Lie Until You Laugh

29- Plane Tickets

“Line up for stretches,” He’s Penn the Petrifying now. He’s always Petrifying during practices, and now that it’s Monday morning, he’s in character.

I line up with the rest of the tired dancers and we start to stretch. I see Penn steal subtle glances at me and then I’ll blush and look away and in my peripheral vision, I can see him laugh a little bit but before anybody can notice it, he’s scarily frowning again.

We stretch and then when our ten minute stretch is over, Penn starts us off by telling us that we’re done with partner dancing for a while and he explains that now we’re going to go into hip hop. I’m pretty okay with hip hop, so I don’t have a problem with that, I guess.

“After July, I’ll start giving you more time to work on your competition piece, so you’ll have a lot of time to work on that,” Penn informs us before we actually start working on dance moves. “But it’s only the middle of July so we’ll talk more about that later. Now, we’ll start with a pop.”

And so practice goes by and we learn a few basic hip hop moves before we put them together in a sequence that’s actually really challenging. Penn does his prey thing, where he walks around and critiques everybody’s dancing. I know that I shouldn’t be nervous because he’s my boyfriend now and he shouldn’t make me nervous when he does this, but when we’re at practice, it’s like he’s a completely different person. So as he starts to critique Stella, I become nervous about what he’ll say about my dancing.

He analyzes me as I repeat the dance over and over again. He watches my every move with his scrutinizing gaze and doesn’t say anything for the longest time. I think about Saturday night, how we were cuddling in my bunk together and I almost find it hard to believe that this is the same person. If I didn’t have a faint hickey in my neck from Saturday, I would be convinced that the past week was actually a dream or something. My eyes travel down to his shirt-covered abs and I blush when I remember seeing them in the flesh on Saturday.

“Stay focused,” Penn finally speaks, obviously following my train of thought. I can tell by the smirk I see on his face when I look up at him again. “Concentrate.”

I am concentrating, I think to myself coyly. On your abs.

He gives me one last lingering smirk and then continues down the line of people. I let out a long breath of relief and continue dancing until he gets through all three rows of people and then gives us a five minute break.

“I saw them,” I blurt to Stella, Brian, and Mason as we sit down in the back of the studio for our five minute break and start to guzzle our water.

“You saw what?” Mason wonders curiously.

I point towards Penn. “Them.”

“REALLY?!” Stella squeals excitedly. “Tell me everything. I must know, I really have to.”

“Are you talking about his abs?” Mason asks and both Stella and I nod.

“Okay, well close your eyes and picture them,” I say. “They’re pretty great, right?”

Stella nods with her eyes closed. “Oh yeah.”

“Well, times that by like, two thousand and that’s what they actually look like,” I try to explain.

“Do you guys do this every time one of you gets a boyfriend?” Brian laughs.

“Don’t be stupid,” Stella scoffs. “There was no need to do it for you because I’ve already seen you shirtless. We did get a small description of-”

“Stella,” Mason snaps, seeing where the conversation was going and her face starts to redden.

Stella laughs shamelessly and I remind myself never to tell her anything too personal. “Okay sorry. Anyway, did you touch them?”