Page 62 of Two-Step
“Hmph.You say thatnow,”she mutters, but I see relief behind her eyes.
“Okay, then. Without music, let’s walk through it.” I position us back in the Two-Step stance. “Step-together-step-touch. Step-together-step-touch.”
She’s comfortable here. No missteps or wrong footing. I keep it up for a few more repetitions.
“Now, step-together-step-back,” I say, moving my grip to her hands, stepping back on my right foot and waiting for her to mirror me. Then I make a trellis of my left and her right arm. “Then step-in-step-around-step-together-step-back.”
Iris takes one step and stops, looking up at me from under our arms. “Like this?”
She’s all wide-eyed and beautiful. Damn, she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I swallow hard and nod. “Yep. Keep turning. Think of it as turning ninety degrees with each step, so you end up facing me from the other side.”
“Geometry,” she murmurs with a glint in her eye, moving easily through the rest of the turn. “That was my jam in high school. Way better at that than algebra.”
My grin breaks free, followed by a rogue thought. If she would have been in my geometry class, I would have learned nothing about angles. Just curves.
I clear my throat, grasping for something else to think about. “Where was high school?”
Iris rolls her eyes. “All over, really. Freshman year was in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Sophomore year was in Tarzana, and then I did my last two years online because I was working.”
My brows draw together. “Acting?”
“Yep. Modeling and acting.”
I blink. “You mean you’ve been working since you were—”
“Sixteen,” she says with a nod.
“Full-time?” I can’t hide my surprise.
She executes a little back and forth head tilt. “Mostly. When I was lucky.”
We should be dancing, but instead, we’re standing still because I can’t stop asking questions.
“So you’ve been acting professionally for how many years?”
“Six,” she answers, grinning.
This makes her twenty-two. My God, she’s a baby.
A baby who has been working in her career longer than I’ve been teaching.
“That’s incredible.” I mean it. I’m a little in awe. And what the hell am I doing? I get us back on track. “Again. Step-together-step-touch. Step-together-step-back.”
And we go through the lead up and the turn again. Again. Again. And again. Each time at the slowest possible pace. We move too slowly for any mistakes because I want her to feel successful.
It works.
“This isn’t so hard,” she says, coming out of, oh, probably our twelfth turn.
I fight my grin. “Maybe it’s time to add some music.”
Her eyes go wide. “I mean, we don’t have to.”
I chuckle. “Yeah,chère,we do.”
“Sha?”she imitates me, frowning. “What’s that mean?”
