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The ballet run is, to be completely frank, not Lucy Preston’s favorite part of the day. She tries –- she puts on her headphones, finds a quiet corner to do a little work, since class is only an hour and it’s not worth going somewhere else. She can still hear tinned classical music and the endless thump of nine-year-olds at the barre, jetéing across the floor, one-two-three one-two-three. Amy is convinced she’s going to be the Sugar Plum Fairy, and Lucy could reel off the statistics about eating disorders and the tiny, tiny minority of dancers who ever make it in professional ballet and the punishing standards and retiring at twenty-nine with broken feet and a broken body and the dark stories about abuse and grooming and –- and –- try to convince her baby sister to pick something better, in short. But maybe she needs to take off her anxious critical feminist hat for two seconds, and put on her supportive sister hat instead. It’s been two years since they were orphaned by that car crash, and Lucy ended up with sole custody of her little sister at age twenty-one. She’s trying to finish the first year of her PhD and remind herself that they can do this. Somehow. Amy doesn’t have to be aiming for the Bolshoi. Maybe she can just take dance lessons because it’s a normal thing for a nine-year-old girl to want to do, and God knows they need a little of that right now.Lucy leans back against the wall at the renewed thump and clatter from inside the studio. Older girls in tutus run by, hair upswept in tightly gelled buns, smelling of too much makeup and the rosin in their pointe shoes. Various stage mothers have asked Lucy if she’s planning to help sew costumes for the Nutcracker this year, with the implication that if she doesn’t, she is insufficiently committed to her daughter’s career. Some of them haven’t even seemed to realize that she is in no way old enough to be Amy’s mother. It has felt selfish to keep up with her PhD plans, rather than dropping out and focusing only on her sister. Does she deserve this, Lucy wonders? A life of her own, even now? Still?(Who knows. Maybe she doesn’t.)She grimly marks out a few sources to check on later, doesn’t get much else done for the rest of the session, and waits until Amy and her classmates speed out in their sweat-dampened leotards. As they head for the changing room, the teacher follows them out. Lucy has seen him before (it’s impossible not to see him), but they’ve only exchanged a few words. The kids call him Mr. Flynn. He’s tall and dark and may be a Bolshoi veteran himself, to judge from his accent, though Lucy has been unable to picture him in tights, spinning a prima ballerina beneath the floodlights. It’s made her wonder once or twice if a grown man has some other reason to want to hang around impressionable little girls, but that’s definitely the anxiety talking, her fear that she’s totally blowing this replacement mother lark. Amy and the other pupils love him. She usually won’t shut up about him on the car ride home.At the moment, Mr. Flynn himself doesn’t seem to realize that Lucy’s there. He turns to go, sees her, and looks surprised. She can see him struggling to put a name to the face, give up, and say, “Good evening, remind me of your…?”“Good evening.” Lucy gathers up her papers and stuffs them into her backpack. “I’m, ah, I’m Amy Preston’s older sister.”They’ve been here just long enough that the question of showcases might arise, if Amy wants to have Mom and Dad come and watch her recital, the time-honored tradition of parents everywhere to eagerly applaud while ten-year-olds with stage fright shuffle through Swan Lake. Lucy hopes he isn’t about to ask about that. There’s no real easy way to have that conversation, and it gets tiring explaining that your parents are dead to everyone you randomly meet. Lucy offers an apologetic smile. “I hope it’s all right that I just borrowed the corner to do some work.”“Not very quiet, I imagine.” Flynn raises a dark eyebrow. “But yes, of course.”Lucy finds herself momentarily dry-mouthed as he turns out the lights, locks the studio, and she trails after him to the reception area. Yes, all right, it’s catastrophically cliché to have a crush on your little sister’s dance teacher, but her life is terrifically lonely, and Flynn held a door open for her the other night and she thought about it for five days straight. She’s starved for any kind of attention, for adult connection and friendship, and – she’s not going to say anything, of course. This is for Amy, she’s not going to ruin it. But maybe it’ll make the ballet run more bearable, or perhaps less, if she just sits there and pines from afar for what she can never have. Sounds about right.They’re still by themselves waiting for the girls to come out, though, and Lucy wonders if there’s some sort of obligation on her to make polite conversation. Flynn doesn’t seem very sociable, shuts up a little once teaching is done, and she doesn’t want to be a pain. But something she wasn’t expecting makes her blurt out, “Amy’s –- Amy really likes your classes. So that’s –- thanks.”“Does she?” He glances up. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.”“Yes, she -– well, we –- ” Oh God, oh Christ, Lucy, no, no, you are not dropping the dead parents bomb on the man in the only conversation longer than two seconds you’ve had to date. “Things have just – there’s been a lot of change recently, and it’s been good to have that. You know kids, she wants to be the Sugar Plum Fairy, and –- anyway. Yeah.”A corner of Flynn’s mouth turns up. He doesn’t seem to find this silly, or childish, or unrealistic, or whatever else. Instead, so quietly Lucy almost misses it, he says, “My daughter did too.”And with that, as the girls come hurrying out in a chattering flood, as Amy hurries up to swing off Lucy’s arm and ask if they can get a Frosty on the way home, Flynn nods to her. Turns on his heel, pushes his way out into the parking lot, and vanishes into the night.
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Lucy allows herself to hope, for a couple of weeks after that, that the experiment in exchanging words like semi-normal adults might continue. But there never seems to be the opportunity. Once, she looks up to find his eyes on her, but she’s surrounded by a debate about snowflakes and Mother Ginger and fabric sales, and after a strange, suspended moment, he nods gravely and strides back into the classroom. Lucy’s decided he’s incapable of walking like a normal human being. He may swagger or stride or prowl; he doesn’t walk. Once, she decides to take the initiative and ask him what she might do to help for the performance, aside from sewing costumes. She tells herself that bypassing the competitive parenting is a feminist act and going straight to the person likely to actually need logistical help, is entirely disinterested, really… But then Amy is grabbing at her arm and explaining that Olivia has invited her to a sleepover that weekend and she’ll get all her homework done first, promise promise. Lucy blinks, and focuses. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, sweetheart, that’d be fine.” Belatedly she catches herself up: “What does Olivia’s mom say about it?” She’d learned that one the hard way.“Oh,” says Amy blithely, “they’re both fine with it.” Oh.“Well,” says Lucy, “that’s fine then.” She runs a hand over Amy’s head, over the wisps of fine hair coming free from the bun. “I can drop you off after seminar on Friday.” And she does, and she watches Amy scamper away from the car with her little sister’s kiss on her cheek and her thanks ringing in her ears. And Lucy thinks that maybe, just maybe, she’s not making an utter mess of this.She does sometimes wonder if she’s turning, gradually and irrevocably, into a really grim, bitter person. It’s an uncomfortable thought. But Lucy hates November and its rain, and having to submit a paper draft and an annotated bibliography and a sample seminar design all in the same week. And although she’s grateful for the tutoring gigs, of course — bills have to be paid, and ballet lessons have to be paid for — she is so very tired. When she’s not afraid she’s turning bitter before her time, Lucy sometimes thinks that just 8 hours of sleep would make the world look different. Maybe. Maybe not.Maybe the world would look different if Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution weren’t blurring in front of her eyes. Maybe the world would look different if Nicholas hadn’t been a dick in seminar. Again. Maybe if her parents hadn’t died… oh hell. The ballet class lets out, and the students stream past her — all lightness suddenly gone from their feet — and Lucy stuffs her book into her satchel and tries not to cry, tries to ignore the fact that she is almost shaking with fatigue.“Good evening, Lucy.”Of course he would find time to greet her tonight, of course, of course… Anxious to appear collected and presentable, she stands up abruptly. Too abruptly, as it turns out, as something curious happens to her knees and there is a ringing in her ears and for a dizzying moment, Lucy is not quite sure which way is up. Her first coherent thought is that she can’t have fainted, because she’s standing up. This is quickly followed, however, by the realization that ‘standing up’ is a generous term for what she is doing. Lucy finds that she is chiefly supported by an almost alarmingly solid male arm encircling her waist. Oh god.“Um,” she manages, and then, because her brain is a traitor, she blurts out: “Please tell me I didn’t swoon.”“Ah… no,” says Garcia Flynn. Very gently, Lucy is let down onto the bench. “No, you… a little light-headed, I think.” Lucy cannot bring herself to meet his eyes (and not only because tilting her head that far back seems dangerous at the moment.) She’d welcome the Rat King’s trapdoor at this point, but no such luck. Flynn’s impossibly long legs recede, and she takes a deep breath. Fine. He can go deal with some other minor crisis and she can swallow her mortification, and they can both pretend this never happened. So much for the development of their semi-silent semi-friendship whatever, but…“Hey.” She starts, and tells herself that she really must stop doing that. Flynn sits down on the bench next to her very slowly, as if ready to interrupt the movement if she were to tell him to go away. When he hands her the paper cup of water, he does so by reaching across his body, carefully not infringing on the space that, apparently, he’s decided to treat as hers. Lucy — annoyed to find that her hands are still shaking — takes it.“Hey,” she says, and sips at the water. She manages a quick half-glance in his direction. “Um. Thank you.”“Don’t mention it.” When she looks over at him the second time, she finds him regarding her with such intensity that she looks away. “Are you eating enough?”“Yes,” says Lucy promptly, and her stomach growls. She wraps her free arm firmly over her midriff. “I am, mostly; I…” She trails off. Flynn is watching her in silence. She’s used to the silences of people just waiting to tell her all the ways she’s wrong, and why, and this isn’t one of them. He isn’t judging her, and he isn’t preparing to interrogate her; he’s just… waiting. “It’s just hard,” says Lucy. Strangely, she finds it easier to meet his eyes than to pretend he isn’t there. “It’s… it’s been especially busy lately, and between driving between school and the tutoring gigs and Amy’s things, it’s just… hard to find time.” Flynn nods: one slow, deliberate movement, an appraisal and an acknowledgement. “School?” he asks softly, and whatever she had been expecting, it wasn’t that.“Yeah.” Lucy feels a reflexive prickling of excitement; maybe she is doing the right thing after all. “Yeah, it’s… I’m trying to get my Ph.D.” And if that isn’t a reliable conversation-killer. “In history,” she adds. “I’m in the very early stages, though.”“Would you…” says Flynn, and stops.Lucy finishes her cup of water. “Would I what?”“Would you be willing to tell me about it? Over dinner?”Lucy blinks; she can feel her jaw go slightly slack. “I… what?”“Dinner,” says Flynn, with as much solemnity as though he were teaching her the word in a new language. “I could cook. For you and Amy, of course. That is, if you — you don’t have to come to my place, I didn’t mean — ” Flynn doesn’t trail off; he stops dead. He’s gone a rather surprising shade of pink, and Lucy tells herself that she shouldn’t find this touching.“No,” says Lucy. “I mean yes. I mean…” She bites her lip. “If we wouldn’t be imposing.” She’s needed to go grocery shopping since Tuesday, but she’s not going to tell him that. Lucy tells herself that she still has some shreds of pride worth preserving.“Not in the least.” Flynn stands up, and puts out a hand to help her to her feet. “I’d enjoy the company.” And looking at the depths in his eyes, and the shadows under them, Lucy finds herself believing him.
