The Devil of DiRisio (2 page)

It was kind of unfair of me to call Pierre an ape, since he was actually quite attractive, in an emaciated, runway model kind of way. I would’ve preferred for him to be more apelike. Apes were strong. An ape could lift me properly. I prayed he would give up dance so I could be paired with another dancer. I wished he would go off and become a model. But then someone might have to stand at the end of the runway jiggling a set of keys so he knew which direction to walk.

Tonight the conversation with Will was the same for the most part.
Except, after picking on Pierre, we would usually go into our complaints about our respective lives.
Will would
complain he didn’t get enough playing time and no one on the team respected him because he was too young. Will had not turned nineteen yet, and the next-youngest person on the team was twenty-two and had already graduated college.

I would say that all the instructors thought I was too big to be a ballerina and that’s why they paired me with Pierre, because he was the tallest male dancer there. I’d never make a name for myself with him for a partner. He was awful.

But tonight, Will didn’t start his complaints. He grew silent. I knew what that meant.

When we reached the fountain, Will pulled me to him, kissed me and said, “I love you, Sonya. I love you so much I followed you from New Jersey to Rome. I would go anywhere for you and do anything for you. All I want is one thing.”

Then he took the familiar black felt box out of his pocket. It was the same one from when we were in New Jersey. The same one I had seen several times. Will got down on one knee and said, “Just marry me. Please.”

I loved Will. I really,
really did. But, he was my
first
love, my
first
kiss, my
first
boyfriend. It wasn’t like I wanted to play the field or anything before I settled down, but I was seventeen. What kind of seventeen-year-old even thought of settling down? I wanted to see the world. I wanted to dance across Europe. I wanted to dance with the Russian Ballet. And while I wanted Will with me, I didn’t think we needed to be husband and wife. Not yet, anyway.

I wanted to be Sonya Garrison, prima ballerina, before I simply became Mrs. Will Maddox. Was that selfish? Well, I couldn’t help it. It was how I felt.

All the tourists around the fountain started applauding. People were yelling
yes
in several different languages. I bent down and gave him a long kiss, which all the spectators took as an affirmative response. But Will knew better.

“Not yet, Will. I’m not ready,” I whispered in his ear. Will stood up shaking his head in disbelief as he put the box back in his pocket.

Then he put his arm around me and said, “Rejection number fourteen. How many times are you
gonna
shoot me down?”

“You’re just
gonna
have to keep asking to find out,” I said with a smile.

~ * * * ~

“Can we go upstairs?” Will
whispered
as he kissed my neck. We were back at the dorms, sitting on the stairs in the lobby. We started out just talking, but that had lead to more.

“Anna … Marie … is there,” I said.

“Let’s go to my place.”

I felt Will’s hand going up my dress and massaging my thigh. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t want him to stop. But I knew he would, eventually. Believe it or not, Will and I had not ‘done it’ yet. We’d had plenty of opportunities to, but something always got in the way. The night before my honor trial at Bridgeton Academy, while we were still living in New Jersey, we came really close. He had even reached for the condom, but then the phone rang and he had to go bail his sister Julia out of jail. Then the day of his graduation, I was finally going to shed this veil of virginity until we went to my place and found my mother waiting for me with my acceptance letter to the
DiRisio
Academy of Dance.

After that, I went on tour for three weeks with the
DiRisio
Ballet Company and Will went into his rotation of training and games. When we finally met up in Rome in July, Will planned this elaborate romantic dinner in his house. The mood was perfect, and it almost happened, but then Will nearly burned his house down because he didn’t read the directions properly on the breadsticks he was baking. In his defense, they were in Italian.

So then, we tried to forget about making it romantic and just tried to get it done. But it still didn’t happen; Anna Marie had interrupted us twice, his coach once, and his housekeeper three times. Once we were interrupted by Animal Control because apparently someone’s pet llama had escaped. Yes, a llama!

Now that I thought of it, it was kind of funny. But when it happened I wanted to personally kill all llamas. It was August, and I had just returned from another tour with
DiRisio
. I rushed over to Will’s house even before unpacking. I found him shirtless, sweaty, and sexy as hell as he lifted weights on his patio.

Normally, the sight of bodily fluids repulsed me, but that day I missed him so much and wanted him so badly that I would have gladly licked the sweat off of every inch of him if it meant that I could spend one more moment in his presence. Fortunately, nothing that disgusting was necessary as he missed me as well. I ran and leapt into his lap with so much force I nearly knocked him over and made him hit his head on that
bar
thingie
.

Without even a hello, we started kissing each other hungrily. I wrapped my legs around him as he stood up and started walking toward the bedroom, yanking my clothes off as he went. By the time we reached the bed, only my bra and panties remained. Will was kissing my neck and moaning my name when I saw something that resembled a creature from a
Star Wars
movie walk past the window. I screamed.

“What? What’d I do?” he
panted
as he jumped off of me. I told him what I saw and he said, “You’re being ridiculous, Sony.” Will started calling me Sony back when we first started dating. He always said I was more entertaining than his
Playstation
. “If you don’t want to do this I can wait. I’ll wait forever for you.” Then he smiled. He had the cutest, sweetest, most honest smile ever. I knew he meant what he said and that made me want him all the more. He made me warm and tingly all over. I couldn’t resist that smile. We started kissing again.

