“I need it now. Give me your hands.” And he covered his face with my hands, breathing them in.

A second round of rapid runs in a circle of one man’s pain. Trains on distant tracks from the music. Hands from one dancer holding the other, lifting and drawing me nearer. In watching them, I was dancing, too, dancing until sweat covered the floor like a cascade of tears now glowing in swirls of radiant, colored stagelights. Then feet reaching for the ground.

Splinters. Watch out for the splinters.

Once he had shaken the tobacco-stained hands of a sharecropper’s boy, the son of his mother’s maid. And he rode all the way home smelling his hand and knowing how hungry he suddenly was for the rough love they held. The first night we spent together, all he wanted to do was sleep with his nose pressed to the part in my hair. He said my smell came from the soil.

The lights faded from blue to orange. The dancers gained shadow and space. Each threw a bit of his body into the light, captured color and grace from the bare stage.

He fumbled at my jeans. His fingers couldn’t hold. “Just take me,” he whined. “Give me what you are.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Metro.” He was shaking in my arms.

“I won’t call you nigger ever again. I’ll be your nigger. I’m not a white motherfucker. I’m not.”

“Who called you that?”

“They did. Out there. In here. What’s the difference?”

“Talk sense, Metro. What’s gotten into you?”

“I’m not Metro anymore. I’m Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima.”

“And what does that make me, huh? Another nigger, huh.” And before I realized it I was shaking him, slapping him, knocking him about the head. He started to cry. I felt his mouth curl up, the tears cascade. I licked them dry. I held him in my arms. “You don’t need it like this, baby. Not like this.”

Then saxophone. A flurry of trumpets. Staccato piano. The A-train stride. Arms vibrating, legs twisting. Torsos lean. Feet firm on the ground. Hips whirling in a storm. Floorwork. Wideman extension. Arms reaching up-two-three, curve-two-three, down.

“Hold me,” he said, pressing my hands to his chest, making me feel him all over. “Hold me here,” he said, guiding my fingers to his throat. “Keep holding. Tight. Tighter. Tighter.” His voice was a strained whisper. Air rushed out of him.

Palms flat, knees bent in geometry. Arabesque. The dancer ran and leapt and landed in the waiting arms of the other. My muscles panted loudly with the dancers, my spine arched up and wide. “Touch me. Hold me,” my body said from the distance.

“Get your clothes on. I’m taking you out of here.”

“Yes, Jesse.”

“You all right, now?”

“Yes, I’m better now.”

“You go first. Watch your step. Take my hand.”