Chapter Text
Tristan had been hurtling Melanie into the air in two-and-a-half full-extension revolutions on a ten-minute loop before Tobias cut the music and walked into the middle of the studio floor yelling stop oh my GOD STOP you look like seagulls dive-bombing the pier!
“Sorry, Tobias,” Melanie recited, panting as Tristan—panting—wilted her back to the ground. Tobias crossed his arms in front of his surprisingly well-developed chest and did one of his brusque pre-critique exhales.
“You have to get your hands on her before the downbeat. You’re missing it, then you’re trying to make up the time on the catch and scoop. You look like you’re trying to clear a Frisbee over a hedge. Look at her, Tristan. See her next to you? Look at her spine.”
The six other dancers of Tobias Bell’s germinating Piece 4, gathered under the barre while waiting their turn, craned to the left to try to see Melanie’s back in the mirror. At the end of the row, Gabin’s heart was pounding pleasantly beneath his black Spandex Capezio T-shirt, as it did now whenever Tobias was being a cunt.
“She’s the size of a sixth grader. That is an American eleven-year-old, okay? Her bones can’t handle the g-force. You’ll break her neck. Is that what you want? To kill her? Do you hate her, Tristan?”
“No,” said Tristan, looking worriedly down at Melanie’s forest sprite shoulders.
Tobias made an Okay with his right hand. “Then take hold of her before the downbeat. Again.” He put his headphones back on and marched back to sit on top of the piano. Pointedly he did not look at Gabin. (He didn’t have to.)
The music started up again, legato, 4/4 time. At the cello cue, Melanie lifted her arms (though. It would’ve been nice.) and did her lethal triple-fouetté in front of Tristan’s hips. This time he took her up at the right beat and swung her around at the right speed, but five four-counts later he traced a C in the floor at way more than the forty-two to fifty-three degrees decided upon the night Tobias had blocked it out on his kitchen floor, with Gabin watching from his perch on the countertop naked from the waist up and eating one of the most delicious things he’d ever had: a speculoos cookie from a place called Trader Joe’s.
“Stop, stop stop stop. Okay, now you’re—” He climbed down again, bangs flouncing. His voice got quiet, which was a sign: anything louder or softer than ordering a cappuccino. “You’re stepping over the path. Up and around, catch and scoop, half a shovel, garden path, wrist wrist, dive. Okay?”
Tristan took as deep a breath in his choreographer’s face as union rules allowed. “It’s hard to walk the whole path and let go in time for the wrist wrist.”
“Why?” asked Tobias curtly.
The waiting dancers exchanged tense looks.
“Because I have to move my hands,” Tristan attempted.
“And will your lungs not be working this entire time, either?” Tobias asked. “Will your pituitary gland cease secreting hormones? Can you use muscle memory to execute a move while preparing for the next one, or does every twitch of your body require conscious control? You’ve evolved beyond this, Tristan. Act like it.” He didn’t even raise his hand the whole way, just flicked it under his elbow and prowled back to the cherry red piano in his gold-embroidered distressed leather high-tops. “Again.”
Gabin sat on the floor with his legs criss-crossed like a good Catholic schoolboy, radiating patience. Oh, such patience! He could wait for hours these days, but he wouldn’t need to; when Tobias started wandering between his dancers, the countdown had begun.
Tobias touched his watch and the music came back. Melanie turned perfectly, Tristan hoisted her high and low, Melanie flipped over, and Tristan traced his toe. It was fine! Tobias hated it!!! At the end of their thirty seconds, Tristan placed Melanie on the floor and turned around to find Tobias sitting with his hands folded in front of his mouth: Our Father who art in Heaven.
“Was the wrist wrist okay?”
Tobias made Tristan watch him blink slowly. “Is Melanie alive?”
Tristan visibly stopped himself too late from checking. “Yes.”
“Then I guess it was fine,” he said flatly. “Mishi. Purple guy.” This was to Antonin, who had worn a lavender bodysuit three weeks ago. “From the top.”
Tristan took Antonin’s seat with some relief, head held high. At Gabin’s left, Mishi in her baby blue tights and very expensive rose-lined leotard leapt up and hustled to the center of the room. Antonin met her already posed. He was a principal; the highest-ranking dancers of the official ballet company of France had to impress their choreographer like anyone else, though they were used to less extremely fucking arbitrary parameters. Tobias had already cut and swapped out Liam Collignon for Jean-Christophe on the grounds that he didn’t like the line of Liam’s calves in first position.
(Gabin’s calves were perfect.)
“Ready?” said Tobias without looking, and he touched the face of his watch.
Antonin could throw a giraffe in the air and make it look good, so he had no problem with the recherchée and double-jointed Mishi Duplessis. They glided along so smoothly and articulated that at the end of the wrist-wrist-dive Tobias just had them loop back to the start, his fingers pressing into the sides of his neck as they went into the slips and swooshes, Antonin’s arms like rope around Mishi’s waist. He was a principal for a reason! Which most choreographers cared about!!
“STOP. No. No. Okay.” Tobias unfolded yet again. “You have to keep her close, you have to keep her very close, Mike Nichols close, or you don’t get the effect of the bloom on the garden path—you’re like, thrusting her out over the ledge every time you spin around, are you all scared of mono or something? You’re incredibly twitchy around the female dancers. Just.” He pressed his hands over his face, leaving a triangle free over his mouth. Yes. YES. “Purple, sit down. Gabin. Come here.”
YES!!!!!
He kept his face absolutely neutral as he got up and wound through the throng of Tristan and Melanie, Jean-Christophe, Lula, and Anne. Everyone watching was thinking the same thing. If he smirked even a little, Lula would slit his Achilles tendon with the pink Exacto knife she used to thatch her pointe shoes. He didn’t need to smirk.
That was star power, baby.
Tobias gesticulated mutely in the direction of Mishi’s elbows and went back to his seat before Gabin was even in position. Mishi lifted her arms and Gabin tucked two fingers under her wrists.
Hi, he mouthed at her.
I don’t care if you’re fucking the choreographer you will not drop me, said her eyebrows.
The cellos swelled warm and floral from the floor, and Mishi began to sway. Gabin moved with her. She was subtle and a little daintier through her fingertips, and when he partnered with her—which used to be never because she was slightly famous with the Statue of Liberty set, but now under their tyrannical overlord’s singular eye it was sometimes—when he danced with her he could hoist and swirl and otherwise induce her across the floor with a little more verve than with Melanie or Lula or Anne. She could absorb it. And it made him feel like he shot lightning out of his fingertips.
She bent backwards at such a steep incline that as he held her he could see nothing above the underside of her chin. They traced their Cs together, and he didn’t need to count or imagine the line—Tobias had shown him once and so the curl was burned into the proprioception of his back and hip and thigh and shin and foot. Mishi wrapped herself around his waist and he swung her so low to the ground that Melanie and Lula twitched backwards, but Mishi was stone cold: her back muscles didn’t even tense. He tossed her up and swooped her close less crisply classically than Tristan and not at Antonin’s height but with a bubbling happiness weirdly inaccessible to the other boys around Tobias or perhaps even around Paris or the whole world. When Mishi snuggled down in his arms and he bent forward, levering her legs into a one-eighty at the ceiling and brushing her bun against the wooden slats, he could have kissed her from the joy of it. Except Tobias would have thrown his headphones at him.
They hung there in the suspended quiet, their noses slotted together. From a reverberating and rapidly re-approaching distance he counted some ten seconds. He chanced a look.
Tobias was sitting with his elbows on his knees. When Gabin met his eye, he raised his eyebrows and looked at the others, lifted a lazy hand: See?
* * *
What Tobias did during the seven or so hours of the manically scheduled workday at Le Ballet National that were not devoted to his own rehearsals was not entirely known. Some days he could be found lying on a patch of the floor with his legs crossed up on the wall, or Zooming with New York, or skimming the froth off a cappuccino with an eviscerated croissant in the commissary and staring at the wall; once he reappeared in the evening wearing a T-shirt from the Musée National Gustave Moreau. But for some two weeks straight now, and every night, he and Gabin would magnetize.
Sometimes they’d find each other during the day too, down a hallway while Gabin was mainlining a banana or one of Melanie’s sweet dried mango slices between dances and they would go sit together for a few minutes. Tobias would sketch or doze with his head in Gabin’s lap (particularly if he was in shorts) while Gabin stroked up the bridge of his nose and between his eyebrows and monologued about casting or some new lurid personnel drama or the last pirated episode of Vanderpump Rules. (“She’s nice,” Tobias had once murmured sleepily, throwing Gabin’s day into chaos.) But usually Gabin was ferried hither and yon by Raphael’s ferocious daily schedule at such a pace that he and Tobias only saw each other during Tobias’s own hour for Piece 4.