He unclasped my bra and started moving his lips down the center of my body, sending thrills straight through my core. I closed my eyes and threw my head back, arching my body to his, wanting more. But when I opened my eyes, I saw it again. And, I swear to God, the little booger was peeping at us through the window.

“Seriously, Will, there’s something out there,” I said, and for some reason I tried to hide my nudity from the beady-eyed monstrosity. Will turned around to look and, of course, by that time it had left, leaving Will thinking I was completely insane. Then the doorbell rang. Will sighed, grabbed a shirt, and went to answer it. The next thing I knew, Will and two other men were running around outside trying to catch the little four-legged contraceptive.

Once they were gone and the llama had been captured and returned to its rightful owner, Will had sat on the edge of the bed and laughed. There was no way the mood was coming back after such a fiasco.

Will thought the llama incident was a sign. He felt we might as well wait until we were married. So, recently, even if the conditions were perfect, we didn’t have sex. We could be completely naked behind a locked door with Rambo, the Terminator, and the crew from
Mission Impossible
standing guard and suddenly he would stop and murmur, “sign of the llama,” as he put his clothes back on. It felt more like, “
curse
of the llama.”

Yes, it was very frustrating sometimes, but Will was now determined to wait. Even if I spent the night at his house and we slept in the same bed, sleep was all we engaged in. The result was lots and lots of cold showers.
For both of us.

I think that was another reason why Will was in such a rush to get married. I know it wasn’t the only reason. I knew he loved me, and I knew I would eventually say yes, but sometimes I wondered if he was more in love with the idea of me than the real me. He fell in love with me two months before I even knew his name. He had watched me dance through the window of Ms. Alexander’s studio, and he thought I was some sort of angel that came to help him get over the tragic death of his parents. He even calls me
Angel
sometimes.

Will
wanted
a wife and children. He wanted to recreate the family a drunk driver had stolen away in the car crash that killed his mother and father. He thought I was the key to his happiness. I was his everything. Sometimes that scared me.

“It’s already after midnight. You have a plane to catch at five in the morning,” I told him.

“Don’t care. I want you,” he whispered into my neck.

“And
I
want
you
to get some sleep,” I said, pushing him off me. “How do you expect to get more playing time if you’re completely exhausted every time you go on the court?” Will grunted and ran his fingers through his golden hair.

“You nag just like a wife,” he said with his sweet smile. “Why don’t we go make it official?” He tapped the pocket that held his mother’s ring.

“Go get some sleep.” I said, rolling my eyes.

“That’s fifteen. You’ve rejected me fifteen times.”

“Well, at least that’s divisible by three,” I teased before running up the stairs.

“Did he ask?” Anna Marie
said as soon as I walked into the door.

“Yep.”

“What did you say?” I flashed my
ringless
hand as an answer. “You said no again? How could you? You’ve said no fourteen times,” she whined.

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen?
He asked you twice tonight? I swear to God, if you don’t marry this boy, I will.” Anna Marie tossed her Italian tabloid magazine in the air and jumped on the bed. She always read those trashy magazines. She said it was her way of learning the language.

I didn’t think it was helping. She constantly had to ask me to translate something for her. “What is the matter with you? I thought you loved him,” she said as she started jumping up and down on her bed like a five-year-old with a sugar high at a sleepover. That girl had so much energy.
       “I
do
love him. And I know he loves me. But when it comes down to it, I’ve only known him for like eight months. I’ve had blisters that have lasted longer.” Anna Marie stopped jumping and stared at me.

“Did you just compare your boyfriend to a blister?”

“I just don’t see the need to rush into marriage. I’m not even eighteen. I haven’t graduated high school. If he loves me as much as he says he does, he’ll wait till I’m ready.”

“You really just called your adorable, athletic, affluent boyfriend a blister. What is the matter with you?” Anna Marie continued to stare at me like I was some sort of retarded alien as she sat down on her bed. She would kill for a boyfriend like Will. Actually, she would probably settle for any boyfriend. Anna Marie was pretty average looking. She had dull brown hair that was not quite short and not quite long, not quite curly and not quite straight. She had a thin dancer figure, but not enough curves to attract the opposite sex easily. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t gorgeous. She was just Anna Marie Thompson, the only friend I had at this place. She was the only other American, so she was easy to talk to. I didn’t have to constantly translate in my head or decipher a thick accent. At the end of a long day of dance instructors yelling at you in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian, her Minnesota accent was a welcome change.

“Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said as I slipped off my shoes and sat on the bed. I rested my chin in my hand and added, “I just think I should get to know him better before I give him the rest of my life. I mean marriage is forever, or at least it should be.”

“What else is there to know about him? He’s gorgeous and he loves you. He really, really loves you. He calls you every
day,
he writes you love letters, he sends you gifts. He moved to another country for you, for Christ’s sake!” Anna Marie had started a ballet warm up with an imaginary bar as she said this. It was like the girl couldn’t sit still.

“You see, that’s part of the problem,” I said as I suddenly realized what had been bothering me about Will. “Sometimes he just overwhelms me with attention. It was the same thing when we lived in New Jersey. Don’t you think Will’s a bit obsessive or possessive or whatever you call it?”

“No, I think he’s romantic.” Anna Marie went into her grand battements which were really just high kicks. “Besides, you know he has a disorder. You don’t just get over that overnight.”

She was referring to Will’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He used to see a therapist regularly for it, but he hadn’t found another therapist since we had been living in Rome even though I’d reminded him about it several times.