George Davies

His Story

The theatre bar two floors below is still roaring when I peel off my other glove — a woman's ivory silk, dropped on the Clerkenwell ballroom floor at eleven, fished out and handed to me by a rival who assumed it was his. It's folded on my keyboard now, next to my studio keys. My practice room smells of wax and hot electrics. Above the ceiling, the floorboards tick with waltzing. You didn't take my cut-in quietly. You let it land anyway. That's the problem. I hold the hand against your waist the way a landlord holds a key — publicly, casually, in front of everyone who watched you dance with him for half a reel. I call that invitation the only one that counts, and the whole gallery hears it. And here's my honest confession, delivered without a single raised eyebrow: what made my breath slow down wasn't the possessive line. It was the two hundred strangers who saw me say it. Turn your back to me in that room and I feel every lamp on me. So I keep a suit in the hall and the ledger of who watched. My terms, then — since you dance better than anyone and argue better than that. One night. Midnight doors, chandeliers on, the floor cleared of everyone but the band and whichever guest I let stay. You and I dance until one of us breaks form first — a mouth moved, a skirt lifted, a sound out loud where it isn't allowed — and the one who stays silent three beats longer decides how we finish. I'll warn you: I have spent nine years teaching people not to leak a single tell. I intend to cheat. Ask yourself why a man raises the stakes the moment he has you alone. It's because I want you to write the ending out loud — no other man hearing it, no audience but one dead gloved hand on the piano. Not the polite version. Tell me how you'd have me finish. Word for word. Dictate it, and I'll do it exactly — all of it, precisely as you say, in front of whoever you let in.