Their sacred and nigh-matrimonial kiss onstage (ONSTAGE) notwithstanding, Tobias had not actually made it a habit of grabbing Gabin by the scruff of his neck like a kitten after each run-through and sticking his tongue down his throat in front of everybody. Instead it was more like: Hm. Mhm. Okay. And then after Gabin had showered and changed back into his slim-cut Diesels (secondhand) and found Tobias meditating alone to Slipknot next to the cubbies where the girls kept their shoes he would say, “You want another pirouette after the catch, don’t you?” and Tobias would stand up already reaching for him. Now, this evening, he had Gabin pooled in his lap in front of the floor-length mirror in little, deserted Studio A; the sun had long since set, a rainstorm threatened all day had broken and was drumming against the tall windows, and Gabin was panting into Tobias’s open mouth. The spoils of a good rehearsal.
“Jean-Christophe wants to fuck you,” said Tobias.
Gabin had one hand at the base of Tobias’s spine and with the other was sort of compulsively massaging the back of his head. Tobias either had the world’s most insane conversational instinct or else he enjoyed forcing Gabin to stay coherent while receiving a mercilessly serene handjob while still in his jeans. He managed to sound calm. “You know who that is?”
“I know he wants to fuck you.”
Tobias’s thumb was being very interesting. Gabin’s thighs were shaking after nine hours of hard labor but he kept his perch. That was just the kind of service you got when you were fucking one of the best ballet dancers on the continent. “He doesn’t want to fuck me. He wants to kill me.”
“Strange how many people want to do both.”
Gabin swallowed a sound like gghhhhnnnnngng and just screamed it in his head. “You have—my—you wanted to kill me?”
Tobias tilted his head so their mouths brushed when he spoke. “I think your own bent for self-destruction will suffice for both of us.”
“I don’t have a bent.”
Tobias cupped his balls and tugged. The light behind Gabin’s eyes went nuclear and he yelped FUCK JESUS CHRIST.
“Right there,” Tobias murmured.
“Fuck, oh fuck, oh my God,” he mumbled into Tobias’s temple. He’d hitched up onto his knees and now when he opened his eyes he could see himself in the mirror, his left hand gripping the short hair at the back of Tobias’s head and his right hand splayed white-knuckled at the small of Tobias’s back. When with their small but steady movements he could see the fabric which was the color of buttercream caught under his hand it was dark with Tobias’s sweat. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
“You gonna come?” he asked softly.
“No,” Gabin gritted out.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You want to?”
“Yes, you asshole—fuck oh my God, Tobias please—”
“I can see who wants this,” Tobias said quietly, swirling. In his lap Gabin was trying to fuck himself with nothing against Tobias’s sternum. “Walking around here all day, I know who wants to have you. You know who wants to have you like this? Hurt you a little?”
“There’s nobody,” Gabin said in a wet slur along the curve of Tobias’s eyebrow.
Tobias kissed his cheek. “You’re falling apart.”
“I’m not falling—” Tobias’s hand went watertight up the length of his cock and pressed in so sweetly with his thumb that Gabin’s eyes rolled back and his spine went liquid. “Ahhhh…”
“Don’t you fucking come,” Tobias said into his throat.
Gabin forced himself to hold his breath and shook his head, probably, he was so hard his brain was running on a backup generator. Tobias’s hair smelled like bergamot and if he was not fucking Gabin over the side of the balustrade in ten seconds he was going to throw himself in the Seine. But he had his fucking orders!!!
He screwed his eyes shut. “Please.”
“You gonna let him touch you?”
Distantly he knew even this mostly, almost entirely constructed fantasy sequence was getting Tobias off and that some largest part of it was the specter of a single other masculine hand moving Gabin’s wrist two degrees to the right or adjusting the fall of his hair. Never mind that the only other intimate touches he had weathered during his career had been largely self-initiated strikes and punches—even this specter of close quarters had some spice to it pungent enough that Tobias could smell it from across the room—
“No,” Gabin panted, “no.”
“And everyone knows what?”
He could barely articulate: “You’re fucking me.”
Tobias kissed him. Gabin kissed him back with gluttonous, one might say ravenous hunger; Tobias slipped his tongue into Gabin’s mouth and as to a life preserver Gabin clung to it, sucked deep. When it pulled out he moaned.
Tobias leaned back, looked around Gabin’s face, his chest, up and down. His cock iron-hot and hard, weeping. Against some deep internal consideration Tobias judged him ready or not and pumped his hand once with near-final surety.
He almost fucking came. He grabbed for Tobias’s shoulders blindly; they sort of wrestled over it and came out with Tobias holding his hands very tightly as Gabin pushed against his grip and tried to forcibly swallow the cum back down his dick. His whole torso pulsed forward, his face on Tobias’s face, not kissing, just thrust together like to shatter their noses. Tobias’s eyes were open, Gabin could feel his eyelashes flicker. Terror and panic. Breathe. Push into his hands. Tobias pushed back. It was almost like a hug. He watched Gabin force down the most natural compulsion in the world.
“Get up,” he said gently.
“What?” Gabin croaked.
Like a marionette with the strings trailing up to God Gabin was moved: Tobias rotated himself to kneel facing the mirror and pulled Gabin’s ass back into his lap but the other way around, Gabin’s hands on the floor as he stared into his own face high with color in the giant mirror.
“Put your hands on it,” said Tobias.
This was shocking. In his entire time at the National Gabin had never touched it. Almost unsure it would materialize under his hands he lifted his right and pressed it to the cold surface. Tobias waited until he had braced his left hand too, then yanked him back the last half-inch by his belt loops and with that omnipotent arm reached down. Not for the first time in his life Gabin was made to look at himself during the act but for the first time was it understood that the image of himself was a gift. When he came, his hands tented and slipped down in their own sweat, and Tobias laughed but graciously and kissed the back of his neck. He made Gabin scrub the handprints off with his bandana.
* * *
By Friday morning, Tobias had settled—he swore—on Piece 4’s cast list, the pairs therein, who started where, how many seconds of darkness they’d stand in before the lights came up after the music started, and whether or not the girls could wear their hair down. They could!
Except—Lula, does yours always do…that? Around your ears? Could you…cut it?
“He is in a much better mood,” Mishi murmured to Gabin as Lula tried to mime counter-spiralling with a curling wand. In an intriguing rhetorical move not unique to herself, Mishi spoke in French when gossiping around Tobias, who’d encountered “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ce truc?” on Clozemaster last Wednesday and had had to be coaxed off the floor with a guava pochette.
Gabin was staring at the spread of Tobias’s shoulders under a soft wool knit sweater that cost three months of his grocery budget. “Since yesterday?”
“Since we’ve come here,” she said. “And even in New York, there was always something wrong. He would move away from us very fast. It felt like we were in the way of the ghosts dancing perfectly in his head, always just behind us. Now, he is more…” She dropped her shoulder and flopped her hand, loose and sparking. “Well. A little more.”
“Lula, it will GROW BACK,” Tobias said over the tops of his fingers.
“A little,” said Gabin, grinning.
The dance opened in a month, one of the later entries in the season. The cast could only meet twice a week because of the monstrous Carmen, in which Gabin played absolutely no one of consequence WOW what a shock, and a looming production of Sylvia that had a psychological stranglehold over the perpetually skittish Opéra administration. (There was in theory a germinating fifth Bell Piece but no echoes of it had yet drifted out from under the doorway of the man’s brain into the hallway of general knowledge.) So Tobias settling down and putting his dancers through consistent, permanent paces very soon, like, now, was important.
Thus you can imagine the discipline it took for everyone not to scream when he stopped them all twenty counts of four into the song saying STOP, no, stop, STOP!!!!
“This is, oh God, this is all wrong,” he said, palms over his eyes from where he sat on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” said Mishi chivalrously, her wrists in Gabin’s hands. “I dropped my hip.”
“Your hip is fine, everyone do your hip like Mishi,” Tobias said into his hands.
“Is it the wrist wrist?” asked Gabin.
“No,” said Tobias.
“Do you want the long spin longer? Two more counts?”
“No,” said Tobias, more plaintively.
Mishi squished her forehead at Gabin like, Is this getting worse? But he shook his head: you had to get Tobias up and moving, like a temperamental engine. “You don’t like the changement, you want the changement faster.”
Tobias shot up to stand so fast that six feet away Lula leaned back. “No, it’s the, it’s the—” He made a big hand movement of catching and crushing the invisible thing. “Mmngh, it’s like, it’s too—”
“Short,” said Gabin, smiling down at Mishi. Watch this.
“It’s too short!” said Tobias at the ceiling.
“The ice skate?”
“No—”
“The arabesque?”
