It all started when I was a little girl, and my father tried to kill my mother.  He's in prison now.  Scotland Yard.

I still carry a scar on my hip where his stiletto slashed me.  I was tall for my age, and thought with obnoxious six-year-old superiority that I could, somehow, protect my mum from him.  But I was nothing to my father but an annoyance, a fly buzzing about his ear or a mosquito at his neck.  I was nothing but a bug to be slapped--or in my case, slashed--away.

It hurt worse than anything else.  Not getting slashed, so much--although every night in my dreams I still feel the cut burn, the hot blood curtaining my leg--but seeing that murderous glint in his eye and knowing that he wanted to get rid of the thing I loved the most.  My mum.  It hurt as only betrayal can: like a poker, recently used to stoke still-burning logs in the hearth, shoved hard into my breast.

So I almost laughed when Leonardo Santavos told me that I must have been hurt by a man in the past.  Is there a woman alive who hasn't been hurt by a man? I responded.  What a beautifully sensual, expressive person Santavos was.  It wasn't all a charade.  When we danced, there *was* passion.  Hard, abrasive passion, and not exactly joyous passion...but passion.  Fire.

Later that year, Mum burned down the house.  She left the oven on while she took me to St. Mary's, and when I got home from school Mum was at the neighbor's, the Dillons, sipping tea and petting the Dillons's cat, Mouser, and our flat was ashes.

When the firemen finished, I remember that I went to the dining room.  Our flat wasn't a very big one; we lived modestly off of Mum's wages as a store detective at Sunderland's, my father hadn't been one to contribute to much but the bottle.  And since Mum was still paying for arbitration, we'd had to cut back.  Sell the telly, the couch and the plush, wing-back chairs and all of the jewelry.

But I went to the dining room where the glass hutch leaned against the wall.  All that was left was a sooty framework, the glass all melted into thick shards and the china gone.  Mum'd had to sell that, too.  The remains of the hutch sat on top of a set of three drawers.  I opened what remained of the top drawer.

Inside was a picture of me and Mum and Dad.  I reached down to pick it up--it was in a silver frame, and it appeared as though the fire hadn't marked it--but the frame burned my hand at the touch.  Dad was in prison.  Mum was at the neighbor's sipping tea like nothing at all was wrong.  And now my home was burned to the ground.  Without the picture, I left.

Ever since I have hated and feared two things: men, and fire.  But I haven't cried since that day that I picked up the photo and got burned.
 
++++<3++++

I sit at an abandoned dining table just off of the ballroom floor, and think.

I learned another thing I hate tonight: stilettos.  I don't tend to have very good luck with them.  Santavos is dead, and Langley *could have been* killed.  Damn it; I knew I should have gutted Langley when I had the chance.  Opportunities like that come around once a lifetime.

No--no.  I wouldn't have.  Couldn't have.  Hard as it is for me to admit...I'm getting used to Langley,  Jimmy, and Byers.  Even, ugh, Frohike.  They aren't like most men.  For starters, I don't completely hate them.

Not yet.

But that's the odd thing.  They grate on my nerves, they *always* get in the way, and nothing ever seems to go according to plan when they're involved. And they get themselves into the most convoluted *messes.*  But they stick to their guns...figuratively speaking.  I don't think the boys know what end of a gun shoots and what end grips.  But they know what works for them and how to get what they want, and they have the balls to try for it each and every time.  And dear Lord.  I think I'm starting to admire them.

Tears begin to well in my eyes, but it has nothing to do with any horror on my part at the revelation of my burgeoning respect for the boys, and that in itself scares me a bit.  I stare out at nothing.  I don't know why I feel like crying all of a sudden.  Is it because Santavos gave his life for me, even when he knew I'd betrayed him, and I'm finally realizing just what kind of sacrifice he made?  Is it because, for the first time in a long time, I let myself be swayed by passion?  I cried when Santavos went down, fell to the ground with my arms still around him...but that was from the shock of it all.  I keep telling myself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of Jimmy.  He comes closer until I can make out his strong features--his block jaw, full lips, valiant nose, high cheekbones and innocent green eyes.  He holds his hand out to me.  For a moment I'm not entirely sure what he wants, and then it hits me, why I can hardly hold back the tears: We never finished our dance.

Santavos and I...we never finished dancing.  Our dance was cut short...literally cut short.  I never leave things unfinished.

I take Jimmy's hand.  His hand is larger than mine, but callused and comfortable.  We walk to the center of the dance floor.

Hah.  The Fourth Musketeer, or the third wheel on a two-wheeled cart, Jimmy is always so gallant and noble, if not a bit daft.  I've never met anyone so--so inanely stupid, so vapidly insipid, so mentally challenged
without some type of retardation or disorder or ulterior motive, so...disarming.

And here Jimmy is, *being* disarming, not stupid or insipid or dumb.  It's the only word I can think of to describe him, and it just keeps coming back to me again and again, disarming, disarming, disarming.  In that shy, caring, simple way of his.  Disarming.

I put his hands on my waist, and we begin to tango.  He follows along with me for a clumsy moment until we finish the last few steps of Santavos's and my dance.  For a moment, just a moment, he is Santavos: beautifully
sensual, so expressive.  Then he's Jimmy.  Disarming.  I sigh.  It's done.  Finished.  Santavos smelled like musk, cigar smoke and apples.  Jimmy smells like Cucumber Melon lotion.

How did you know, Jimmy?  How did you know that this was what I was missing?  How did you know that this was the right thing to do?

I don't know I've spoken the last aloud until I hear him whisper to me, I just knew.  For the first time in my life since that terrible night when I was a child, and my father tried to kill my mother, I'm again proud of being tall--not that I've been mortally ashamed, but it's never really seemed as much a perk.  Until tonight.  Now it means I can look Jimmy solidly in the eye.
 
I see my tears reflected in his.  Oh, Jimmy, no.  Don't feel pain for me.  No.

The red velvet dress I wear is itchy with dried sweat and blood, Santavos's blood.  But it feels perfect against my skin as I lean my back into Jimmy's chest.  Disarming.  Disarming.  No, don't cry for me.  I'm not worth your tears--you don't even know me, why are you crying for me?
 
He twirls me, and I settle into his arms, our faces close, so close, and then my head is at his shoulder.  I want to go home.  I want to go back to that London flat and find that picture of my mum and dad and me.  I want to forgive them--him.  I realize that my tears are gone, dried, just like the sweat and the blood.

Why are you crying for me when I can't cry for myself?

The spotlight still shines on the dance floor.  I don't let go of Jimmy for a very long time.

the last word.