The Ballerina's Secret

Still.

He prickled at being slighted by Tessa. Again. Granted, this was her world, not his. He was in a dance studio, not some smoky blues club in the West Village, where, even now, he could have his pick of women.

Maybe.

Probably.

He had no interest in actually putting that theory to the test. Why he cared at all what the willowy creature who’d practically mowed him down thought of him was a mystery.

Except they’d had something of a moment, hadn’t they? A moment when she’d held on to him a little too long, when his heart had beaten a little too hard. It had happened so fast, he would have thought he’d imagined it, if not for the memory of his shirt gathered in her clenched fists. For a second, he’d nearly remembered what it had felt like to belong to someone.

Then he’d come to his senses. He knew nothing about this girl, other than that she was a beautiful dancer. More important, she didn’t know the first thing about him.

Now her head was bowed, and Julian couldn’t help noticing the lovely curve of her shoulders, the grace of her willowy neck and how very pale and delicate her complexion looked set off by her jet-black leotard.

God, she was gorgeous. Too gorgeous to waste away in the corner of the room, with a number pinned to her back, while Chance preened like a peacock less than three feet away from the mirrored walls. Not that Julian harbored any ill will toward his friend. Chance had gotten him this gig after all. Of course, it wasn’t exactly the best gig in the world. Far from it.

But coming here had gotten him off the sofa and out of the house. As pathetic as that sounded, it was progress.

Somewhere in the very near vicinity, a throat cleared. Julian glanced over his shoulder to find Madame Daria looming over him. Honestly, lady. Give it a rest.

He rose to his feet as slowly as humanly possible and shot her a lazy grin. “Daria.”

Her face grew red. Julian had anticipated an angry reaction, and Madame didn’t disappoint. “Mr. Shine, our rehearsal time started three minutes ago. You’re holding up the entire audition.”

Julian clutched his heart in mock regret. “My sincerest apologies.”

She rolled her eyes and waved toward the grand piano with a flourish. “Shall we begin?”

“Absolutely.”

She turned on her pink-slippered heel and joined the Russian at the front of the room. Julian’s gaze snagged briefly on Chance, who just shook his head in obvious disgust. Julian’s only response was a slight shrug of his shoulders before Chance turned away and launched into a grand tour en l’air.

Message received. Madame wasn’t the object of Chance’s derision. Julian himself was.

Don’t ogle the dancers.

Right.

He looked down at Tessa, still sitting at his feet, tying satin ribbons around her ankles with trembling fingers.

“Allow me,” he murmured and reached for Tessa’s elbow to help her up.

She promptly ignored him. Yet again.

He stood there, feeling like an idiot, while she rose gracefully to her feet—unassisted—and walked away from him without so much as a backward glance. He’d been agitated at being ignored the first time but was willing to overlook it. The second time, not so much. He’d basically put his job on the line to buy her a little time. Granted, it was a job he didn’t particularly care for. A crap job, really. But Tessa didn’t know that, did she?

He stalked toward the piano, all the while reminding himself he had no interest in romantic liaisons. He was a mess. Messed up enough to know better than to become involved with someone. Anyone, much less a woman who looked right through him.

He’d forgotten himself for a moment—that was all. He wasn’t the man he’d been two years ago. Inside or out. A glance in any direction in this mirrored room was all the reminder he needed.

Madame Daria clapped her hands, and Julian dutifully pounded out some Debussy. Row by row, the dancers spun around him until the studio was little more than a dizzying blur of lithe, lean bodies and spinning pink satin. Despite every effort to the contrary, Julian’s gaze found Tessa. Time and again. He told himself it was only because Madame kept screaming corrections at her, sometimes quite literally in her face.

He almost believed it.

He wasn’t coming back. This time, he meant it. At the end of rehearsal, he took painstaking care to make sure he left the sheet music in the exact right order. Anyone should be able to pick up right where he’d left off. He thought idly for a moment about who that person might be, and then decided he didn’t care. What difference did it make?

We don’t need Mozart. We need a body.

Right. Well, that body would no longer be his.

“What are you doing?” Chance leaned against the piano and crossed his arms. If Julian had any sentimental attachment to the baby grand, he would have chastised Chance for getting his sweat all over it. Maybe wiped the Steinway down with a towel.

But he didn’t. “Packing up. What does it look like I’m doing?”

If Chance realized he’d meant permanently, he didn’t bring it up. He grabbed a T-shirt out of the dance bag at his feet and pulled it on, as the last remaining dancers slipped out of the room. “I saw you looking at her, you know. We all did.”

