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Grace
“Maybeit’satongue thing,” Jasmine says.
“What is?” I finish darning the final stitch on the tip of my pointe shoe.
“The reverse figure-eight that woman, Fiona, talked about. Maybe it’s something he does with his tongue.”
“Gross.” My response is mostly reflexive. I’m not disgusted by the concept of oral sex. I just don’t like thinking about Aidan having any kind of sex with Fiona—or anyone.
Except maybe one person...
I sweep the dirty, inappropriate thought under the metaphorical rug and concentrate on sewing the satin ribbon onto my pointe shoe. Our school only offers a modern dance ensemble, so Jasmine and I attend classes with a private classical ballet company in the evenings.
“Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it,” Jasmine says with a cheeky grin. I know she’s tried it, and more. Attending an all-girls boarding school has made finding boys to date more difficult, but she makes the most of our school breaks, and the fact that her dad’s work allows her family to travel extensively throughout the summer.
Sometimes I think the fact that I haven’t made an effort to meet someone means there’s something wrong with me. Jasmine has tried introducing me to guys in the past, but I always get too stiff, too nervous. I can’t make myself relax enough to let the conversation flow.
The only boy—or, in this case, man—I’ve felt comfortable letting my guard down around recently is Aidan. I still can’t believe I told him about my mom putting me in the closet.
“I just think it’s good to keep an open mind,” Jasmine says. She puts all of her weight into stepping on the box, or toe-portion, of her pointe shoes to widen them. All pointe shoes start off very stiff, so we have to prepare them in special ways to make them supple enough to dance in.
I listen for the satisfying crunch as I lower my heel onto the toe-portion of my own shoe.
“We don’t even know for sure that it’s a sex thing,” I say quietly.
“Um, how is it not a sex thing?”
A few dancers within earshot hit us with odd looks. We move to the edge of the room and begin bashing the tips of our shoes against the wall to dull the sound they make against the floor.
I lean toward Jasmine so none of the other dancers can hear me say, “It sounded like he was hurting her.”
“Maybe he was,” she says. “What? Don’t act like you don’t remember the night we stayed up to watch that movie trilogy. You agreed with me that BDSM could be hot under the right circumstances.”
I do remember that night, and those movies. I remember thinking, how could anyone want their partner to hit them? And how could this man, who claims to love this woman, want to cause her pain?
As a dancer, I’m hardly a stranger to tolerating pain for the sake of something grander. It’s almost as if I’m my own Dominant. Soaking my feet and legs in ice water after a long day of practice hurts like hell, but I still do it. Not just because it’s good for my muscles, but because I’ve come to associate an aching body with a job well done.
And, I’ll admit, I did find most of the sex scenes in those films arousing.
If a man I loved and respected asked me to endure pain in order to please him, I think I could find a way to bear it. For the right man, I could bear anything.
“Lace up, everyone,” our instructor, Gina, announces. “We only have seven more weeks to prepare, so we need to get started.”
This season, we’re performing a stripped-down version of Giselle, a French ballet about a duke who falls in love with a beautiful, shy commoner, though he’s betrothed to someone else. He disguises himself to court her, but she dies of a broken heart when she learns of his betrayal.
Our ballet company is small, at just under twenty people in our age group, but that just means everyone gets a chance to shine. When I told my mother I’d been cast in the title role last December, she was over the moon.
Knowing she won’t ever be in the audience at one of my performances again... It’s heartbreaking.
But instead of breaking down and crying, I throw myself into the dance. I’m grateful that I was able to practice while at Aidan’s. If I hadn’t, I’d be struggling to keep up.
I sleep restlessly that night, unable to get my conversation with Jasmine out of my head. I think about the implications constantly over the next few days. When I’m not dancing or doing schoolwork, I’m reading about BDSM. Blog posts. Novels. I even watch a few movies and instructional videos—all on my phone, off school wi-fi, in the dark, after Jasmine’s gone to sleep.
Is this what Aidan and Fiona were doing behind closed doors? It would explain the sounds I heard. From the interactions I witnessed—and my own research—I get the impression that the two of them are only casual play partners. Is she the only one, or does he have other submissives? Subs he plays with regularly. Subs he collars.
I lose myself down the rabbit hole wondering what he’s into.
Before I know it, I’ve been back at school for two weeks.