“Oh God, the arabesque.” Tobias stopped right in front of them, pressed his hands flat together, and pushed them away: parting the Red Sea. “Sit down. Sit down. You two. From the chainé. Just don’t—don’t—”
“Step over it?” said Gabin.
“And not—with your hand.”
“But the forte—”
“Relaxed,” said Tobias, pantomiming sagging relief with his shoulders. “And on the six, not the four, okay? Okay, go. Go!”
He spun away and pressed himself flat against the mirror to face Mishi and Gabin, the rest of the cast huddled in their respective corners like very disciplined and organized little discarded orphan children in shambolic Adidas leg warmers.
“The arabesque on six?” Mishi whispered quickly over the music cueing up.
“Guitar strum into the fence,” Gabin said into her ear. “Don’t worry, I’ll catch you.”
Quietly she took the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ in vain but contorted herself into her first position.
Tobias ran them through it five times. Less…empirical, he said, less brutalist. More like…have you seen those Cy Twombly paintings of the dripping flowers? Can you do it like she’s wearing a tuxedo? Have you seen the end of Brief Encounter? It’s the opposite of that. And at the end of each cycle he came closer and closer to them dancing until he was perched in a squat on his toes ten inches from Mishi’s feet, staring up at the numerous and infinitesimal creases and stretches and flexes and tucks of their bodies, close enough to hear them breathe, tiny forced exhales and holds as they came together: their characters were sort of in love, it seemed, Tobias eschewed a narrative but over the course of his eight-counts Mishi grew warmer and warmer towards Gabin’s body, and by the end she was taking huge bites out of him, and it ended in a swoon. Of which Tobias could not yet countenance.
“Okaywait hold it—pause. Hold her there. Pause.”
Mishi’s blooming loose coils of hair bounced hard as Gabin jerked her still and she hung there, upside down.
“Here?” asked Gabin, biceps straining.
“Yeah. I mean, no, but yeah.” Tobias pushed himself back to his feet and began to circle them. He’d curled his hand over his mouth like a cartoon detective. “Something is…you’re like three-fourths…shouldn’t it be a bit more…”
He moved Gabin’s chin up, then back down with the tip of his finger. Mishi rubbed her lips together and averted her eyes, inches from the floor. The only sound was her and Gabin’s breathing. Tobias pulled her ankles higher—Gabin felt it around his waist—and nudged Gabin’s calf with his sneaker toe as if checking the tire pressure. It was like being stalked by a freak in the Musée d’Orsay.
“What are you thinking,” said Gabin, gritting his teeth after two full minutes. Mishi weighed ninety pounds soaking wet but he had her suspended at an angle like to throw her down a staircase.
“I don’t know,” said Tobias faintly. His eyes were pointed at Gabin’s shins; his mind was on the moon. Then he looked up into Gabin’s face. “How are you on pointe?”
His brain went a little misty. “Pointe—shoes?”
“Tobias,” said Mishi throatily.
“Huh,” said Tobias.
“My eyes are getting pink.”
“Oh God, flip her over,” Tobias muttered, and he helped get her right side up, where she clung to Gabin’s lapels, blinking dreamily.
“I’m good,” said Gabin, a new excitement flooding to replace the lactic acid in his arms, “en pointe—Tobias, really?”
Tobias gave him an appraising once-over. “Are you sure? ’Cause that’s all ankle.”
Gabin felt himself starting to beam. He hadn’t danced en pointe in years! Didn’t matter!! “Yes, I’m sure—”
Tobias looked over at the three other men. “En pointe?” They made startled sounds of assent. He rotated back to Gabin. Gabin opened his mouth. Tobias turned and walked out of the studio.
Mishi was cradling her forehead. Tristan and Antonin looked at each other.
“I never know if we’re supposed to follow him,” whispered Anne.
Gabin held Mishi’s upper arms gamely as she shook the blood back into her head, feeling like a scarf of silk was being trailed up the length of his body. Pointe shoes. Pointe shoes, for the boys? A new trick for him? Had Paris put pointe shoes on a man outside of A Midsummer Night’s Dream since the Russian Revolution? Should someone get Le Monde on the phone??
He was just starting to lift himself onto the balls of his feet, as if to see, when the doors on the other side of the studio flung themselves open and there stood Tobias: “Where the hell’s the costume department around here?”
* * *
He commandeered the giant shelf of pointe shoes as through Mishi interpreting at his shoulder he cajoled one of the costume ladies into ferreting out some equivalent of a men’s 39. If he so ordered, the costumers would have to fit the boys especially and order one or two pairs of pointe shoes a day for each of them. The young woman presently pressed into service by the strange choreographer from New York oozed skepticism but unearthed one for him with a game smile.
Tobias tossed the right foot up in the air, judged the slight weight, looked over his shoulder, found Gabin, opened his mouth—and paused. And Gabin knew what he was going to do fifteen-sixteenths of a second before he did it.
“You,” he said to Jean-Christophe and beckoned with his finger.
Shepherded by their mad abbé deeper down the table, the group re-huddled around Jean-Christophe and his iron calves pumping lusty octane, and Gabin was obliged to watch Tobias kneel, actually kneel, take hold of Jean-Christophe’s right foot, and insinuate his tendons into the pink satin purse of a girl’s pointe shoe. Jealousy sizzled like mercury up Gabin’s spine.
Tobias looped the laces above Jean-Christophe’s instep. “Okay,” he said. “Try an attitude.”
Everyone took a step back to give berth. Jean-Christophe rested his right hand on the edge of the table, which sat a few inches lower than barre-height, and seemed to gather himself, then hoisted himself up onto the pointe shoe’s platform toe, rising some four inches, and breathed deep. His leg muscles popped radically. Slowly, slowly he raised his left leg behind himself, his foot and his knee curved inwards on a perfect perpendicular plane.
“American,” Tobias murmured. He unspooled an arm from across his chest and with the pad of his index finger raised Jean-Christophe’s ankle to the height of his shoulder. Jean-Christophe’s chest tilted forward and he closed his eyes.
The girls smiled and gave Jean-Christophe a silent ovation. Tobias leaned back on his heels and tilted his head to study the exact warp and rend of Jean-Christophe’s inner thigh and the top of his foot. Tobias did not have an inner checklist; he had a puzzle piece forever missing its mate and if you slotted into it he wouldn’t scream at you but neither would he smile, rather he’d stare at you for seconds upon seconds as if checking against this all being a dream, then he’d pass on. Gabin knew this because he had so far thrice been the perfect opposite and in the meantime now Jean-Christophe’s right foot was perfect and this surety burned up the soles of Gabin’s own feet like a septic gash.
Tobias lifted his head from examination of Jean-Christophe’s flexed and elongated pelvis for one of the costume ladies. “Is this the only color you have?”
“Rose et marron,” said the tiny woman.
He sighed. “Like a Ken doll. Are you sure there isn’t any green? Vert? A median between a Pacific pine and fresh cut grass? Okay, everyone spread out. Lula—that way. We’re looking for green. Or a dusty red like in postcards of the Utah badlands at sunset.” He took off for a far corner but stopped and looked back once, at a soft noise from a throat. “Oh, Jean-Christophe,” he said blandly. “Just…stay there.”
Jean-Christophe rolled his lips between his teeth and bit down. The muscle above the tendon in his ankle tensed and tightened in some supple pain as he balanced in the quiet of the long, dark room and the sewing woman back at her post and ballerinas whispering in the hidden wings and Tobias off in some lone corridor. Gabin was never included in Tobias’s everyone and so stood there in artificial sprezzatura attempting to conceal from Jean-Christophe that he wanted to slice his hamstring with Lula’s Exacto knife. Actually within reach was a letter opener made of bone.
“Is he still there?” Jean-Christophe asked through some crescendoing pain. Both legs were shaking.
Gabin picked up the little blade and drew the milky white tip under his thumbnail and gouged out what might have been tobacco or dried blood. Tobias would haul Gabin by the hair into a spotlight later on of the sort Jean-Christophe could only dream. In the meantime he could stay on fucking pointe.
“Yes,” said Gabin.
* * *
That weekend, he took Tobias dancing. They went to an improvised rave run by university students out of the top floor of what used to be a sugar factory and wore black sneakers, and Gabin watched as Tobias entirely by universal gesture negotiated the sale of a tablet of ecstasy stamped with a tiny picture of Lucy van Pelt. Tobias kissed it into his mouth. For the whole night and until the police broke up the party and during which they invented new pigments of sunset red behind their eyes they were never farther apart than the length of their arms.
* * *
Before ten o’clock company class began on Monday morning, Tobias was summoned to Geneviève’s office. When she looked up from her phone behind her glass desk she seemed surprised to see Gabin trotting in after him.
“What’re you doing here? I didn’t ask for you.”