A pain shot through Julian’s temple. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. The girl. Number twenty-eight.” Chance’s tone was altogether too dismissive for Julian’s taste. She had a name after all.

“Am I to assume you’re talking about Tessa?”

Chance raised a brow. “Ah, so you admit it.”

“I admit nothing. Can we not do this?” It was a moot point, anyway. This time tomorrow, he wouldn’t be here to stare at Tessa. Or anyone.

“Listen, I know I said not to ogle the dancers. It grates on Madame’s nerves. Just try and be a tad more subtle next time, would you?” He shook his head. “Besides, you can do better than a dancer who isn’t even part of the company. Two of the soloists asked about you yesterday. I think they know who you are.”

Who I am.

Who am I?

It was a question he’d been asking himself on a daily basis since he’d put down his trumpet for the final time. “What have you got against auditioning dancers? You were one yourself a while back.”

“Nothing.” Chance shrugged. “But if you’re going to pick one, at least pick a good one.”

Julian tossed the sheet music in a pile on top of the Steinway. “What are you talking about? Are you blind? She’s nothing like the other ballerinas.”

“Exactly. That’s the problem. She’s not supposed to stand out. You’re not supposed to notice her at all. She’s auditioning for the corps. The corps dancers all have one job. The same job. They move in perfect unison. They’re background.”

“That’s a rather harsh description, don’t you think?” Julian slung his messenger bag over his shoulder and headed toward the door. He’d spent long enough on this conversation. Too long, actually.

Chance fell in step beside him. “Not harsh. Accurate. She’s going to get cut. Mark my words. When your little Tessa stands out, it’s because she’s screwing up.”

His little Tessa. Hardly. He didn’t even know why he was having this conversation.

He stalked wordlessly down the hall, hoping against hope Chance would just drop it.

“There she is now,” Chance said and pointed at a slender window in one of the smaller studio’s doors.

Don’t do it. Don’t look.

He looked. Because apparently there was some truth to Chance’s accusations. Maybe he’d stared. Maybe there’d even been some ogling.

He found her attractive. So what? He was only human. It didn’t mean he wanted to pursue anything. It simply meant he was a normal, red-blooded male.

Of course he hadn’t felt much like a normal, red-blooded male in a while. A long while. But what he saw when he looked through that window stirred an undeniably primal reaction in him. He had to suppress a groan.

Eyes closed, arms fluttering like a butterfly, Tessa moved across the floor on tiptoe. Like those times she’d been chastised in rehearsal, she moved with complete and utter abandon. Only now, alone in the semidarkened studio, there was no one there to rein her back in. No Russian. No Madame. Just Tessa, dancing for no one but herself. It was one of the most beautiful sights Julian had ever set eyes on.

A strange, dull ache formed in the center of his chest. He felt as though he were witnessing something he shouldn’t, some inherently private moment. Maybe it was the way she danced with her eyes closed. Or maybe it was the stillness of the lonely studio. Maybe both. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that every stretch of her arm, every lithe arabesque, seemed to impart a secret. A secret born in pain and longing. She moved with such melancholy grace that it almost hurt to watch.

“Why is she still here?” he asked and wondered if Chance noticed the sudden edge to his voice. God, he hoped not.

“It’s something she does.” Chance shrugged, seemingly oblivious. “She practices. Pretty much every chance she gets, not that it’s doing much good. This is the fourth time she’s auditioned.”

She practices every chance she gets? After a full day in the studio?

“That doesn’t sound like your typical dancer to me.” As if Julian actually knew the first thing about ballet.

Chance shook his head. “She’d never work out.”

“People improve. New dancers get chosen all the time.” Julian lifted a brow. “You did.”

“Now you’re comparing her to me? I thought you’d barely noticed her.” Chance let out a laugh. “She’ll never get chosen. She can’t handle it. It would be too much work.”

Julian watched as she traveled the entire length of the room on her toes, with the tiniest steps imaginable. She looked like she was floating on a cloud. Or through a dream. He swallowed. Hard. “She doesn’t strike me as someone who’s afraid of hard work.”

Chance’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know, do you?”

Julian tore his gaze from the window. Finally. “Don’t know what?”

“Tessa can’t hear. She’s deaf.”

It took Julian a minute to process what Chance was saying. Even then, it didn’t make any sense. “What do you mean she can’t hear?”

“She had an accident a year or so ago.” An accident. Chance dropped his gaze. He knew full well that Julian was no stranger to accidents.

“What kind of accident?”

Chance cleared his throat. “A ballet accident. Her partner dropped her during a lift, and she hit her head. He wasn’t just her dance partner either. He was also her fiancé.”

