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“What are you doing?”
“I’m asking you to dance, of course.”
“Asked to dance? By a man who likes to insult me?” He snatched his arm away and peered in search of people’s stares. Only he found none. “Is this a joke? Could you not ask any of the women here?”
“I am asking you,” he said sternly, letting out a breath, “precisely because you are not a woman.”
Bron felt his face drop into something like shock, or sadness, or both. He wasn’t a woman, but that didn’t mean the words didn’t hurt. He didn’t know who he was.
“Won’t people think it odd? To see you dancing with me. What is it you said the last time? That we are representing this house?”
“I know what I said, and it was wrong of me to have done so,” he was quick to respond, with a confidence seeped in truth. The way Darcy had a hold of his hand felt somehow electric, gentle. Willing and wanting.
But did he want to dance? He braced himself for mockery. “I don’t know …”
“Just look at you. They aren’t to know.”
So that was it. The reason he could be seen with him. He wouldn’t be an embarrassment. A spectacle.
“One moment I’m inappropriate. The next, befitting a dance.
Darcy leveled him with his gaze. “Will you dance with me or not? Was it merely your intention to cause a stir looking like that, if not to dance?”
“I don’t understand why wearing a dress should cause such a stir. Look around the room. Isn’t that what everyone else is doing here? Wearing some sort of dress?”
Darcy’s gaze strayed from his for a moment and he fumbled for an answer. “In any case, they aren’t to know.” Bron had given him a chance to redeem himself, and thought it best to turn away, protect himself, and protest against the ludicrousness of this request. But before he could speak, Darcy continued: “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t … I don’t know what the right words are to say, to convince you. I can see it in your eyes. Every time I say the wrong thing. I’m trying here. I am.” Hearing some truth in this, Bron immediately softened. Darcy paved over his quick moment of angst by picking some imaginary flint off his shoulder, before regaining his composure. “As host of this party, and the enormous amounts of money spent entertaining our guests, I should be allowed to dance with any person I choose. And I know who I’d like to choose.”
There was no denying the statement to be saccharine and “try hard.” But there was something about it that Bron liked. He bit the soft inside of his cheeks.
“Even if that person happens to be an epicene boy in a somewhat tacky garment.”
He faked a laugh. “God, you almost had me there. I spent good money on this thing!” He gestured to the skirt.
“Bron, I will not force you. But would you like to dance?” Darcy took a hold of his palm and shuffled his feet in the square he designated his own. “With me?”
Bron was sure this man was pretending. Acting. Playing a part. Reciting words meant to be romantic but which rested on the cusp of cloying. Did Darcy think they would charm his victim into submission, with that look of sincerity now washedacross his face? Was Bron as gullible as that? Yes, he was. And more so too.
His soft “okay” gave in to the full weight of Darcy’s pull, and with Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” playing in the background, Bron couldn’t have predicted the night would take a turn like this.
Darcy said, “No, no, like this,” and grabbed him tighter as they stepped about slowly, counting out one two three, one two three, as Darcy’s father had done with Bron, until Darcy spun him in an unexpected twirl. Bron concentrated on the floor, his neck twisting left to right to ensure his feet stepped the right steps and followed Darcy’s as they should. When they picked up the pace, Darcy spun him again as though he were a qualified dancer who could pull off such a routine. With each and every dip, Darcy brought him closer to his chest, his breath in his face, which smelled of wine, and the fragrance wafting off him a mix of leather and pepper and incense.
Bron risked a glance up at this man, who gripped at his waist and dropped his hands. He could feel the warmth and weight of them through his clothes, on the small of his back. It made Bron stop and pull away, conscious of the things it stirred in him. That there was perhaps too much drink in his own system, and Darcy’s, to validate any of these feelings. Because while he was anxious and worried about others gawking at him with looks of confusion, he was also captivated by the unlocking of something like longing within him.
But settling into a slow rhythm, all those in his periphery melted away from view, a change of shot, but a continued sequence, until all he saw was this man leading him. Like all those women he’d seen on film, he felt as scandalous as Anna and Vronsky fromAnna Karenina, as hypnotized as Natasha by Andrei inWar and Peace—they were in a crowded room, surrounded by those who would scorn and sneer at him if they knew, but he danced alone in his own little world, with a man who didn’t understand him but who, for one reason or another, charged amagnetic pull toward him. For a moment there was Darcy, and Bron was all at once Keira Knightley, Mia Wasikowska, Charlotte Gainsborough, Lily James. Of course it was an illusion, but for a moment he believed it to be entirely true.
He knew this was not how it went for people like him, and somewhere in the room he was sure to find the wizard behind a screen, directing their every move, shouting “CUT!” to end the take, so they would fall back into their normal selves.
“You must forgive me for my previous outbursts,” Darcy said, again on his path of penitence. “There is something unnerving about the way you are, so comfortable in your own skin, and I shouldn’t have made a mockery of it.” He forced them to a halt, and Darcy seemed poised to say more, but then Bron felt a sharp contortion of Darcy’s body—a quick tug away from his hand, a sudden stiffening.
Bron followed Darcy’s gaze to that of a woman staring at them both, the same woman who’d been talking to Ada on the stairwell. Darcy brushed his lips against Bron’s gloved fingertips in a quick motion, and bowed. All soft expression, the hint of what Bron could’ve sworn was genuine pleasure, melted away from his face, replaced by a formal, blanched look.
“Meet me in the library tonight when the party’s over,” Darcy whispered, close to Bron’s ear. “But for now I must leave you.”
Darcy left him feeling like a gutted fish, insides spilled out for all to see. He watched as Darcy ascended the stairs and walked toward the woman who looked at them. It made his heart beat faster, each step he climbed. And when Darcy glanced back over his shoulder, he felt himself closer than when they had been touching, a beam of light connecting his eyes to Darcy’s. A floor apart, yes, but this was a vital moment in any story, where a glance of want is shared between two people. He felt it in his chest, how they’d ceased to be separate beings, how his heels pinched his toes, and how the music drowned his ears; how Darcy’s glance back for him made him think he was somebody, notjust some man in a dress, but someone whose life could be made into something. A glance that showed him where the old Darcy ended and a new one began.
Bron held out the hems of his dress and twirled around the foyer, through the halls where people gathered and spoke, between sips of champagne, about shambolic governmental policies, about trade deals or the monarchy. If one who had known him before could see him now, they would say that his face had transformed, that his skin emitted a glow, that his glide through the rooms allowed him to walk an inch above ground.
So, as instructed, he took himself into the library, where Darcy had said he would meet him.