“Good morning, madame,” he said with the big smile he reserved just for her. He took the chair at the left in front of her desk; Tobias drifted into the right. “I’m saving everyone the trouble of repeating what you say to him back to me in twenty minutes.”
“This is a staff meeting,” she enunciated. “Go to class.”
Gabin pointed to Tobias with his thumb. “You’re going to ask him about repainting scrims?”
“I’m going to talk to him about choreography.”
He touched his chest, bare under the deep Spandex V and between the wings of his puffy vest. “And I’m a dancer!”
Geneviève glanced at Tobias and switched to rapid French, where he could not follow. “You two don’t actually come as a set. He doesn’t need you to escort him around. There are still some spaces in France where you are not required. It’s inappropriate.”
He made a big face like Wow, Really? “Where are these spaces? They sound terrible. And ugly. And uncoordinated.”
Tobias pointed at himself. “Do you need me…?”
Geneviève sighed. “Yes. Fine. Tobias—you’re still working out your next piece, aren’t you? The fifth one. You haven’t started blocking it out, you’re still…conceptualizing?”
“I’m in phase two,” he said.
“What is phase two?”
He mimed shifting something in his lap from one block to another. “Moving from an abstraction to a hypothesis.”
“Ah. I see. And is the hypothesis stage early enough for me to input a directive?”
He sighed. “Well, it’s already embryonic. But I guess we can still…change its hair color.”
Geneviève smiled. “That’s perfect. Tobias, I love the pieces you’ve made during your time with us. Off Rhythm has turned into as much of a cult classic as a ballet at the National can, and the…whatever the last one was called was like a little miracle. Everything I dreamt you could do for us, you have done. Really, it’s astonishing. And I’ve heard you commandeered the costume mistress into fitting some of the boys with pointe shoes for your fourth work. Is that true?”
“You should really have more colors in stock,” said Tobias. “I wouldn’t want to be behind your desk the day a tabloid reporter discovers you don’t have robin’s egg blue satin.”
“No,” said Geneviève, blinking. “Of course not. Me neither. I only say all this because…” She split into a fast smile and covered her mouth over a short laugh. “I’ve never had to say—this is strange for me! Tobias, for your fifth piece, can you please cast a lead from one of the principals this time?”
Gabin opened his mouth, but Geneviève hit him with a Sometimes I Am Your Pretend Mom And Sometimes I Am Your Boss And This Is The Second One index finger. Tobias just looked at her.
“I know you like to pick your dancers based on general suitability more than rank, which is very American and meritocratic and thrilling. But most of our audience, as you might know, expect the lead roles to generally be danced by the lead dancers. It’s sort of how a ballet company…works? The principals and soloists expect to dance the solos, and the audience and the reviewers expect it, and the, you know, members of the French government who make up our board expect it. The étoiles have only been promoted to étoile because they’re the best of our best, which is the best in the country. And, some might say, Europe. So…what do you think? Could you audition the principals for the lead in your next piece? Just the principals?”
If she’d whipped out a bow and arrow like Legolas and shot Gabin through the heart, he would not have been more stunned. “You’re making him cast a principal?” he asked, leaning forward quickly.
“I’m not making him do anything,” said Geneviève. “I’m asking, as his director.”
“If he wanted to cast a principal, he would cast a principal. He has already cast principals. Antonin, Tristan, Alix—Séverine—Loïs, Liam, the girl who only did eighteen fouettés in Swan Lake—”
“Shockingly, Gabin, this is why I didn’t ask you to sit in on this meeting,” Geneviève said over him. “It’s not your decision. And I’m not implying that Tobias has only chosen you again because of your relationship. I’m saying that maybe…some people, outside this room, who only know you as a member of the corps, or your criminal record, might think…that Tobias keeps casting you only because of your relationship.”
Gabin flung his arm out in Tobias’s direction. “He casts me because I’m the best dancer for his dances! Everyone knows that. They saw us!”
“Oh, Gabin, please, shut up for a moment. Tobias, what do you think?”
He seemed to be seriously considering. “Do I have to cast them if they’re bad?”
“None of them are bad,” Geneviève said patiently. “I am confident you can find one of our étoiles who suits you beautifully. Maybe someone you’ve overlooked in the past because you didn’t know them well enough, or because you were temporarily,” she picked up and moved a spiral calendar two inches to the right without looking at him, “heartbroken. How about I schedule an audition for tomorrow afternoon? Would you have enough embryonic steps by then to show them something?”
Gabin looked at him. Tobias had crossed his arms over his apricot-orange cashmere crewneck and was squinting at the ceiling. “I suppose,” he said slowly. “As long as you make it clear that this is strictly a hypothesis. I can’t have whoever it is stage a mutiny once it solidifies into a premise and suddenly they can’t do the jetés.”
“I will make that clear in the announcement,” said Geneviève.
“This is tyrannical,” said Gabin loudly. Hello?? “This is degrading the point of the audition in the first place—”
“He will hold auditions for everyone,” Geneviève said over him, “the next time he has a ballet with a substantive cast. But this piece has very few dancers. We have to showcase our best, according to the rank they’ve earned.”
At the word rank, his whole back flushed red. “How am I supposed to get promoted if you refuse to cast the corps!”
“You do get cast!”
He held up his hands and consciously softened his voice. “So I am effectively a soloist. Let me audition.”
“Tobias,” said Geneviève. “Would you step outside for a minute, please?”
He looked at Gabin, who shook his head minutely, but then he rose with his hands flat on his thighs as he did whenever he was tamping down an emotion and left the office without speaking. When the door snapped shut, Geneviève turned to Gabin. He felt a rush of foreboding.
“Gabin, to be quite frank,” she said, in French again, “what more do you want? You danced lead in our last two shows, skipping over people twice your standing. You’re dating, or whatever, our sparkling guest choreographer who’s about to use you in some equally big though perhaps less 8½ circumstances again, which gives you an incredible opportunity to demonstrate your capacity to be cast elsewhere, which you probably will be if you stop biting cops. And at the end of the season, you may very well get promoted without Tobias staging dances on you because by then he’ll be back in New York. So what about my request that he just once make use of the casting system that’s worked for five hundred years bothers you?”
“He likes using me,” Gabin muttered, chest much hollowed.
“I know. That’s why I’ve asked especially.”
“Did Matthieu make you do this?” Gabin asked quickly. “Is he still angry that Tobias cut him from Piece 3?”
“Matthieu didn’t get cut from Piece 3. He quit after Tobias sent him to Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“So clearly they can’t work with each other!”
“He would, however,” Geneviève continued, the ends of her dark bob twitching, “appreciate his choreographer give him an equal shot at a starring role.”
“He doesn’t need this,” said Gabin. His heart beneath his henley was pounding. There was some combination of words to get her to see this but he couldn’t seem to find it: that fucking Matthieu Rivière did not need Tobias Bell trussed up like a Christmas present for his delectation. His haircut was too stupid. And his earrings, which were real gold and diamonds, were stupid, and his stupid spiral tattoo on his left bicep which was a STOLEN COPY of the crescent moon on Gabin’s left bicep and nothing anyone said could convince him otherwise!!! “If he was good at this—the way Tobias needs him to be good at this, then he would’ve done it when he subbed for me, it would have worked already! It doesn’t matter if he’s a good principal to Alain or Raphael or fucking Marion Cotillard if he doesn’t understand Tobias.”
“Then he’ll cast someone else.”
“He has me!”
“He needs to have more than one person,” Geneviève said gently.
Gabin stared at her. It must have been for some time because eventually she stood up and came around the desk to him and drew him standing.
“Go back to class,” she said gently. “You need to be warm for him when you put on your pointe shoes.”
“I don’t mean that no one,” he tried to begin.
“I know.”
“They already have—”
“I know.” She walked him along the rug and stopped a few feet in front of the doorway. She kept a soft hand on his forearm. “It’s not ‘having,’ Gabin. It’s not The Phantom of the Opera. We all dance for each other. And when you’re a principal, you will be the most beautiful Romeo for whatever future Alain first lays eyes on you. But for now, I need a lead dancer to lead Tobias’s next dance.”
“They can dance lead in Coppélia,” said Gabin, starting to feel real panic, “and Quixote and La Bayadere and Manon and Giselle and every other fucking show you put on, Geneviève, please—” She closed her eyes, but not cruelly, like she was covering the slightest sheen of tears. “—please, I’m not asking because I want to do everything, I promise, I know I’m part of a company, that’s not what I mean—just let me do his. He likes me best for them anyway, it won’t bother him, please, Geneviève—” She took his hands and squeezed them in a calming gesture he remembered from childhood only ever performed as a theory of warmth and affection, and he sped up. “—please, just let me have him. I don’t care if you never cast me again. Everyone else can have everyone else. He’s the only one—this is all I want.” She was looking very intently at their knot of hands inside of which his may have shook. “I know I’m too much trouble, I don’t mean it, I love it here. I just want to dance for him. Please let him use me while he’s here. Just let me have him. Please.”