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En route to his apartment, Lucy’s headlights in his rearview mirror, Flynn tells himself sternly and repeatedly that this is a terrible idea. It is, for one thing, the most egregious breach of boundaries. A foolish word, he’s always thought, too often invoked by people who enjoy both prying and privacy; but still. One of the studio’s clients and her sister. Put another way, one of his students and her sister. God. But Lucy Preston’s face. She’s looked ready to burst into tears for the past three weeks. He should, he tells himself, have noticed something earlier, have said something earlier. Whatever his feelings about her, about her steely courage in dealing with the parental score-keeping and with Amy’s education, whatever his feelings about the habit she has of pushing her hair back over her ear, or twisting it around her fingers while she works… Flynn inhales sharply. Whatever his feelings, he has no excuse for ignoring the misery of another human being, of ignoring her pallor and the sharpness of her bones. By the time he’s pulled into his driveway, Flynn is defiantly resolved on doing this more than once. Besides, he likes Amy. He takes a deep breath, consciously straightens his spine. If only life were as simple as the stage, a series of coordinated actions with their own necessary logic to drive you forward. Flynn gets out of the car.Amy is already in the drive, half-bouncing on her toes, waiting with a child’s impatience for adult slowness. “It’s very nice of you to have us to dinner, Mr. Flynn.” He bites back his amusement. She’s so clearly obeying an exhortation; but she seems genuinely enthusiastic, for all that.“It’s my pleasure,” he tells her gravely, and only then allows his eyes to travel to Lucy. She looks steady enough on her feet, just very tired, and heartbreakingly young. “Round the back,” he calls. It is almost physically painful to turn away from her — Aeneas turning his back on Creusa — but Amy is dancing along beside him telling him how ballet class has been helping her with math and how she doesn’t mind broccoli, not really, but it’s not her favorite only don’t tell Lucy because it’s very nice of him to have them in any case. He has to trust that Lucy is behind them. He tries not to think too much about how strange it is to have other feet on these stairs again, and girlish confidences in his ear, and other presences in this place. He holds the door open for Lucy, and Amy subsides into silence while she takes her shoes off.“Thank you,” says Lucy, a little breathlessly, and he manages a nod. He casts a quick look around, as if some forgotten sin of housekeeping will obtrude itself on his notice. There’s the mail he keeps meaning to sort through, but nothing egregious. Still. Flynn finds himself uneasily conscious of how little there really is to the place. He wonders if it will look to Lucy as it does to him: like a place badly masquerading as a home. The neutral carpets, replaced by the insurance company while he was in hospital; the too few books on the shelves, leaning over the empty spaces where llamas and bears and princesses and, yes, ballerinas used to be. Flynn scowls at his inoffensive living room. “At least there should be something on the walls.”“What?” says Lucy, and he realizes he has spoken aloud.“Nothing,” says Flynn hastily. “Sorry. Now — ” he claps his hands briskly together — “what about dinner?” There is a slight pause.“Oh, anything…” begins Lucy.“Spaghetti!” says Amy at the same time.“Excellent, a decisive vote. I’m not sure I have spaghetti — a deplorable lapse in taste on my part, of course, Amy — but pasta I do have, and…” He opens cupboards, discovers with relief that the spinach in the fridge hasn’t gone off. Flynn tells himself firmly that the objective is to get Lucy fed, full stop, and that it doesn’t matter if she decides he has the cooking skills of a lazy teenager.“Nut allergies? Aversion to garlic?”“No,” says Lucy.“Nope!” echoes Amy, “we’re not vampires!”Flynn grins down at her. “Well, that’s a relief.” God, he’d forgotten this. Teaching classes was one thing, but he’d forgotten what it was like to have a child making jokes over dinner. Iris, of course, had still been young enough to be inventing her own, nonsensical and a source of infinite delight. Flynn swallows. Pine nuts are probably a little ambitious for a nine-year-old; walnuts, then.“Can I…?” begins Lucy.“No, no.” He momentarily abandons the spinach in favor of getting her a glass of water. “You stay right there.”“She managed to burn herself making oatmeal last week.”“Amy!”“Well, you did. Don’t worry,” adds Amy, “I’m doing the oatmeal now, so she won’t hurt herself.” Flynn glances sharply at her. It had not occurred to him that Amy Preston might be inconveniently perspicacious. Or that he himself might be embarrassingly transparent. He turns to slicing the garlic. “Do you mind if I start on my homework?” The request is tactfully directed at the refrigerator, halfway between Flynn as host and Lucy as chief authority.“Be my guest.”Amy giggles. “I am your guest.”“True enough.”“How long have you been teaching?” asks Lucy in a small voice, after a few more minutes have elapsed. Ah. Flynn pretends to investigate the boiling water, pours the penne into it with unnecessary care. “About four years, now.” He shakes the iron skillet to distribute the shimmering oil before lowering the heat. He stands with the bag of walnuts in his hand, as though he might be called on to act at any moment. “What attracted you to teaching? I mean, can I — can I ask how you got into teaching?”“Of course.” Anything to remove that terrible hesitancy from her voice. “Of course.” It’s not her fault that, almost five years after the fact, he still hasn’t figured out how to talk about it. “I…” He’s mentioned Iris to Lucy, of course, but he’s not fool enough to think that long division is enough to keep Amy’s attention entirely. He could not bear for this to become classroom gossip, however sympathetic. “I was in an accident,” Flynn says, as neutrally as he can manage. “It… it was a long recovery period.” His colleagues had been remarkably generous; Aurélie had reduced him almost to tears by calling to offer him his pick of roles on a day when he was wondering if he’d walk properly again. But he had never fully realized, before, how many ballets were about death — love and death, and hopeless desire. Albrecht, weeping at Giselle’s grave; Solor, following Nikiya out of reality itself; the prince throwing himself into the lake after his betrayed swan. No, he couldn’t have gone back to that.“I’m sorry,” says Lucy softly. Flynn shakes himself, and scrapes the toasted walnuts into a bowl, tosses the garlic into the skillet, pours the spinach in after it.“Don’t be,” he says at last, and then curses the English idiom. “I… I don’t mean that.”“I know.” He turns to meet her eyes, and has to remind himself to breathe normally. He tells himself that this is foolishness and worse than foolishness. It is only, he tells himself, that he is as tired as he always is during Nutcracker rehearsals, and lonelier than he will allow himself to remember. There is no reason that he should want to go to his knees in front of Lucy Preston to receive the blessing of her compassion.Flynn clears his throat. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
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Lucy has a lot to think about. Flynn’s face as he bade them both goodbye at his threshold, his earnest “Any time” inviting them back. Amy piping up in the car on the way home: “He’s nice. …I mean, nice nice.” Lucy had had no idea how to respond to that. And now, there’s Jiya’s invitation to birthday drinks.“After early modern science on Friday,” says Jiya. “Can you come?”“I’d love to,” says Lucy, trying not to look at the clock over Jiya’s shoulder. “I really would. But I don’t want to leave Amy home alone more than I have to, so…”Jiya’s face falls. “Sure,” she says bravely. “I get it. I just thought… I wanted to ask, you know?”“It’s sweet of you,” says Lucy, shoving her pedagogy books into her bag. “I appreciate it. Really. It’s just…” That sentence doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. “It’s sweet of you,” repeats Lucy, a little lamely. “I… I have to get her to ballet class.” Lucy sometimes thinks that the Waltz of the Snowflakes has driven her a little bit mad. But she plugs away at her work, tweaking her paragraph organization and expanding her footnotes.“Lucy Preston?” Lucy blinks, and looks up to find a dark-skinned, kind-faced woman looking at her. “Um, yes.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “If Jessica told you to talk to me about the costume-sewing, I’m afraid I…”The woman laughs, rich and full. “Oh no,” she says. “I’ll sew costumes, but I draw the line at intrigue. Michelle Christopher, by the way.”“Oh!” says Lucy, putting out her hand. “I’m sorry. Olivia’s mother.”“That’s right. And I confess that I do have a request.”“Oh?”“A diplomatic mission. Denise and I have two kids, and, well… Olivia’s upset that she can’t do the Nutcracker and the science camp like her brother.” Michelle sighs. “It’s easier in the seasons when they’re in the same sports.”“Oh,” says Lucy for the third time. Would the words make more sense if she weren’t so tired?“So, I was wondering if Amy would be free to come over this weekend. As a treat, you know.”Enlightenment dawns. “Oh!” says Lucy, feeling a bit like a wind-up doll. “Of course. I — that’s really nice of you. She always loves spending time with Olivia, and… is it your cooking?”Michelle chuckles. “It is. You’d be more than welcome to join us for dinner, if you like. On Friday? We’ll get the girls from school. Six o’clock?”“Yes,” says Lucy, before she can talk herself into saying that she really can’t (she could use the time for online tutoring, or coursework, or cleaning the damn kitchen.) She’ll have a Diet Coke at Jiya’s drinks party, and dinner with some functional adults, and the world won’t end.“Wonderful,” says Michelle warmly. And Lucy thinks that maybe, just maybe, she’s not making an utter mess of this.***For one thing, she’s getting better at making Pasta With Things. This, Flynn had confided mock-solemnly over the dinner table, was the secret to last-minute cooking.“Pasta with two other things, and you’re done. And cheese, of course,” he had added, passing the Parmesan to Amy, who had been eyeing it longingly.So Lucy makes Pasta With Things. One of those things is usually a can of diced tomatoes, but there’s no law against that. And the chicken sometimes turns out sort of brown and chewy… but Amy eats it anyway, without seeming to mind.November drags on. Lucy takes her courage in both hands and invites Olivia for a reciprocal slumber party. She usually feels as though she falls through the social cracks, between her grad school cohort and her parents’ distantly benevolent friends. But maybe she’s getting the hang of this. And maybe, maybe she’ll survive the end of the term and a constant soundtrack of Tchaikovsky. Especially if she negotiates regarding the latter.“Amy,” says Lucy, scraping zucchini into the frying pan, “I really love that you want to learn from watching professional ballet dancers, and it’s great that you can do that on YouTube, but…” Passing behind her sister’s chair, she stops. “Wait, is that…?”“Yeah,” says Amy brightly. Taking advantage of Lucy’s distraction, she helpfully scoots her chair over so her sister can see better. “Nutcracker, grand pas de deux, 2010.”“Oh.” Pride and zucchini abandoned, Lucy sits down next to her sister. It was one thing to know, theoretically, that Flynn had been a ballet dancer, but this… “Holy sh—” Lucy bites off the word.Amy gives her a look of withering scorn. “Kids at school say ‘shit’ all the time.”“Doesn’t mean you should,” returns Lucy automatically. She swallows. Before Amy’s ballet obsession, Lucy had been to see The Nutcracker exactly once, at the age of seven. Her chief memories consisted of the magic of the Christmas tree and the terror of the Rat King, and being allowed to have chocolate at the interval. She had not remembered anything like this.“Let me show you the black swan duet!” says Amy. “I have to…”“Come on, it’s my favorite! Five minutes?”“Fine, five minutes.”“Isn’t she beautiful?” says Amy dreamily. “Look at how steady she holds herself, so that when she does the développé with her arm around the Prince’s neck it’s like she’s encircling him with her whole body.”“Uh, yeah,” says Lucy. Is ballet even appropriate for nine-year-olds? The glory in this section all goes to the female principal, so Lucy supposes she doesn’t have to worry about a teacher-crush.“I love her,” says Amy, and Lucy suddenly wonders when she should be having The Talk with her baby sister about sexuality. Maybe she could… postpone that? “Mr. Flynn says,” continues Amy sententiously, “that the arms are often what set apart really good dancers.” Amy wrinkles her nose. “Mostly he says it when we complain about exercises.”“Yes, well, he’s a good teacher.” And to her own chagrin and not-inconsiderable embarrassment, she cannot tear her eyes away from his hands, resting at his partner’s waist as if they belonged there inevitably. “Now we see the Prince’s variation,” explains Amy. “He’s expressing his joy.”“I… see.” Holy shit. “That,” says Amy, “is called an entrechat.”“The bit where he just… scissors his legs in the air?”“It’s more like braiding.”“Okay.” Lucy swallows. She’s pretty sure she can feel herself blushing. The oil makes an ominous sizzling noise, and Lucy jumps up to scrape the zucchini off the bottom of the pan.They are invited to join the Christophers for Thanksgiving, and Lucy manages to make a pumpkin pie that isn’t watery (on the second try.) The crust comes from a box, but hey. There is pumpkin pie; Thanksgiving can proceed. Denise, without altering the seriousness of her expression, explains that doing Thanksgiving without their in-laws is an act both of self-care and of international diplomacy. Michelle and Lucy discover that they both had childhood crushes on Maureen O’Hara in “Miracle on 34th Street.” Amy falls asleep in the backseat on the way home, clutching a container of Michelle’s macaroni and cheese in her lap. And Lucy thinks that maybe, just maybe, she’s not making an utter mess of this.
