulse hammers against the inside of her chest. It’s only Marzipan. You’ve been doing this since September.

But the reassurance feels false; it doesn’t help. It never does. She is nearly vibrating with anxiety. Almost every time she’s stepped onstage this season, she’s told herself that this is it, this is when it really counts, but every time, she turns out to be a liar because the stakes just keep getting higher. It’s not just the company she’s convincing now. Varrish is a complete stranger, and she needs to convince him that he wants her. That he needs her.

She walks to the edge of the wing for her entrance, and the hot stage air on her skin triggers a full-body shiver that she has to desperately suppress. Her cheek twitches with the force of her smile and she immediately dials it back just a notch—Varrish will not cast her if she looks manic—before opening her arms in invitation to the audience. She does not feel ready, but the time has come anyway.

The instant the music starts, everything shifts.

The lights catch her like a net of fire—not blinding, but galvanizing, kicking her senses into overdrive. She hears the drag of her pointe shoes against the marley like it’s somehow louder than the orchestra, sees the flash of rhinestones like each one is winking at her. Every shape is edged in diamond, every breath like cut glass. Her whole body is drawn bowstring-taut. When she jumps, it’s like the air holds her a beat longer, and the landings vibrate through her when the floor welcomes her back. It’s not ease—it’s a strange kind of sharpened intensity, one that leaves her almost raw. 

She’s numb when she finishes. She exits stage right after her curtsy, her teeth chattering, muscles shuddering with the aftershocks of the strangest burst of adrenaline she’s ever experienced. In the same moment, she both doesn’t remember a thing and remembers too much, like the firing of every neuron for the last two minutes is etched into her bones. It was good. She knows it was good—even if the details are hazy, like her mind has wrapped them in gossamer—but she doesn’t know if she could dance like that again, on command.

Doesn’t know, honestly, if she would want to.

They shuffle to the back of the wings to make room for the Flowers dancers while they wait to go on for the finale. Sloane fidgets with her flute, passing it from hand to hand, and when she looks at Maren and whispers, “Was he there?”, she’s not even sure what she wants the other girl to say.

Maren presses her lips into a thin, red line. “I didn’t look,” she admits, and Sloane can’t tell if she’s disappointed or relieved.

***

The weekend limps along like a wounded animal, and so does Sloane, nearly skating across the icy sidewalks as she approaches her apartment on Saturday night. Four of the weekend’s six shows are over—Thursday and Friday nights, and then both a matinee and an evening performance today—and her whole body is protesting the excessive jumping and unreasonable amount of time spent in pointe shoes.

It’s not snowing yet, but the wind is brutal, and Sloane’s cheeks are numb as she unlocks the apartment door and slips into the kitchen. She drops her bag, leans back against the door, and blows out a long sigh. This evening’s performance marked the halfway point of the Nutcracker run—only seven more shows stand between Sloane and a solid week of time off, but the finish line still feels unreasonably far away.

“Bad night?” Liam asks from the living room.

Sloane leans down to untie her boots so she can toe them off. “It was fine. I’m just tired.” Her eyelids feel heavy with makeup and false eyelashes, and she feels the drag of them as she blinks in the dim light of the apartment. “I…” She inhales through her nose and her brow furrows, her train of thought derailed by the hint of cinnamon in the air. “It smells good in here,” she says blankly. 

Liam made breakfast this morning, like always, but she knows for a fact that when he’s left to his own devices, he doesn’t really cook, and the kitchen is the kind of warm that means the oven’s been on recently. She straightens up and peers into the living room, surprised to see a plate of gingerbread on the coffee table. “What…?”

And then she notices the candles: on the counters, the windowsills, the top of the bookcase. There are so many that she’s distantly wondering where they all came from: squat little tea lights, a cluster of pillar candles on a decorative plate, a few slender tapers in the fancy brass holders Mom used to keep on the dining room table. She steps into the living room, awash in the warm glow of firelight, and Liam offers her a small, hesitant smile. 

“Happy Solstice, Sloane.”

“You remembered,” she murmurs. She knew what date it was, abstractly, but the brutality of the week’s schedule and the stress of casting had all but erased its significance from her mind. 

“Of course I did,” Liam says softly. He glances down at the plate of gingerbread—the teeny men a bit misshapen but golden—and then back up at her. There’s a streak of flour on his sweater. “It’s probably not as good as yours,” he admits, “but I did my best.”

Sloane can tell from the color and the aroma that he’s followed their mom’s recipe. Her heart clenches. “I’m sure it’s close enough,” she tries to tease, but it comes out quiet, with a watery note that she can’t suppress. She reaches for a cookie, nudging aside a wonky little guy to grab one of the circular ones from the bottom of the pile. There, pressed into its surface, is an imprint of a Tyrrish rune for love and good fortune. 

She stares at it. Making the gingerbread for Solstice is always her job now, and she distinctly remembers putting their runic cookie stamps (passed down from their great-grandmother) in the back corner of their tiny, overstuffed pantry when she was done with them, since they only get used once a year. The fact that Liam went looking for them sends something sharp twisting through her abdomen. 

“Do I want to know what the pantry looks like right now?” she asks dryly, so she doesn’t burst into tears over a piece of gingerbread.

Liam winces theatrically. “It has been… creatively reorganized.”

That is clearly code for I have made a mess of things. Sloane snorts, mood sufficiently lightened, and takes a bite. Immediately she’s nine again, sneaking a cookie before Solstice dinner while Mom and Dad light the candles. It’s a little chewy, the dough just a fraction thicker than she normally rolls it out, but the sharpness of ginger and the cinnamon warmth are just right. For a moment, she’s home.

She swallows thickly. Liam is clearly waiting for a verdict, eyes wide with anticipation, and her lips tug up into a smile even as her eyes sting at the bittersweet rush of memory. “You did good,” she tells him.

“Seriously?” He grabs one for himself and bites into it with a snap. “Mmm.”

“Did you not—”

“Try them? No.”

Sloane raises an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Full disclosure: the first batch was completely inedible, and if these ones were bad, I would have to reckon with the fact that I wasted seven cups of perfectly good flour in one day.”

She laughs and grabs two more cookies before plopping onto the couch. Liam joins her with his own handful, and they crunch through a few more bites before Sloane blurts, “Wait, seven cups?”

Liam blinks. “I was following the recipe.”

“You made two full batches?”

“Well, we only have one batch now,” Liam reminds her haughtily, “because the first one was probably poisonous. And we can bring the extras to Xaden’s on Wednesday.”

Right. Wednesday is Christmas, which means—Sloane almost chokes on her next bite. “Oh my gods,” she mutters. “Your finals finished yesterday, and I didn’t even ask how they went.”

Liam chuckles good-naturedly. “They were fine,” he assures her. “Honestly, they weren’t as bad as I expected. Except biomechanics—that was just as bad as I expected. Maybe worse.”

