The Beau & the Belle
Page 9

I tip down so I’m almost level with her eyes. She looks up at me and the evening light filtering in from the garden catches on her hazel eyes. She’s wearing an expression of gratitude so genuine, I’m caught off guard.
“I know the steps already,” she says. “So you don’t have to start from the beginning. I guess I just get tripped up when it’s sped up.”
“Okay, then we’ll start slow.”
She swallows, lets her gaze drop to my hand, and then she stands, accepting my invitation. Her right hand falls into my left, and I’m surprised to find it shaking. I squeeze it lightly as my right hand wraps around to rest on her shoulder blade. She’s trembling as she places her fingertips lightly on my arm, as if she’s scared to touch me. If we were out on the dance floor at a formal event, I would step closer, but I don’t close the gap between us. Arm’s length is better. I barely touch her.
“There’s no music,” she points out with a laugh.
I shake my head. “We don’t need it. Just follow my lead and listen to the count. The waltz uses a three-count measure: 1-2-3, 1-2-3.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Good. Are you ready?”
She nods so I start with my left foot and step forward, then to the side with my right foot, and then together. Right foot forward, left foot to the side, together. It’s been a while since I last waltzed, but it’s second nature to me, like riding a bike. I keep counting until we’ve found the rhythm.
Lauren’s brows rise with shock as we wrap around the kitchen island. “You’re really good, way better than the boys I dance with. Did you do cotillion when you were my age?”
I smile. “No. My mom taught me how to dance.”
“Huh.”
We keep moving slowly. Lauren’s movements are robotic and tense, like she doesn’t quite trust me to lead her.
“She thought it was important for me to know, even if I wasn’t able to do the cotillion thing. Relax your shoulders and let me lead. You’re fighting me for it.”
She laughs and looks down at her feet like they’re the offending body part. “I am?”
I tighten my hold on her right hand. “Yes. Relax.”
No doubt half her problem is the fact that the boys she’s dancing with are terrible dancers themselves. She’s been forced to learn how to lead because they’ve failed so miserably at it.
She heaves in a deep breath and the tension in her shoulders releases by degrees.
We continue moving for a few three-counts and then she smiles tentatively. “Better?”
“Marginally. You know, I’m half-tempted to teach you how to lead and let you take control during cotillion practice.”
She laughs, and the sound is pure innocence. “I don’t think Preston would like that.”
Who cares what Preston thinks? I’d forgotten how much stock teenagers put in perceived judgment.
“Would you have liked that when you were 17?” she continues. “If a girl knew how to lead?”
I want to laugh at her question. When I was 17, my public school dances featured styles less like waltzing and more like having sex with clothes on. The girls I dated weren’t wearing poofy dresses and kitten heels.
The life I’ve lived taught me to be a leader. Sooner or later, she needs to learn to be one too. She needs to toughen up. The hardest lesson for most kids her age is that you can’t let shitheads from St. Thomas (or anywhere) dictate your happiness. I tell her I’d have been impressed back then if a girl knew how to dance, if she was confident and bold.
She lights up at my encouragement and soon, she loosens up her footwork and moves with a newfound freedom. We glide around her parents’ kitchen until she’s smiling and laughing, all traces of her bad day left behind.
It’s hard for me to pull away once I see that she’s got the hang of it. My original intention was to help make her feel better, but the dancing has been good for me too. It’s been a while since I’ve let loose.
Her cheeks are flushed when we finish dancing and I drop her hand. She bows in an exaggerated curtsy. I offer a little bow.
“Feel better?” I ask with a gentle smile.
She nods enthusiastically. “Loads. Thank you.” Then her eyes catch mine. “Seriously.”
I shrug it off like it’s nothing, but really, it wasn’t.
She pours some water and hands it to me. I finish in a few short swallows and am about to leave when she speaks up.
“I was wondering…if you didn’t do cotillion and you didn’t have to go to dances like this, why did your mom think it was important for you to know how to waltz?”
“She just did. Manners, etiquette, dance—all that meant something to her, so she insisted on teaching me.”
I set my cup down in the sink and turn around to see her worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “My dad mentioned the other day that you—well, the Fortiers used to own the house across the street.”
I know what she’s hinting at.
“My family did, yes.”
“But not anymore?”
“No. My grandfather sold the house.”
She frowns. “That was silly of him. My parents say it’s really hard to buy property in this area. If he’d held on to it—”
“It wasn’t really by choice,” I say, my tone biting.
“Oh.”
I glance away, annoyed that I’m having to explain this to her, a girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth, all because her grandpa was better with money.
“Well it’s a good thing your mom taught you that stuff anyway. Even if you didn’t grow up in New Orleans society, my dad says the Fortier name still carries weight, and…well, he thinks you can build it back up again if you work hard enough.”
I’m having déjà vu, except not really, because even though I’ve heard those words before, they’ve never come from Lauren. That sentiment was hammered home throughout my childhood. My mother set the table in our double-wide trailer with cloth napkins and three types of forks. She taught me table manners, drilled them into me so much so that I could sit down to eat at Buckingham fucking Palace without breaking a sweat. I was enrolled in every honors class my high school offered, taught that education came before all else, but not education for the joy of learning. No, it was education for the sake of equipping myself with the tools needed for climbing social ladders.
It was the very definition of faking it until I made it, because even though she couldn’t keep up with the Joneses, she had dreams of raising me to be one. It probably sounds a bit brainwashy, but the fact is that I want that now too. Sometime between my childhood and now, her dreams became my dreams, except my plans are a little bigger.
IT’S NOT FAIR. Rose and I are the same age, so our bodies should look more or less similar, right? In reality, let’s just say that Rose could walk into a Victoria’s Secret and the sales girls would guide her to the lacey bras that lift and separate like magic. Me? They’d ask a security guard to guide the unaccompanied minor to the Disney store across the mall.
It’s ridiculous.
I might as well be a preteen boy with my flat chest and knobby knees. Just the other day, Julie Robichaux tried to compliment me for having long legs, “…like a model, or like a chicken.” Add that to the list of my insecurities.
Maybe it’d be better if I wasn’t friends with Rose anymore. At the moment, she’s standing in front of my full-length mirror, repositioning her bikini so it covers all the unmentionables while revealing just a hint of the very mentionables. Her dark hair is silky and smooth, pulled up in a sporty ponytail. I finger one of my curls and puff out a self-indulgent sigh.
“Stop,” she insists.
“What?”
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself, which is making me want to feel sorry for you—and frankly, that’s becoming a full-time job.”
“I’m not feeling sorry for myself! I’m just hosting a tasteful pity party in my head. All my neurons are invited.”
Her gaze finds mine in the mirror’s reflection. “You’re the one who wanted to throw this pool party.”