She took a very slow, deep breath. “Gabin,” she said, “you shouldn’t be afraid.”
This stunned him momentarily. “I’m not afraid.”
“Good.” She lowered her voice even more, into a murmur like to kiss his head before turning out his bedroom light. “It’s just one dance. He’s not going to lose interest in you because you sit out one dance, is he?”
Gabin felt himself shake his head.
“No. Now, are you going to cause a problem for me?”
His shoulders sank in their sockets. He was still on probation, and that hadn’t changed just because Natalie Portman had tweeted about him. He shook his head.
“Are you going to watch the auditions with grace and good sportsmanship?”
Gabin searched himself. “Yes.”
“Thank you.” She leaned around him and opened the door.
He followed her into the hallway. Lucien was alone, stapling a pile of brochures stacked higher than his computer monitor. Gabin and Geneviève looked left and right together as if at an intersection.
“Where’s Tobias?” asked Geneviève.
Lucien shrugged. “He said something about hex triplet four-B artichoke green and ran off.”
* * *
The costume mistress worked in the basement beneath the east wing. Gabin cut class and took the stairs.
Her name was Vanessa, and she was like five feet tall and psychic and always a hair-trigger away from telling some girl who didn’t like her assigned fluffy pink bodice to go fuck herself. Some of the more wayward in the company took to her warmly; she liked Gabin because he would flirt straight at her and give her the opportunity to insult him erogenously the entire time she measured his chest and the circumference of his thighs. Among everything else she was responsible for were the seventy-five hundred pairs of shoes the National went through every year.
Gabin rounded the doorway quietly in case she was pointing a needle at something important, but no one was standing at the big, long table in the middle of the room, around and above and on top of which hung almost innumerable tutus and leotards and hats, and draping skirts and headdresses and tunics and tufts of tulle yet shaped and yards of velvet and satin wrapped around themselves, and bags of feathers and microscopic beads and elastic bands, and drawers of needles and pencils and hairpins and matchboxes and wax and chalk and measuring tape. At two stations facing away sat two women bent over sewing machines, the scissoring motor hums syncopated and vibrating through the wooden floor which was older than the roof of the whole building and up through the soles of Gabin’s puffy black space boots. He kept to the side and slipped through a slit in between a prince’s red jacquard vest and Lady Capulet’s ball gown into a long, silent, cool room lit low with blue-white lights and smelling of spearmint and wood cleaner and crushed rosin.
He walked slowly through a maze of ancient bureaus and makeshift closets hanging from the ceiling. Possibly an urchin child or some creeping demonic animal that hadn’t seen sunlight since Louis XIV shut them up in here could stalk him through the silent shelves but more likely the ghost of some twilight prima donna not yet ready to share her black Odile tiara. He leaned forward to peek down each row before passing, and in the second to last before he would have to slip into some third yet unexplored chamber he found him, sitting with his ankles crossed amidst a riot of open shoeboxes and holding a swatch of glossy fabric taut against his knee.
When Gabin reached him he tiptoed his fingers across Tobias’s shoulder first so he would look up. When he did the angle shot pale shadows down the hollows beneath his tectonic cheekbones and up into his deep dark eyes.
“Oh, good.” He took off his headphones as Gabin sat down beside him, carefully in case there was rhyme and/or reason to the precise stack and fall of fabric swatches draped and scattered like lush debris around Tobias’s legs. “I’ve been approximating. You’ve got a lot more pink than me.”
He had Gabin rest his forearm palm-up across his satiny sweatpant thigh and held one color swatch after another up to Gabin’s skin. He kept very still as Tobias worked, and a sort of woozy pall drifted over him at the soft touches and the sight and ambient warmth of Tobias leaning down and inspecting his body. Briefly he remembered entirely by touch a scene of a hand on his shoulder as he lit a votive candle before or after an Advent mass when he must have been eight or nine.
He forced himself to look down into Tobias’s hair. A royal purple looked promising but was dismissed.
“How much of a dance is a hypothesis?” he asked when he couldn’t stop himself any longer.
“A broad theme,” Tobias murmured, tilting his head to study two indistinguishable shades of gold against Gabin’s wrist.
“And what is it for this one?”
“Deconstruction.” He sighed and tossed the fabric squares away in opposite directions. “I can’t wash you out again. That was one of the problems with the second piece. The lighting was too cold.”
“There were no problems with the second piece,” Gabin said patiently.
Tobias rubbed his hands over his face hard, as if bracing himself with ice water. “And I would never have you catch her off that table now. You do so much better from the floor, you look like a toreador.”
Gabin grinned. “In a good way?”
“In the best possible way,” he muttered into his hands.
Gabin flexed his arm, in case Tobias was peeking and wanted to see his veins pop. “And what does deconstruction…mean? To you?”
Tobias sat up and lunged forward for a previously discarded box and pulled out a leaflet of patterns, sunflowers and pinstripes and tiny satyrs playing violins and little foxes locked in circles. “Jack was suggesting I emphasize the single dancer, which I don’t usually, not for an entire number, but it would be a chance to do something,” he spread his free hand out, grasping air, “concentrated. I like pairs, I feel good with pairs, but he said feeling nervous about it meant I should move towards it. Since radical terror seems to be a motif of my Parisian interlude anyway.”
Gabin did not say and as your second Parisian motif may I ask what I have not offered in the way of concentration? Instead he went with the much more subtle and restrained, “Who’s Jack?”
“McMillan.” He adjusted Gabin’s wrist bone and shimmers of piquant agony scintillated up his arm. “The New York Geneviève.”
Ah, so less likely to be the “>>>>>> EX EX YOU BROKE UP <<<<<<” who had texted Tobias overnight after the onstage (ONSTAGE) kiss an Instagram story and a message: Is this why you schlepped out to London you madman??? Gabin had only seen it because he’d tapped Tobias’s phone screen for the time!!
“Maybe,” he said. “But you should cast whoever you want. It’s your ballet.”
“I will,” Tobias said absently, draping him in emerald green.
“Does it have a lot of jumps?” They both liked jumps.
“Sort of.”
The hand not being cast in chromatic red bronze by Rodin was jittering next to Gabin’s leg. “What’s the costume like?”
“I don’t know,” Tobias murmured, like he was looking through a telescope at an unfamiliar planet. “Simple. Probably monochrome. Are your rings upstairs?”
“My—rings?”
“The silver rings you wear, aren’t they silver? Sometimes you wear them to rehearsal and sometimes you don’t. They’re silver, right?”
“Yes—silver. Yes, I can—they’re up in my bag—”
Tobias looked up from the dappled green swatch and straight into Gabin’s face. Gabin blinked and shut up. Tobias put the tip of his finger under Gabin’s chin and through microvolts of electricity turned Gabin’s head towards his near shoulder: he leaned closer and narrowed his eyes at the studded hoop in Gabin’s ear.
“That’s it,” he muttered to himself, then let go and bent back over the shoeboxes. Gabin sat there thrumming like a plucked bass string. “It’s just gotta be the right cold…”
I would wear lead manacles for you and you know it. “If the ballet is still in the embryonic stage,” Gabin said into the quiet air, “does that mean that you and the other dancer might—will you, does that mean, how much of the hypothetical choreography do you think could still change depending on how you feel about the…other…dancer?”
Tobias gave him a sideways look of the sort that seemed to come to him without effort which shot an X-ray across Gabin’s soul and spat out the numbers.
“It’s not a collaboration,” he said softly. Whenever he spoke below classroom level his voice fried into a crackle like a fist of spun sugar. “It’s just spectacle for the front of the brochures at the end of the season. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
Tobias rifled through an envelope of burnt pinks at rapid speed. “The system they filed these under is confounding…”
He couldn’t quite stop himself: “Could I still try the jumps for you, sometime? Just in case all the principals get in a terrible cycling accident and break only their legs?”
“If you want—oh, shit.” Out of the pack Tobias lifted a deep, bloody red and stared at it two inches from his face.
Gabin scooched closer and offered his arm, and Tobias draped it across his palest skin, just before the inner crease of his elbow, angled him under the arctic light. They both leaned in. The square was flushed blueish red like a smashed cherry and beneath it the veins under his skin violet like an occult treasure map.
Tobias breathed out shortly, pleased, and as he did lately when pleased he touched Gabin: he turned and kissed his cheek. Gabin smiled there in the dark but then Tobias didn’t draw away; he kept his nose pressed to Gabin’s skin and nuzzled him.
