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"You will be excused from anything after 8pm to give yourself time to get showered and to the dance studio."
I curled my face in disbelief. This was extreme. No one ever got excused from camp.
"Look," Coach said, lowering his eyes to his desk while he thought about his words. "This is something I think you need. You're hardened, heavy. It’s making your game suffer. Try my method without giving me shit."
I nodded and started to turn around. Coach always got his way and I guess he earned that right. I wanted to do better and be a part of this team. I wanted to make him proud. If I could do that by whatever exercises he had planned, I could handle it.
* * *
"You have gotto be fucking kidding me," I mumbled Tuesday evening outside of Brisé. Little girls in tutus and pink tights were leaving with their parents, one after the other.
A quick google search on my phone had told me Brisé meant: a jump in which the dancer sweeps one leg into the air to the side while jumping off the other, brings both legs together in the air and beats them before landing.
What the fuck?
I know Coach did not send me to be a ballerina. He didn't, he wouldn't. No way in hell.
I swiped a hand down my face and moaned, the motion making me cringe because I was so damn tired from practicing all day in the Atlanta heat. This explained why Coach insisted I shower, though. I was sure my football sweat wouldn't be very kosher on the floor of this prim studio.
When I felt like the coast was clear, I walked across the street and opened the door to Brisé. The smell of perfume and froufrou immediately hit my senses and made me scrunch my nose. And I wasn’t even in the dance room. This was just the lobby.
There were chairs to the right, lined up along a huge window that looked onto a dance floor. To the left, there was a reception desk and little pink chairs lining a huge mirror. My guess was that was where the kids got themselves ready for class.
I waited by the door, unsure if I should move in further or wait for someone to appear. I was way out of my element here and quite frankly, I was tempted to turn around and tell Coach I would ride the bench. No complaints either, I would keep it nice and warm for whoever was starting in my place. Fuck, anything would beat being a damn ballerina two nights a week.
Then the thought of exercise hit me. Coach used the word, exercise.
Exercise.
He didn’t say a damn thing about dancing. Sure, he had mentioned that dancing kept players loose and flexible, but he didn’t mean ballet. Not a chance.
I was still standing with my back against the door when a woman entered the lobby through a back office door. She didn’t see me, and for some reason, I didn’t say anything. I stood there with my hands behind my back, ready to bail out of the door if she so much as breathed the word perriot.
Her back was to me behind the reception counter, fumbling through papers, so I took that time to take stock of my new exercise instructor. Her dark hair was tied up in a tight bun, not a damn hair out of place. She was wearing pink tights and a black ballet outfit—something you would see on TV.
The ballet get-up was doing things to me that I didn’t expect. For some reason, I was into it. I watched on as she lightly moved from one thing to the next, so delicately that she looked like she was floating.
When she was finally satisfied, she turned around with the kind of grace I expected to see and screamed as though she had been attacked. The poise and finesse that I saw in her moments before was gone.
Her face was red and her right hand was stretched out, as if she was a tight end trying to defend the football on a run down the field. Her other hand was over her heart, that was most likely beating out of her chest.
Didn't she expect me? Coach had to have set this up by telling her, right?
"Um, hi?" I asked, unsure what else to say.
"Please leave," she said firmly, trying to hide her fear. "The cops are keeping an eye on this place since last time."
Last time?
"Um, what?" At this point, she was probably scared of how illiterate I sounded. I was giving her the cliche hard-nosed meat head that played football and grunted. I needed to wrap my head around what the hell I did.
"I have a gun," she stressed, trembling in her voice this time.
I finally held my hands up, "Ma'am, my name is Ty Black and I play football but my coach sent me here and I am starting to think I am in the wrong place."
I reached into my pocket and grabbed the paper coach gave me. I started to read it but she had already lowered her hand and her face had settled into a proper poise.
"I am so sorry, Mr. Black," she had turned right back into the graceful and composed woman I had watched dancing around a few minutes before. "I am expecting you, Mr. Peyton arranged everything."
