Sweet Romance11 min read
The Wild Man Upstairs and the Dance I Couldn’t Lose
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"I can't sleep again," I said, tapping the ceiling like it was a drum.
The old wooden house answered with that same tired groan. It had been five nights—five long nights of the ceiling reverberating, of my mattress trembling as if a storm lived above me.
"You're knocking?" Aramis asked without turning, voice low and bored.
I stood in the dim hallway, cigarette between two fingers, the smoke making patterns as useless as my patience. "You're not the only one who needs to rest."
"You could move," he said. The door opened just enough for him to show his jawline and one wet sleeve. "Or move here."
I blinked at him. He smelled like after-rain and work—an odd kind of good that made the small hairs on my arms stand up. "Nice try," I said. "But where would I put my vanity mirror?"
"You have a vanity?" He arched a brow and the half-light carved his face, making him look like the kind of man who lived in storms.
"A girl has a few things." I erased the last cigarette ash into the hallway pot and pointed at the ceiling. "Five nights. You really do like the soundtrack."
He pulled his shirt further down his shoulders, water still clinging to him in thin threads. "Not my fault your building is haunted," he said.
"Not my fault your building is loud," I returned. "Fix it."
He considered me. Then a bigger man with a shaved head poked out from behind Aramis and grinned sheepishly. "Sorry, miss. It wasn't him—"
"It was him?" I asked, surprised the world contained both the smoky charm and this awkwardness.
"Just leave," Aramis cut the man off. "And fix your life."
I wanted to rant. Instead I laughed. "You should apologize."
"I said sorry," he said, the tone flat and abrupt.
"It sounded better when you weren't trying," I teased.
He gave me one of those looks people hand out like bad currency—almost amused, mostly annoyed. "Name's Aramis," he added, as if that settled anything, then shut the door.
I walked back to my little room like I'd won a prize, lit my cigarette, and—finally—slept.
Later, I learned he was a mountain rescue team leader. People here called him Aramis Wolf and treated his name like a promise. He wore practical clothes and had that sort of stern kindness that never knocked. He'd come from the city years ago and never gone back.
"You're the dancer, right?" Juniper asked one morning while passing me a bowl of tomato-and-eggs, which I ate like a ritual.
"I dance. I collect tomato-and-egg dishes like they're little trophies," I said, grinning. "Both yellow, both familiar."
Juniper winked. "He won't come to the restaurant for that. He's busy."
"Busy with tragedy?" I asked.
"Busy doing good," she said. "He leads the rescue. People get lucky because of him."
I leaned back, thinking of Aramis's silence, the wet salt in his hair when the bath finished, his odd suggestion that I could "move here." I had been fragile lately—so many edges rubbed raw since the accident—and his rough slate of a face made the edges dull sometimes.
One night the roof started leaking in my bathtub. The drips grew slow and round, then bigger, then treacherous. I climbed the stairs with bandaged hands—second thumb bleeds still weeping—and knocked.
"Again?" Aramis's voice.
"Your bathroom is leaking," I said. "It sounds like someone is sawing the world."
He came to the door with that same indifferent air. "It's late. I fix it tomorrow."
"Tomorrow I'll be another day older," I said. "And crazier. Do something."
His eyes flicked to my hand, the white of gauze staining pink with dried blood.
He squinted, perhaps pity or perhaps the recognition of a fellow human with holes. "Fine," he said. "You can sleep somewhere quiet tonight."
I almost said 'your bed.' "You mean, I can sleep on your couch?"
"Don't be dramatic." He snorted. "You can sleep in the bed."
He went into my bathroom, an agile, silent thing. "Water pipe's burst," he said, voice coming from the dark. "Too old."
"What are you doing?" I asked, watching the outline of him work the pipe. The hem of his shirt tugged, revealing lean abs, muscle that said 'work' instead of 'gym.' It made my chest do something I hadn't given permission to do.
He looked up at me. "Are you staring?"
