Lead and Follow(62)
Dima shoved empty hands in his pockets. He wasn’t needed at Club Devant until late in the afternoon. Loose ends was even an understatement. So he wandered. Against the swells of people, he headed downtown. He watched his sneakers track over the dirty, gum-spattered concrete.
He came to a stop, seemingly out of nowhere. He looked up and found the diner off the park. The place where it had all started to go wrong.
There was no halfway point on which to balance a life. Paul, for all his fun, had been a bridge—from the locked stasis of their old life, across to something new.
No one ever lived on a bridge.
And for Dima, there’d be no going back.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lizzie awoke alone in a bright triangle of sunlight. She blinked a few times, swallowed and groaned against the familiar dizzy hangover feeling of being dehydrated. Her mouth tasted like rotting mushrooms, and she really needed to pee. Too many petty demands on her attention, when all she wanted was to smile up at the ceiling and stretch her deliciously aching inner thighs.
Dima.
God, they’d been like comets. She wanted another ride. That meant getting up and doing the right thing. No more pretending that they were something they used to be. No more hiding from how much she wanted a future with him—more of a future than just dance partners.
She grabbed his bathrobe from the back of the door. Wrapped in his scent, she hurried to the bathroom to take care of those truly not-so-petty necessities. Brushing her hair before seeing him first thing in the morning had never been a priority. They’d been roommates too long for that sort of silly posturing, but she did the best she could with curls that had been mushed to hell and back. Her roots were showing. She smiled at herself, knowing how much Dima appreciated her new color. Time to make an appointment.
Make all these little changes. With and for him.
A shower would have to wait. She wanted to plaster her body along his back, snuggle up on that hard-earned frame, and kiss him on the nape until he needed to fuck her against the kitchen counter.
No thank you, sun salutation. Got an alternate workout planned this morning.
She found the living room empty. Standing there, feet bare on the hardwood floor, she stared uncomprehendingly at the pair of rolled yoga mats in the corner. The kitchen was empty too. Hell, it wasn’t that big of a place.
“Dima?”
She hustled to her bedroom. Maybe he needed somewhere to stretch out that wasn’t all over her. Maybe…
She already knew what she’d find. Her bed. Still neatly made—such a powerful contrast to his bed, which looked like it had been worked over by a tornado.
Cellphone next. No calls missed. No voicemails. No texts.
She laid her RAZR back on her nightstand and simply…sank. Down along the door of her closet, the terrycloth of his robe smoothed the way. Her knees collapsed in a slide that had no choreographed grace. Ice coated her heart. A fine tremble shook to the ends of her fingers and toes.
He was gone. He obviously didn’t want to be found.
A powerful burn started in her belly and thrust into her throat. Sometimes she’d suffered the same roiling nausea before a competition, but Dima was always there to rub her lower back. He’d never touched anything else, heeding the hours she needed to prepare hair, makeup and fake tan to the outrageous extremes required of pro dance. The reminder—that Dima should be there, helping her through a crisis—only made her stomach pinch harder. The burn intensified until she staggered to her feet, barely making it to the toilet.
Kneeling there, her hair once again in sweaty disarray, she let go of weeks of bottled-up emotion. Maybe longer. Maybe she’d been holding in those sobs since her torn ACL slaughtered the healthy, vibrant animal that had been her old life. Hot tears coated her cheeks. She wrapped his robe closer around her shoulders and let every ounce of remorse and confusion find an escape.
But most of the time, close isn’t good enough.
His whispered words from the night before came hurtling back into her mind.
That’s what you don’t get. I did think. Over and over.
She lifted her heavy head and scraped damp hair back from her temples. Her eyes hurt. Her chest ached. Shivering despite the heavy white terrycloth, she sank her nose into the soft folds. A deep inhale threatened a new round of tears.
I will never go anywhere you aren’t eventually willing to follow.
God, how long had he been pulling them this way? Little choices. Small moves. And choices so goddamn huge that he should’ve made them with her.
How long had she been dancing her way to him in return? Flirting with other guys, telling him the details of every encounter, dragging Paul into the mix… She’d been replying to his every unconscious signal, when he’d asked for more.