“I’m the worst,” Sloane moans. “I haven’t been supportive at all. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” Liam tilts his head and gives her a stern look. “Don’t go there. I know how important all of this is for you. This is the biggest opportunity of your career; it’s okay that my finals aren’t the biggest thing on your mind right now.”

Sloane huffs and turns away to stare into a candle so she doesn’t have to maintain eye contact. “I’m still sorry,” she mumbles, because she is. Her big brother is going to be a doctor and help injured people—people like her—and he deserves her support, deserves to know how proud she is of him. “You deal with my stuff all the time.”

Liam nudges his leg against hers. “I’m your big brother. That’s my job.” 

They’re both quiet for a moment. Sloane watches a bead of wax drip down the side of one of the taper candles and pool around its base in the holder. In the flickering amber light, everything feels warm and surreal—she can almost forget her exhaustion, her nerves, the ache in her bones that never quite eases. She swallows and tips to the side to lean her cheek on Liam’s shoulder. “They would be so proud of you,” she whispers. She doesn’t have to say who she means. 

Liam’s temple comes to rest against the top of her head. “They’d be proud of you, too,” he tells her. “So proud.”

Sloane lets her vision slide out of focus, turning the whole room into a blurry golden glow, and hopes that’s true.

***

They normally don’t perform on Mondays, especially not a matinee, but the sixth show rounding out this weekend from hell is a school show, when a few of the public schools in the area haul their students—many of whom are certainly far too excited by the impending holiday break to truly appreciate the arts—to the theater, and the average age in the audience hovers somewhere around nine years. Company member opinion on school shows varies; Imogen, for example, finds them excruciating, but it doesn’t actually matter what any of them think. There’s always a spike in enrollment at the academy immediately following winter break, and as long as that keeps up, the company will keep doing school shows.

The energy is different today than it has been for most of the last week. They’re all exhausted, but the excitement of having the next two days off means there’s an edge of mania, too, especially since it has been confirmed that Varrish has gone back to Basgiath for the holiday. Sloane’s sticking pins into the back of her head to secure her bun, her sore scalp protesting one particularly vicious jab, when Avalynn eases onto the stool next to her with a suspiciously innocent expression on her face. “What do you want,” Sloane asks flatly. 

Avalynn’s jaw drops in mock offense. “What happened to ‘hello, how are you?’” She flicks Sloane’s arm. “Anyway, you’re not on for another hour, so I was wondering if we could talk about Tuesday.”

Sloane frowns without looking away from her reflection, so it ends up looking like she’s frowning at herself instead of Avalynn’s bullshit. She digs another pin into the neat blonde spiral of her hair. “‘Tuesday’ like tomorrow?” 

“No!” Avalynn flicks her again, and Sloane does rip her eyes from the mirror this time to glare at her, unamused. “Last Tuesday, you goof.”

Sloane reaches for her Snow hairpiece and starts pinning that down. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says, and means it. Her brain is so fucking fried that thinking about anything out of the realm of the next two hours feels impossible. “What happened Tuesday?”

“You’re killing me,” Avalynn groans, dragging her palms dramatically down her cheeks. “I’m trying to be excited for you, and you’re giving me nothing.”

“Excited for what?” Sloane asks in exasperation. 

“You and Aetos!” Avalynn finally explodes, and Sloane abruptly misses her entire head with the next bobby pin. For some reason, that is not what she expected. Admittedly, Dain has been taking up his fair share of her thoughts recently, but unfortunately for him (and Sloane, honestly), things like casting have been entitled to a much larger portion of her brain. 

Avalynn clearly interprets her shocked silence and borderline flailing as some kind of admission, because she crows, “Ha! You totally thought you would get away with not talking about it!”

Sloane pulls herself together enough to resume her pinning. “Talking about what?” she asks, bewildered. 

“You danced with him,” Avalynn says meaningfully, her fingers steepled under her chin as if this conversation is irresistibly fascinating.

Sloane finishes with her headpiece and lets out a deliberate, controlled breath. “In case you weren’t aware, I was at work, and that is my job—”

“Bullshit!” Avalynn declares, too loudly. Cat glares from across the dressing room, but the show technically hasn’t started yet, so she can’t complain much more than that. “You always dance with Cam. Always.” She must read the instinctive denial on Sloane’s face, because she carries on, “And don’t give me that shit about it not being a big deal. You went back to him on Wednesday! You never dance with someone again if they’re not good the first time.” She leans forward and props her elbows on the counter. “So. He must’ve been good.”

Sloane can’t help the way her cheeks flame under her stage makeup. “Shut up,” she hisses, because Avalynn really is making it sound like they fucked or something. Avalynn just cackles like that was entirely intentional. “You are such a nightmare—yes, he is a good dancer, which you already knew, because he’s a soloist.”

“Come on,” Avalynn begs, like Sloane’s holding out on her. “I saw the way he looked at you. And the way you looked at him.” Sloane’s mouth opens and Avalynn immediately steamrolls over her, almost pleadingly. “Sloane. Honey. You’re gorgeous. He’s gorgeous. You could be gorgeous together.”

Sloane rolls her eyes. “Are you trying to pimp me out?”

“Deflection!”

“Oh my gods.” Sloane rubs wearily at her temples. “We’ve talked about this. I can’t date anyone right now. You know I can’t. And you know why.”

“Notice how you haven’t said you don’t want to,” Avalynn presses, because she is a monster. 

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Sloane insists. “I have to stay focused. I need to be one hundred percent in this.” 

The first measures of the overture float through the speaker on the wall, the cheerful, lilting notes at odds with the almost-sympathetic look on Avalynn’s face. She’s not teasing anymore; her shoulders have slumped forward just a hair. “This can’t be your whole life forever, honey,” she says softly.

The pity in her expression, her voice, triggers something animal and scared in the back of Sloane’s brain. She just barely manages not to visibly recoil from it, from the memories of the last time people looked at her like that. Her knee gives a phantom throb. “It won’t be my whole life forever,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “But it has to be my whole life right now.”

***

The show passes in a blur. She doesn’t make any mistakes, but she feels a little fuzzy, like the frame rate of her body is lower than normal. Marzipan is a monumental effort. By the time the solo is over, she’s dripping sweat and panting like she’s run a half-marathon rather than dancing for a little over two minutes.

The curtain drops for the final time after they’ve all bowed, and over the dull roar of hundreds of schoolchildren being shepherded back to their buses, the cast breaks apart into barely-controlled chaos. Ridoc is half-out of his costume already, and there’s a sprinkling of bobby pins in the wings as dancers deconstruct their buns on their way back to the dressing rooms. Sloane has her empty water bottle tucked under one arm, her other hand wrenched behind her back to try to start unhooking the clasps on the back of her costume, her ears filled with the shuffle of dead pointe shoes and the babbling of borderline delirious company members. She’s sweat-sticky and tired and sore, and she’s ready to go home and not hear another trilling piccolo for the next forty-eight hours. It’s going to be glorious. 

