Adult Content Warning
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Summary
“It’s—a nice, neat thing to know,” Billy says. “I’d practice when I was alone.” This is true. In a hazy shaft of light in his garret bedroom, stooped so as not to strike his head, he’d sometimes trot a methodical box-step. It was neither the romance nor the grace of the thing, but its order; the mercy of its repetition. One might enter a space outside of time; each turn twin to the one before. It was as though there was always, somewhere, a room in which he might be found waltzing and he only had to step into it to meet himself there. (His mother characterized him as a lonely child, but she was wrong: he was a solitary one.)
“And when you weren’t alone?”
“Jealousy is unbecoming of you, Cornelius. You get a face like a kicked pup. All stung-looking and wide-eyed.”
“I’ll show you a kicked pup—I know a fine long greyhound could use a swift boot to the ribs.”
“Oh, darling. I’m not in the mood. And anyway, there’s no one else now, is there?”
“Is there?”