He was late. He’d gone to work, come home, dithered and waffled about whether or not he ought to go, and then finally made himself do it. Davi was there. Chico ought to be too. Although Davi
had
to go, since it was also considered a rehearsal for the technical things, and also Davi was nosy and liked to be involved.
The dress rehearsal was a big deal. Chico didn’t know why this was news to him, but it was. He was on the way to the studio before he remembered the rehearsals had been at the school for the past week.
He’d had to dash back to get his car and then find the school, which was on the edge of town, and both smaller and larger than he’d been expecting. The school was for kids in Brandywine, the neighboring even smaller town of Rio Claro, and all the kids who lived out in the unincorporated areas.
Being a school, it also had a security guard, even after hours, and Chico was forced to drag his sewing kit out of his hatchback to prove he was there with the ballet people and not whatever sort of weirdo the guard thought he was. By the time he finally found the auditorium after that, the rehearsal had begun.
Chico froze in the doorway. The few people watching, Jase maybe, Davi, a parent or two, Mr. Winters, and probably Rafael, were all vague shapes in the first row. The lights were dimmed, the music was playing, and students Chico no longer recognized were on stage.
He’d only missed the very beginning. After he got over his surprise at how professional the ballet suddenly seemed, he slipped into the room and plopped into the nearest seat without taking his eyes from the dancer as she emerged at court to entertain the king.
Chico glanced toward the king, a still, crowned figure watching her dance, but the dancer had his attention, as she was supposed to. He’d never seen Faith dance this part, the dancer alive and free and happy, with no idea what lay in store for her.
But he could see it now. He wondered if the lights around her had darkened to put the rest of the stage in shadow or if it was his imagination. He knew it was on purpose when lights remained on the king as well, as he approached her.
Chico sank down in his chair as if that would help him not see what was going to happen. Knowing the story was terrible, watching their movements as the king followed and followed her was terrible. Eventually she was going to have no choice but to take his hand, and Chico hated it. He hated everything—how delicate Faith seemed all of the sudden, how alone the dancer was, even with the entire court around her.
He wiped at his face and shifted farther down into his seat, curling into a ball with only his borrowed girl’s sweatshirt to protect him. After a few more minutes, he pulled the sleeves over his hands and covered his mouth to contain the noise he was making.
Someone appeared in the seat next to him, descending from nowhere to reach out and tug one hand from Chico’s face.
Rafael slid their fingers together without seeming to take his attention from the stage. He put a notebook and a pencil in his lap, the same one his father used, although he couldn’t possibly write in it while holding Chico’s hand.
But his palm was warm and dry, and his grip was sure.
Chico wanted to call himself silly or fragile or broken for crying like a fool at an amateur ballet performance. “She’s so alone,” he whispered. The king would like her that way. Chico had known that before. He didn’t know why it was breaking his heart now.
He buried another sound in his sleeve and then went still when Rafael pressed a brief kiss to his temple. “Don’t hide it.” Rafael’s lips brushed him as he spoke. He tightened his hold on Chico’s hand. “You’re supposed to feel it,” Rafael assured him softly. “It’s ballet.”
Chico looked at him, trying to make out his features in the dim light to determine if Rafael was teasing him again, if he truly wasn’t embarrassed.
“I’m not always like this,” Chico tried to say, but his voice cracked. It was a lie anyway. He’d always been too emotional, too free to show what he was feeling. But never like this, with tears that wouldn’t stop coming whenever he thought about the dancer heading to her doom.
He got another brush of lips at the corner of his eye. “It’s the greatest compliment you could give them.” Rafael nodded toward the stage, toward the kids dancing their hearts out. He waited until Chico looked back at them too, then turned in his seat to keep an eye on his students.
He stroked his thumb across Chico’s knuckles for another moment, then made a noise under his breath and muttered something critical about Travis’s timing. If he noticed Chico’s bewildered stare, he gave no sign. He acted as though Chico wasn’t studying him in the dark through the worst of the king’s “wooing” of the dancer, and he said not a word when Chico tugged their clasped hands to his chest and held them there in tense excitement when the inventor was introduced.