She shoves open the dressing room door with her shoulder and squeezes inside, stepping over bags and pointe shoes and a Flowers tutu that someone’s discarded on the floor, a sad lump of pink tulle. Sloane turns her back so Visia can release her from the confines of her bodice—stupid fucking hook-and-eyes—and lets the energy wash over her. The room smells like sweat and hairspray and feet, and the reek is so familiar, so absurdly comforting, that she closes her eyes. Lets her shoulders slump, the tension in her neck release, as she listens to the overlapping chatter and imagines the Epsom salt bath she’s going to take as soon as she gets home.

And then there’s a buzz. It’s loud but staggered, phones vibrating in tandem on the counters and stools and inside lockers and bags. Sloane doesn’t even open her eyes—it must be a weather alert, probably another blizzard—until there’s a gasp, a yelp of oh my god!, and then the half-hysterical atmosphere dissipates into complete silence.

It’s the kind of held-breath silence that means something monumental has happened, and immediately Sloane knows, with all the certainty in the world, that casting has dropped.

Her stomach sinks like a stone at the same time that her heart rises into her throat.

She reaches for her phone. Types in her passcode with the same tremulous care that she might use to defuse a bomb. Taps the email notification and watches the attached file load. 

Her eyes are so dry that they’re burning but she can’t force herself to blink. The room crackles with electricity like every single one of them is wrapped in live wires instead of layers of spandex and chiffon. And finally the PDF pops open, and Sloane skips right past the flowery header, the casting is subject to change, searching for her name.

The text scrolls into view. Blunt. Clinical. Work II: [Title TBD] - Choreography by B. Varrish. Principals: Dain Aetos, Sloane Mairi

For a beat, her whole body goes weightless. She reads it twice, three times, waiting for her name to morph into someone else’s. It doesn’t. There it is, locked in black-and-white: her and Dain, Varrish’s chosen pair.

Her stomach flutters, sharp and giddy. Then, before she can process it—her eyes snag on something lower.

Work IV: Aether - Choreography by M. Kaori. 

And there, under Ensemble, tucked among almost every single other member of the corps de ballet, Sloane sees her name again.

Her breath stutters. She blinks, hoping she’s somehow misread, but no. Her name is tucked right there, buried among everyone else’s, a catch-all line that erases the glow of “Principal” like it’s nothing more than a typo. She’s in Varrish’s piece, yes—but she’s also just another body in the corps.

She forces herself to look over the rest of the list. The other guest choreographer, Felix Gerault, has snatched up Drake and Mira (surprising absolutely no one), and Xaden has what promises to be an enormous solo in Devera’s piece, but Sloane’s situation is almost unique; she and Cat—who’s a featured soloist in Felix’s work—are the only two people cast in Kaori’s piece on top of a highlighted role.

It’s blatant. Sloane is wanted, for sure, the same as Cat, but she’s being doubted, too. She’s being tested. 

Around her, the silence has broken with the first audible reactions, but Sloane is so overwhelmed that she can’t parse individual words or phrases from the steadily-rising din. She stares at her screen until it goes black from inactivity, and then she puts it back on the table, face-down, like that can somehow contain what she just saw until she feels like she’s ready to face it. 

A near-shriek of “Sloane!” is the only warning she gets before Avalynn’s barreling into her, and Visia has to steady them before all three go crashing into the mirrors. “I’m so excited for you!” Avalynn squeals. “It’s everything you wanted!” She hops up and down, her hands wrapped around Sloane’s biceps. “Principal. In Varrish’s work.”

Sloane glances down at her friend’s fingers on her skin and wonders if she’s having some kind of out-of-body experience. “Yeah,” she breathes lamely. Her whole body is buzzing, like her blood has been carbonated and it’s fizzing through her veins. “I… yeah.”

Avalynn pulls back and studies her face. “You don’t look happy.”

“Of course I’m happy!” Sloane blurts. “Of course I am. I just…” She tangles her hands together to hide the tremble in her fingers. “I’m just tired. It doesn’t feel real yet.”

“It will,” Visia says knowingly from behind her. “Now go take this costume off.” She squeezes Sloane’s hip over her bodice and Sloane gropes blindly for her wrist to squeeze back—a silent thank you for freeing her from this conversation, to give her a second to process this news.

She gets changed in a dazed sort of silence. Brings her costume back to wardrobe and just barely remembers to point out the little spot inside the bodice where the boning has been poking out and rubbing against her ribcage. Heads back to the dressing room to grab her stuff, fielding congratulations and well wishes like she’s just won an award. She dodges Cat, not at all in the headspace for any direction that confrontation could possibly take, grabs her stuff, and murmurs a quick “Merry Christmas” to her friends before she takes off for her secret side exit. 

She’s so overstimulated that she feels like she’s become a ticking time bomb, but as she shoves the door open and the frigid air hits the flushed skin of her face, the too-muchness of it all starts to fade. The wind tugs at her jacket and stings her ears, and Sloane shivers, dropping her chin so the icy breeze can hit the tacky sweat at the back of her neck, trying to shock herself back into her body. And it’s working, the anxiety hissing out of her like helium from a balloon, and she feels almost like a person again when the door opens again behind her and she hears, “Hey.”

Sloane exhales slowly. She’s calmer now, enough so that she turns to face the voice rather than pretending not to hear it. And there, wearing that expensive-looking black jacket and a small but comfortable smile, is Dain. 

Her lips part like she’s going to say something, but nothing comes out. It suddenly occurs to her that she has no idea what she’s supposed to say, no idea how he feels about casting. If she were a soloist, she probably wouldn’t be too excited to get paired up with someone from the corps for an opportunity this big. If he’s disappointed… well, it won’t just be Varrish she has to prove herself to.

Dain seems to realize she’s not going to speak, and rescues her by putting an end to the silence himself. “Heading home?” he asks benignly, and Sloane blinks.

“Um.” She’d anticipated a different topic of conversation, and she has to reboot, ducking her head. “Yeah. Just… needed a minute.” She’s going to make him be the one to bring it up, she decides; if she can gauge how he feels about casting, then she can react better. The fact that she’s approaching this discussion like it’s a hostage negotiation is admittedly insane, but this is hardly the most insane thing to happen today, so she bites down on her cheek and waits for him to answer.

Dain’s smile changes—gets warmer, somehow. “I bet. It’s kind of mean of them to drop casting on us after this weekend. No one’s head is on straight.” 

“I don’t think their heads were on straight,” Sloane mutters automatically, because she’s tired enough that her filter is a little bit gone, and Dain laughs.

“Definitely bad timing,” he agrees, “but they got some things right.” He nudges her arm, brown eyes shining in the afternoon light. “Congrats, by the way. It’s your first principal role, right?”

Sloane has to look away, heat rising to her cheeks again. “Yeah,” she admits. When he doesn’t answer right away, she chances a glance back at him, narrowing her eyes. “You don’t seem…”

He waits for her to finish, but when she doesn’t, he raises one eyebrow back at her. “No, please continue,” he says dryly, one corner of his mouth tugging up in amusement. “Tell me how you think I should be reacting to this, and I’ll adjust accordingly.”