The shiver up that side of his neck actually lifted his shoulder. Tobias got up, saying now he just needed to find a red that projected the same red as this red for Mishi which might not be her red but would look like Gabin’s red, and as he walked off with his square towards the sewing ladies calling for Vanessa, Gabin kept his arm up. He would keep it up until Tobias ordered it moved which if delayed by kingdom come as the priests decreed then Gabin would sit there amidst hellfire holding his arm where Tobias’s thigh used to be and years later the archeologists would find his charred body under the cinders and would know, ah! That pose, look! That was just how he was wanted.
* * *
He hadn’t been sure, that night after Piece 3 had exploded, even after the now-most-famous French kiss of all time, that Tobias’s sexual interest in him would sustain itself once they left the theater, or even survive the rainy five-minute walk from the fire exit to the corporate apartments where Tobias slept. Things slipped his mind; it was absolutely possible they’d get to his doorway and he’d look over and say, Oh, Gabin—did you want notes? So the least Gabin could do was not let him forget he was there. He’d scraped his heels against the pavement, flicked his fingernail on the bus stop sign, everything but touch him.
They’d taken the walk in a silence that had begun after the final champagne bursts of cheers from the front of the house and out in the courtyard (they didn’t know about the livestreaming until hours later) and congratulations from sweating dancers scattered backstage and in the dressing rooms where Gabin had changed at top speed and clustered behind the concrete steps out back smoking, their windbreakers shielding their leotards from the damp, and though this silence was entirely unnatural and might to an outsider uneducated in the severe barometric patterns of Tobias’s focus (a designation which now excluded ALL OF PARIS) seem cold, it wasn’t. Instead it was like a bird perched on the edge of the rooftop of a house on fire. Gabin had offered him a cigarette which he’d declined and so lit up his second daily allotment alone; the rain was light but he was still covered in sweat, so he was freezing. Tobias walked with his hands in his pockets, half a pace ahead in an electrifyingly missable exercise of authority, all while Gabin thought over and over he picked me. He picked me.
Out of the elevators he’d leaned stylishly against the wall as Tobias without once looking at him unlocked the apartment door. His room was pitch black but warm and smelled faintly of pears and amber. Gabin bent to take off his boots and Tobias shucked off that long green coat and with a click turned on one of the thirteen or fourteen little lamps that dotted his open floor plan. The sitting room table was covered in empty takeout and opened overnight cardboard delivery boxes and a sketchbook and his single-occupancy fish tank all of which Gabin recognized from his ten-second visit some weeks previous to dispatch vermin. And across the room the bed. Tobias just looked at him, and that hooked the leash to the gold-plated collar he’d fastened around Gabin’s neck the moment they’d met: Gabin followed at his heels.
They met kissing at the den of down pillows. Tobias wrested hold of him again and cradled him close and kissed him in quick little bursting excavations. He had very strong arms and Gabin had to focus—he felt drunk—to consciously meet his tempo and not melt like a blonde starlet. Tobias finally finally finally touching him was setting off an electro-chemical reaction under his skin and he wouldn’t have been surprised if upon examination he’d induced a sunburn. When Tobias began to lean back at first Gabin thought he himself was swooning; then his chest and his stomach and his legs were pressing down on Tobias’s chest and stomach and legs. God, he was so warm, running his hand up and down Gabin’s back unhurriedly but very firmly, and Gabin felt himself wave up to meet it in a sort of slow-motion tantric stretch up and down.
Their kisses opened much more deeply than they’d done onstage, and then it got a little nasty. Tobias wouldn’t let him lean back to adjust or change direction, his hand on the back of Gabin’s head kept him planted so their tongues just churned hot and thick over and over and over and over and very soon due to dehydration-induced delirium Gabin had sort of spaced out rutting his hard-on against the left-hand jut of Tobias’s pelvic bones. At the precise penultimate point to him coming in his fucking joggers Tobias released his skull, crunched upwards to pull off his own shirt, looked Gabin dead in the eye and said, “Get on.”
Giddy with the thrill of obedience, he worked down Tobias’s immaculately rumpled plaid linen sweats and rode him like a fifteen-hand Arabian. He let Gabin plant his hands low on his chest (daydreaming on the bus in the taut beforetimes, he would have thought this would be too much touching!) and displayed absolutely no embarrassment staring up into Gabin’s face as Gabin struggled valiantly not to moan like too much of a desperate corps de ballet glory whore. “Oh, fuck,” he said, “oh fuck,” fuck me, oh fuck, and he would not allow himself no matter how cathartic it would’ve been to scream JESUS, THIS DICK IS REALLY BIG, because he was tough, he could do a perfect trophy wife cowgirl victory fuck, he was literally a trophy! Jesus Christ this man’s dick was not kidding around!!!!
He would’ve allowed the demon inside and let Tobias come in him, but Tobias had braked Gabin’s pistoning hips with his giant hands and said get down on your front.
“Front?” Gabin repeated dazedly.
“D’you like that?”
He tried to lick his lips to say yes but he had almost nothing except Tobias’s spit. He shifted his weight, eased up and carefully—Tobias lifted him—dismounted.
He got down on his knees and braced himself on his forearms like to hold a plank. Behind him Tobias knelt between his legs and pushed them very gently further apart.
“Little more,” he said in that sweet, soft voice.
Gabin looked up at the framed arthouse poster on the blank white wall barely lit by the single desk lamp and spread his knees a few more inches.
“Try to get your belly on the bed.”
A wave of something like horror—the delicious kind—seeped up his back, not unlike in the seconds perhaps before a rocket went off or between the leap and the parachute or when only two hours ago that exact voice had cut through its own orchestration yelling STOP STOP STOP and Gabin had thought he’d messed something up so cataclysmically that Tobias was going to kill him onstage but instead what had happened was the most beautiful thing in the world. Don’t tell me to try, he thought, and he took a deep breath and exhaled, prayed, and sank down down down. His sore hip flexors ignited as his thighs turned out further and further tendons and exhausted sinew stretching pink and tender, and he winced and thrust his jaw and submerged himself as if underwater beneath that gaze. He could feel it on his spine. The cool sheets where no one had yet touched met the insides of his legs and his ass turned up in absurdly vulgar offering and his elbows moved forward to accommodate the stretch. When he’d gone the lowest he could go he was in a split, his knees bent back, with less than half an inch, a fingertip between the mattress and his stomach.
“That’s good,” said Tobias. The inflection he only got around Gabin—surely—a translucence or lightfulness or slightest impression of gravel or sugar or juice. He never said good. He said okay or no but we can’t fix that now or again from the jump and this time try not to make me regret affixing the image of your body in my mind. He never said good, good job, good job I love you good job— “You should do this every morning, your extension would be insane.”
“Yeah I’ll do that,” said Gabin through gritted teeth.
Tobias’s hand pushed up the back of Gabin’s neck into his damp curls and gripped him as one would a dog to force it to mind. “Tell me if you want me to stop?”
There existed in all the criss-crossing Avengers universes exactly zero worlds where he’d tell Tobias to stop including the one where his body began splitting upwards from the cleft like a shattered chestnut.
“I will,” he said.
For a second there was no moving and no sound except for Tobias’s thumb on the side of his neck and the faint cozy electric hum which was the motor keeping the goldfish alive. He held his breath.
“You’ve got a beautiful back,” said Tobias.
Gabin had to drop his eyes towards the blue and grey bayadere pillowcase in a feint of insouciance so he wouldn’t cry. “I know.”
“I know you know,” Tobias murmured, and then that cock was pushing back inside him.
The fucking was exceptionally, perhaps terminally deep and he could not now even shift pressure onto his knees because Tobias had him cracked open and displayed like to rip his guts out of his chest cavity. Tobias had gotten his right hand around the meat of the front of Gabin’s thigh and thus he was pinned in three places. The strain along the hinges in his hips was alarming and he couldn’t even care about it yet. As Tobias’s base pleasure or interest or satisfaction with him grew the fucking became so thorough and sadistically, unyieldingly metronomic that Gabin tried to yank his head out of this grip so he could howl into said pillowcase but the fingers in his hair held him fast. Soon out of desperation he was speaking in code.
“Jesus what the fuck this dick is crazy,” he mumbled tightly.
“What?”
He tried again to wrest his head free but it stayed wrenched backwards like in a horse’s bridle. “What the fuck, what the fuck—”
“Gabin, I can’t tell what you’re saying.”
In revenge he rolled his ass back. “I have to fuck in French!”
Tobias shoved his face into the pillow.