Eventually some things required Rafael’s attention. He took his hand from Chico’s to write a note, or he would yell for everyone to wait, and the music would stop and the dancers would become anxious teenagers again. After the intermission, Rafael hopped on the stage to talk to everyone. Seeing the magic as it was created should have broken the spell. But Chico stayed in his seat in the back row while the lights went on and then off again, curling his hands in the sleeves of his burgundy sweatshirt.
He would have looked away completely if he could have. The inventor, a quiet boy who almost never spoke in rehearsals, whose costume Chico had sadly overlooked, had an equally quiet way of dancing, at least at first. He didn’t have power like Travis, but there was something in the way he moved, like hope in human form or calm strength. Mr. Winters might have choreographed a lot of his dancing, but Chico didn’t think Rafael’s dad had been the one who coached him to dance that way.
Someday Chico wanted to see footage of a young Rafael dancing and find out if he’d been like that. Chico thought he would have. Perhaps that was even where Rafael had first heard of this ballet, by performing in it. If he had and there wasn’t footage, Chico would cry all over again.
The pas de deux was exactly as Rafael described it. It was more than flirting, so much more. The dancer revealed herself timidly and then with growing confidence when the inventor caught her, or once, lifted her in a move that made Chico gasp. The inventor admired her so ardently that Chico ached for the moment she finally extended her hand to him.
When it happened, he bundled himself into his seat and watched the rest of the ballet with his arms wrapped around his knees. Their dance stayed with Chico long after it became time for the inventor to present the clockwork dancer, although he did smile when Amy came on stage as this tragically empty thing, effervescent one moment and lifeless the next. She’d chosen to mimic Faith almost exactly, but moved without the love and joy the dancer had just displayed. She was perfect, almost creepy, in her depiction of the object of the king’s desire, although Chico would have to find a better way to describe it before he congratulated her.
The rest of the ballet went well, only a few missteps that Chico, honestly, barely noticed, although the dancers acted as though they were major. Faith startled him by breaking down a bit, but Travis folded her in his arms, and Rafael rolled his eyes so hard Chico could see it from the back, and then everyone was dancing again, and Chico was free to brood.
Chico was distracted and could admit it.
The dance, that long dance, between the inventor and the dancer was what made him hide his face and what kept him curled up in his chair until the final desperate act.
When it was over, or at least when the lights came on, because the dance wasn’t over in his head, the others started milling around, fixing things or looking proud. Dancers practically threw themselves at Rafael for his approval, and he rewarded all of them with smiles or hugs or a comment Chico was too far away to hear, but which made them bounce on their probably tired, sore feet.
Davi came up to him after a while. He took one look at Chico’s red-rimmed eyes, or possibly at his sweatshirt, and drew his eyebrows together in concern or confusion. But he said nothing. He sat down and held Chico’s hand too. For about ten minutes, they sat in silence, and then Jase appeared and called Davi over with this light in his expression he didn’t seem aware of, and Davi stood up and went back to whatever last-minute technical things required his attention.
Tomorrow the kids had school, but no rehearsal. They were supposed to relax, have fun, and try to think of something else, if they could. Chico heard Rafael announce that and nearly laughed to himself because those kids were not going to relax, and everyone knew it.
But that was their dismissal, and slowly they all left the room and the building, until only the technical people were left. Rafael went backstage and stayed out of sight long enough for Chico’s damp, stinging face to dry completely.
He reappeared just as the lights dimmed again, then turned off. He stopped for a moment at the front of the stage, maybe letting his eyes adjust or taking in the sight Chico made. He might have been wondering why Chico was still there. But he walked down the steps and up the aisle until he was in front of Chico, and then he held out his hand.
Chico took it.
“DESPITE WHAT
I said about how ballet is supposed to affect you, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Rafael said, after he’d tucked Chico’s sewing kit onto the floor of the passenger seat of his car, down by Chico’s feet, and gone around to get in the driver’s side.
