With Will, the barrier dissolved. He was approachable. He didn’t demand your attention, but he made looking somewhere else not as interesting. Something about his style was distinctive, powerful, yet controlled and percussive—he cleverly caught little accents in the music, making Erik wonder if he were a drummer. An adjective dangled just beyond the edge of Erik’s mind, a proper metaphor to capture this way of moving. He tried to pin it down, along with all these other impressions, feeling a little puzzled Will Kaeger was the one to provoke them.
The Bourée rehearsal finished and the senior soloists took to the stage. Leo passed a few dollars over his shoulder and dispatched Erik to the soda machine in the lounge. He came back to find Kees and David having a heated discussion in another language.
Benignly excluded, Erik sipped his soda and observed the two men. David was olive-skinned, good-looking in a scruffy way with long sideburns. He wasn’t much taller than Erik, but he took up far more space. Not fat, but a bulky weight slapped in chunks on his frame. Kees, on the other hand, was tall and lean, broad-shouldered, distinctive with his bald pate and single diamond earring. His deep voice slid gracefully around the guttural lingo Erik was trying to identify. German, maybe?
A rustle behind him, a waft of sugar, and Daisy Bianco sat down, leaning her elbows on the back of the empty seat between Erik and David. With the blue headband drawing her hair back, her face was a palette of soap-and-water loveliness, her eyes two splashes of aquamarine. Erik wanted to dive into them, plunge like a dolphin through their warm, salty depths and surface somewhere inside, shaking her from his wet head in spraying arcs of—
“Can I have a sip?” she said.
He blinked and passed her the soda. “What are they speaking,” he whispered, leaning his head toward her, motioning to David and Kees with his chin.
“Dutch,” she said, capping the bottle and returning it. “Kees is from Amsterdam. David was born in Belgium.”
It got worse. Will dropped in next to Daisy, muttering something in yet another language, possibly French, and Daisy was answering him. And then, gee whiz, David and Kees jumped right in, switching tongues with ease. Erik sank in his seat and moodily drank his soda, feeling dull and uninteresting in the midst of this cultured, multi-lingual conversation.
Leo Graham, who had been quietly sitting and sketching, turned around in his seat. “Enjoying the United Nations conference?”
The cross-talk dwindled away, almost guiltily. “Where you from, Erik?” Kees said.
Slowly, the blond Erik turned his head. All eyes were on him, but he looked only at Kees and answered. “The Philippines.”
He got a laugh and Daisy touched his shoulder. He passed her the soda again and their fingertips brushed. He watched the pull of her mouth at the bottle. The rise and fall of her throat. Her tongue quickly brushing her lips. The flash of her straight, even teeth as she laughed at something Kees said. She gave the bottle back to Erik and smiled.
“Thanks,” he said, wanting to kiss her. He thought about sliding his palm along her smooth neck and smelling the skin of her face. The first touch of her mouth on his. The edges of her teeth against his tongue. The last drops of Coke lingering sweetly there.
The intense vision sideswiped him, left him mute, stupid and staring as Daisy got up and went back to the stage to rehearse the Prelude in F Minor.
The all-female quintet was set to a simple piano arrangement, one Erik finally recognized. His fingers moved in chords on the armrest. He’d played this once. Unfortunately he didn’t get to watch the dance, for Leo sent him on a thousand errands just then, and he missed the entire segment.
He returned to the auditorium when the male quintet was finishing up. He sat down by David and watched Will again, trying to take apart his distinctive style. Such disciplined mastery of his body, and yet effortless at the same time, jumps and turns coming out of nowhere. The energized fluidity reminded Erik of something, what the hell was it?
“He’s good,” he said to David.
“Right? The thing with Will is when he’s not in the dance studio, he’s in martial arts class. And it shows.”
Erik put a palm to his forehead. “That’s what I’ve been seeing,” he said.
“Yeah, you don’t want to fuck with him. He’ll double pirouette and break your nose.”