Dance With Me (3 page)

Ed's eyebrows went up at the “who doesn't know his place” comment, and he paused, because he really didn't like to lie to Vicky. Finally, he nodded. “Okay.”

“Ed,” Vicky said, her tone full of warning.

Ed winked. “No calls, Vic. I swear.”

Vicky tapped her pencil a few more times before sighing and leaning back in her chair. “All right. Then just make sure I have plausible deniability.”

“Promise,” Ed said, grinning over his shoulder as he headed back out the door. “Good luck with your meeting.”

“Good-bye, Ed,” Vicky called without looking up.

Ed saluted, then headed back down the stairs and toward the gym.

La Bouche was playing when Ed pushed his way through the doors to the gym, some remix of “Be My Lover.” Generally Ed preferred to leave the nineties right where he'd left them, but he had to admit, this song had always made his toe tap.

Of course, not once in his memory had the song come with a hyped-up chipmunk with a mic screaming, “And one! And two! And one!” over the top of it.

Laurie Parker was, Vicky had told him, some big-time dance instructor whose family lived in Medina and who used to dance on Broadway and everywhere else famous, and really, in Ed's book this alone was reason enough to hate him. Ed had told Vic they didn't need some suburban snot coming over here to give them charity, but that had only made her mad.

“He's a friend, Ed, so back off,” she'd said. “In addition to his doing favors for me, we still get together every now and again to discuss our mutual love of Barbra Streisand. And don't turn up your nose at me, football-player-who-listens-to-Britney-Spears.”

“She's just misunderstood,” Ed had grumbled.

Laurie
. What kind of pussy name was that? Of course, it went with the rest of him. Laurence Parker was everything Ed hated in a man: he was rich, he was from the suburbs, and he was a freaking billboard for gay stereotypes. It was probably some sort of double standard, but Ed couldn't help it. His whole life he'd been fighting the “gay is girly” shit, and he was damn sick of it. Gay could also mean a semipro football player. Who listened to Britney, yeah, but he knew a few of the other guys on the team who did too. Really, Ed was a pretty macho guy who just happened to be gay. But
Laurie
. Shit.

He'd give Parker credit for not mincing when he wasn't leading aerobics classes, but that was about it. He was overly feminine both in his looks and his gestures. He was a dancer and an aerobics instructor. He fussed about getting dirty. He was stylish and graceful.

He listened to Barbra Streisand.

They weren't great reasons to hate somebody, Ed knew, but that didn't stop him getting his back up every time their paths crossed. The only good thing about Laurie was that he was always ready to fight back. So far in the month Ed had been coming to the center, they'd fought over Ed's mess in the locker room, space on the bulletin board, whether or not it was unhygienic of Ed to spit into the drinking fountain, whether or not everyone from the Twin Cities suburbs were pompous asses, the relative merits of dancing and football, and above all, the volume of the music Laurie used to accompany his classes. He really didn't know the guy outside of his name and that he always seemed to find Ed's last nerve, but really, that was more than enough.

And this was not the first time the PA system had failed to work the way the maintenance people swore it was wired to. This was not the first time, either, that Ed had complained, and it was not the first time Vicky had said there wasn't much she could do and Ed had tried to take matters into his own hands. On other nights when he was just in the weight room with a client, he'd been content to vent his spleen and make Parker as worked up as he was. Sometimes he'd managed to get the volume turned down, but that was it.

Tonight was different, and so tonight he planned to make his approach differently. But since no one had informed Laurie of this, he gave Ed a decidedly hostile glare as he wove his way through the throng of sweaty, flailing, middle-aged women.

“No,” Laurie said as Ed approached the stage, flipping up the mouthpiece of the mic so his sharp retort did not carry through the PA. He didn't so much as miss a beat, either, his petite, Lycra-clad body still stepping from side to side and pumping his arms up and down in time to the music. “No, I will not turn down my music. No, it is not my fault the system keeps screwing up. No, I will not use a CD player, because I can't. No, I will not at least listen to ‘decent music,’ because this is the music I have chosen and that I like. And yes, I have to count, because
that's the way we do it in aerobics class
.” He jerked his chin down and gave Ed a withering look. “Did I miss anything? Or have you thought up some new idiotic objections?”