"Is it illegal?" I shot back, catching my breath as if I'd run.
He snorted. "Go. Out."
So I did. He fixed the pipe with sowed patience and a calm I'd seen in only two other things: a stage light before a show and a river waiting to flood.
"What did people do before you?" I asked later when he emerged, dripping, leaning against a doorway like he was an old tree.
"People do what they must," he said. "Call me if it leaks again."
He was brusque, but that night he salvaged my sleep. The next morning I felt better, brief like a stage cue, but better.
"You hurt?" he asked days later in the clinic when I nearly fainted from fever. He'd come with a tool kit and a glance that never judged.
"A little," I said, throat dry. "The hand is angry."
He sat by the bed like a hall guard. "You shouldn't be alone when you're this hot," he said.
"I'm not alone," I said. "I have tomato-and-egg and bad music."
He leaned close enough to fix a stray hair behind my ear without touching. "Fine. You have me."
He left abrupt, the way men of his sort did when affections risked tying anything invisible. But he had changed things a little.
"You're reckless," William said when I answered a call from the city. He's the director who'd rescued me from the pit of nothing—William Cherry, who had this cultivated patience and small authority. "Come back. There's an audition."
"Yes," I said, because work is a compass and grief is a fog. "Give me time."
"Don't lose everything before you get there," he warned.
"I won't," I promised. But I nearly forgot how to move. Stage lights were complicated machines and my body remembered nothing of that old fluent flame. At night I dreamed of the stage—hot lamps, a girl's fall, a bone's harsh snap.
Aramis came to the hospital once while I recovered. He stood in the corridor, cigarette smoke haloing one shoulder, and made no movement beyond the simplest practicality. He waited without crowding.
"You can't throw yourself away," he said when I told him some of the nightmares. "You have to want to keep what you can."
"Why do you care?" I asked.
"Because someone has to look after the future in this place," he answered. "You are a bright thing; you deserve a horizon."
"That's poetic." I laughed, but the laughter had a break to it. "You aren't the type. You hide poetry in tools."
"You talk in circles," he said. "Just come back to your life. It's better than disappearance."
He stayed through the drip-and-patch nights, through my pyrexia, through the mornings when the ceiling shrieked again and I knocked and he came and fixed.
That spring he let me ride with the rescue team as a passenger on a small mission. The village had a boy stuck in a ravine. The team went like a shadow, steady and sharp. Aramis moved like he carried the mountain inside his ribs: deliberate, kind, relentless.
"Don't romanticize my job," he warned me when I reached for his hand while the team worked. "This is not for hearts to melt at."
"It's very easy to romanticize," I said. "You look like the kind of man who'd look better in a magazine with the caption 'Do Not Disturb.'"
He smirked. "You're impossible."
"Likewise."
But one night, soaked to the bone and shaken by rain, we sat by a small stove in the team shed and I told him things I hadn't told anyone.
"I used to think my hands were the only reason I lived," I said. "Then I broke one and the world expected me to vanish."
"People say stupid things," Aramis said softly. "They think one tool equals a person."
"I feel like a ruined instrument," I said. "They tell me to stop performing, to quietly be less."
"You will dance again," he said simply.
"Do you honestly believe that?" I pushed.
"Yes," he answered. "Because you are not an object. You are a person who moves and fights."
Those sentences were small, but they warmed me. Later that night he sat outside on the shed steps while I practiced a few basic moves in the dark, hands wrapped, body shaking. He didn't look. He simply stood a sentinel, and the fact of that steadied my feet.
Three heart-beat moments happened in the next months.
"First," he said in a low voice that made my hair rise when he wrapped his jacket round my shoulders after a practice in the rain. "I am not patient for everyone. For you, I will be."
"That's a promise?" I teased, but my hands clutched the fabric as if anchoring.
"Second," he said later when I landed a small turn. "You make me laugh with the stupidest things—like how you eat tomato-and-egg. It's... yours. I like that."