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December is always a grim month, the days drawing in. Flynn is careful to keep his turtlenecks sorted by color; tempting as it might be to simply wear black, he wouldn’t want parents fretting about his commitment to their children’s well-being. Or, for that matter, precocious seven-year-olds asking why they couldn’t wear the same shirts three days in a row.The Nutcracker tradition helps. It gives him something to do, in the form of several dozen things at once: thinking about his dancers’ posture, and resilience, and moods, and immune systems for the better part of twelve hours a day. But still. He still finds himself awake before dawn. He still has the sense of moving through time like a sleepwalker. He goes to the studio early — it is better than the apartment — and occupies himself there. There is, when there is nothing else, the discipline of the body. Emma’s key is always in the door at 8 a.m. sharp.When Amy Preston asks to stay late and watch the Sugar Plum Fairy rehearse, he says yes without hesitation, without thinking about it. It is only when he emerges from the lesson to find her hanging on Lucy’s arm that he wonders if he has committed the cardinal sin of siding with a child against a responsible adult. “Please,” Amy is saying.“Sweetheart, you know I’d love for you to do it, but — ”“Do I owe you both an apology?”“No,” says Lucy promptly.“Please tell her it’s okay,” begs Amy. Over her head, Flynn raises his eyebrows.“It’s just,” says Lucy, and her voice shakes a little, “that it’s finals week, and the scheduling is weird. So I need to collect Amy and then get back to campus to deliver a seminar paper. That’s all. It’s a very kind offer.”“If you…” says Flynn, and stops, and swallows. “If you were willing, I’d be happy to stay on here, with Amy, until you were done.” Amy, remarkably, remains mute.“Well,” says Lucy slowly, “if you’re sure.” She smiles a little, as if at her own hesitancy.“I’m sure,” says Flynn, and returns the smile. Amy is vociferous in her thanks. “Any time,” he adds softly, for her sister’s benefit.“The tenth, then,” says Lucy, entering it in her calendar, and it is only then that he realizes.Of necessity, of course, it is a day like any other. And he tells himself that it can only be a good thing for him to be quite fully occupied, from putting on coffee for the first parents in the morning, to overseeing the advanced dancers in the evening. They are close enough to performance, he tells himself, that his distraction need not matter much. He praises absently, and corrects when he can, and it is enough. It must be enough. It is just that he has trouble, sometimes, remembering to breathe.It is with relief that he turns out the lights at last, Amy trailing in his wake. “Thanks again for letting me stay,” she says, stifling a yawn.“Don’t mention it. It’s a good way to learn.”“Do you think I’ll be the Sugar Plum Fairy someday?”Flynn swallows. “Why not?” Why not indeed? She is bright, and passionate, and dedicated. Why not? “You can settle in here until your sister gets here,” he tells her. “I’ll just move these things… and there you are.”“Thanks,” says Amy brightly, and crosses her legs underneath her in his desk chair. Her backpack is covered in embroidered patches; the folder for her math homework has a unicorn on it. Flynn had planned to stay with her, to sort through his files, to clean off the desk, to review the lists of new students. But looking at Amy’s head bent under the lamplight, he knows with piercing clarity that he cannot bear to be in the same room with a girl Iris’s age, who is sweet and clever and funny and alive.“I…” says Flynn, and Amy looks up. “I’ll just… clean up the studio for the morning. You can stay here. It’s fine.”“Okay.” He tells himself that his departure from the office is not a flight.Weeping echoes off tile; the studio is a safer space than the bathroom. And he does get the floor swept. And then he simply sits down on a chair, and lets go. He is not sure how much later it is when the door in the vestibule clanks open, admitting soft steps.Lucy pauses on the threshold of the studio. “Flynn?”“Don’t — ” His own voice sounds hoarse, raw in the silence. “Don’t turn on the lights.” Her motion is arrested. For another moment she stands there, a shadow and a pale face in the doorway. Then she comes to him, and Flynn holds his breath. The shine of moonlight on snow is caught in the mirrors on the wall, an uncanny luminousness. “Hey,” says Lucy Preston softly.“She’s safe,” he manages. “Amy’s safe, she’s in my office, she — I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.” And God, that’s a hollow promise, but he means it, for whatever that’s worth. Lucy’s brow furrows briefly. And then, to his utter shock, her hand descends onto his shoulder.“Hey,” she says again, “hey. I know that. I trust you.” It is all he can to keep from turning his head to meet her touch, all he can do to keep from leaning into her. He should, he knows, find something to say to her. “I’d ask if you were okay,” says Lucy, still quietly enough that they are surrounded by the silence of the room, “but…” She doesn’t move her hand from his shoulder; for this he finds himself intensely grateful. “Do you want to talk about it?”“I… it was today,” says Flynn; and she waits until he can speak again. “I told you that I had a daughter.” He hears her intake of breath, sharp in the silence. “It was a robbery. Armed. Iris had had a nightmare; Lorena was in with her. By the time I got there, it… they…” He manages to swallow. He forces himself to breathe deeply."Your daughter," says Lucy, "and your partner." In her voice there is sorrow without pity, and oh, he is in danger of giving way entirely."My wife," he says dully. "She was my wife." He runs a hand over his face. "I don’t know what else to say. Except that it is easier to believe in fate — random or malign — than to believe that there might have been, somehow, something I could have done differently.” Something that wouldn’t have ended with Lorena covered in blood, covering their daughter with her body. Something that wouldn’t have ended with him surviving them. Gradually he becomes aware of the fact that Lucy Preston’s hand has come to rest between his shoulder-blades, describing small circles there.“I’m sorry,” he says.“Flynn.” He is very much afraid that there are tears in her voice. “We’re friends.” The quality of the ensuing silence changes subtly. “We are, aren’t we?”“Of course.” He has reached for her free hand before thinking about it. “Of course, that. Yes.”“Well then,” says Lucy, as if that explained everything, as if that answered everything. “Flynn,” she says, after another moment, “do you want to come home with me?”“What?”“I just… I’m not sure you should be alone, that’s all.” She comes around to stand in front of him. “Flynn?”He raises his head to look at her: let her see him, then. Her brown eyes are liquid and enormous, but she looks utterly resolved. “Lucy, you don’t have to do this.”“I know,” says Lucy. “I have to do most things in my life, but not this.”Flynn looks up at her. Against the many reasons why he should not allow himself to accept her offer, there is only her face in the moonlight. “Please,” he says, and Lucy nods as if they have concluded a contract.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
He staggers a little, in rising, and instinctively Lucy reaches to put a hand on his arm. To her surprise, he seems in fact to be steadied by it. She has come to take for granted that he is always aware and in control of where his body is in space.“Are you all right to drive?”“Mm.”“Okay.” She has to resist the impulse to stroke his arm — or, worse, to simply go into his arms. “I’ll get Amy. If… if you clean up I can just tell her that you’re coming over as a thank-you or for the company or… something.”Flynn clears his throat roughly. “Yes.”“She’ll be in bed by 10 anyway, on a school night,” says Lucy. “Don’t worry.” She wonders, turning away from him, if that’s the silliest thing she could possibly have said. She resists the temptation to look back.Amy is on the floor of Flynn’s office, propped on her elbows, poring over a folio-sized tome with illustrations of what appears to be eighteenth-century stage design.“Hey, princess.”“Hey.” Amy scrambles to her feet, and scoops the book up after her, replacing it on the shelf. “I finished all my math sets and my science worksheets.”“I don’t doubt it. Besides, a Preston girl can never resist a bookshelf. It’s in our blood.”Amy giggles, and then yawns, shouldering her backpack. “Home now?”“Home now. Um,” says Lucy, “Mr. Flynn’s coming with us.”“He is?”“He is.”