“That doesn’t sound—”

“Good?” he interrupted in order to finish for me. “No. It isn’t. I hate it. It drives my mother crazy. But I love her and I want to see her and that comes with seeing him. And he’s my dad. There’s a pull. Nearly impossible to fight. So I get it. How it’s hard to let go. Hard to stay away. But my father never hit me.”

All right.

I was beginning to rethink my friends being much better friends than me. Because it seemed everyone knew what I didn’t quite openly share (but I still shared) during our kidnapping. This being about my dad getting physical.

And really, what happened during a kidnapping should stay with the kidnapping.

“Axl—”

“He never drove me to harming myself.”

I closed my mouth.

He looked down and touched “After,” a piece that came to his hip, and then his attention returned to me.

“This breaks my fucking heart,” he declared.

I held my breath.

Oh yes.

He knew that this studio was where I expressed things.

“It’s you as a girl and it’s you as a woman, cast in cement, formed of iron, and I get it’s hard to break free. What I don’t get is that it isn’t hard to come out of yourself and take someone’s hand. You got at least half a dozen of them extended to you. Why the fuck would you not only avoid them, but slap them away?”

Since he wasn’t letting me talk, even if he asked a question, I didn’t say anything.

“Lottie’s hurt, Hattie,” he shared.

Oh no.

I closed my eyes.

“Yeah,” he said.

I reopened them.

He kept going.

“She likes you. You mean something to her. Last night was so important, everyone’s gathering, Elvira’s pulled out her boards, all so they can celebrate one of their own, and where the fuck are you?”

“I had something come—”

“Don’t give me any of your shit.” He shook his head sharply. “I don’t buy it.”

I shut my mouth again.

“Mac has a heart of gold.” “Mac” being what the guys called Lottie, seeing as her last name was McAlister, at least for the next few weeks. “What the woman doesn’t have is the patience of a saint. So you blew it last night, Hattie. Fuckin’ huge.”

With this statement, suddenly, breathing felt alien to me.

Axl walked my way.

He got close.

He stared down his nose at me.

And breathing was a memory.

“And you dance for me,” he said quietly, but not a sweet quiet, an angry one, “begging me to kiss you like I mean it. I wait over an hour for you in the parking lot after, and you run away. You dance for a room full of people, but it’s all about me, then you run away from me.”

God.

I’d done that.

After the opening night of the Revue, I’d delayed as long as I could before I’d gone out.

Partly because the girls and guys were all meeting at an after-hours bar to celebrate, and I intended to do a flyby, but the longer I delayed getting there, the less time I’d have to spend there before I could say I was tired and leave.

Mostly, though, it was because I worried, after I looked at Axl when the dance was done, that he’d be waiting for me.

And he was.

Right outside the door.

And I’d run from him.

I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about it since.

But now that he brought it up …

Humiliating.

“The girls tell me you’re shy,” he said. “They tell me I gotta put in the effort. I do, and time and again, you make a goddamn fool of me.”

Oh no!

I didn’t want him to feel like a fool.

“Ax—”

“So yeah, Hattie, last night, hurting Lottie, you fuckin’,” he got nearly nose to nose with me, so close, I could see thin threads of midnight striking through the steel of his eyes, “blew it.”

And with that, he moved away, walked around me to the door, and he slammed it behind him.

I didn’t even turn to look at it.

I stared at “After.”

He was right.

That was me.

After my failed audition for the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

Mom had been there, and of course Dad, both of them together, even though she’d moved out and got her own apartment at least a year before.

I’d been fourteen.

Two years before that, my ballet teacher had told my father, “Don, she’s talented. There’s no doubt about it. She just doesn’t have the body for it. Through no fault of her own. Hattie’s healthy. Fit. Limber. She has grace and power. She’s just too tall and big boned. She simply isn’t built to be a prima ballerina.”

And even before that, Mom had said, “Hattie, sweetie, dance for you. If you’re not dancing for you, you need to stop dancing.”

I thought I was dancing for me.

I loved dancing.

I loved dancing and painting and calligraphy and helping Mom decorate her cakes.

“My artsy girl, my free spirit, my rainbow,” Mom used to call me.

But I’d messed up, twice, during my solo routine at the audition for the Chicago Academy. They’d let me start again, but not a third time.

And after, Dad had lost it, backhanding me, catching me on the jaw.

Right in front of everybody.

Huge drama.

Huge.

The teachers were horrified and ticked. They threatened to phone the police.

Mom had lost her mind.

“If you think you’re getting custody now, Don, you’re insane. I’ll fight you ’til I die, until I die, you monster.”

And I’d retreated from their hate, doing physically what for years as they hurled it at each other I did mentally. I curled into myself in a corner, just like “After.”

A teacher and Mom had talked me out of my solitary huddle, and all the way back to the hotel, Mom was on me, “Has that happened before, Hattie? Has your father touched you like that before?”

I told her no.

And he hadn’t.

He’d never hit me.

But she stayed on me.

So I confessed that he’d pinch me. Grab my arm in a way it hurt. Sometimes pull my hair.

“How had I not seen this?” she’d lamented, openly torn to shreds. “How did I miss this? How didn’t I know this was happening?”