Making Promises Read Online Free PDF Page B

Shane was grateful. Her bulimic days to keep a dancer’s weight were obviously over, and he thought she was beautiful. She was wearing a green unitard and tights, and her long, blond-streaked brown hair hung in waves down her back. Her brown eyes slanted mysteriously at the crowd as she stopped as though listening and then grabbed the 24

    strong drapery suspended from a hard-bolted scaffold, erected directly above the dancing square.
    As she climbed, a costumed man appeared—shirtless, but with a hairy pair of trousers on. Truly hairy—he also had pointed ears, long hair, and eyebrows colored in to wickedly arch. He began the narration as Puck, telling the story of Titania’s seduction by Oberon, and Shane was lost. He still saw small things—the bandages wrapped around Kimmy’s feet and knees were worn threadbare and showed him that she was still plagued by injuries, but the way her body moved like silk in water showed him that she was doing what she loved, and it was worth it. The way Kimmy’s mysterious smile never wavered even as she worked her dancer’s body around the hanging draperies, seeming to fly above the ground, told him that her heart was still in this hard, difficult work—and the way her hair clung to her face with sweat told him that she’d learned that nothing you really loved came without its price.
    Shane was so proud of her he actually felt his chest swell. His whole life, he’d wanted to be lovely and graceful, he’d wanted to move like his heart moved, and here was his twin sister, doing just that, and she was beautiful.
    And then Oberon entered, and Shane’s brain took a vacation.
    Oberon was supposed to be dancing in the forest before he caught sight of Titania’s loveliness and became enchanted. Shane was completely enchanted by Oberon.
    He was small—maybe an inch or so shorter than Shane’s sister—and slightly built. His hair was blond, tightly curled, and came to a point on his forehead above almond-shaped gray eyes. He was… delicate. Pretty. He had high, Slavic cheekbones and pouty lips and a little diamond of a chin, complete with a dimple, and Shane’s heart tripped over itself and fell in a puddle as he began to move.
    He moved like poetry, like music, like song. Birds were clumsier, cats more awkward, snakes less sinuous. The music was slow—it was time for a power exhibition—and Oberon performed. He was not dancing on a floor in toe-shoes; he was dancing barefoot, his feet wrapped like Kimmy’s, indicating injury or pain, and still he moved as though his body was pure power, and not flesh and bone at all.
    Slowly he extended his foot, his leg parallel to the ground in front of him. Just as slowly, he raised his foot, then grasped it, holding his leg Making Promises

    nearly flush with his side before he left his toes pointing to the blue sky and bent backward, taking his weight on his hands and making a graceful extension under the golden October sunshine.
    His other foot came off the ground, and he held the pose until Kimmy swirled the sturdy draperies around his feet. He tangled himself in them, and then—as the narrator told of Titania taking a fancy to the dancing faerie king—used the draperies and his amazing body to haul himself upward to join Kimmy for acrobatics in the air.
    Please God, let him like guys.
    Shane was half ashamed of the thought. It wasn’t like he had a chance—even a chance of a chance—with such a person. The man clasped hands with Kimmy, and the two started a slow spin, hands clasped, legs extended in the draperies, bodies stretched out over the ground.
    Oh God. It almost seemed impossible that Shane was breathing the same dust.
    It was just, Shane thought, his eyes hopelessly glued to that lithe body rippling with lean, corded muscle, that it would be nice to dream. It was like when a middle-aged woman, happily married, found out that her favorite movie star was gay. It broke her heart a little just to know that there wasn’t a