“Okay,” says Amy, just as Lucy is wondering what pretext would be the least likely to arouse her curiosity or concern. Lucy glances sidelong at her sister. Should she be concerned by this unexpected acquiescence? Well, even if Amy’s apparent lack of inquisitiveness is too good to be true, Lucy decides, that can be a problem for later. For now, she just needs to get them all home.This she does. A voice in Lucy’s head busily insists that this (whatever this is) was a terrible idea, that she has presumed too much and that she has no idea what to do with the ravaged, haggard man on her doorstep.“Can’t get rid of me,” says Flynn to Amy; and he locks the door behind him. “Following us everywhere,” returns Amy with a grin. Lucy tells the voice in her head to shut up, because maybe it’s not down to her alone. Maybe they can do this, the three of them. Whatever this is. Amy stifles another yawn. “It’s not rude if I just…”“Not at all,” says Flynn, before Lucy can respond. And looking between them, Lucy is struck by the thought that Flynn might just adore her younger sister as unreservedly, as unconditionally, as she herself does. Well. That’s something else to file away for later.“I’ll check in in fifteen minutes,” says Lucy to Amy. “Okay. Night, Mr. Flynn.”“Good night.”The silence after the shutting of Amy’s bedroom door seems to fill the space between them. Lucy holds Flynn’s eyes, and wonders what to do next. ‘Sit down before you fall down’ is hardly an appropriate thing to say to a guest. “Have you eaten?”Flynn blinks at her. And then, to her surprise, he half-laughs under his breath. “How recently?”“Okay,” says Lucy. “I could… I could make eggs? I promise, not even I can mess up scrambled eggs. My days of burning them onto the pan are long past.”“Thank you.”Whisking the eggs and milk, Lucy is sure that she can see him swaying on his feet out of the corner of her eye. “Have a seat.” By the time she turns around to hand him a glass of water, he has done so. “I know that one of the key ingredients in scrambled eggs is supposedly time,” she says, “but tonight…” The silence between them still seems like a fragile thing, sustained by fragile agreements. But Lucy gets the store-bought bread out of the toaster and the eggs out of the pan at roughly the same time, and sits down next to him at the counter. She eats her eggs, watches him become gradually less tentative with his.“How…” says Flynn, and Lucy waits. “How are the secret societies of the French Revolution?”“You remembered that?” His expression, as he meets her eyes, is one Lucy can only classify as stricken, and she guiltily presses onward: “I mean — it’s not that you wouldn’t, or — I just — so few people do,” she ends lamely. “Not many people even care in the first place.”A smile pulls briefly at the corner of his mouth. “So… since we’ve established that I do…”“I’m looking at fashion,” says Lucy, “and how it was used to express and debate political identity?”“Mm.”“That’s it, really.”Flynn shakes his head. “You’re the expert. Tell me.” Lucy regards him thoughtfully, as he stoops above her counter, legs braced against the bars of the stool. “If we switch to the couch,” she says softly, and he nods in acquiescence. “So,” Lucy continues, settling into her corner, hugging a pillow. “Revolutionary fashions.” She is acutely conscious of the space between them, and of how easy it would be to close it.“Les Incroyables and les Merveilleuses of the Directoire period are the most famous examples, of course, of how people used fashion to express identity, but I think the fact that they were able to do so says something important about how clothes and bodies were perceived. I think we need to look at that more.” Right now, she is fully occupied with looking at him: at the shadows on his face, at the exhaustion in the lines of his mouth. Does anyone over the age of eleven actually care what happens to him on a daily basis? Does he have anyone to care about him? At least she has Amy.“Look,” says Lucy softly, “at how many of our terms for groups of the time are derived from fashion. Take the sans-culottes. Take the Cordeliers — Robespierre was a member — who were named after the Franciscans…”“’M listening,” says Flynn, and opens his eyes. “Please. Please don’t stop.”“Well,” says Lucy, and swallows past the lump in her throat. “Well, the Cordeliers club was founded in the old convent — threatened by Necker, rescued by the king — so maybe what I really need to be doing is looking at fashion and space. Anyway, they kept the name. Another name for the Club of 30 is the Breton club. That implies regional fashion, doesn’t it? I know regionalism has been done, but I want to look at how these differing styles of dress, all side by side in Paris, could reveal and obscure identity, facilitating the dense espionage networks….”Lucy holds her breath. She tells herself that she should not, should not be tempted to run her hand through his hair. As quietly as she can, she gets up from the couch. “You asleep, Ames?”“No.”Lucy crosses to the bed, and sits on the edge of it, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.“It was really cool to see the practice,” whispers Amy.“Good.”“How’d your presentation go?”“It was fine, sweetheart.” Lucy brushes back her sister’s hair. “Thanks for asking.” She leans forward, and kisses Amy on the forehead, and tucks the two corners of the sheet. “Snug as a bug…”“In a rug,” finishes Amy.“Love you.”“Love you too.”On the threshold, Lucy is struck by a thought. “Amy!”“Yes?” The voice from the bed is already sleepy, soothed by ritual.“Sorry,” says Lucy. “It’s just… Flynn passed out on the couch, so… he might still be here in the morning.” The silence seems very long.“Oh,” says Amy at last. “Okay.”Lucy exhales. “Okay,” she says. “Sorry. I just… thought you should know. Night ’night.”At her footstep, he sits up in a fluid movement that reminds her that of course, he must often have slept like this in hallways, in dressing rooms.“I’m sorry,” says Flynn, before she is all the way into the room. “I’ll — go.”“No,” says Lucy, more abruptly than she intends to. “I mean, of course I can’t tell you what to do.” She plaits her fingers together, wishing she could put a name to the expression in his eyes. “It’s just… you don’t have to.” She wonders if he thinks that he should leave, or if it genuinely has not occurred to him that he has an alternative to sleeping in the house where his family was killed. Still mutely he regards her.“There’s only the couch,” says Lucy softly. “But we have plenty of blankets. And you could change into your street clothes in the morning. I told Amy that you might be staying over. That you had fallen asleep on the couch,” she adds hurriedly, “and that you might be staying over.” Some of the tension has left his face, and Lucy ventures a smile. “I have vodka,” she suggests. “It’s not great vodka, but it will knock you out.”Briefly he closes his eyes, and then meets hers. “You think of everything, Lucy Preston.”“I try,” says Lucy. She thinks that maybe, just maybe, they can do this. Whatever this is.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
By 7:30 the next morning, he is back in the studio, having dropped Amy off at school as an apology to both the Prestons for disrupting their morning routines. And now, he is trying desperately not to think. He tells himself that it is not a dereliction of duty if, for one day, he remains unshaven in a twice-worn turtleneck. He tells himself that it would have been unbearable, untenable, unconscionable, for him to remain in Lucy Preston’s home in the cold light of morning, for him to linger in the simple pleasure of seeing her hair loose about her face, of watching her grope for her coffee mug while already absorbed in an article about women as scientists in the sixteenth century. Her willingness, on their comparatively brief acquaintance, to look out for him as a friend — to look after him, even — is of course remarkable. But then, she is a remarkable person.
“Would you like to come for dinner again? Sometime this week? Next?” Amy is repacking her bag at the last minute, he and Lucy alone in the kitchen.
“Oh!” (He still wonders why she seems so surprised by kindness.) “You don’t have to…”
“I’m not trying to repay a debt,” he assures her, “to repay this. I wouldn’t dare to think I could. I just…” He finds that he has clasped his hands in an echo of ballet’s gesture of supplication: forgive me; speak to me; return my love. As unobtrusively as possible, he drops his hands to to his sides.
“I’d like that too,” says Lucy softly. “Amy and I both would. Flynn — ”
“Ready!”
“Right!” says Lucy briskly. “Gloves, cell phone, lunch?”
“Check, check, and check!”
“Right,” says Lucy, and presses a kiss to her sister’s temple. “Off you both go, then,” she adds, and blushes as though she has been guilty of taking a liberty.
