Sweet Filthy Boy

I sigh, looking back down the street.

“Just because you can’t dance professionally doesn’t mean you have to stop dancing for a living. Find the spot in the distance and don’t look away, isn’t that what you told those girls? What is your ‘spot’? Finding a way to keep dance in your life?”

I blink away, back down the block to where the girls are still twirling and laughing. His spot is teaching law. He hasn’t taken his eyes off that point since he started.

“Okay, then.” He appears to take my silence as passive agreement. “Do you train to be a teacher? Or do you learn to run your own business? Those are two different paths.”

The idea of having a dance studio makes a warring reaction explode in my belly: elation, and dread. I can barely imagine anything more fun, but nothing would cut off my relationship with my family more thoroughly than that.

“Ansel,” I say, shaking my head. “Even if I want my own studio, it’s still about getting started. He was going to pay for my apartment for two years while I got my degree. Now he’s not speaking to me and there is no way he’d get on board with that plan. There’s something about dance for him . . . it’s as if he doesn’t like it on a visceral level. I’m realizing now that, whatever I do, I’ll have to make it work without his help.” I close my eyes and swallow thickly. I’ve taken such a profound mental vacation from the reality of my future that I’m already exhausted after only this tiny discussion. “I’m glad I came here. In some ways it’s the best decision I ever made. But it’s made things more complicated in some ways, too.”

He leans back, studies me. I adore playful Ansel, the one who winks at me across the room for no reason, or talks lovingly to my thighs and br**sts. But I think I might love this Ansel, the one who seems to really want what’s best for me, the one who is clearly brave enough for both of us. “You’re married, no?” he asks. “You have a husband?”

“Yes.”

“A husband who makes a good living now.”

I shrug and look away. Money talk is exceedingly awkward.

As playful and goofy as he can be sometimes, there is nothing but sincerity in his voice when he asks, “Then why would you need to depend on your father to do what you want?”

UPSTAIRS IN OUR apartment I follow him into the kitchen and lean against the counter as he reaches into the cabinet for a bottle. Ansel turns, shakes two ibuprofen tablets into my palm, and hands me a glass of water. I stare at my hands and then up at him.

“It’s what you do,” he says, offering a tiny shrug. “After two glasses of wine you always take ibuprofen with a big glass of water. You’re a lightweight.”

I’m reminded again how observant he is, and how he manages to catch things when I don’t even think he’s paying attention. He stands, watching as I swallow the pills and put the empty glass on the counter by my hip.

With each second that ticks by when we aren’t kissing or touching, I’m terrified the easy comfort we have tonight will evaporate and he’ll turn to his desk and I’ll turn to the bedroom alone.

But tonight, while we stare at each other in the muted light provided by the single bulb above the stove, the energy between us seems to only grow more electric. This feels real.

He scratches his jaw and then tilts his chin to me. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

My stomach flips. “I’m not sure I believe that I’m—”

“Stay,” he interrupts in a tight whisper. “I’m dreading the day you leave. I’m losing my mind thinking about it.”

I close my eyes. This is half what I’ve wanted him to say, and half what I was most afraid to hear. I pull my lip between my teeth, biting down my smile when I look back at him. “I thought you just told me to go to school to open my own business someday.”

“Maybe I think you should wait until I’m done with this case. Then we can go together. Live together. I work, you study.”

“How could I stay here until the spring? What would I do?” It’s been wonderful, but I can’t imagine another nine months living idly as a tourist.

“You can find work, or you can just research what’s involved in opening a studio. We’ll leave together, and you can defer school for one year.”

If possible, this is even more insane than my coming here in the first place. Staying means there is no end to us—no annulment, no fake marriage—and there is an entirely new trail blazed ahead.

“I don’t think I can stay here and be alone so much of the time . . .”

He winces, dragging a hand through his hair. “If you want to start now, go and I’ll come next spring. I just . . . Is that what you want?”

I shake my head, but I can see in his eyes he correctly reads my gesture to be I don’t know.

My first few weeks here I felt both like I was completely free, and also a bit of a leech. But Ansel didn’t invite me here only to be generous or save me from a summer at home or spent psyching myself up to start school. He did it for those reasons and because he wanted me.

“Mia?”

“Mmm?”

“I like you,” he says in a whisper, and from the slight shake of his voice, I think I know what he’s really saying. I feel the words like a warm breath across my neck, but he hasn’t stepped any closer. He’s not even touching me. His hands are braced on the counter behind him, at his hips. This bare admission is somehow more intimate from a few feet away, without the safety of kisses or faces pressed into necks. “I don’t want you to leave without me. A wife belongs with her husband, and he belongs with her. I’m always selfish with you, asking you to move here, asking you to wait until it’s good for my career before you leave, but there it is.”