Sloane’s brain short-circuits. She starts to jump to her own defense, but what ends up coming out is, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I think you turned this talk into something huge and scary in your head, and it surprised you when it didn’t play out that way,” Dain says, bluntly but not unkindly. He’s tilted his head down slightly to account for their height difference, and Sloane realizes she’s staring up at him, wide-eyed like a child. She’s completely lost control of this conversation, if she even had any to begin with. “If I had to guess, I’d say you thought I’d be disappointed, and it’s throwing you off that I’m not.” He studies her face for a beat, and then seems to decide he’s right. “I could pretend to be, if it would make you feel better.”

Sloane does not want to admit how unnervingly well he’s assessed the situation. “Surely you’d prefer someone else,” she eventually says. “You’re usually with Cianna.”

“And I danced with you during what we knew was a casting class,” Dain says patiently, like he’s waiting for her to catch up. “Twice.”

She rips her gaze away from his again to stare at the ground, and kicks at a pebble, sending it skittering down the sidewalk as she says helplessly, “I just…”

“Assumed?” Dain finishes for her, and waits until she looks back at him, frowning, to say, “Well, as someone once told me, ‘You know what they say about assuming things.’”

Sloane’s jaw drops. He’s teasing her—she said that in class on Wednesday, right before they danced together. “Out of everything I’ve said to you, that’s what you remember?”

“I have a pretty good memory.” He shrugs, unrepentant. “Comes in handy.”

She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she crosses her arms and tries to look unimpressed. “Great. So you’ll remember every single time I step on your foot.”

“Perfect,” he says, grinning. “I’ll keep a tally. When you get to ten, you can buy me a drink.”

Despite herself, Sloane’s mouth twists into a small smile. Because she can picture it: them, at one of the cocktail bars Avalynn’s always trying to get her to come to. Wearing something that isn’t a leotard or athleisure—something low-cut, probably—and sipping a lavender lemon drop, watching Dain’s hand wrap around a glass—

She shakes herself, blinking hard. Dain’s still looking at her, his head tilted a little like he’s waiting for something, and she realizes he must’ve asked her a question. “Hm? Sorry, I’m…” She waves a hand vaguely near her temple, and Dain nods like that explains everything.

“I just asked if you’re taking the train home,” he says, seeming not at all irritated at having to repeat himself, even though it was because she was so busy thirsting after him that her sense of hearing turned itself off. “I know your brother sometimes picks you up.”

It shouldn’t surprise her that he knows that, given his self-professed good memory, but it does anyway. A tiny, slutty part of her that sounds a lot like Avalynn asks, do you think he keeps track of everyone else’s transportation? and she shuts it down instantly. The post-show exhaustion must be melting her brain. “Yeah, I told Liam not to bother since it’s not snowing.” She tilts her head to the side, in the direction of the station. “It’s not that far.”

Dain nods, hitching his bag up higher on his shoulder. “Great. I'll walk with you.” Sloane hesitates—she doesn’t need the company—and he adds, “As your new partner, the responsible thing to do would be to make sure you don’t slip on black ice and crack your head open between here and Walnut Street.”

“Your confidence in my ability to walk two blocks is flattering.”

“Don’t take it to heart,” he says easily. “I grew up with Vi.”

Sloane huffs a laugh. “Fair.”

They fall into step side-by-side, and Sloane finally lets herself exhale, a plume of white in the gray afternoon air. Her pulse is still erratic, her head still crowded with images of Varrish’s name in that email, of hers right below it, but it doesn’t feel as crushing as it did a few minutes ago. She glances to her left, where Dain had inserted himself between her and the road without even seeming to think about it, and dares to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she’s been given a partner that will be on her side, this time.

Chapter Text

Aretia Ballet Theatre’s run of The Nutcracker closes on the last Sunday in December. It’s bittersweet, as the last performance of any production always is, but eventually the full cast is stepping forward for their fifth bow because the audience will not sit the fuck down, and Sloane finally allows herself to just be over it.

She brings her costumes back to wardrobe without much sentimentality, mostly because she’ll probably wear them again next year. On her way out, she passes little Julianne, who runs a reverent hand over the red satin Clara dress as she turns it in for the final time. She likely has a hell of a ballet career in front of her, but her Clara days are over. Sloane offers the girl a sympathetic smile as she slips back out the door into the hallway. She knows that feeling: the sticky sadness that comes with letting go of something you’ll never have again. 

The dressing rooms are a complete disaster as everyone tries to clear out the junk they’ve been steadily collecting over the past several weeks. Sloane picks her way through the maze of bags and warmups back to her own designated spot, trying not to step on toes or trip over outstretched legs. She scoops up the battered pair of pointe shoes she tore off her feet the moment the curtain closed and examines them. The satin around the toe box is frayed and torn, the right one stands up by itself when she sets them down, and they just feel pretty… squishy. Structurally unsound. Yikes. Those have to go. She pitches them into the closest garbage can. There are three beautiful days of downtime for her to sew a few new pairs, to break some in before starting Varrish’s rehearsals.

Amidst the mayhem, she peels off her tights and tugs on a pair of sweatpants, zips up her warmup jacket. Leans in close to the mirror with a makeup wipe to scrub off as much of her lipstick as she can. Almost loses her balance when Visia pops up next to her, swings her foot up onto the counter, and crows, “Look at this blister!”

Sloane laughs despite her exhaustion. It is a pretty big blister, along the side of her pinky toe, and the top layer of skin is peeling back. “Get your gross foot away from me.” She shoves at Visia’s shin.

Visia unceremoniously slaps a bandaid over the carnage before tugging on a sock. “Snow can kiss my ass,” she announces, not just to Sloane but to the entire room. “Those stupid échappés stole my toe skin.”

“That was very rude of them,” Sloane agrees sympathetically.

The energy is a little cracked, frenetic with physical exhaustion and relief that the longest run they do all year is finally over. Almost everybody looks wrecked, half-dressed and sweaty with unraveled buns and mismatched socks. Everyone’s bodies show the strain differently. Visia’s not the only one with mangled feet, but Sloane feels it in the same place she always does: a hot, persistent throb behind her kneecap, determined to make her hear it, to make her listen. And for the next three days, she’s allowed to listen.

Sloane wriggles into her parka, tugs the zipper halfway up, and swings her bag onto her shoulder. She steps over Visia’s leg toward the door and is automatically halted by Avalynn calling, “Wait, Sloane!”

She knows what the question is going to be even before Avalynn begs, “Come to the bar with us, please!”

Sloane glances down at herself. “Dressed like this?” 

“We're all dressed like that,” Visia points out, and she’s right, but Sloane shakes her head.

“I will see you at Cam’s on Tuesday, I promise,” she says placatingly. Cam has hosted New Year’s Eve ever since they graduated from the Academy and he moved into the townhouse, since he has the most space (and the most money, which he uses to purchase an unreasonable amount of liquor). “You know I can’t tonight.”

