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January hadn’t danced, not since Earth. It had hurt when he first stepped out of the artificial gravity of the station, because those first few steps into the red dust had been so weightless. Already, he had known that he would never dance again. It was too risky to everyone else if you moved like that, when you were an Earthstronger on Mars.
But it would have been so easy, so natural, wouldn’t it? To uncoil, step into momentum, take off. He would launch into the air, and his feet would come together, and he would spin and spin and spin like he never had before. Double assemblé, but make it triple, make it quintuple. The descent to the rusty ground would be all slow and bird-glide grace; he would flutter down into a cabriole, then do it all again in the opposite direction.
But he hadn’t done that, of course. He had hobbled through the sand with the others. More than the rotten-egg stench of the place, more than the cutting cold, that was what he would remember for the months to come, cramped in his quarantine cell. The imagined feeling of it, what it might have been like if he had simply leapt. He could attempt to stretch and keep himself limber in the little space he had, to maintain some kind of muscle strength in his arms and legs and core, but he couldn’t jump or spin or do anything more hazardous than a press-up. There were the rules. And so he rehearsed them in his imagination: whole ballets performed in Mars' floating gravity, mind dancing till his skull ached.
And then they had released him, and he’d stopped. There had been work to find, and a place to live, and the effort to find food his body could keep down. There had been little time to imagine dancing. He’d done it, sometimes, in the droning hours of the factory work, but only ever on the periphery. It was too sharp up close.
Eventually, mostly, he had stopped.
***
They were to dance at the wedding.
No one had told him about it until after the vows. He could concede there had been no reason to, when there was so much else to prepare and so little time to do it in. No one knew what he had been before, and so they hadn’t known it might be relevant to mention. It was completely reasonable; he told himself for the fourth time. There was no reason to be angry. It was only a dance.
It wasn’t a complicated piece. Any clumsy-footed Earthstronger could have done it; all short ceremonial steps to a string quintet. Still, the feeling of moving to music again made his lungs feel full for the first time in years. Everything fell away for a moment, and when he came back he had to fight hard against the heat that brimmed at the back of his eyes. He hoped no one had noticed—not Gale, and certainly not the journalists, who stood eating canapes while January, empty-stomached, pretended to meet Gale’s gaze, and Gale pretended back. The trick was to look just off the corner of their inside eye, and to unfocus. Their jewellery, all ruby and green, made hummingbird flashes through the blur when they turned.
It might have been pleasant, if Gale’s hands hadn’t been touching his skin like that. They weren’t hard, but they weren’t gentle. It was a cool-fingered, perfect in-between. They were hands that should only have belonged on something mechanical. And Gale moved as a machine did, too; a well calibrated one, because each step came down in the right place, precise, right on the heart of the beat. There was still no scent on Gale despite the heat of dancing, not even perfume or a hint of clean laundry.
They never once spoke, not even when the music lowered to its end. Here, at the drawl of a major chord, Gale turned their hip, and flicked their clean-jawed head, and dipped January with a steady hold on his back. And there was nothing in it. No life. January fully understood, as Gale began to tip their head down, that he hadn’t married someone cruel, or even someone cold. He had married something arid.
Gale moved down like something drifting, slowly enough that January could have jerked away if he had wanted to—but he couldn’t, not in front of everyone. He had known this was coming; he had agreed to it. And so he closed his eyes, and waited for it to be over.
Dry lips nicked at his, and all the cameras in the room shuttered.