He’d offered to walk Chico to his car, but Chico had only continued to stare up at him until Rafael had given him this strange, shy grin and asked, “Really?” before leading Chico to his car. He had a small SUV, a few years old, and the backseat was filled with boxes of fliers and one or two coats. The seats were clean, but the floors needed a vacuum for all the pine needles and pollen and trail dirt Rafael had dragged in with him. The interior smelled like coffee, and it was warm enough that Chico didn’t need to stay curled up in his sweatshirt, although he did.
“You made that,” Chico answered, in total awe, and watched in fascination as Rafael shook his head.
“I’ve discovered I don’t like seeing you cry. Not like this.” Rafael scowled out the windshield. “There’s you tearing up about the tragic love story, and then there’s you sobbing into your sleeve. I couldn’t just leave you there alone, thinking you had to hide it.”
The way he phrased it should have meant more embarrassment, but Chico only continued to stare at him. “You said I could cry. That it was okay.”
“It’s more than okay.” Rafael exhaled a garbled, rough few words that Chico couldn’t make out. He drove them off the school grounds and through town before he looked over at Chico again. “Do you want me to take you home?” he asked. The teacher who knew everything was gone. Chico would have been more stunned by that if the ballet hadn’t stolen his everything.
He slowly shook his head, and Rafael made another little noise before turning toward Alberi Lane. “The way you stare at me sometimes. You kill me and you’re not even trying.” Rafael sighed deeply. “You have all these feelings, and you show them like it’s nothing.” He briefly took his hands off the steering wheel to gesture helplessly. “Everyone around me is about passion for the art, passion
through
the art, and there you are, wounded by my ballet and curled up in my car and gazing at me.
God
. How you look at me makes it hard to remember where I’m standing. Do you even realize?”
Rafael sucked in another long breath and then straightened again, as quickly as someone raising a curtain. “I’m glad you came and that you got to see the ballet as a member of the audience. You deserved that, and the kids were so glad to see you. They all loved their costumes, by the way. Your additions to the costumes looked really good.”
Chico gave him a frown and finally remembered how to speak. “What are you talking about? Who cares about those right now? I could embroider flowers in my sleep, but you made
that
.”
Of all people, he would never have expected the embarrassment or modesty from Rafael. “I contributed,” he corrected Chico in his husky voice. “The kids did it. And my dad did most of the choreography.”
“You talked them through it, and you taught them to do those things, and you brought everything together.” Chico waved his hands to sum up every emotion he’d felt in that audience. “That’s amazing. It was amazing. Just so you know.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Rafael offered, with a little smirk. He could have been playing, acting as though he didn’t believe what he was hearing, but then Chico knew he did because his smirk grew into something genuine. “I told them you were moved to tears. I’ve never seen those kids so excited.”
That took away some of Chico’s dreamy, ballet-induced mood, but not enough to make him move when Rafael pulled up in front of his house. Cabin was a better descriptor than house, though it had a small yard and a driveway and even a mailbox. The windows were dark, and the porch light wasn’t on, so Chico couldn’t see much, but he stared at it curiously as he gracelessly slid out of the seat.
He forgot about the sewing kit like he’d forgotten about his own car, and he followed Rafael up the driveway into his home. Rafael offered a hand to lead him over the stone path to the door, but turned back in surprise when Chico took it. Chico had no idea what would make him look that way.
Inside Rafael’s house was much like inside his car. Nothing was dirty or messy, but one look around said a busy, distracted man lived there. Chico stepped into the living room and slipped his hand free to go study the framed pictures on the walls.
More photos of his family, some of Rafael, much younger, with other dancers at a studio Chico didn’t recognize. Some of the boys had their arms wrapped around Rafael. Sometimes he had his arms around them. “You were popular,” Chico remarked, in front of an artsy, black-and-white photograph of Rafael, who was young, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He was naked, although arranged so nothing too scandalous was visible. Another male dancer, equally nude, was at his feet. The picture looked like part of a series of artistically nude dancers, which was the only reason Chico didn’t say anything about Rafael displaying a picture of himself like that in his living room.