“Fiiiiine,” Avalynn moans. “You better look hot!”

Sloane rolls her eyes, but takes the concession for what it is. If tonight was any other night, her friend would’ve put up more of a fight, but this tradition might as well be etched in stone: on closing night of The Nutcracker, everyone in the extended Riorson family spends the night at Xaden’s. 

It’s been this way since they were in the Academy, playing party children and polichinelles and little mice. They pile into Xaden’s house, drape themselves over furniture and the floor and each other, and eat takeout before claiming beds and couches and sleeping for at least twelve hours. It’s silly, but it’s tradition, and Sloane would not miss it for the world, so she definitely would not miss it just to go to the bar in sweatpants, no matter how much she loves her friends.

As if on cue, Imogen pokes her head in the door, already wrapped in her own winter coat, a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of pink roses tucked unceremoniously under her arm. “Sloane, you ready?”

“Yep, coming.” Sloane kisses the top of Avalynn’s hairspray-crusted head in wordless apology for skipping out, offers a “goodnight!” to the general chaos of the room, and follows Imogen out toward the lobby to meet up with Garrick, who’s driving them both to Xaden’s. (He’s also driving Bodhi, because this way, Xaden can drive Violet and Liam, and the three of them can be disgusting for a bit together before anyone else has to endure them.)

Brennan passes them in the hall, his hands full of plastic crates of Therabands and foam rollers. He nods at them. “Looked good out there,” he says, then levels Sloane with a look. “Now use this time off wisely and rest.”

He doesn’t wait for a response. Sloane sticks her tongue out at his back.

“I don’t understand what he thinks we do in our free time,” Imogen says. “Come on, Garrick’s been bitching about being hungry since intermission.”

They meet the boys in the lobby, which is mostly empty now, with just a few ballet staff closing down the merchandise tables and boxing up unused programs to get hauled back to ABT. Sloane knows with one glance at the situation that if they don’t get going, Bodhi’s bleeding heart will compel him to offer his help, and then they’ll be stuck here for hours, so she keeps her feet moving toward the front doors. Imogen thankfully follows her lead, and they make it to Garrick’s SUV with no further delay.

Riorson House is in the nicest suburb of Aretia: a seven-bed, seven-bath behemoth tucked up on a hill, surrounded by cedars and spruces. Garrick pulls up the long, winding driveway and parks right behind Xaden’s car, blocking him in, but it’s not like it matters. None of them will be leaving until tomorrow afternoon, anyway. 

They traipse inside, Bodhi snatching Sloane’s bag to carry it for her like the chivalrous dork he is, and drop their shit in piles in the entryway. The house is comfortable and inviting, every available surface still draped in holly and pine boughs and red-and-gold ribbons, because Solstice and Christmas may both technically be over but the season doesn’t end until Nutcracker does. Sloane draws in a deep breath and closes her eyes at the wave of cinnamon and cranberry-scented air from the variety of scented candles tucked onto the various shelves and end tables. The sense memory of being much younger, standing here in this same house, descends over her like a warm blanket.

“We’re here,” Garrick calls, as if they haven’t made a complete racket already. Sloane unzips her jacket, toes off her shoes, and then she hears it.

There’s the rapid click-clack of claws on wood as not one, not two, but three dogs round the corner from the kitchen. Sloane extends her arms to greet them, dropping to her knees even though it’s most certainly not necessary. Violet’s Great Dane, Tairn, stands nearly three feet tall at the shoulder, and he sniffs the top of Sloane’s head before moving past her to nudge the front door shut with a dignified huff. Sgaeyl—Xaden’s blue doberman, who tends to treat everyone besides Xaden like she’s irritated with their very existence—presses her nose briefly into Sloane’s sternum in acknowledgement and accepts a few neck scratches. Andarna is the last to appear in the doorway, thirty-something pounds of golden fur and furiously wagging tail, dragging a stuffed sheep that’s nearly the size of her like she’s trying to show it off to all the new arrivals. 

“Hi, baby!” Sloane coos. “Wow, did you get a new toy?” 

The baby-talk sends Andarna’s tail into overdrive, thwacking into the walls as she hauls her bounty over to Sloane. After a few moments of full-body wiggles, Sloane scoops the puppy up, sheep and all, and brings her into the living room to plop them both down on the loveseat for snuggles.

“You guys took your time,” Xaden drawls from one of the couches. He’s tucked into the corner of the sectional, Liam’s head pillowed on one of his thighs, Violet spread out bodily over Liam like a human blanket. The wires of a heating pad snake over the back of the sofa and disappear behind Xaden’s shoulder—his back must be bothering him again. 

“Excuse us for trying to give you three some alone time,” Garrick snarks. He settles into a squishy armchair and reaches out with grabby hands for Imogen, who flicks him on the forehead on her way to plug in her phone next to the fireplace. “Food?”

“Incoming,” Liam says, flashing his phone at them, which is lit up with the tracking screen of a delivery app. “We got the usuals. It won’t be long.”

“Great. I’ve been starving since—”

“Since intermission, we know,” Imogen groans. Sloane laughs, burying her fingers in the soft fur between Andarna’s shoulder blades as the puppy gnaws on her sheep’s ear. “There’s a protein bar in my bag, if it’ll make you stop whining.”

Garrick makes a face, which is probably fair, since Imogen’s preferred brand of protein bars happens to taste like dirt, and Imogen makes a face back, which is also fair, and Bodhi makes the executive decision to change the subject. Unfortunately, he goes about this by asking if the rehearsal schedule for this week is out yet, and all of the blood in Sloane’s body runs cold.

She still doesn’t know what the fuck she’s thinking or feeling about the way casting shook out, but almost none of it is good. On the one hand, she got exactly what she wanted, exactly what she’s been working her ass off for: a principal role in an original piece by a renowned choreographer. A chance for her big break, a chance to be someone outside of the corps. On the other hand, though…

Being cast in Kaori’s piece as well has kept her up later than she’d like the past few nights. Aether isn’t a new work; Kaori choreographed it for National Ballet of Navarre when Sloane was still in her first few years at the Academy. She’s only vaguely familiar with the piece, but what she does remember of it is grueling: twelve straight minutes of precise footwork, speed, and athleticism, set to a driving orchestral soundtrack. Frankly, she’d be nervous about her ability to perform it well even without the pressure of Varrish’s casting hanging over her head. She hasn’t been asked to perform a piece like Aether since—before.

And that’s not even mentioning Dain. He apparently took the news of their casting remarkably well, considering he has far more experience than she does, but Sloane knows better than to get comfortable. Just because he’s been friendly so far—kind, even—doesn’t mean shit. Doesn’t change the fact that historically, things like this have gone south for her fairly quickly. 

She doesn’t want to talk about this. Not now, not today. Sloane shifts Andarna off her lap and stands, a little abruptly. “I feel gross,” she says by way of explanation, when more than one of her friends offers her a semi-concerned look. “I’m gonna shower really quick.”