After he was done Tobias stayed inside him and on top of him for a minute but more nicely. He eased Gabin’s hips up and put his cheek to the back of Gabin’s shoulder and breathed. Gabin kept his eyes shut and concentrated hard on not inhaling too deep or fast enough to seem spent. This was basically a conditioning stretch, and he was fine. Better than fine. Everyone on the planet who knew someone who knew someone with a phone who liked ballet had seen the lunatic American choreographer kiss him. Tobias was a genius and in two weeks even that asshole from Le Monde would be licking his shoes and Tobias would have his pick of all the gay dance groupies in Paris but right now he was here, drifting his eyelashes across Gabin’s shoulder blade. Gabin had earned him, and Tobias liked him! Out of all the beautiful slabs of meat walking the halls of the National, Tobias had chosen him. No one’s ever done something like this for me before, he’d said. I was picking you anyway. You let me down.
“What else can I,” Gabin began, flushing all over again with breakneck shame.
“Nothing,” said Tobias. He blew a single slow, cool breath at the top notch of Gabin’s spine and kissed the spot. Gabin’s eyes went wet so fast he thought he’d not noticed that Tobias had hit him.
He got Gabin on his back parallel to the headboard and kissed him. Tobias’s body on top of him was heavy and unspeakably sacrosanct. Gabin touched his waist and Tobias didn’t stop him. His knees hurt to unbend; he stretched gingerly along the mattress until his feet found Tobias’s shins.
Tobias propped up on his elbows and considered him. He touched the space—everything he did was insane—between the delicate wings under Gabin’s collarbones. “When did you get these?”
“When I got in.”
He grinned, that crooked knockout. “You’re funny.” His eyes drifted up and down Gabin’s throat. “The stuff you do that’s quiet.”
As Gabin lay there with the top of his head blown off Tobias stroked along one collarbone with the backs of his nails. Break it, Gabin thought wildly, mold it healing sideways if that’s what you want!
Instead Tobias nestled down between his legs, wormed two fingers up his ass, and swallowed his pulsating dick so deep that Gabin thought (distantly) it had possibly breached his vocal cords. Gabin came with his head dangling off the edge of the bed, Tobias’s forearm bracing the small of his back, and his eyes rolled up into an ecstatic darkness known otherwise only to those on the brink of death by combat. Tobias milked it out with slow enveloping strokes of his tongue and afterwards lay his temple on Gabin’s thigh. He helped with an unobtrusive hand on Gabin’s shoulder when he tried to sit up and then they sat there, staring at each other.
“Do you do this with all your leads?” Gabin asked. He allowed himself a split-second fantasy of Tobias fucking Matthieu’s face into the wooden studio floor because it was so impossible and insane and would never happen that it was funny. His hand twitched.
“No,” said Tobias. “Do you do this with Alain?” He smiled as Gabin laughed, still panting.
“Just Raphael. Before he assembles the casting sheet.”
Tobias got that rare playful look around his mouth and eyebrows that made that twitchy thing in Gabin’s chest alight: Showing off? “I see. Must be how Matthieu made principal even though he can’t catch a hundred-pound girl in the air without dropping his fucking knee.” Gabin must have successfully covered his reaction because Tobias only leaned closer to kiss his cheek. “Do you want to spend the night? Because these are really comfortable sheets and I just washed them, but we’d have to shower first, separately—not because I don’t want to shower with you, but it’s a very small, like, incarceral-small shower stall and both our shoulders won’t fit, unless you want me to wash your hair for you. Which I’ve imagined doing, but you probably use a special shampoo for curly hair. Mine is just regular strengthening and UV protection.”
That Matthieu was the first face pulled out of thin air made Gabin want to bite through his own arm. “I’d love to stay the night,” he said quietly.
“Okay,” said Tobias. His posture softened, and he looked straight into Gabin’s eyes, left then right, then drifted down to his mouth.
Gabin parted it slightly and began to lean forward.
“You should drink some water,” said Tobias. “Your lips are starting to crack.”
* * *
Auditions for Piece 5 were being held in Studio B, which had a gilded ceiling but was otherwise the most stripped-down of the studios and the one with full theater dimensions. Anyone who wanted could sit in, but under the DANCERS designation on the daily schedule, the box read ALL PRINCIPALS. Someone had handwritten across the margin “HYPOTHETICAL CHOREOGRAPHY” in red china marker.
Grace and good sportsmanship. Gabin had promised her. So he crouched at his gym bag for a little longer than necessarily needed to towel off his neck as the rest of the corps filed out at the end of rehearsal for Carmen en route to Studio B—class field trip!—with perhaps a put-upon look on his face. But he would be good. He was getting everything he wanted, as Geneviève had sort of said, and everyone knew it, and he wouldn’t now be churlish when other people’s hard work got them something shiny. Grace and good cheer, all that jazz. So he pulled on Tobias’s size-large purple Tisch hoodie over his tank top and was just rising to give himself a big Tough Look in the mirror when he saw two or three men standing behind his reflection and jumped.
“What is this new piece, Gabin?” asked Tristan. At his shoulders Antonin and Apollon looked very serious. “What’s in it? Has he shown you?”
Gabin had spun around quickly in a manner not wholly analogous to James Dean. “No—uh. He hasn’t shown me.”
“But has he said anything?” asked Apollon. “The sheet says only principals. So it must be torture?”
“Is it because he didn’t like anyone else’s entrechat quatres in Piece 3? Is this a punishment?”
“It’s not a punishment,” said Gabin.
“How many parts does it have?” asked Antonin.
He threw a blindfolded dart at Tobias’s ground plan. “Just one or two.”
The boys made grim sounds. Apollon took a long pull from his raspberry açai green tea Celcius as if at Rick’s Café.
“Don’t worry,” said Gabin, once again smolderingly cool. “The piece is…it’s simple. Deconstructed.”
“He gave me shin splints after two rehearsals,” muttered Antonin.
“He must have made it impossible,” said Tristan, “we thought, you know, in revenge, because he was so unhappy and insane before the last one. And to keep Matthieu out.”
“Well, Matthieu is back,” said Gabin. He moved his shoulders into the same tilt as Tristan’s to mimic his nonchalance. Grace. Breeding. Discipline and docility. “He admitted he was powerless over alcohol and a higher power could restore him to sanity. Which in this case was Geneviève.”
Tristan sighed and adjusted his bandana. (He and Gabin were the rehearsal cowboys.) “Then I pray I am both cast and not cast. Like the tiny particle in the atom, forever there and not there, immeasurable. A danseur conjectured.”
Apollon clapped Antonin on the back and began to walk him out. “Come. I will Theragun your shins, mon frère.”
Before following them, Gabin put his hand in his hair and violently shook out his curls (which no one else had like him) and tightened his own bandana around his forehead. He tied the strings of Tobias’s hoodie into a bow, hoisted his bag, and looked over his shoulder into the mirror. The deep purple sweatshirt brought out the pink undertones of the two-day-old love bite under his ear.
During the five-minute union-mandated break at the end of the last hour, most of the company had crammed itself into a chattering lunchline at the barre opposite the mirror in Studio B. The twelve principals had separated themselves ever so slightly in a cluster, stretching eight-mile legs and exuding elegance. Tobias wasn’t there yet.
Gabin plopped his bag at Mishi’s hip and sat cross-legged next to her. She was a quasi-soloist very popular with the people and as such was probably permitted to audition; the tightness in her forehead above her nose suggested some anxiety on this point. Tobias liked her—they’d known each other for years in New York (aghh.)—but everything she did had a sort of Vive la France! penumbra forced over it by her literally aristocratic mother, and the other girls didn’t like her.
“Ankles still warm?” Gabin asked.
She offered him a tight smile. He grinned big and pointed at her, then to the middle of the floor.
She rolled her eyes, like Ugh, yes, and it will end in disaster. He encircled her ankle with his thumb and index finger and squeezed, jostled her leg. She laughed and elbowed his elbow. “Don’t break it!”
At the forefront of the principals, cranking his leg up in the vicinity of his earlobe, was Matthieu Rivière, back from his cathartic Grand Tour. According to rumor, Geneviève had persuaded him that Tobias’s hostility in the lead-up to Piece 3 had been a function of his—Tobias’s—short-term erotic despondency and was not based on any actual dislike towards Matthieu himself. Unknown was whether Matthieu had yet approached Tobias and facetiously shaken his hand, but that was exactly the sort of thing that fucking asshole would do. He loved starring in the theater of forgiving and forgetting. Oh, Gabin, back from Elba, so unripe and petulant like a baby olive, still I could never hold a grudge against a fellow dancer even one so minor and troubled and virginal as you, let me offer you my hand in front of everyone which you may lick either on the top or the bottom… Dick.