In the studio, Flynn tries to focus solely on movement, on breath.“Flynn,” says Emma’s voice from the doorway, “a word.”He rolls his shoulders back, tries not to sigh too audibly as he follows her. “Ma’am.”“I don’t know why I let you do this,” says Emma, before he has seated himself on the opposite side of her desk. “‘Scenes from’ is quite good enough for most people. We’re not a youth ballet.”“No,” says Flynn evenly. “But our students enjoy it. And it draws in others — or are the numbers down this year?”Emma holds his eyes for a long moment, the corners of her mouth drawn grimly down. “No. We’re doing very well off it, as I suspect you know. I’ve had several families talk to me about joining the studio in the new year.”“Good.”“More work for you, or another hire.”Flynn shrugs. It is on the tip of his tongue to suggest that Emma might slum it among the seven-year-olds herself. But besides such a remark being neither politic nor wise, he suspects it might not be good for the seven-year-olds.“You could take on more advanced classes,” suggests Emma.“If necessary, but… You can tell them the odds about dance academies. I’m happy to let them believe in fairy tales a little while longer.”“Always too softhearted for your own good. Speaking of which,” says Emma, “I hear a disturbing rumor.”Oh God. Someone, somehow, has gotten hold of his dinner with Lucy, about his letting Amy stay late, and twisted these things into something foolish, or shameful, or merely vulgar, and he’ll have to explain to Emma, and then he’ll have to explain to Lucy, and…“I hear,” continues Emma, “that there is going to be a tree.”Flynn lets out a breath. “Ah, yes,” he manages. “Yes, that’s — so I hear. Kevin Carlin’s older brother. Engineering major. It’s connected to his senior thesis project.”Emma pinches the bridge of her nose. “Flynn. How do you expect to clear a damn science project with the theatre?”“Already done, on university letterhead. It’s a great mistake to tell a 21-year-old boy what he can’t do, apparently.”“You’re enjoying this.”Flynn attempts to look chastened. “It’s the Nutcracker,” he says placatingly. “Everyone expects the growing Christmas tree. Blame Balanchine. Kevin’s doing very well as the Nutcracker Prince,” Flynn adds.Emma sighs. “Good. I see you’ve put the Preston girl in as one of the party dancers. She’s been with us only a year, correct?”“Closer to two, and she’s a very dedicated dancer. Besides,” says Flynn, “Olivia Christopher is First Party Dancer this year, and they’re inseparable.”“As I was saying,” remarks Emma, “sometimes I’m not sure how you survived the cutthroat world of dance.”Flynn looks down at his interlaced fingers. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “I’m not sure that I did.”“Speaking of cutthroat politics,” continues Emma, “the mothers. Parents, whatever — it usually is the mothers, who haven’t figured out anything better to do with their time and the brains they’ve been given.”“What?”“The homemade costumes keep the costs down, of course, but I really do think I’ll have to lay down rules for next year. Some sort of participation or pay-in system. I keep being asked to arbitrate and I simply do not have the time. They’d be much happier, I’m sure,” says Emma dryly, “if you took an interest.”“What?” says Flynn again.“Did you sleep last night?”“Better than — ” Flynn bites that confession off. “Yes.”She shakes her head, sighs. “Fine, don’t tell me. What I was saying boils down to this: it would not kill you to practice some of the customary daily hypocrisies.” He raises his eyebrows. “For now, of course, providing that no zippers give way at crucial moments, we’ve survived another year.”“Yes.”“And now there’s just the competitive ticket-selling.”“All I’m interested in,” says Flynn, “is keeping the children out of it. Their concern is the dance, and that alone. They are to dance, to dance as well as they can, and to enjoy themselves while doing it. That’s the official line.”“Fine.” Emma makes a note on the legal pad in front of her. “I’ll add it to the spiel — makes our job harder, etc., if we’re trying to hush up gossip and oneupmanship using the parents’ weapons.”“Yes.”Emma frowns at him. “First performance in under two weeks. Are you all right for it?”“Of course. Aren’t I always?”Emma sighs. “As long as you are, I suppose the rest of it doesn’t have to be any of my business. Don’t make it be, Flynn.”“No, ma’am.” He knows it for the warning it is. He unfolds himself from the chair. “They’re a good group,” he says.Emma looks up, and grins at him. “You say that every year, Flynn. Get out of my office.”That evening, he emerges from the last class to find that Lucy is not on her bench. And for one vertiginous, enlightening moment, he panics. He finds her cornered, and standing her ground.“Look,” the fair-haired woman opposite her is saying, “if this ballet is going to be a success…”“Then everyone will dance, no one will get hurt or sick, and ideally no one will cry.” The other woman opens her mouth, and shuts it again. “Besides, Jessica,” continues Lucy, “I’m not really sure that twenty-something grad students are anyone’s target market.”“Well, but still…”“Still,” says Lucy, falsely bright, “I’ve doubled my ticket sales from last year. Have a great night!”Jessica collects her daughter, and they depart, and Lucy looks up and sees him. Flynn would like to think he’s not imagining that the tension goes out of her shoulders.She smiles at him, and his heart turns over. “Hey.”“Doubled your ticket sales,” he says, by way of greeting.“Uh-huh.” Her expression tells him that she can read in his eyes the amusement that he has attempted to keep out of his voice. Lucy glances conspiratorially over her shoulder. “I’ve invited my friend Jiya from seminar.”He does laugh then, if silently, and inclines his head in acknowledgement of her diplomacy. “So.” Lucy steps a little closer; Flynn tells himself that she is only leaving room for the stream of departing students, that it means nothing. “Are you… How are you?”“Fine.” She appears unconvinced, and perhaps with good reason. “I’m fine. And entirely serious about that offer, by the way.”“Oh.” She blushes, color high on her cheeks. “Yes, I mean, thank you, um…” She raises her hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and he resists the impulse to cover it with his. “Friday?” says Flynn.“Friday.” Lucy smiles up at him, and oh, she is radiant. “Friday would be lovely.”“Good. You, ah, you should have my number from the studio. If you need directions, or…”“Yes,” says Lucy Preston again, and this time she does not correct herself. “Thanks.”“Lucy, Lucy, Lucy!”“Amy, Amy, Amy.” She does not look away from him. Flynn moistens his lips.“Can Olivia come for a sleepover?”“Well…” Lucy sighs, and does turn to the girls, who are alight with expectation. “You can ask your Mom and Amma, Olivia, but I think you ballerinas should focus on getting plenty of rest this week.”“Awww!”“That’s a very good idea,” says Flynn, half-sternly. Amy sighs theatrically. “You may be a very good teacher,” she informs him, “but you’re not very much fun.”“Ha. Well.” Flynn clears his throat, strives for a light tone. “Can’t have it all, right?” Amy pulls a face at him. “Come on, you two,” says Lucy. “Home time. Denise and Michelle will worry.”“Good night,” says Flynn, when they are almost at the doorway. And Lucy Preston half-turns, and smiles at him, and he knows himself to be entirely lost.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“So,” says Lucy the next evening, carefully timing the question to coincide with spaghetti, “dinner at Flynn’s on Friday?”Amy puts down the Parmesan with an abruptness that tells Lucy her attempt at nonchalance was vain. “Aha!” There is a triumphant gleam in her younger sister’s eye. “Tell all!”“I…” begins Lucy feebly, and stops. “There’s nothing to tell.”Amy frowns at her, and picks up the Parmesan again. “Sister code. Come on.” Lucy sighs, and leans back in her chair. “What entry?”“Article number…” Amy pretends to ponder… “sixty-four. In which it is established that you definitely have to tell me if someone’s interested in you.” Lucy chokes on her water. “Romantically,” adds Amy, rolling the R.“Amy!” gasps Lucy. “That’s not — he’s not — ” She gives that up, with the excuse of an entirely genuine coughing fit.“Well there’s also Article 64B,” pursues Amy, “in which it is further established that we have to tell each other if we are interested in someone else.”“Amy,” says Lucy, somewhat hoarsely, “Mr. Flynn and I are friends.”“Uh-huh,” says Amy, and continues cutting her pasta into neat bites, a prim expression on her face.“People can be good friends,” insists Lucy, “without it having to turn into something else.” How’s that for a life lesson? “And I’m sorry about having him stay over at the last minute without warning you, but… he was tired.”“He was exhausted,” corrects Amy, as dramatically as only a nine-year-old can.Lucy finishes her glass of water. “Yes, well. Sometimes friends do that sort of thing for each other.”Amy regards her skeptically. “Like having us for dinner on Friday night.”“Like having us for dinner on Friday night,” says Lucy. Amy sighs. “What?”“What what?” Lucy makes a face at her younger sister. “Look,” says Amy, with the air of one making a magnanimous concession, “I know you’re friends. Which is a bit weird because he never talks much to the grownups. But he’s nice, so anyway. I also think he likes you.”Lucy buries her face in her hands. “Amy, we are not doing this.”“I’m just saying.”“Well, you can stop ‘just saying’ and eat your spaghetti.” The wrathful whine of stainless steel against a dish proclaims that Amy is doing just that. Lucy waits for her blush to subside before daring to emerge from protective cover and get another glass of water. As far as parenting-while-a-sibling went, that was not her finest hour. But maybe, just maybe, she’s not making an utter mess of this.***By the time Friday comes around, Lucy is back in panic mode and wondering if she ever really left it. What is she thinking? She could perfectly well have declined his invitation. She could have made some excuse — any excuse — and gotten out of it. She has that one last seminar paper to finish up; she should get some online tutoring hours in. That not accepting the invitation had not even occurred to her in the moment… Lucy shakes herself. What is she thinking? Allowing herself to pine over her sister’s ballet teacher is definitely a bad idea and can only end poorly. Even if Amy is right — which, Lucy insists over an insidious voice in her head, she isn’t. She’s nine years old, and surrounded by heteronormative romance, and Lucy has probably allowed her to watch too many Disney movies. Or, she reflects guiltily, ‘90s rom-coms. She’ll have to ask Jiya what the cool geek girls are watching these days.She feels slightly guilty about arriving empty-handed, but a grad student budget doesn’t run to fresh flowers. She forces herself to breathe deeply as they hang up their coats, and… “You made bread!” exclaims Lucy.“I did,” says Flynn. He seems amused. “And stew. Don’t look so horrified, Amy; I’ll show you what’s in it.”“Should I be offended,” asks Lucy rhetorically, “that I’m not allowed near the stove?”Flynn smiles. “You can open the wine.”“I’m not offended.”“Now,” Flynn is saying, as she opens the fridge, “the herbs are tied together so they don’t get in our teeth, but you can fish them out with the ladle…”“The spiky one’s rosemary!”“And the small one’s thyme, and the other one’s sage…” Lucy takes a deep breath, and takes a firm grip on the corkscrew, and wonders if it is terribly wrong, that she should find herself wanting this. She tries to tell herself that it’s just the seductive prospect of having someone else cook dinner sometimes.***“We aren’t talking too much shop at you?” asks Flynn, as he gets them seconds.“Oh no,” says Lucy gamely, “Amy’s been educating me. Well,” she adds, “trying to. She’s been explaining choreography to me, but I still don’t know what half the terms are.”“Be careful,” says Flynn, his eyes twinkling, “or I’ll get you a ballet dictionary for Christmas.”“Oh! That’s a challenge,” declares Lucy, raising her wine glass to him. “You might find yourself with a weighty tome on the French Revolution.”“Sounds fascinating.” Lucy swallows.“No one,” says Amy, mock-plaintively, “has asked what I would like”; and the conversation takes a less dangerous turn.“You should teach Lucy how to cook,” declares Amy at last, letting her spoon clatter into her empty bowl.Flynn nearly chokes on his wine. “Amy,” he says, wiping his mouth, “that is very rude. And very flattering, thank you. I would be more than happy,” he tells Lucy formally, “to share the recipe.” “Well,” says Lucy, “I might need detailed directions. Stews have a way of going watery on me. And this has been lovely, but I should drive us home.”“But you can’t!” Lucy looks over at her sister, transfixed by shock. “You can’t!” Amy’s voice is rising, hard and high. “How could you — ” She pushes back her chair from the table, and Flynn rises with her. “I can’t believe you would do that,” says Amy reproachfully. “After Mom and Dad — ” She bursts into tears, casts one agonized look at Flynn, and flees the room. The bathroom door slams.For a moment, there is awful silence, broken only by Amy’s muffled sobbing. “Go,” says Flynn; “it’s fine.”Lucy forces herself to get up from the table, has to grab at the back of her chair for support. It’s finally happened. She has finally done something truly and spectacularly stupid, and Amy will never forgive her, and even if she does, Lucy will have lost her fine and splendid trust. Outside the bathroom, Lucy takes a deep breath. “Ames? Can I come in?” Silence. Lucy tries the handle, and finds it unlocked. Gently she shuts the door behind her, and sits down on the rug behind her sister. “Amy?” She puts a hand on the shaking back. “Amy, I am so sorry. We should have talked about it.” Another stifled sob. “I just… I didn’t think.” Now that she does — now that she is forced to — Lucy is vaguely surprised that it hasn’t come up before. But her social life has been virtually non-existent, and Denise doesn’t drink alcohol, and… here they are. On the floor of Amy’s dance teacher’s bathroom. Oh God.