This seems to settle them, though Liam raises a questioning eyebrow that she ignores. “I put towels in your room,” Violet says, referring, of course, to the guest room on the second floor that Sloane’s been sleeping in since she was a little girl. “Pizza should be here in fifteen minutes.”

Sloane smiles in thanks, praying that she’s selling it, that her slightly off-kilter behavior can be written off as post-show fatigue rather than the beginnings of yet another anxious spiral. “If there’s no buffalo chicken left when I come down, I’m rioting,” she informs them, and then takes off for the stairs so she doesn’t have to hear anything else.

***

They don’t stay up late. The pizza is finished by eight—Liam and Violet clean up while the rest of them essentially slip into light comas—and Bodhi turns the lights off around ten. They all start fading not long after that, the flickering glow of the fireplace and the quiet murmur of the sitcom on the TV lulling them all into comfortable, cozy stillness.

Xaden’s the first one to doze off, his head tipping back to rest against the top of the couch, and Violet and Liam exchange affectionate glances before they gently nudge him awake to move upstairs to his bedroom. He doesn’t fight them, which is a clear indicator of the bone-deep fatigue all the dancers are feeling tonight, though he does mumble “don’t burn my house down” over his shoulder on his way to the stairs. The dogs follow, and the stern look Tairn gives them all as he herds Andarna out of the room is the final sign that it’s time for them all to go to bed.

And Sloane tries. She really does. She goes through the motions of her nighttime routine—washing her face, brushing her teeth, a few minutes of gentle stretching before she climbs into bed—but despite her attempts to ease her body into sleep, she’s wide awake, her muscles buzzing with a strange, electric sort of tension. There’s a brief moment where she considers getting up to stretch some more, but she’s too familiar with this sensation to really think that’ll fix it; she’s not falling asleep unless she burns some of this off.

It’s complete bullshit, since she just finished the marathon that is the longest performance run of the entire year, but if her body is demanding more exercise, she’ll comply. 

The hallway is quiet, everyone else clearly on the verge of sleep in their own rooms if they’re not out cold already. Sloane tiptoes down the hall, avoiding the creaky spots she’s known since childhood and taking extra care to be silent as she passes Xaden’s room to keep from waking the dogs. It feels almost like she’s doing something illicit, like when they used to sneak downstairs to steal chocolate cake after their parents had gone to sleep, but she tries to shake that off. Working out isn’t against the law. 

(Somehow she feels like a criminal anyway.)

The living room is dark, but the warm glow of the fireplace offers enough light for Sloane to navigate by. She picks her way over the basket of dog toys to grab Violet’s yoga mat out of the corner and steps off the plush rug to unroll it onto the hardwood. Her right quad twinges as she lowers herself to sit, and she throws a hand down to take the weight off it with a quiet hiss. Her leg has held up well, considering everything, but she can tell it’s going to hurt tomorrow. Can feel her thigh starting to stiffen, the muscles that support her kneecap going taut with prolonged fatigue. 

She lies on her back, plants her feet so her knees point to the ceiling, and slowly curls her upper body off the mat to start her normal ab series. This is her go-to when she can’t get her body to shut the fuck down: fifteen minutes of brutal core work that leave her sweaty and shaky and too spent to stay awake ruminating about work and Dain Aetos.

She snarls at herself, exasperated. Ridiculous. She would be feeling this way no matter who got cast alongside her. Dain and his gorgeous technique and equally gorgeous face have nothing to do with it.  She shakes her head sharply and curls up even higher on her next rep.

It’s a weird, twisted kind of meditative: pushing her body to its limit until all she’s aware of is the burn. There’s no room for thoughts beyond the sweat trickling down her temple, the baby hairs sticking to the nape of her neck. She works through crunches, leg lifts, scissor kicks, and is just starting Russian twists when she hears footsteps on the stairs. Something in her chest squeezes inexplicably in alarm, like she’s about to be caught performing a ritual sacrifice rather than an ab workout, and she dismisses the thought with another toss of her head just as Xaden appears in the doorway.

He doesn’t say anything at first, so Sloane ignores him, focusing on her breathing and keeping her back straight, until he finally says, “Tell me you’re not doing Pilates right now.”

Sloane doesn’t stop moving. “I’m not doing Pilates right now,” she parrots dutifully. 

She catches his eye for a second on her next twist to the left. He’s scowling at her, clearly unamused. 

Something about that is incredibly annoying. “It’s not like I’m making you participate,” she snaps, lowering herself slowly back to rest her elbows on the mat. “Go back to bed.”

Xaden doesn’t move. Sloane glares at him, her chest heaving as she tries to regulate her breathing, and he glares right back with the same kind of aggravated-big-brother expression he’s used on her since she was a kid. “Was this ordered by your PT?” he asks flatly, in a way that suggests he already knows the answer.

Damn him. Sloane briefly considers lying before she remembers who she’s dealing with here—Xaden has no shame and will absolutely bring this up with Brennan, and Brennan definitely won’t back her up, considering he explicitly told her to take it easy. “Not all of us have to be ordered to cross-train,” she says airily, rather than answering directly. 

She goes to flip over onto her stomach, and Xaden says pointedly, “Not all of us have to be ordered to rest, either.”

There is exactly one moment where she attempts to ignore him, pushing up onto her hands and knees, before he continues in the same low tone, “If you try to do a plank right now, I’m going to wake up Liam. We both know your quad is already tight. Don’t make it worse.”

Sloane lets out an aggrieved sigh, but flops back onto her side instead. She didn’t really want to do a plank, but being told she can’t is annoying. “And why are you down here policing my evening activities?”

“I wouldn’t have to police them if they weren’t stupid,” Xaden points out. Then he exhales and tilts his head toward the kitchen. “Came down for water.” The look he levels at her makes it clear that he expects her to join him.

She wonders, just for an instant, if it’s worth it to resist, then just as quickly decides it definitely is not, and peels herself off the mat to follow him.

Xaden doesn’t turn any lights on, so the room is lit only by moonlight reflecting off the snow outside and the digital clocks on all of the various appliances. It’s silent other than the quiet hum of the fridge. Sloane accepts the glass of water he hands her and takes a sip, ice clinking against her teeth.

She doesn’t realize they’re in a standoff of sorts until he breaks it himself. “You’ve been quiet today.”

“I haven’t.” The denial is immediate. Instinctual.

Xaden just raises his eyebrows a hair, incredulous. “Sloane.”

But she has just enough dignity left not to give in. His judgment of her exercise, she can take, but she’s putting her foot down. “Don’t you trust that I would tell you if something was wrong?”

“No. Not even a little bit. That’s why we’re standing here.”

Sloane wants to kick him in the shins. Very maturely, she refrains. “I’m fine. I just couldn’t sleep,” she insists. “And I was almost done. I was going to go to bed when I was finished.”

