“It’s not that,” she said apologetically. “I love when you touch me.”

He breathed a sigh of relief and sat beside her. “Is this better?”

“Yes and no,” she said softly.

He laced their fingers together, pressing a kiss to the back of her hand. “How about this?”

“I like that. I liked you standing in front of me, too. It’s not you, Quincy. Despite what it probably looks like after last night, I haven’t been with many guys, so if I react funny sometimes, it’s because I don’t know how to react.”

“It doesn’t look like anything to me, Roni, other than two people who are into each other.”

“Then that’s good. I’m still new to this whole couple-dating thing. My whole life has been about dance, as I told you the other night. But it goes deeper than just dance classes. Remember how I said that my grandmother wanted me to get out of the place where we lived?”

“Yeah. To be honest, the way you described where you grew up made me wonder why she allowed you to live there. I get that she refused to be run out of her home, but still. It didn’t sound like the best place for a young girl to grow up.”

“I know. Shortly before she died, I learned there was more to why we stayed. According to my grandmother, I started dancing as soon as I could walk. I don’t want to sound braggy, but she said that even when I was young I was a gifted dancer. When Elisa validated what my grandmother saw, it changed everything. It changed the way I saw myself, and it gave me a path to get out of the awful place where we lived. It’s true that my grandmother didn’t want to leave because she’d grown up there, but now I know that the only way we could afford my dance lessons was to stay there, because the apartment was rent controlled.”

“A means to an end.”

“Yes, and by the time I was twelve, I wanted that end with everything I had,” she said so passionately, her face brightened. “I danced my butt off seven days a week. The reason I’d never roasted marshmallows or gone to a single school dance or party was that I didn’t have a normal childhood. Gram and I never even went to the movies. I never saw a Disney movie until last year, when I watched one with Angela at her apartment. While other kids were out at parties playing Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven and when they were experiencing their first kisses and going to prom, I was here honing my skills, striving to be perfect, because talented wasn’t good enough to get into Juilliard, and that was my dream. I’m not complaining. It was my choice to work that hard. I could have had a less lofty goal and had more of a life, but I was never happier than when I was dancing. When I was lost in the music and motion, I was no longer the girl who had to keep her head down and run from the bus stop to the apartment, or sleep with my head under a pillow because the gangs outside my windows were up at all hours, squealing wheels and shouting profanity.”