“Amy,” says Lucy, and swallows. She doesn’t want to sound defensive, or didactic, or… “Amy,” she says, “I love you so much, and I would never do anything to endanger you. Okay?” Amy sniffles, but she relaxes slightly under Lucy’s touch. “I… Amy, can I tell you why I made my choices?”“Mmhm.”“Okay,” says Lucy, and she pulls her younger sister into her arms. “I’ve had a — a lovely evening.” Amy cries a little harder. Well. “And I didn’t finish my glass of wine. Because I wanted to be absolutely sure of being safe for you. Okay?” Lucy swallows. She kisses the crown of her sister’s head, inhales the scent of her strawberry shampoo. “I’m going to love you till I’m one hundred and ten. Right? I’m going to love you till I’m one hundred and ten, and…”“And then you might forget, but I’ll remind you.”“Right,” says Lucy. She rocks her sister in her arms, and wonders if she’s made an utter mess of this.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Their absence is an emptiness, and it seems to last a long time. At first, he stands at the head of the table as if paralyzed. He does not want to think about how long it has been since he was powerless to help those he loved.So, since he cannot do anything else, Flynn does the dishes. He stacks, and soaks, and dries. The offending wine glasses he cleans with ruthless thoroughness, and wipes down with furious vigor, and returns to their cupboard. He sets aside a container of the stew for Lucy, in case she wouldn’t refuse it. He wonders if perhaps he should have made her free of the rest of the apartment. They can’t be comfortable. But there is only his bedroom, and then… He’s done nothing with Iris’s room. Perhaps he should. But as it is there are only empty walls, empty shelves, and a white carpet where he cannot help but see blood.Softly behind him the latch clicks, and he turns, and he wonders if he’s done everything wrong. Between them the table gleams curiously bare, as if he had been concerned to remove the meal’s traces, as if it had been insubstantial as a feast of fairy tale. And Lucy… She raises one shaking hand, rakes her fingers through her hair.“Lucy.” He wishes he had permission to take her in his arms. He wishes he weren’t holding a dishtowel. “I…” begins Lucy. “I should have told you earlier. It’s just, there’s never a good time, and…” Quite suddenly, and almost noiselessly, she begins to cry. “I can’t,” she says, and Flynn drops the dishtowel, and goes to her. “I can’t,” says Lucy again, and he cannot bear it: that she should be so unhappy, and so alone. For an instant his hands hover helplessly above her shoulders.“Lucy,” says Flynn, as prayer and reassurance, and he takes her right hand in his, and places his left hand at the small of her back, and manages to get her to the couch. He is more than surprised when she leans into him, curling towards him as though she cannot bear to do anything else. And perhaps that is no more than the truth. “Shh,” says Flynn. He may not be what she needs — he may not even know what she needs — but he can at least try. “Shh.” He aches for her, and he aches with her, and he has no idea what to do.“What,” says Lucy at length, “what are you humming?”“Ah.” He hadn’t realized that he had been; hadn’t allowed himself to take stock of the fact that she is quiet and spent against him and he would give anything for her to be at home here. “It’s, ah, a lullaby.” Lucy inhales unevenly. “The rain is falling,” he recites softly. “The rain falls, and the grass grows, and the forest turns green. And in the forest grows a tree, there grows a tree slim and tall. And under the tree my sister is sitting, and I am beside her.”Lucy shivers, and lets out a long breath. “I should have told you.”“I don’t…” Flynn swallows. “I don’t feel that way about it. Whatever it is.”Again Lucy shivers against him. “Our parents,” she says. “I mean, you must have known that they… that we… It was two years ago,” she says. “A little bit more than that. They were killed by a drunk driver. It was just — just one of those things. It wasn’t even a holiday, or raining, or…” She trails off. “I thought we’d dealt with it. I mean, not permanently, you know it doesn’t work like that, but I didn’t expect that Amy would… I should have realized it would upset her.”“No,” he says. “You couldn’t have been expected to know.”Lucy yawns, and his heart turns over. “’S complicated.”“Yes.”“I said I’d make the apologies for both of us, by the way. She… she thinks a lot of you, and it’s my fault, anyway.”“No one’s fault,” says Flynn. “Does she… You’re both welcome to stay over, if that…”“No. Thank you,” Lucy adds, “but I think… home. Own bed. For both of us.”“All right.” He takes a deep breath, and inhales the orange and bergamot of the scent she is wearing, the soft scent of her. He is dangerously tempted to take her fully in his arms, to lavish her with endearments until neither of them can think. Flynn clears his throat. “Coffee?”Lucy sits up abruptly. “Coffee would be great.” “Right,” says Flynn. “I’ll… see if Amy’s freshened up and, um…”“Washcloths in the cupboard,” says Flynn.“Thanks.” Flynn stands over the coffeepot, and mutters imprecations against himself. He would do anything for them — it feels like a belated discovery — and what does he have to offer? Coffee, and a simple meal; an apartment with blank walls; and old songs, learned in other times.***There is never much time for rest, in the week before a performance; mercifully, there is never much time for thought. He gets through it. He gives instructions, and he gives praise, and he tries to help his students feel that there is a kind of magic, beyond and through the discipline. Flynn tries not to treat Amy any differently.He finds his eyes seeking her out more than usual; he finds himself anxious to know that she is all right, that he hasn’t thrown her off her stride. But if she is a little more subdued than usual, she doesn’t seem too distracted. Her movements are still graceful and precise, and she still giggles with Olivia Christopher. Him she talks to less. Flynn hadn’t realized that he had come to expect their exchanges; but their absence is palpable. No eager questions beginning “Did you know…?”; no teasing inquiries about how many people he has loomed over recently; no updates on the evolution of Pasta With Things. And Lucy does not talk to him at all.“You should play Drosselmeyer,” says Amy suddenly, on Wednesday, as she is taking off her shoes. “While directing all of you?”“Well,” concedes Amy, “not now, but, like… in life.”“You haven’t seen me in greasepaint,” retorts Flynn, striving for their usual tone. “I might be too terrifying.”“You aren’t terrifying,” says Amy, and it feels like an absolution. “I don’t think Drosselmeyer is either. He’s just… not like everybody else. Besides,” she adds, “you’d be really good at using the cape: I’ve seen videos of your Onegin.”Flynn splutters, coughs, and gets water up his nose. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do you time those remarks?”“No,” says Amy guilelessly, “but I might in future! ’Night!”“Good night,” says Flynn. It seems strange, that he should feel as though a weight had lifted from his shoulders.
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Lucy is glad to simply survive the week. She makes sure that Amy gets rest, and gets vitamins, and gets as many of her favorite meals as Lucy can put on the table. She herself, in turn, is ambushed by rather more hugs than usual, and gets home from her Sunday tutoring appointments to find the vacuuming already done. So they reassure each other. Lucy just wishes that she didn’t feel as though she had created a fault line, ready to open the ground beneath them. And she is uneasily conscious of the fact that a dinner party where two-thirds of the participants ended up sobbing could hardly be reckoned a social success.At rehearsals, she avoids Flynn, insofar as she can. Often, it seems, she finds him looking at her; never does she surprise reproach in his eyes. And she supposes that’s a good thing. Something to be grateful for. Something to build on, or to rebuild from. But, having agreed to be responsible for the ticket desk and front of house, she has ample excuse to evade conversation in favor of logistical minutiae. She’s presumed on his friendship, and jeopardized his relationship with Amy, and the wisest course seems to be to retreat before she does any more damage. Amy seems to be recovering remarkably well, all things considered. So that’s all right. They’ve survived. Lucy tells herself that this is enough, and that she should be grateful for it, and that it’s no use wanting more, or wishing that it might be different.On the night of the first performance, she drops Amy off backstage and retreats so quickly she almost trips herself. And Lucy double- and triple-checks her alphabetized tickets, and tells herself that it’s fine, that he’s busy, that he won’t have noticed. She hands out change from a dented tin box, and tells herself that this is enough. She tries to tell herself that the idea of more was only a silly fantasy anyway, as childish as the belief in midnight magic, a growing tree, a Nutcracker prince. Lucy is very grateful for the apparition of a friendly face.“It’s nice of you to come,” she says.“You’ve said that a million times,” returns Jiya, “and I’ve said it’s a treat! News flash: local grad students pretend to have social life. No, scratch that; we are having a social life. And there’s even a candy table!”“Supporting the studio’s ongoing…” begins Lucy automatically.“Junior Mints!”“Those too.”“Lucy,” says Flynn’s voice in her ear, and she jumps; she feels like a cartoon character, scrabbling for purchase on thin air. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”“’S fine,” says Lucy. She is suddenly and horribly aware that she has missed him.He inclines his head as if she had granted him a pardon. “I’m sorry, but can you hold them for ten minutes?”“What?”“Ten minutes till doors,” says Flynn, and sighs. “Zipper.”“Oh!” Instinctively she puts out a hand to his sleeve — and snatches it back when she hears his intake of breath. “Sure,” says Lucy. “Sure. Toi toi toi, since I didn’t say it before.” And at that Flynn fleetingly smiles, and with a brief nod, melts rapidly away in the direction of the wings.“Lucy,” says Jiya, when they have taken their own seats at last, “please tell me you are not stoically ignoring that man.”“What?”“Well, the hot med student who’s sitting in on early modern science because he thinks cultural history is important (also hot) has been making puppy eyes at you for the last two months, and I thought you were ignoring him because you thought he was boring, or because you were into women, but — ”“Women too,” says Lucy automatically.“Women too, okay, but if ignoring hot men who gaze soulfully at you is just your normal m.o., Lucy, I’m going to have to stage an intervention.”“I…” says Lucy, feeling a bit lost in the conversation. “Noah? Never mind, he isn’t the point.”“Damn straight,” says Jiya decisively. “He can find someone else to follow him to wherever he gets his placement. What about Baryshnikov in burgundy?”“…Jiya, how do you know about Baryshnikov?”“I’m a cultured woman. No, actually, VHS of Swan Lake when I was 12, crucial to my sexual awakening. But we digress.”Lucy sighs. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”“I can be stubborn about this,” warns Jiya. "He literally trembled when you brushed his arm, Lucy."“Jiya, he… We’re friends.” Lucy turns to the program booklet and begins to page through it with desperate concentration, finding only kindergarten photos and improbable ads for hardware stores.“And he adores you.”Lucy closes the program booklet, presses it firmly between her hands. “That’s not how it is,” she says. It feels strangely like a lie.“Okay,” says Jiya, and pops three Junior Mints into her mouth. “Be that way.”Lucy holds out her palm. “Chocolate. As compensation for grilling me about my love life.”“Your non-existent love life, apparently,” grumbles Jiya. Lucy is saved from replying by the opening notes of the overture.She tries not to crush the program between her hands. She finds herself curiously nervous on Amy’s behalf. But it all goes remarkably smoothly, all the characters finding their places on stage. It is a strange feeling, to see the kinds of in-jokes and intimacies that Amy and Olivia share formalized, ritualized in the gestures of the ballet. Through mime alone the girls chat and laugh and whisper; they play games, and they marvel at Drosselmeyer’s wonders.And of course Lucy’s biased, but she really does think that Amy is particularly good, her vitality on display even in an inclination from the waist, a gesture of the arm. Lucy cries a little at the curtain call; she does wish their parents could have seen this. But Jiya hands her a tissue, and Amy is radiant, and Lucy thinks that maybe, just maybe, she isn’t making an utter mess of this.
