“Alright, brother. I’ll see you soon.” I start to end the call when his voice comes back over the line.
“Where are you now?”
The air, my breath, and everything around me feels like it freezes in that instant. I can’t tell him what I’m doing or who I’m seeing. He would dig far too deep into my psyche and fuck me up more than I already am over seeing her. No, I need to keep this to myself. For now.
I clear my throat again, my heart hammering away in my chest while I force my thoughts into overdrive, looking for an easy answer. There are so many, I’m sure, but I don’t think of any of those. “Took a little detour to San Juan Island. You know, just revisiting some of our old hangouts.”
The second-long pause before Anderson responds is enough to let me know he’s onto my lies. Not that he would have any clue of the specifics. As the older brother, Anderson has always been able to see right through all of us. Even at thirty-one years, I can’t seem to escape his big-brother mentality.
“Sounds good,” he says, and I’m thankful when he doesn’t question me. “See you when you get here.”
I end the call so fast, my head is spinning, but my heart rate keeps its pace, thanks to the sight in the second-floor window.
Seeing Violet at that party—those magnetic brown eyes, those achingly brilliant curves, and those dance moves that put me in a trance just as much as they used to—made me far too curious for my own good. Which is why for the past two months since that night, I had to find out more.
Much of her life is a mystery, but it was easy to track her down. All I had to do was find out where the owner of the private dancers worked, and that led me right to Pinklettes. Violet works in the bar right beside it.
From there, I found her apartment, where she seems to live alone. And then I found the dance studio she seems to frequent. Maybe she works there. Maybe she just dances. Either way, I love to see that she’s still living out her dream in some capacity.
Violet had been dancing as long as I’d known her. In fact, the first time I laid eyes on her was the first day of first grade, at recess, when she and some other girls put on a tap-dance performance on the basketball court when my boys and I were approaching to play basketball.
“Maybe you should practice a little more before you steal our court,” one of my friends had chided angrily.
“We’re trying to play ball,” muttered another.
“Yeah, this is our turf!” yelled another.
Then the boys looked at me, like they expected me to throw an insult out too. I was the only one who hadn’t.
Feeling the heat of their eyes on me, I stared directly at the dark-haired girl in the center of the dance troop and glared. “Your moves suck.”
It was a terrible insult, one that felt phony leaving my mouth. The tap dancing didn’t bother me. In fact, I couldn’t stop wondering who the girl in the center was and why I hadn’t seen her before. But nothing made me feel more terrible than when the girl in the center stopped dancing, stared back at me in shock, and then burst into tears.
Turns out, it was her first day at a new school, and she had been attempting to make friends. I found that out when I cornered her at lunch and apologized profusely. It wasn’t in my nature to make girls cry. If anything, I was the happy one. The kind one. The helpful one. But that day, I was the bully.
Maybe it was my guilt from that day, but I was determined to make friends with the new girl.
I invited her to sit with my friends at lunch, along with her friends too. I carried her book bag to and from the bus, and I claimed any seat next to her before anyone else could. I asked her to come to my lake party that summer, promising her that we would always be friends. And I never stopped encouraging her to dance.
Before I knew it, my guilt had transitioned into something completely different, and wholeheartedly genuine, surprising both of us. Violet had somehow become my best friend. And I had become her best friend too.
It’s Violet’s profile I see up in the dance-studio window, just like when I saw her standing in front of that mirror two months ago. She’s got her hair knotted in a bun, her hand resting on the ballet bar along the window, and an arm raised, bringing her entire form to her full height.
She’s stretching. I remember enough about her dancing back in grade school to know what those long reaches and deep bends mean. There was a time when watching her became a secret obsession, one I never wanted my friend to know had turned from innocent to erotic as hell. And I remember the exact day fifteen years ago that my impure thoughts began.
She’d gotten a ride to dance class from her dad but asked me to pick her up after. It wasn’t an unusual request. She was a few months younger than me, so I would drive her everywhere when her father couldn’t. But for some reason on that day, I decided to walk inside instead of wait in my truck.
The moment I spotted her through that transparent glass wall, something inside me changed. I hadn't even recognized her at first. She was strutting across the dance floor to a slow and sultry number in knee-high heeled boots and wearing nothing else but a long, oversized white button-down top.
We were sixteen, barely past driving age—and sure, my attraction to the female species dominated my mind and, well, other organs—but Violet had always just been… Violet. However, on that day, she was a lit fuse to my every desire. A ticking time bomb. And maybe even a red flag—an indication for what was to come.
Looking back on that day, our detonation was inevitable. I just never expected our friendship to explode right along with it. And as I sit here today, watching Violet dance through the top-story window, my debate on how or when or if I might approach her weighs heavily on my heart. So much so that when the light in the studio flips off, I’m jarred into panic mode. I scramble to sit upright in my seat, my heart galloping in my chest.
What am I going to say?
How will she feel about me being here?
Will she run again?
That last question sobers me some, the reality of our situation illuminating my mind like a floodlight, forcing me to change my perspective.
What am I even doing here? I might have been the one who left town seven years ago, but it was Violet who destroyed our friendship. It was Violet who shattered every last fragment of what we’d built, including any possibility of a future. Yet it’s me who’s become so obsessed after one glimpse of her months ago that I can’t even formulate a single thought without her in it.
Anger rumbles in my chest, my mood suddenly changing. An eagerness to leave comes over me in a heated rush. My hand flies to the push button to start the ignition but halts the moment I see the door to the two-story suite push open.
Violet walks out in an oversized gray sweater and knee-high boots that remind me so much of when we were sixteen. She’s every bit a woman now. Her dark hair is shorter than I’ve ever seen her wear it, reaching just past her chin. Clearly, the long hair she wore that night of the party was an extension of the mask. A disguise. But the purple tint of her dark-brown hair is unquestionably her own and even more distinct under the lamplights.
An expression of concern flits across her face as she looks around the nearly empty parking lot, her eyes locking on my truck. I sink slowly, praying that the broken lamppost I parked under is enough to shield me from her view. The irony is not lost on me. The shadows are my masquerade. My mask. And I’ll use them until I’m ready to be seen.