Julian thought back to the moment she’d crashed into him before rehearsal, the utterly blank look on her downturned face when he’d told her not to worry and the brush-off she’d given him when he’d tried to help her up. He remembered the way her head hadn’t moved at all when he’d spoken to her on the train. She hadn’t been slighting him. She’d never heard a word he’d said.

He shook his head. No. It just wasn’t possible. “How does she even do it? How does she know what’s being said in class? How does she dance?”

“She reads lips, and she counts the beats.”

She reads lips.

Without realizing what he was doing, Julian ran his fingertips across his own lower lip. Then he made contact with the scar tissue near the corner of his mouth, and his hand fell away.

He glanced at the window again, even though everything within him told him to turn around. Turn around and walk away. While he still could. None of this was his concern. In the silvery light of the mirrored room, Tessa’s eyes fluttered open. Her gaze fixed with his, and Julian knew it was already too late.

Chapter Four

Conductive hearing loss as a result of ossicular chain discontinuity due to head trauma.

Tessa glanced at the words printed on the bright orange sticker on the tab of the file folder in the nurse’s hands.

Her diagnosis.

It had taken her doctors—four of them in all, led by Dr. Meryl Spencer, an auditory specialist at Mount Sinai—ten days and a total of three different hearing tests to settle on one. It was really just a fancy way of saying what everyone suspected. When she’d fallen and hit her head, she’d sustained damage to the delicate bones in her middle ear. They were no longer connected properly, which prevented sound from being conducted to her brain. It was impossible to tell the extent of the damage, or whether or not her hearing loss was permanent, until her body healed.

In the words of Dr. Spencer, it was “a waiting game.”

So Tessa waited.

And waited.

All in all, she’d been waiting for thirteen months. Thirteen months of adjusting to a life of silence—a life without the sound of laughter or the voices of the people she loved or the Manhattan street noises that Tessa hadn’t realized were so ingrained in her consciousness until she no longer heard them. A life without music.

But she’d adjusted. She’d done it. Through it all, she’d never lost the one thing she loved most of all. She’d never lost dance.

Tessa wasn’t waiting anymore. She hadn’t been waiting for a while now. She was getting on with things. So thirteen months was probably an exaggeration. She wasn’t sure when she’d given up the notion that she’d ever hear again, but she most definitely had. What kind of person would hold out hope after all this time?

“The doctor will be with you in just a moment.” The nurse offered Tessa a soothing smile and slid the file folder into a plastic chart holder on the door to the exam room.

“Thank you.” Tessa nodded.

Once the nurse was gone, Mr. B, who’d accompanied Tessa to the after-hours appointment, relaxed and settled into a comfortable ball. Seconds later, when Dr. Spencer opened the door, the little dog popped back up.

“Hello, Tessa. And hello to you, too, Mr. B. It’s good to see you both,” the doctor said.

“You, too.” Tessa exhaled a calming breath. Everything’s going to be fine. There’s a simple explanation for all of this.

Right. Because traumatic head injuries were so often classified as simple.

That was never the case. Literally never. Not even a year after the fact.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” Tessa shifted, and the paper on the exam table made a terrible, crunching sound. She winced.

Dr. Spencer’s brow furrowed, and she pulled an otoscope from the pocket of her white coat. “Your email said you’d been experiencing some auditory symptoms. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, and I’ll take a look inside your ears?”

Auditory symptoms. What an innocuous way to describe the chaos in her head. “I can hear all of a sudden, but it’s not right. The noises are distorted. Too loud. Too...” Too much. Much too much.

The doctor asked her more questions and examined her ears using the otoscope. When she was finished, she slipped the instrument back inside her pocket and smiled. Tessa hadn’t seen Dr. Spencer smile much before, if ever. Her bedside manner was usually polite, efficient and a little on the brusque side. Then again, maybe there’d just never been anything about Tessa’s case to smile about. Until now.

“It seems as though there’s been a change in the connectivity between the bones of your right middle ear. That’s the most likely possibility. It’s good news, Tessa. Potentially very good news.”

Tessa swallowed and glanced down at Mr. B, who was wagging his tail. Good news. It didn’t feel so good. “But what does it mean, exactly?”

Dr. Spencer nodded, and her smile grew even wider. “It means that the hearing in your right ear is potentially on the road to being restored.”

Her right ear only. That explained why she’d felt so lopsided and out of balance. And why she’d fallen out of a piqué turn during her audition.

