Sometimes he’d managed to get the volume turned down, but that was it. On other nights when he was in the weight room with a client, Ed had been content to vent his spleen and make Parker as worked up as he was. system had failed to work the way the maintenance people swore it was wired to. So far in the month Ed had been coming to the center, they’d fought over Ed’s mess in the locker room, space on the bulletin board, whether or not it was unhygienic of Ed to spit into the drinking fountain, whether or not everyone from the suburbs was a pompous ass, the relative merits of dancing and football, and above all, the volume of the music Laurie used to accompany his classes. They weren’t great reasons to hate somebody, but Ed got his back up every time their paths crossed. He was a dancer and an aerobics instructor. He was overly feminine both in his looks and his gestures. Really, Ed was a pretty macho guy who happened to be gay. Who listened to Britney, yeah, but he knew a few of the other guys on the team who did too. Gay could also mean a semipro football player. His whole life Ed had fought the “gay is girly” shit, and he was damn sick of it. He was everything Ed hated in a man: rich, from the suburbs, and a freaking billboard for gay stereotypes. Laurence Parker was some big-time dance instructor whose family lived in Medina and who used to dance on Broadway or something. Of course, not once in his memory had the song come with a hyped-up chipmunk with a mic screaming over the top of it. Generally Ed preferred to leave the nineties right where he’d left them, but he had to admit, this song always made his toe tap. La Bouche pulsed through the gym as Ed pushed his way through, some remix of “Be My Lover”. Because with every turn across the floor, Ed and Laurie realize the only escape from their personal demons is to keep dancing-together.

Dancing leads to friendship, being friends leads to becoming lovers, but most important of all, their partnership shows them how to heal the pain of their pasts. When Laurie has a ballroom dancing emergency and Ed stands in as his partner, their perceptions of each other turn upside down. It would be a perfect escape, except for the oaf of a football player cutting him glares from across the room. Laurie was once one of the most celebrated ballet dancers in the world, but now he volunteers at Halcyon Center to avoid his society mother’s machinations. The only fly in his ointment is the dance instructor, Laurie Parker, who can’t seem to stay out of his way.

He hates his soul-killing office job, but he loves volunteering at a local community center. Ed Maurer has bounced back, more or less, from the neck injury that permanently benched his semipro football career.

Dance With Me by Heidi Cullinan