The Count
The studio was empty, which was the point.
Mireille liked the mirror room after ten because the building went quiet and there was no one to watch her fail. She could be as clumsy and furious and human as she needed to be, and the only audience was herself — which was, admittedly, the worst possible audience, but at least she wasn't paying for anyone else's judgment.
She started the combination. Her body knew it. Her body had it — muscle memory laid down across eighteen years of training, a blueprint written somewhere deeper than thought. But then she thought about it. That was the problem. She thought about the port de bras and her arms went stupid. She thought now the turn and her feet disagreed about which direction now was.
She stopped. Stood there. The mirror showed her standing there.
"You telegraph it," said a voice from the doorway.
Mireille turned. A man. Sitting on the floor just inside the door, back against the wall, knees drawn up, watching her with the particular calm of someone who had been watching for a while and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
She didn't know him. She was quite certain she didn't know him.
"Excuse me?"
"The moment you're about to go wrong," he said. "You take a breath. Half a beat before the stumble." He paused. "It's the preparation, not the execution. You're thinking too early."
Mireille looked at him the way she looked at choreographers who offered unsolicited structural criticism — which was to say, with the exact quality of patience that was not patience at all.
"The studio is closed."
"I know." He didn't move. "I have a key. Maintenance." He held it up — an ordinary key on an ordinary ring. "I was going to leave. Then you started."
"How long have you been there?"
"Long enough." He got to his feet, unhurried. He was unremarkable looking, was her first thought — and then she revised that, because unremarkable wasn't right. He was careful looking. The kind of face that gave nothing away and had presumably been doing so for some time. "Would you like me to count for you?"
"I don't need —"
"You need something to listen to that isn't your own thinking," he said. "That's the problem, isn't it? You know the steps. When you stop knowing them, you do them perfectly. When you remember them, you don't."
The aggravating thing — the truly aggravating thing — was that he was right.
"Fine," she said, because she was tired and stubborn and the run-through was due tomorrow. "Count."
He counted. Not mechanically — he had a sense of it, the way some people have a sense of rhythm that goes beyond keeping time. He felt the phrase. And when she was three beats from the place where she always unraveled, he said, quietly, "Don't," and she didn't, and the turn was clean, and the combination ended where it was supposed to end.
She stood in the sudden silence.
"You guessed right," she said finally. "About where I fall."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved through his expression — brief, and then gone.
"Yes," he said. "Something like that."
She should have heard it. The half-truth of it. The shape of a lie worn smooth by practice.
She didn't. She was too relieved about the turn.
He had been watching her for four months.
He had been watching her since October when he'd unlocked the studio at eleven at night and found her already there, running the same eight bars over and over with a focused, private ferocity that he hadn't been able to make himself interrupt. He had sat down. He had waited for her to notice him. She hadn't noticed him.
She never noticed him.
He knew every place she stumbled. He knew the particular breath she took before she second-guessed herself, the way her chin lifted a fraction of an inch when she was fighting her own mind. He knew the combination she was attempting tonight better than she knew it, because he had watched her fail it thirty times without the pressure of being watched.
He should have introduced himself months ago. He should have said, the first time: I'm the maintenance man, I have a key, my name is Daniel, you're extraordinary.
He hadn't said any of it.
And now she was looking at him with the satisfied expression of a woman who had successfully completed a difficult combination, and the credit she was extending him was you guessed right, and he had said yes, something like that, and that was — that was the shape of the thing he was now living in.
"Same time Thursday?" she asked.
"I'll be here," he said.
He was always here. That was the problem. That was the whole problem, from the beginning, and he hadn't done anything about it, and now she was putting on her shoes and thanking him for his good instincts, and he was going to have to decide, at some point, what kind of man he wanted to be.
He had, it seemed, been putting that off as well.