“You don’t seem nearly as happy about this development as I’d expected. This is what we’ve been waiting for, Tessa. To be honest with you, I’d nearly given up on any kind of natural healing of the connectivity in your middle ear. It’s been a year.”

As if Tessa didn’t know the exact date she’d fallen. September 14. She’d never forget.

“It’s just nothing like I expected.” A siren wailed somewhere outside the building—an ambulance most likely. A migraine began to blossom behind Tessa’s right eye. “Everything is so loud. Distorted. Something must be wrong.”

She blinked back tears. Mr. B pawed at her foot and gazed up at her, his soft brown eyes wide with worry.

Dr. Spencer scooped the dog into her arms and placed her in Tessa’s lap. “I understand your concern, and I promise what you’re experiencing is completely normal. Remember how difficult it was to adjust to your hearing loss? It took time and patience. You need to be gentle with yourself now, just as you were before. Hearing has a profound effect on a person’s perspective on life. It’s time to alter your perspective again.”

Alter her perspective. She could do that. She’d done it before, hadn’t she? “How so, exactly?”

“The only surefire answer is time. I’m going to give you the same advice I give patients right after they receive cochlear implants. Reduce your amount of external stimuli as much as possible. Take things slow. Stay home so you can get used to the common sounds of everyday life. Eventually, the sound won’t be so disorienting for you.”

“Stay home,” Tessa echoed.

At least she’d already told her mother she couldn’t teach tap tonight. If she went straight home after this appointment, she’d have a solid eleven or twelve hours before she had to leave for the final day of auditions in the morning.

She nodded. “Fine. How long are we talking about, exactly?”

Dr. Spencer shrugged. “It varies. It’s different for everyone. Once you’ve gotten reacquainted with the surroundings in your own little world, you can start to venture out of your house. Sometimes it takes months. Most of the time, only a matter of weeks. You used to hear, so the process should go more smoothly for you. I’d say take two to three weeks to yourself before you venture out again.”

Two to three weeks? Impossible. “But I can’t do that. I’m auditioning for the Manhattan Ballet. I have to be in the studio tomorrow.”

Dr. Spencer’s smile vanished altogether. “Now probably isn’t the best time to tackle something new, Tessa.”

“I can’t drop out midaudition. I might never get this chance again.” She shook her head. No. Just no. She couldn’t lose another year of her life. She wouldn’t. “Maybe it’s not as serious as you think it is. Could this be temporary? Remember the tinnitus I had just a few weeks after the accident? It went away. This could, too, right?”

She was grasping at straws. What’s more, she wasn’t making sense. What head injury patient with conductive hearing loss complained about her hearing potentially coming back?

Judging from the bewildered look on Dr. Spencer’s face, none of them did. Only Tessa. “The tinnitus was indeed temporary, thank goodness. Some patients go their entire lives with ringing in their ears. I was relieved beyond measure when it became clear you wouldn’t be one of them.”

Tessa swallowed around the lump in her throat. She should be grateful.

And she was. Truly.

She just wished her right ear had waited a day or two before deciding to heal itself, or whatever was going on in there.

Of course, what difference would a day or two have made if she got cast in the new ballet and earned a part in the company? None. Although that possibility was looking less likely by the minute.

“To answer your question, yes. This could only be temporary, too. Head trauma is unpredictable.” The doctor reached around Mr. B to give Tessa’s hand a squeeze. “I hope it’s not. Deep down, I think you hope the same thing.”

The doctor was right.

Tessa nodded.

But since the day thirteen months ago, when her partner dropped her at ballet rehearsal, Tessa’s hope had taken a serious hit. She wasn’t sure how much she had left anymore.

* * *

The solution seemed obvious—Tessa was going to have to withdraw from the auditions.

She waited until the next morning to decide, on the off chance that she’d wake up and find that everything had gone back to normal. Normal, meaning silent. She didn’t breathe a word about what happened at her doctor’s appointment to her mother, or anyone else, for that matter. How silly would it have been to have to go back and explain that she hadn’t gotten her hearing back after all?

She was in denial. Clearly. Because when she woke up and turned on the bathroom faucet to brush her teeth, it sounded as though she were standing on the edge of Niagara Falls.

I can’t keep going like this and pretending nothing is happening.

She was quitting.

Maybe someday she’d get to audition again, if they agreed to give her another chance. Tessa wasn’t holding her breath.

She was going to explain to Madame Daria in person, though, just in case it might make a difference next year. Or the year after that. It would be her last trip outside for the next few weeks. Her swan song. Then she’d follow Dr. Spencer’s advice and hole herself up until the world made sense again.

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