“I liked her, too.” Dang. There it was: full confession in under a minute flat.
She didn’t seem to mind, merely smiled a little more and looked down at her coffee for a second.
“Been at the gym?” he asked to get the conversation off who liked whom and back on track.
“Dance studio.”
“What kind of dance do you do?” He realized he knew a grand total of nothing about dancing except his mother made him do the Macarena at Aunt Crista’s wedding. It had been…painful.
She reached into the bag beside her chair and pulled out a pale pink ballet slipper, worn soft at the toe, and dangled it as though presenting evidence to a judge. “This kind.”
“Ooh. A ballerina?”
“To my last strand of DNA.” She tucked the slipper back in the bag. “I’ve been in tights since I was two,en pointesince twelve. Won state competitions all through high school, went to a dance academy in Houston, did a stint in New York, and ended up in New Orleans, which is where I stayed.”
“New York? I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be. It wasn’t the big time. It wasn’t even a good time. Mostly it was a reality check that some dreams can survive on life support, but they do, eventually, expire.” She said it without bitterness, just the clear-eyed honesty of someone who’d made peace with a dead dream.
“So you went…home, I assume, to New Orleans?” he asked.
“Only because of…” She crossed her eyes playfully. “A guy.”
“Ahh. And?”
He waited, hoping she’d say said guy was history.
“And I found my calling in dance after all.” She leaned closer. “Little girls with big dreams and high hopes. I ended up teaching ballet—and jazz, contemporary, and tap—at a studio in Metairie, and it turned out to be a billion times more fun than trying to claw my way to the front of someone else’s program.”
“Five-year-olds in tutus are fun?” he asked, mesmerized by her story and the easy telling of it.
“Fun? They are magic! They fall down, they get up, they spin until they’re dizzy, they are pink and sweet and delightful. It’s the purest form of dance that exists.” Her face lit up in a way that made his chest do that same kind of dance. “There really is nothing more beautiful than a three-year-old and her chubby-leggedplié.”
She made teaching children to dance sound enchanting.
“And are you going back to that studio in Metairie?” He hoped his voice didn’t sound strained—like he cared that much about her next move.
“Nope.” She lifted her cup to her lips, sipping what he suspected was very cold coffee.
The simple, one-syllable answer threw him after all her openness.
“Then…are you staying here to teach two-year-olds in tutus?”
“If I can find a studio,” she said. “For now, I’m filing my father’s paperwork and…”
“And…” he prompted.
“Guess.”
He drew back at the suggestion, thrown like a gauntlet. “And…trying to get fulfillment but not actually finding it?”
She smiled. “Trying to forget that my poor little heart got stomped on. Can we talk about you now?”
The verbal flip threw him, as much as her confession.
“Sure,” he said, remembering he had coffee and that he was in The Grind and probably late for lab and he really didn’t care. “I’m a thirty-year-old single father culinary student hoping to get an internship.”
“Yes, Driftwood. Dad and I ate there the other night, and Isobel mentioned that she’d interviewed you.”