Xaden studies her over the rim of his glass. Sloane holds his gaze and tries her best not to resemble the resentful sixteen-year-old she’s sure he sees when he looks at her. Tries to project vibes of tranquility and inner peace and whatever else it will take for him to stop bugging her. 

Eventually, he lets out a long, slow breath. “You know why I…”

He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t have to. Because Sloane does know why. She remembers him sitting next to her bed in the emergency room, his other hand holding his phone to her ear so Liam could talk to her on his way from campus. Remembers him squeezing her hand in the ambulance, jaw clenched tight enough to break his own teeth. Remembers in vivid detail the look on his face when he’d burst into that studio and seen her on the floor, a gut-wrenching blend of horror and fury that makes Sloane shiver when she thinks about it, like ice water’s dripping down her spine. 

“You are a professional worrier,” she says, instead of saying any of that. Her voice is light, and Xaden’s brow ticks like he knows she’s deflecting, but he doesn’t interrupt her. “I’m okay. It’s just been a long few weeks. But I would tell you if…”

She lets that hang, too. It’s a sentence she doesn’t know how to finish. She’s never been sure, really, how much Xaden knows about the lead-up to her injury. He knew enough to have Jack dismissed from the company, of course, but as to the extent of it… It seems better to leave that blurry. For everyone’s sake.

Xaden seems to internally deliberate before he opens his mouth again, looking defeated. Sloane’s not delusional enough to think he’s really been convinced—if they weren’t both exhausted, this conversation would definitely continue—but he’s letting it go for now. “You’ll tell me,” he repeats. A command.

“Yeah,” she whispers. “I promise.”

It’s clearly not good enough, but he finally nods, a small dip of his chin in clear concession. “Okay. Fine.”

They walk back upstairs in silence. Xaden lingers in his own doorway until she arrives at her room, and he’s still watching when she eases the door shut.

***

Sloane texts Cam at 6 PM on New Year’s Eve to ask if he needs help setting up. Predictably, he texts back more than an hour later: 

No need. Just get here before 10 and look hot

Well. She can do that.

She takes her time in the shower, blows out her hair so it falls in glossy golden waves over her shoulders. Then she goes to her bedroom, opens her closet door, and chews on her bottom lip while she picks through the hangers for something to wear. It’s different now than it was when she was younger, when they’d have an illicit end-of-semester party in a Level Eight’s dorm room, and she’d wear something sparkly and so scandalously short that her parents were probably rolling in their graves. She doesn’t even spare those sequined minidresses half a glance now—just shoves them toward the back and keeps looking.

Finally, she settles on a top that she vaguely remembers Visia forcing her to buy. It’s satin, sapphire blue, and so low cut that it dips past her sternum—it’ll certainly show enough skin to satisfy her friends without exposing the one part of herself she still sometimes doesn’t know how to look at.

She does her makeup once she’s dressed: bronze eyeshadow, a generous application of mascara, a glossy lip. Mists perfume over her pulse points. Grabs a pair of pointed toe pumps that she will surely regret later but that look great with these pants. The finishing touch is a necklace of her mom’s, an emerald-cut diamond on a long chain that dangles just low enough to draw the eye down.

Yeah, she looks hot. Cam will be pleased.

Liam takes one look at her outfit and offers to drive her over, which Sloane accepts, because she’s not in the habit of taking the subway with her tits half-out. He drops her at the corner of the block a little after 9:30 with a stern reminder to “be safe,” and she sticks her tongue out before heading up the steps to Cam’s door.

The lights in the townhouse are dimmed, the music loud, the air warm in the way that means it’s full of people with lowered inhibitions. Sloane eases out of her jacket and ditches it on the pile draped over the back of one of the couches. The floor has been cleared a bit by pushing the furniture toward the edges of the room, and people are mingling, dancing—she spots Avalynn immediately, dangling off Lynx, clearly a little drunk already.

“Sloane!” Avalynn squeals, abandoning Lynx to throw her arms around her. “Oh my gods, you look insane—like, in a good way. Can I borrow that top?”

Sloane snorts. “You can borrow it when I’m not currently wearing it, sure.”

Avalynn tugs her to the kitchen, where the DIY bar is spread over every available surface. Sloane takes a glass of champagne and takes a long sip, bubbles tickling her nose, as Avalynn starts rattling off a shockingly lengthy list of the gossip she’s managed to gather since the show closed two days ago. 

Visia joins them a little while later, pouring herself a drink with a highly questionable liquor-to-mixer ratio and whistling appreciatively the moment she lays eyes on Sloane. “Damn, Mairi.”

“Stop objectifying me,” Sloane grumbles, cheeks burning, but a grin tugs at her mouth anyway.

Visia brings her own gossip offerings, namely that Bodhi and Ridoc are hooking up (Sloane knew, of course, but she pretends she didn’t, for Bodhi’s sake), and they get steadily tipsier as the night continues. The edges of Sloane’s thoughts are softened by the liquor, and her body starts to unclench by degrees, the lingering tension from Nutcracker and casting bleeding out of her like ink into water.

And that’s when she feels it: a shift in the air, a small gravitational pull. She looks up, and there he is.

Dain’s not even looking directly at her—just scanning the room like he’s not quite sure why he came—but her stomach still does a complicated little flip. He’s in a dark button-down, sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, and his curls are slightly messy, like he’s run a hand through them too many times. He spots her a moment later, and the alcohol has mellowed her just enough to make her lips twitch with amusement when she follows his gaze down her body and back up.

“He has good taste,” Visia mutters into her drink as she watches them watch each other.

“You are a menace,” Sloane hisses back.

Avalynn returns from the counter with another glass of prosecco, eyes darting wildly until she gets a handle on the situation. “He’s got ‘fuck-me’ eyes,” she reports gleefully, and then does a double-take at Sloane. “So do you, if you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t,” Sloane says sharply, but she can feel heat creeping up her neck. She tips her glass back just for something to do, the bubbles tingling pleasantly down her throat.

Visia eyes her dubiously. “You’re blushing harder than that time in Level Six when—”

“Shut up.” But Sloane’s voice breaks on a helpless giggle, because she can feel Dain’s gaze on her again, subtle but deliberate. Something in her chest is fluttering nervously at the attention, like she’s bracing for a correction, and she only realizes her hands are shaking when Visia nudges her arm.

“Relax,” she murmurs. “He’s not going to eat you.”

Avalynn raises both eyebrows. “He looks like he wants to put his mouth on something.”

Sloane’s face flames so bright it must be visible from outer space. “You’re awful,” she says as Visia snorts a surprised laugh into her own cup. “I don’t know why I’m friends with you.”

“I’m a delight,” Avalynn corrects primly. “It’s not my fault you’re repressed.”

“I’m not repressed!” This is technically true, and Avalynn knows it, seeing as she was present for the majority of Sloane’s wild phase in their late teens. “Just because I don’t want to pounce on my coworker—”

“Oh, he’s your coworker now?” Visia says incredulously. 

“He was never not my coworker,” Sloane points out. “He’s my partner.”