“I'm teaching a class too.” Ed nodded to the hall. “In the weight room. In five minutes. Where right now no one can stand to be for more than ten seconds because it sounds like the aerobics class from hell.”

“It's
not my fault
—” Laurie began through gritted teeth.

“No, it's not,” Ed agreed, interrupting him. “But you're the only one who can do anything about it right now.” He put his hands on his hips. “I want to know what it takes to get you to use a different sound system just for tonight.”

Laurie pursed his lips. “There is no other—”

“There is, actually. It's old, and it's fussy, but it would work for one night. Just for tonight. Because this class isn't like training somebody where I can go out to the hall and explain something and then use sign language to communicate in the weight room itself. I need them to hear me.”

“Tell them to come back next week when the system is fixed,” Laurie said, and Ed shook his head.

“No. I have as much right to be here as you do. You get your way every time this happens, dude. It's your turn to bend over.”

The look Laurie gave Ed could have cut glass. “I am not—”

“I'm sacrificing too,” Ed said quickly, because he honestly did not want to piss him off anymore. Not until he got what he was after. “So I want to know: what is it you need? Something here at the center, something outside of the center, something at your job—you name it. Your car washed and waxed while you direct me from a lawn chair, your flower bed dug up, whatever. What do you need?”

Laurie still didn't so much as slow down his repetitive steps and arm pumps, but he did regard Ed thoughtfully for a few beats. “You
really
want it this time, don't you?”

Ed held out his hands. “Surely you can think of some suitably degrading task you'd love to give the meddling Neanderthal in exchange for one half of one night on a subpar sound system.”

Laurie blushed and looked away. “She wasn't supposed to tell you I said that.”

Ed started to get nervous. “Give me something. Anything. Something really embarrassing. I'm never going to give you a better opening than this. Anything, buddy.
Anything
.”

A strange shadow passed over the instructor's face. For a minute, Laurie looked haunted and oddly vulnerable. The look disappeared, and Laurie looked down at Ed with a glint in his eye.

“Anything?”

Ed held out his hands. “
Anything
.”

“Hold on.” Laurie lowered the mic before shouting out some new commands, leading his flock into a new move, taking a minute to encourage them before he pushed the mic up again and turned back to Ed. “What I need is for you to come one night a week for five weeks and be my assistant at my dance studio.”

Ed blinked. Dancing assistant? He tried to read Laurie's face to see if this was a joke, but no, Parker looked pretty damn serious. “What night?”

“Tuesdays,” Laurie said. “Seven to eight. For five more weeks.”

Ed grinned. “Consider it done,” he said and turned to make a beeline for the supply closet.

“There's more,” Laurie said, his voice full of warning.

“Then tell me already,” Ed said, starting to lose his temper. “My class is about to start.”

“As my assistant,” he said, looking Ed right in the eye, “mostly you'll be dancing with me.”

Ed's eyebrows shot up. Then he shrugged. “Okay. Is that all?”

Laurie looked at him with extreme suspicion. “
You
will dance with
me
. Just like that?”

“Do I have to do it naked or something?” Ed asked.

“I'm serious about this,” Laurie said, starting to sound tart. “So if your plan is to just agree now, get your way, and then stand me up—”

“I will get your phone number after class,” Ed said, “and give you mine. But if I'm not there, you can go to Vic to get your pound of flesh. You know she'll be good for it. Now"—he jerked his head at the back of the stage—"can I get you the damn sound system?”

When Laurie jerked his head in reluctant approval, Ed hurried around to the stairs and made his way onto the stage. He glanced at his watch before he started lugging out the speakers and worked faster, because his students were probably already there by now and wouldn't hang out too long. But before he had even half of it out, he felt a hand on his arm, and when he turned around, Laurie was there, holding out a business card.

“You'll lose half your class time getting all that out,” he said. “I'll do it myself. Here, take this and go.”

Ed stopped with one speaker hoisted in midair and raised an eyebrow.

