Black Friday, indeed.
Colt hadn’t been gone twenty-four hours when Kyle was due to go back onstage. The show must go on, he’d told himself, and he needed to dance. It was what he did. He’d needed the audience, and the applause, to remind him where he belonged. To remind him of the only true passion he’d ever known before he met Colt.
Instead he was dealing with so much pain from all directions.
“Hey, Kyle? Kyle!”
He blinked and lifted his head, looking back at the stage. “Yes. Sorry.”
“Where do you enter from?”
They were rehearsing in his understudy for tonight’s performance. As dance captain, that was Danny’s job. Kyle was only there to help with the details. But just as his thoughts had been with a beautiful dark-eyed Cajun the night before, his heart wasn’t in this either. “Right. Sorry. For which number?”
Last night he shouldn’t have been dancing at all. Today, it was the only thing he wanted to do, and he couldn’t.
Ali squinted at him from the stage. “Kyle… are you all right?”
“Hey, let’s take five everybody, okay? No, ten. Take ten.”
Kyle sighed as Danny made his way up the aisle toward him. “Dammit.”
“Kyle, I really need your attention, or I’ll never get through this.”
“I’m sorry. I know.”
“What’s going on?”
He shook his head. He couldn’t find the words to explain that Colt had left him. Even if he could, Danny wasn’t the one to share his love life with. He couldn’t face “I told you so.”
Danny sat on the armrest of the seat in front of him. “It’s just a fracture. It’s not a big deal. It will heal up good as new, and you’ll be on it full-time in a few weeks.”
“That’s easy to say, isn’t it?” God, he was whining like a fucking baby.
“You’ve been pushing hard lately. Maybe your body is telling you it’s time for a rest.”
It wasn’t time for a rest. His own exhibition was supposed to open next week. “I’m going to have to pull the plug on my exhibition.”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
It was more than disappointing; it was irony. It was karma.
“I’m sorry, Kyle. I was focused on?—”
“Stop. You have a job to do.”
Danny nodded. “I do. And they do.” Standing up, Danny pointed to the stage, his empathetic expression suddenly neutral, all business. “Don’t let them down, and don’t waste their time.”
He blinked at Danny a few times, those words hitting him like being zapped with electric current, his brain just needed to sort itself out a second.
“Right.”
Of course, Danny was right. It was about the work. It was always about the work; it had to be. Whether he was onstage or not, people were counting on him. There was a show tonight.
“Yes, right. Of course, Danny. I apologize and I’m ready to work.”
Danny squinted at him, gave him a nod and a smile. “That’s more like it.”