“Well, if you don’t do some partnering before midnight, I’m going to lose it,” Avalynn says unapologetically. She tugs the empty glass out of Sloane’s hands and replaces it with her own half-full one, wiggling her eyebrows evilly. “Maybe he wants to rehearse something.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Sloane informs her. Avalynn snickers like a seventh-grader but mercifully changes the subject, which lasts for all of one minute before Dain starts weaving through the crowd toward them.

He doesn’t come straight over—he stops to exchange greetings with a few people, to laugh at something one of the guys says—but Sloane knows he’s coming toward her. Knows it like a musical cue, like something rehearsed so well that it’s settled deep in her muscle fibers. She takes a deep, steadying breath and tries to pretend her pulse isn’t keeping time with his footsteps.

He reaches them at last, glass in hand, and nods in greeting to both of her friends. “Visia. Avalynn.”

“Dain,” Visia says back, because at least she is capable of pretending not to be a nightmare in human form. Avalynn is grinning furiously, but she thankfully keeps her own mouth shut.

He turns to Sloane then, and those honey-brown eyes are warm and liquid as she stares into them. “You clean up nice.”

The corner of her mouth twitches. “You sound surprised.”

“I’m not,” he says, and clearly means it. She doesn’t know what to do with that. “Just enjoying the view.”

Avalynn’s grin stretches into something maniacal, and Visia physically drags her away before she can do something that causes Sloane to publicly murder her. “We’ll leave you to your appreciation,” she calls over her shoulder. 

Dain watches them go, and then turns back to Sloane, exhaling a laugh. “They’re subtle.”

Sloane lets out a long-suffering sigh. Her hand strays anxiously to her necklace and Dain’s focus follows the movement, because of course it does. “They’re highly irritating,” is the response she settles on.

His smile is small but genuine, eyes crinkling at the corners when he asks, “You want to dance?” The words are simple, like it’s nothing, but his voice is low and the air between them feels alive, every atom charged.

Sloane’s eyes drop for an instant, but they land on his fingers around his glass, which isn’t any better for her heart rate. She looks back up at him. “I’m—not really a dancer at parties.”

It feels like an outrageously stupid thing to say, but his brow lifts knowingly. “You don’t have to be. Just move a little.” He extends a hand, palm open. “Come on. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

For a heartbeat, she stares down at his hand. It’s calloused, familiar. Safe.

Then she takes it and follows him into the living room.

Cam’s speaker system is unreal, and the bass is pounding hard enough that Sloane can feel it in her ribs, right alongside her heart. Dain leads her far enough into the crowd that they’re surrounded by bodies but not swallowed by them. The string lights are catching in his hair, flashes of gold and shadow.

“You don’t have to overthink it,” he says, just loud enough for her to hear. “Just follow the music.”

“I’m a professional dancer,” she reminds him, a little sassily, but she’s smiling when she says it.

He smirks at her. “I know you are, but not like this.”

Party dancing is wildly different from ballet, and Sloane normally doesn’t do it unless she’s very drunk, but there’s enough alcohol in her system right now to counteract the worst of her self-consciousness. She lets her body find the beat—because that’s all this is; there’s no technique involved—in something loose and unchoreographed, noting the flash of surprise in Dain’s eyes before he matches her. The satin of her top is cool and slippery against her skin as she moves, and she brazenly hooks her pinky through one of Dain’s belt loops to tug him slightly closer before she can talk herself out of it.

Dain tilts his head, and the look he gives her—warm, a little amused, a little something else—makes her pulse skip a beat. “See, you do know what you’re doing.”

“Don’t sound so shocked.” Sloane tosses her hair back over her shoulder, barely suppressing a shiver at the way Dain’s eyes skim over the skin it reveals. He’s watching her—not like he’s looking for weaknesses, for flaws—but like he’s learning her. Like he’s paying attention.

“You seem to have a habit of surprising me, Mairi.” 

She laughs under her breath, light and unguarded in a way that startles her. She’s not sure if it’s the champagne or him or both, but the tightness she always carries in her chest—the vigilance, the need to look effortless—has loosened a fraction.

The song shifts, and Dain adjusts with her, one hand skimming over her waist just enough to guide her into the rhythm. The brush of his palm is light, undemanding, and so painfully unlike the possessive touch she’s used to. Her fingers find his shoulder automatically, the simple act of keeping her balance suddenly much more difficult.

“You’re staring,” she says when she catches him watching her again.

“Yeah,” he admits. “I know.”

The weight of his attention is heavy but somehow not suffocating, and she feels like she’s glowing from it. She’s dancing mostly on autopilot now, no idea what song is playing—or if a song is playing at all, honestly. It could be silent and she probably wouldn’t even notice, because his focus is on her and it feels good.

“Five minutes!” someone eventually calls, and she surfaces from the blur of her own half-formulated thoughts as the room ripples with movement. People are calling for more champagne, for sparklers, for Cam to start his countdown playlist. Sloane takes a fraction of a step back, but Dain doesn’t let the space widen too much.

“You want another drink?” he asks. 

Her gaze drops to the glass she’s still holding. She’s surprised she hasn’t dropped it, truthfully. “I’m good,” she says. “You?”

“Water.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Very responsible.”

“Someone has to make sure Cam’s house doesn’t burn down.” He gives her that charmingly crooked smile. “And that you get home in one piece.”

Sloane tries not to gape at him as her brain whirls, trying to spin that into something it’s not. Physically safe, he means, surely, but his hand is still at her waist, and that confusingly feels like the same kind of safety. “Pretty sure I have my brother for that,” she quips back, but it’s a little too breathless to be casual.

Dain huffs a laugh. “Somehow, I have a feeling that keeping an eye on you might be a team effort.”

Something hot and insistent unfurls low in her stomach.

The countdown starts. The room swells with noise—laughter, voices, a chorus of slightly discordant numbers chanted by people who have been drinking and dancing for too long. Cam swears at the top of his lungs and runs to throw open the curtains on the windows that look out over the river, where the fireworks will go off. And Dain leans down just enough that his breath stirs the hair at her temple.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” she breathes, and means it.

“Good.”

“Happy New Year!”

Cam’s living room erupts with confetti and shouting and ill-advised sparklers. People are clinking glasses and blowing those stupid plastic horns and laughing into kisses that they’ll giggle about in rehearsal in a few days. And Sloane braces herself for Dain to draw back, for the feeling of being alone in a room of easy pairs, but he… doesn’t.

Before she can react, he leans in and presses a kiss to her cheek.

It’s nothing more than that. It lasts less than a second, she’s sure, but in the flurry of fluttering confetti and fizzing champagne, the tilt of her world levels out. Stabilizes.

She blinks up at him, stunned, searching his expression, but his smile hasn’t changed: small, steady, soft.

“Happy New Year, Sloane,” he says, just barely loud enough for her to hear.

Her cheek is tingling where he kissed her. And that, she decides as the dancing starts up again, somehow feels safe, too.