To his credit, Laurie only lifted his chin a little and pressed the card forward. “Seven p.m. next Tuesday at the address on this card. Except, actually, why don't you come at six forty-five so we can go over what I need in more detail. Wear comfortable clothing and dress shoes with a heel, if you have them. If you do this for me, it really will be a favor, and I don't mind hauling out the equipment and pausing my class to do it. But if you
don't
show up"—his chin came back down and his eyes acquired some very pointed daggers—"I'll collect the pound of flesh myself.”

“Fair enough.” Ed put the speaker down, took the card, and stuck out his hand. “Thanks, buddy.”

Laurie put his hand in Ed's, letting his slim fingers be swallowed up in Ed's beefy paw. “You're welcome.”

Ed shook his hand once before letting go. “See you at quarter to seven on Tuesday,” he called out, breaking into a jog and vaulting off the edge of the stage.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter Two

fantasia: flamboyant style of tango used for performance

Two days after giving his card to Ed at aerobics class, Laurie sat in traffic, trying to convince himself he shouldn't call Vicky to get Ed's number and call his “favor” off.

On a good day it was a thirty-minute drive from Laurie's studio in Eden Prairie to his family's house in Medina, but when it was rush hour, Laurie knew he could plan on adding at least another fifteen minutes as he joined the commuters coming home at the end of a long day. Usually he was working during rush hour, so it annoyed him to have to limp along behind SUVs and midlife-crisis convertibles instead of enjoying a less populated highway.

Today all the tops were up on the convertibles, however, because an arctic air mass had forced Indian summer to give way to October cold. It was such an abrupt switch that it made Laurie ache, compelling him to turn the heater on full blast, which meant the fan was so loud he could barely hear Robert Siegel's comforting delivery of more bad news about the economy over the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio. The cold, traffic, and regret over his arrangement with Ed made an already unpleasant errand so unpalatable he had nearly turned off three times at different exits and gone home. If he thought he could come up with an excuse his mother would buy, he might have carried the urge through and bailed. But he knew even if he managed one, this dinner party would happen on a different day, and between now and then he would need to deal with increasingly aggressive maneuvers by his mother to get him to “see reason.” Best, he decided, to get it over with.

He allowed himself a compromise, however, in being even later than he already was, which he achieved by getting off at Shoreline Drive and indulging in a driving tour of Lake Minnetonka. The lake was beautiful at sunset, and Laurie slowed down as much as he dared so he could drink it in. He used to take this drive all the time in high school, on his bike when he was too young to drive and in his car as soon as he was sixteen. He'd come here when he was upset, which was admittedly often. While other kids were out getting drunk and getting laid, Laurie had parked—alone—along the shore, staring out across the water, dreaming of the day he would get out of Minnesota.

And now here he was, back again.

He smiled up at the mansions lining the north side of the road, thinking of how he'd vowed to own one someday. In his mind, he would come back to Minnesota a famous dancer, and he'd live in one of the grand houses by the lake, entertaining his famous out-of-town guests with lavish weekend parties. Oh, he'd had it all worked out. And “famous” had been one of his favorite adjectives and his highest goal.

Now...

He pulled off the road and parked the car where he could look out over the water, leaving the vehicle running, though he did turn down the heater fan so he could hear himself think. In afterthought, he turned off the radio as well. The past was starting to make him feel morose, so he thought about the present instead: about his mother's party and about Ed Maurer.

The two made strange bedfellows, and for a moment Laurie smiled, imagining what his mother and Ed would look like in the same room together. Polished, china-beautiful Caroline Parker and big, brutish Ed Maurer. He imagined showing up at the party with him, of Ed in his workout clothes damp with sweat as he broadcast his crude humor, and he imagined his mother in her cream and beige pantsuit and pearls, slender hands folded together in front of her as she tried not to show how horrified she was. For a minute, Laurie wished he'd have asked Ed to be his date tonight instead of asking him to help with the ballroom dance class.

Which was a flatly ridiculous thought, and it illustrated just how very much Laurie had lost his mind. Why would he bring Ed to his parents’ house?
Why
? To be insulted by Ed in front of people he knew for a change? And
why
had he asked Ed to be his assistant in that ballroom class? Except that answer he knew. And as usual, it was Ed's fault.