"That is not romantic," I protested.
"It's mine now," he said simply.
"Third?" I asked on a cold morning when he handed me an old, slightly dented lighter without a word.
It was the tiniest thing: a lighter scarred by use. I took it. "Why?"
"So you have a thing that belongs to me," he said. "Not to fix things, not to own you, just a small possession that says you are not alone."
I cried—quietly, embarrassed, the kind that shakes a chest but doesn't ruin anything. He wiped my face with the back of his hand like someone handling a fragile bird.
We grew like a small patch of fire on a cold hill, careful and alive. He began to teach me how to accept help. I began to learn how to ask for it.
When it came time to audition in the city, the theater smelled of dust and possibility. William had placed me in a piece that would re-launch my career if I could hold—if my hands would obey and if my heart would stop wandering.
"Remember your body," William said. "Your hands are tools, yes, but you are not reduced to them. You are the director's dream of the dancer."
"I will do my best," I promised.
Before I left, Aramis caught me at the clinic. He had taken off his jacket and his sleeves were rolled up, and for once he looked less the mountain and more the man who would keep mountains standing.
"I filed the time-off," he said. "Don't forget to come back."
"Do you mean literally come back?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "Come back to that stupid house, come back to the mountain, come back to me. If you can."
"I will," I said, lying and honest in the same breath because I didn't know then how to measure days.
Rehearsal and the city were merciless. My body remembered some things and rejected others. I spent nights rehearsing alone, calling Aramis sometimes just to hear his even breaths over the line. He listened, and we traded small banalities that felt like breadcrumbs back to each other.
"Do you miss the mountain?" he asked in a call that came when I was exhausted.
"I miss the air," I said. "I miss your awful jokes."
"You are lucky," he replied. "I fix things for a living. I can't fix everything. But I can fix a pipe. I can come when you call."
"I'll hold you to that," I said.
Then the premiere came. Lights like halos. William proud and sharp. The audience a warm animal. I danced like someone holding a rope across a canyon.
After curtain, I expected to find Aramis waiting somewhere. I did not know why I had made that expectation so strong, but my chest had tied itself into that small knot. I walked down to the parking lot with William and my manager and found him leaning against the dark hood of his truck, cigarette smoke curling.
"You came," I said. Relief made me clumsy.
"I told you I would," he said. "You killed it."
I leaned into the darkness and let him hold me for a moment there in the deserted empty of the lot. Then he kissed me like someone saving a life—not hot and frantic, but sure and hard as rock. I felt his mouth on mine and then his hands on my waist, and for once in months I wasn't thinking about hands that failed; I was thinking about a hand that would not leave my back.
"Will you...?" I started, ridiculous and large.
"I will stay," he said, breath warm in the night. "I don't want to be the man who lets you fly alone."
"Do you mean move?" I asked.
He smiled, and that smile was both a weather report and a promise. "I filed the transfer. I'm coming back to the city by year's end. For you."
The thing about promises is that they are heavy and bright at once. I took them both like an offering and a burden. But it was the kind of burden you are grateful to carry.
We had simple days then. He drove me to rehearsals sometimes. He sat in the cheap seats of a studio and watched while I found my feet and lost them and found them again. He was not a man of a thousand words, but the words he chose were the ones that mattered.
"You look different," he said once, watching me train until the lights burned low.
"I look like I stopped dying," I answered.
He smoked in silence and then, with a small, unreadable expression, he leaned across and kissed my knuckles. "You stopped," he said. "Because you wanted to."
We learned to be present with each other's impossible parts. He learned that I would not be caged, I learned that sometimes being rescued means accepting foundations.
When I returned to the mountain at winter's year, the small village treated me like a miracle. Juniper and the others fussed over me. William came with gifts, smiles wobbly with pride. The team gathered in the courtyard with a small bonfire, and for the first time in a long time I danced in front of people not to prove anything but to give joy back.
Aramis took me by the hand on the edge of the circle. "Dance," he said.