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The air is full of the scents of powder and oil and paint, full of the sound of children’s laughter. Flynn can feel his own weariness approaching, as if the draining of adrenaline left his bones hollow. Another year, another first night, another set of notes for his charges at tomorrow’s debriefing. It’s not a bad life. But he is very tired.“The tree grew!” says Lucy’s voice behind him. And Flynn draws breath, and turns.“It did.” She is so very lovely, and he has no idea what to say to her. That he would console her for all her losses if he could? That yes, Amy did do well? That the line of her shoulders in her dress is…“It was just as magical as I remembered,” she says, and Flynn swallows.“Thanks!” Rufus Carlin emerges from the sheets of the theatre. He is, Flynn discovers, busily taking notes on a clipboard, and wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Not the droids you are looking for.’ Flynn glares at him. “It’s achieved,” continues Rufus, “through a combination of hydraulics and...”“Great,” says the woman who must be Jiya, shooting Lucy a look. “Fantastic. You can come over here and tell me all about it, Han Solo.”“Please,” Rufus is saying, as they move off. “Lando Calrissian, at least.”“If I really wanted to pay you a compliment, I’d go for Picard.”“Whoa whoa whoa, hang on there…”Lucy catches her lip briefly between her teeth. “Thank you,” says Flynn, since that seems to be called for. “I…” It is easier to breathe, when you are in the room. “I’m glad it was that, for you.”“It was. Not just — ” she waves a hand — “I don’t just mean the Christmas tree. But the real stuff, your stuff, the dancing…” She trails off, blushing. “Three weeks ago,” says Lucy, “I thought that I’d never want to hear the Waltz of the Snowflakes again, but I loved it. And the kids did such a good job and they seemed to enjoy themselves and I know that’s because you — ”“Flynn!” says Emma sharply, and he curses inwardly. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly to Lucy. He wishes he dared to take her hand. “Diplomatic duties — greeting the families.”“Like me,” says Lucy in a small voice, as he is on the point of turning away.“No,” says Flynn. He knows the fuse of Emma’s patience, and that he has only seconds. “No,” he says again, “nothing at all like you.” And then, before he can give himself a chance to explain or apologize, he goes.***Even with the rule that dancers are to be responsible for their own space, and their own things, he makes it his business to go over the space at the evening’s end, to gather detritus, to collect abandoned belongings. Best to preserve the theatre’s goodwill. En route to the greenroom, he is startled by the apparition of Lucy, ghostly in the half-light. “I — I thought you’d gone.” He swears internally; hardly a gracious overture.Lucy lifts the cashbox in her hand. “Just finishing up. You?”“Just the greenroom; it’s almost done.” He decides not to question the fact that she follows him. He tidies the books on the table, and runs his hand under the edge of it to check for traces of gum — rules are rules, and kids are kids — and straightens, finding it clean. “It’s done.” And he crosses the room to her. “Flynn,” says Lucy, “while we’re alone…”He swallows. “Yes?” The word still emerges hoarse.“I just wanted to say… how grateful I am for your friendship.” For a moment he cannot speak. “I mean,” continues Lucy, “I know you don’t have to do it, and it… it means a lot. To know someone has my back.”“I can’t imagine not wanting to.” He cannot imagine not wanting her; but that, he thinks, is not a conversation to be had here, not what she wants or needs from him, and — his train of thought halts abruptly when Lucy steps into his arms. He stands as still as a man under an enchantment, or beholding one.For a few breaths of time, that is all it is. Then Lucy’s hands begin to rove. Flynn shudders involuntarily, but allows his thumb to explore the hollow at the base of her throat, to trace along the exposed line of her collarbone, to put aside the pale green silk of her sleeve. Her fingers find the scar tissue under his sweater, and she becomes momentarily still.“Bullets,” he explains softly. “I’m sorry.” Strangely, it is that that sets her in motion again, hands exploring the length of his back, bracing themselves against his hips, pulling herself closer.“Don’t you dare,” she breathes, not quite against his mouth. “Don’t you dare apologize.”Kissing her is like a revelation, and the obliteration of all knowledge. There is, for several moments, nothing but this. And then Lucy whimpers, because it is not enough. And Flynn, not waiting to be asked twice, drops his hands to her waist, and lifts her. Lucy makes a noise in her throat, wraps her legs around him, and kisses him as one taking possession.“Hey,” says Amy’s voice, “I was just wondering if — ”Flynn does not drop Lucy. He deposits her on the floor of the greenroom as gently as ever he has set down a partner on the stage, the pas de deux of a dream world ended. Flynn runs a hand through his hair, resists the urge to straighten his clothes. For several moments there is near-absolute silence. Flynn glances over at Lucy, but she is avoiding his eyes and attempting to fix what has happened to her sleeve.“Uh,” says Amy, “sorry, I just — ”“No!” Lucy extends one arm on the instant, as if to physically hold her sister in the room if necessary. “No, I’m sorry — Ames, I am so, so sorry — I should never have — ”“Why?” asks Amy. This stops Lucy mid-sentence. “I told you he likes you.” Flynn’s mouth falls open. He shuts it again. “Why should you never have… uh, whatever.” Flynn swallows the dangerous desire to laugh. “Because we…” Lucy’s voice shakes, and still she will not meet his eyes. “Because the two of you were teacher and pupil before I, um… before any of this happened, and I would never, ever want to do anything to risk that.”“Risk it?” For the first time, Amy shows signs of distress. She comes further into the room: a good sign, Flynn dares to hope. “This doesn’t have to risk that, does it?”Lucy looks over at Flynn for the first time, and he takes this as his cue. “No,” he says promptly. “No, it doesn’t. No.” He takes a deep breath. He takes a long step forward, and gets onto his knees so that he can look Amy in the eye. “I will have to tell Ms. Whitmore,” he tells her. “And it is possible that she will fire me. But if that happens,” he continues, before the tremor in Amy’s lip can become a wobble, “I will find work somewhere else. And if you like, you could study with me there. Or I could give you private lessons. Or… or you could just stay here. It would be your choice, yours and Lucy’s. In any case,” he says, and glances up at Lucy, hoping he is not presuming too much, “in any case, I should consider it a very great honor to watch you dance the Sugar Plum Fairy someday.”Amy takes a deep breath, and gives him a slightly watery smile. “Oh,” she says. “Well. That’s all right, then.” He returns her smile. “Isn’t it?” Again Flynn looks up at Lucy.Lucy expels a shaky breath. “Yes, it — yes, that’s — as long as you two are all right with it, that’s fine.”“That’s fine, then,” says Amy decisively. Some quality in the silence seems to advertise to her that this is not, in fact, the last word on the subject. “So,” says Amy, “I came to see if you were ready to go home. Because it’s late,” she adds, as though Lucy might need reminding of this basic fact. She looks back at Flynn, and wordlessly, in a gesture he knows she will understand, he clasps his hands in front of his chest, a beggar, a supplicant. “Right,” says Amy. “I’ll just… be waiting out there.”“Ames,” says Lucy, as her sister is on the threshold. “Amy, I love you.” “I know,” says Amy. “Love you too.” And then, shutting the door rather pointedly behind her, she leaves them alone. Flynn exhales. He does not quite dare to turn around, or to get to his feet. “Lucy?”“Yes?”He closes his eyes. There does not seem to be enough air in the room. “Lucy, tell me…” He clears his throat. “Tell me what you want.” “What I want?” She sounds slightly incredulous, and he is afraid that somewhere, somehow, he has made a terrible mistake. Surely she knows, surely she knows that he desires her as he has allowed himself to desire nothing on this earth since… “Flynn,” says Lucy, and her voice is taut, “you have to know that Amy and I, that we’re together. It just is that way.” She comes around to face him, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “We’re a package deal.”“You’re far more than that.” Flynn dares to reach for her hand, to take it in his own and trace circles over her palm until he feels her begin to relax. “You’re a family. Don’t think… Never think I don’t recognize that.” Lucy takes another uneven breath. She blinks rapidly, unshed tears spilling down her face. “So,” she says, “so if you… if we do this…”Flynn gets to his feet, retaining her hand in his. “Yes.”“Flynn,” says Lucy, “I haven’t made a mess of this, have I?”For answer, he kisses her. “No,” he adds, because she deserves to hear that, too. “No, you haven’t.”“And we can… we can do this?”“Yes.” He raises his hand to her face — surely he may be permitted so much. She closes her eyes; emboldened, he wipes away her tears, moves to run his hands through her hair. With a small sigh she allows herself to collapse against him. “Lucy,” says Flynn, after a few moments, “shall I tell you how I know?”“Mm.” She is shaking a little in his arms.“In the ballet,” he says, “as in life, cruel things happen. And the cruelty is mindless, and violent, and destructive. And it — in the end, it doesn’t matter.” Lucy shifts her weight, and puts her arms around him. He can feel her heartbeat slowing. “Clara mourns her prince, and loves him broken. That’s… that’s the miracle,” says Flynn, a little unsteadily. “Not the Christmas tree — though of course that’s important. But it’s that courage, to take on the Rat King and all his armies, to throw a slipper when you have no weapons, that’s the magic of it. Love,” says Flynn simply. “I’ve often thought that, in some ways, it’s the most real of the ballets, not the least: love as the key to a magic kingdom, holding the treasures of all the world.”Lucy leans back just enough to look up at him. She is weeping — again, or still — but her eyes are shining with hope. “That’s very romantic,” she whispers, “but aren’t you too old to believe in fairy tales?”“Never.”“Oh,” says Lucy. “Well,” she says, echoing her sister, “that’s all right then.”“Yes.” As if for reply, Lucy burrows against him again, burying her face against his chest. And oh, God, if he only gets one prayer, let him live long enough and love her well enough that she comes to take his embrace for granted as refuge.“So,” says Lucy, after what seems a long time, “shall we go home?”