At Gabin’s hip Mishi was now texting furiously to a picture of a blond boy in a wide-brimmed hat. Gabin stretched upwards, then leaned against the mirror and let his legs stretch out and pointed his feet. Maybe during Matthieu’s turn he could subtly do his resistance band exercises. Just as he reached for his bag, a hush ran through the room, from the far side of the crowd and down the row as the doors opposite opened and Tobias strode in, taking off his matte blue noise-cancelling crown and saying, “Hi, everybody! Okay, this piece is for a principal, which I can tell was a message received as there are eighty people sweating in here. I hope the dozen of you that that actually entails feel gratified at this totally arbitrary display of power coming from over my head that was in no way part of the creative process. It’s a solo, anyway, so really only two of you should care. I told Geneviève after I showed her the steps this morning that I only need one, but she said for legal reasons this piece can’t be performed ten times in twelve days by one person or we could get sued for ‘malicious recklessness.’” He mimed the double American quotation marks and rolled his eyes. “I’ll start teaching the piece next week for three weeks because apparently we have to go slowly, and I have to work this whole thing out with the lighting guy, which is taking forever because he only speaks Provençal and I am still mixing up peux and veux, but for now I need to see who can jump. So.” He fanned one hand out towards the principals. “Who’s strong?”
The men half-looked at each other. Antonin had legs like a bodybuilder and Jean-Christophe had literally come to the National from the circus. Matthieu, draped in a sheer black gauze pullover and built like a sexy gazelle, was standing at a reserved angle but kept his eyes on Tobias.
You needed Geneviève to get him to stand in the same room as you, Gabin thought viciously. Positively irradiating good sportsmanship, he yanked a thread off his sock so hard it turned his fingertip purple.
“Who’s doing the guy in Carmen?” asked Tobias. “Who does the zapateado?”
Apollon raised his hand.
Tobias pointed at him. “Great. Sit down. Who’s Carmen?”
Ariana Alabastra kept her elbow in tight but raised her hand.
“Congratulations. Sit down. You…and you.” He forked two fingers at Inga and Tristan. “Centers of gravity at your sternums. Down.” He squinted at Loïs, who shifted her weight hopefully towards him. He retracted his head half an inch. “Oh. No. Down.”
She puffed a breath into her bangs. He cut through the pastel herd until four motionless dancers remained: Antonin, Alix Chiu, Séverine Sauvageon, and Matthieu. They stood as still as a painting as Tobias surveyed them in silence, notating in white chalk on that smudgy physics blackboard in his head whatever opaque and esoteric tenets and axioms these bodies offered to his diabolic plans.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I’m gonna have you do the jetés.”
At the word, a frisson sparked through the air. He pushed his hands towards the middle of the general crowd.
“You all—back. You guys, into the corner, okay, we need this big circle here. Alix, you’re gonna start—” He paused and frowned, looking at his quartet again. “Wait, where’s Mishi?”
At Gabin’s side, she sat up microscopically but didn’t speak. A few of the girls to her left exchanged glances of ominous significance.
Gabin raised his hand; when Tobias looked, he pointed sixty degrees down into Mishi’s curly bun.
“Oh, great,” said Tobias, perking up. “Why’re you in the corner? Come over here.”
He began issuing further minute instruction to the retreating cell of watchers and cast-offs to create his ideal stage. (“You, hide your legs behind her. What’s the point of socks that bright? Are you signaling the other side of Berlin?”) Mishi shot Gabin a quick, delighted smile and scrambled to her feet. Gabin smiled back, and honestly, he liked her too! Honestly—it was his pleasure to chivvy her forward with the particular power he held under these very specific circumstances. Cool! Love Mishi. He himself it must be said was also there, on the floor, warmed up and ready to jump, but he was—as everyone knew—already Tobias’s lead somewhere else, again, like the Carmens—or unlike the Carmens—and Tobias was clearly and dearly protecting his boyfriend’s very valuable ankles (maybe the most valuable ankles in the entire room?) as any caring boyfriend would even though technically they had not had the exact talk about relationship vocabulary yet and did Tobias even have boyfriends or did he just have pieces of candy out of the company box Jesus Christ SHUT UP GABIN!!!!
Tobias directed Mishi by the delicate shoulders to stand at Séverine’s right, glanced back into Gabin’s corner, caught sight of the logo on Gabin’s chest, and interrupted himself brightly: “Oh, that’s mine.”
Everyone looked around at Gabin and laughed, slouching and grateful, at the pause. Gabin’s heart strained its resistance band.
“You kicked me out very fast this morning,” he said.
Tobias put his hands on his thighs. “Okay, this is not a fair exchange, your French stuff is too tight. I feel like a linebacker. It took me ten minutes to get out of that silk PSG T-shirt last weekend, which I didn’t even realize wasn’t mine until I needed a crowbar to get my arms out. If I dress off your floor, I need a gentleman of the bedchamber like Louis the—which was the last one?” He slashed his throat.
Three girls shouted, “The sixteenth!”
“And what was I saying?”
“Jetés!”
He touched his temples. “Right. So, you five…circle of jetés, arms in fifth, complete extension, straight legs, front and back. About a…dozen, in twenty-five seconds.”
A murmur shot around.
“Will those be at the start?” asked Melanie, wide-eyed from the safety of the floor. “Of the whole dance?”
“Dead center,” said Tobias.
What the fuck, thought Gabin. Outwardly it was easy to smile with pride at his (boyfriend/TBD) and his evil genius. A dozen in half a minute…
Tobias absorbed the reverberations like a velvet wall. “There’s gonna be a thing with strobe lights, so you’ll need to time them perfectly. Leap backs, explosions—you’ll land on your hand once—it’s about six minutes in all, and I do think you’ll throw up, but just wait till you’re done, or the parts when the lights are off. I did the math, and from the middle on it comes out to about—which is an imperfect art for me, I’m terrible at accumulating calculations, I cannot figure out the tip to save my life. I once tipped a cab driver in Seoul the equivalent of a hundred and thirty dollars because I couldn’t do the conversion and the percentage fast enough in the line outside the museum in Gyeonghuigung, and I was getting really upset. I couldn’t look Bong Joon Ho in the face for the rest of the night. It comes out to eighty leaps in three minutes.”
The company erupted softly in horror.
He gave the line a wry smile. “What, you got into dance for the dental? Alix—front and center.”
As if down the pirate gangplank, Alix stepped forward.
Tobias climbed up into his Dracula seat on top of the piano and counted out 4/4 with merciless sangfroid, over and over and over. Alix did four perfect leaps, then couldn’t do the full extension at speed; Tobias had him start again three times in a row. One jeté every other second. Séverine had calves of steel and made the time but not at height. Alix started again. Antonin did a perfect first circle but started flagging on the back six. Mishi nailed them. Alix started again. Séverine did eight high in a row then nearly rolled her ankle landing the ninth. Antonin landed twelve but offbeat; he walked out of the imaginary circle backwards, hands on his waist and panting. Mishi slapped the insides of her thighs and did another round. Alix started again. And through it all, from his perch like the king watching from the royal opera box: Tobias Bell, chanting one two three four, five six what was that?, one two you’ll break your leg, five six just go sit down.
Winded and beautifully flushed, Antonin and Séverine folded themselves to the floor and were absorbed by the nearest corps lackeys; Alix and Mishi stayed standing but backed up as Matthieu was beckoned into the circle by his choreographer’s crooked finger.
Gabin rearranged himself against the mirror. He didn’t want to weigh his ankles down in one position for too long. Later he would wonder if Tobias had left Matthieu until last as an intimidation tactic or to more picturesquely litter the floor with corpses for the hero on his horse.
“You know what to do,” said Tobias.
“Oui,” said Matthieu.
Tobias began to count: one two three four. Five six seven eight. One two three four. Five six seven eight. On every backbeat Matthieu was in the air. His legs split and his arms reached to the sky. He did one revolution, then another. He got to the end, and Tobias counted again. He jumped. One jeté every other second. His legs split and his arms reached to the sky.
“Stop,” said Tobias after the sixteenth leap. “Stop.”
Matthieu’s toes hit the ground almost without sound. The class watching waited for some next new, terrible spell.
Tobias exhaled, unhooked his headphones from the back of his neck, and climbed off the piano. He walked to the front of the silent sitting crowd of seventy-nine and sat down between his discarded principals and Isadore Donadieu. Matthieu watched him, breathing, even panting, but alight. He could so clearly do it again.
“Again,” said Tobias.
One two three four. One three seven eight. One four six seven. Five six seven eight. And Matthieu floated around and around. And Gabin saw it, because his eyes were fixed on the back of Tobias’s neck and no one could tell but him: that look when Tobias’s periphery shunted inwards and he only saw you. Two black bars moving across the wooden floor, and in the middle his dancer. And against the mirror, heat rising behind his eyes, Gabin sat watching at the end of the row, after Sacha and Lula and Loïs and Binta and Toby and Dior and Anne.