"I thought I would be embarrassed," I whispered.
"You won't," he said. He meant it.
I turned and moved; for a few minutes the world was only muscle and air. He watched me like a man looking at the center of his life and the stars at once. When it finished, the village clapped like a small storm. People cheered, and for once I felt applause not like something I needed but like something I could keep.
That night, under lantern glow and the smell of tomato-and-egg from Juniper's pot, he pulled me close.
"Come home," he said.
"To which home?" I asked, half laughing, half frightened.
"To both," he said. "You don't have to choose everything now. Just be here when you can."
I thought about the city, about William's steady hand and the stage. I thought about the mountain, about Aramis's steady knowing. I thought about my broken hand and how I had mended things by learning to be more than what hurt me.
"I will," I said.
We sealed the words with a kiss, and it tasted like the night in the parking lot and also like the first bite of hot tomato-and-egg after a cold morning.
At the ceremony the village threw for the rescue team that year, a small, unplanned moment unfolded. A woman from a nearby town came in and began to boast about a rescue that Aramis had led—taking more credit than due. At first she had half the room fooled with her polished city manners, but Juniper stood up and quietly corrected her. Then one by one the team told the true story—the risk, the seamanship, the decisions Aramis had made alone.
The woman's face changed color as her narrative crumbled. People who had been charmed by her stiff smile now looked at her with a new, sharp distance. She tried to deny the corrections, but the team offered evidence—radios, photos, statements.
"You're lying," she hissed, then louder to anyone who would hear, "I was there. I helped!"
"No," said Aramis steadily, stepping forward. "You left. You came after. You tried to make yourself smaller by tying your name to our work."
"I was there!" she shrieked, then fell quiet as people murmured and pulled out their phones not to record but to confirm. Juniper's gentle voice recited the timeline. Griffin, the young driver, placed his palm on the table and said, "I drove her out after it was all done."
That was enough. The room shifted like the sky before rain. People stopped smiling at the woman and started discussing her the way a crowd discusses a storm. She tried to plead, then to cajole, then to weep, then to walk away with dignity pinned on her sleeves. Each attempt failed. The town had little patience left for false credit.
Aramis didn't shout. He didn't need to. He simply stood and let truth do the work. The crowd's whispers turned to a thin, audible scorn. Someone cursed. Someone else clapped in measured sarcasm. The woman's supporters left her. She stood alone.
The punishment was not dramatic in a way TV scripts love. It was quieter and worse for her: the village closed ranks, conversation shifted away, the restaurant stopped serving her, and her local contacts—people who could move a reputation—muted her. Her attempt to take the rescue limelight failed because those who'd lived the work had the proof and the respect. She exited the village with an older, harder face.
Aramis watched her go and then looked at me. "Some people think applause is a currency you can fake," he said.
"She learned," I said, more softly than I meant.
"Public disgrace is different from punishment," he said. "This is the town's way of correcting the ledger."
The woman left with no parade—just the hollow echo of doors closing. She had once wanted to be seen for a hero; she ended up a stranger whose echo wouldn't return.
I sometimes wonder if my own fall was that woman's kind of spectacle; not because I took credit but because I became the story some wanted to believe. I burned, I broke, I hurt. I was forgiven by a man who asked me to come home, and by a director who never stopped asking me to show up. That was punishment and mercy wrapped in the same coat.
Years later, when I stand in front of new dancers, or when I lean on the sill of that old house and watch the clouds like page-flips, I sometimes remember the smell of tomato-and-egg, the leak in the ceiling, the bandaged hand, the mountain and the man who fixed pipes and hearts.
"I told you once," Aramis murmured one dusk when rain was licking the window and our hands were wrapped around an old lighter, "you are not an instrument. You are a storm with feet."
"I have a watch," I said, pressing my thumb to the lighter's metal. "It ticks me. It tells me when to dance."
"Then let it tick," he said, and kissed me like a promise.
I kept dancing.
The End
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