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That first year, he tells Emma.“So,” she says, on the Monday morning, “first weekend done and dusted.”“Yes.”Emma’s eyes narrow. “What?”Flynn sighs. In some ways, of course, it would be easier to postpone this until after the run, until after Amy has taken her last bows for this year. But there is always the chance that he and Lucy would be surprised in a look, a touch, a shared trip to the grocery store. The risks are too great.“I have a confession to make,” he says.Emma, without breaking eye contact, reaches into the top drawer of her desk, shakes two aspirin into her hand from the bottle she finds there, and downs them. “Go on.”“Ah,” says Flynn. “Lucy Preston.” Emma’s eyebrows climb. “Amy Preston’s older sister.”“Yes,” says Emma, “I know. And she’s… how much older, exactly?”“Twenty-three,” says Flynn, because he knows that’s the question that’s being asked. “She’s twenty-three.”Emma puts her elbows on the desk, begins massaging her temples. “Twenty-three. All right. Please tell me she’s not pregnant.”“What?” He is nearly out of his chair before he consciously settles back into it, pressing his feet against the floor, grounding himself there. “No,” he says. “No. We haven’t — no.” It occurs to him that this may seem like an unchivalrous degree of protestation. Emma appears to have had the same thought, as she meets his eyes again, a wry twist to her mouth.“I see,” she says dryly. “And when, precisely, did this chaste passion blossom?”“I…” Flynn swallows. “Does it matter?”Emma throws up her hands. “Possibly, if it affects how much gossip there’s been, and how much damage control we’re going to have to do.”Flynn exhales, tries not to let his relief show. “I had her to dinner six weeks ago.”Emma sighs. “You’re lucky you’re good at your job, Flynn.” He regards her silently; he does not owe her an explanation, or an apology, or thanks. “The studio can’t afford to lose you, and frankly, I’d be sorry to see you go. Best case scenario, it’s a rival focus for the mothers’ gossip.”“I will not let her — ” begins Flynn, and stops.“…Become a subject for gossip and speculation? Very nineteenth-century of you, but you may not have a choice. And I absolutely draw the line at challenging any of our parents to a duel.”“Mm.”“Fine,” says Emma, and runs a hand through her hair. “One more weekend of performances, and no PDA with the Preston woman, or so help me…”“No,” says Flynn. “No, certainly not.” He recognizes in himself the lover’s desire to defend, to explain: it is not as you imagine; it is a unique, it is a holy thing. He remains silent.“Ah well,” says Emma philosophically. “Still waters, dark horses, something along those lines. Get out of my office, Flynn.” And he does.***The second year, Lucy is studying for her comprehensive exams, and convinced she’s going to fail. Both Flynn and Amy tell her, with touching loyalty, that she is not. She is also worried about the inevitable day when Amy comes home in tears, or in rage, or both, about some piece of prepubescent bullying, or stupidity, or meanness. But so far, among the ups and downs of Amy’s social life, there appears to be nothing too catastrophic. Lucy holds her breath, and pays attention to the names in Amy’s stories of classroom drama, and hopes for the best. Amy, she reminds herself, has more charm and more self-assurance than her older sister… and fewer nerdy tendencies. She has, too, in Flynn, a remarkably level-headed confidant, as Lucy discovers. The first time he offhandedly makes clear that he is at least as well informed about Amy’s social life as she, Lucy is so shocked that she drops the paring knife with which she had been entrusted. By the time Flynn has retrieved it, she’s recovered enough to debate whether she’ll burst into tears with gratitude, or make love to him on the kitchen counter. She settles for kissing him until the pasta water boils over.As a break from reading for her comps exams, she is packing boxes. It seems, in some ways, a reckless thing to be doing, combining their households. But they have been at home with each other almost since the beginning. Surely it’s better to have that reflected in their rent payments. This sensible plan had, of course, been Amy’s idea. She had asked one evening, without looking up from her French homework, why Flynn didn’t just move in with them. Flynn, in the midst of julienning a carrot, scored the cutting board, and blushed to the roots of his hair. And Lucy had stammered out that, of course, he’d be welcome; and only then had remembered to point out to Amy that she shouldn’t just ask things like that. Amy gave her a butter-wouldn’t-melt look and asked Flynn about verbs ending in -ir. So Lucy packs boxes. Jiya comes over to help, and drink coffee, and complain about comps exams. When she asks about Nutcracker tickets, Lucy extracts the information that her friend has, in fact, been texting Rufus Carlin.“But I don’t think he knows I’ve been flirting with him.”“How can he not know…?”“You’re one to talk.”“I retract the question.”“You’d better. Just… wing-woman for me, if you can. You owe me one.”“Oh, I do,” agrees Lucy. “I absolutely do.”***The third year, Amy is dancing Clara, and Lucy is worrying about fellowships. “She’s doing so well,” she whispers to Flynn one night, as though it is a secret. “I don’t want to damage that.”“You won’t.” Almost idly he is massaging her thigh, his other arm propped beneath him on the pillow. “You won’t. Lucy. Are you trying to talk yourself out of accepting a fellowship?”“No.” Her voice is uncertain in the dark. “No. But even if I do get the Chateaubriand, there are no great options. Take Amy to France? I know there are dance schools there, but a year away from her friends, her school, this? Leave her here?”“With me,” Flynn points out.“Yes, but…” He waits for her to resume for what seems like a long time. “I don’t think she’d feel abandoned,” says Lucy at last, softly. “But I would hate to leave her. And it doesn’t seem fair to you.”Flynn hums reflectively. “We could get married.”“What?” She sits bolt upright in bed.“We could get married.”Lucy lies back down. “We could get married,” she repeats numbly.“Spousal visa,” he explains, resuming his tracing of patterns on her skin, “for visits. And it would, I think, make me Amy’s legal guardian.” He turns his head on the pillow to look at her. “It would simplify matters.”“Garcia Flynn,” says Lucy, still staring at the ceiling, “I cannot believe that you have proposed marriage to me as a… as a logistical solution!”“Ah,” he says, and swallows. “Well. If you would like me to propose marriage as a sign and seal of my absolute devotion to you, that can of course be arranged.”“Garcia Flynn.” It is no more than a choked whisper.He rolls over so that he can see her properly, so that he can cover her, so that he can warm her. This, despite her claustrophobia, she likes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, Lucy.” He tells himself it is foolish to feel lost, adrift. “I didn’t mean to…” To take her for granted, to take their permanence for granted? And yet he has come to rely on the idea of that permanence, one constant promise in his world. “If that’s not what you want… We don’t have to… I just thought…”She reaches up, and gets her hand behind his nape, and draws him down to her. “Kiss me,” breathes Lucy. “And then make love to me, you ridiculous man.”He is, of course, more than happy to oblige, but he cannot help but hesitate, his hand skimming her side, tracing the familiar lines of her. “Lucy? Have I… are you…?”She kisses him again, catching his lip between her teeth. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, yes, yes.”***The fourth year, then, is a Christmas between springs. They are married in May, before it becomes too hot, when the whole world is lush and green with hope. Lucy wears hawthorn blossom in her hair. They are married in the university chapel, and Amy, of course, is maid of honor. There are not many guests, but Rufus and Jiya are among them, holding hands, transparently delighted with each other. So too are Denise and Michelle, whose gift is the cake. Aurélie surprises Flynn by responding to the invitation (and his scrawled note: with thanks for everything — I thought you’d like to know) with an enthusiastic acceptance. She whispers good wishes that make him blush, kisses Lucy warmly on both cheeks, and sheds tears into her champagne. Amy gives her speech, and Lucy cries her way through her handkerchief and starts on the tablecloth. Flynn himself is beyond words by the time she finishes, but he beckons her over and gathers her into an embrace that includes all three of them.At Christmas, Lucy hears about the ballet (and everything else) via video chat. She misses them horribly, but she still feels a thrill at seeing them together and delighted with each other. The nine-hour time difference is challenging. But they come to see her over Amy’s spring break. Amy does pirouettes in the Palais Garnier. They walk through Paris in the rain, and Lucy refuses to detach herself from Flynn’s side. They drive to Strasbourg and Nancy, and take separate rooms in small hotels. Afterwards, Lucy retains strangely clear memories of the things she stared at, trying not to cry out as they made love: the molding on a seventeenth-century ceiling, the glow of a streetlamp on the canal underneath their window. Some six weeks later, she resorts to the bilingual Larousse to find out that the term she needs for the French pharmacist is the decidedly prosaic test de grossesse. She cries a little before placing that week’s video call. But afterwards, she thinks that telling him this way at least has one advantage: that she will always have an image of his face.***The fifth year, Amy dances Clara to Flynn’s Drosselmeyer. When Lucy returns from her fellowship, she finds Amy several inches taller and talking about auditions for ballet school. Lucy isn’t sure whether this is the best or worst possible timing, or whether she’d ever be ready for her little sister to launch herself with such passion and such hope on such an uncertain path. But every day, she tells Amy that she loves her and she is proud of her. And at night, Flynn tells her that Amy will be fine — that she’ll be more than fine — and that of course, they can find a way to navigate this.So Amy goes to ballet school… but she still dances Clara to Flynn’s Drosselmeyer, having negotiated for the privilege of doing so. She tells them over dinner, with no small amount of satisfaction, that her teachers were surprised and gratified to learn that he was in the area.“I have, like, five business cards for you. They want you to do guest classes.”“Traitor,” replies Flynn affectionately.“Well,” says Amy, nothing discomfited, “I had to get their permission. Since it’s thanks to me that you’re dancing Drosselmeyer in the first place.”“Perfectly true.”Lucy still feels, some days — despite the dissertation chapters, despite every uncertainty — that she’s stumbled into a kind of fairy tale. Here they are, at the dinner table, with her lover and husband teasing her little sister. Here they are, making a life together. She promises Amy solemnly that she’ll be at the Nutcracker even if she doesn’t fit into the auditorium seats. Flynn promises Amy that she can name her nibling. They both keep their promises; the baby’s name is Clara.