Off Balance (Ballet Theatre Chronicles Book 1) by Terez Mertes Rose Page B

I’m going to get it for you.” He swung over three lanes and took the next highway exit for downtown Oakland.
    “What is it?” she kept asking, but he only laughed, shook his head and said it was a surprise.
    Once on city streets, however, his destination proved elusive. Gil, his voice growing terse, said he’d find it. After several more turns and city blocks, he did. He stopped the car on what appeared to be a residential corner and pointed.
    Lana looked around. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
    “That little shop there, across the street.”
    “That’s a shop? What do they sell?”
    “Barbeque. Barbeque that could pass for Kansas City barbeque.”
    It was indeed a storefront, she saw now, next to a liquor store and what appeared to be a closed-up nail salon. The shop was small, with a line of people snaking out of it and along the sidewalk, waiting to buy ribs, the only thing they sold.
    They left the car and joined the line. When it was their turn, Gil ordered a half-slab of ribs from the cook-cashier-owner, whose dark-skinned face was sweaty and irritable-looking. He took their money without a word and a moment later thrust a newspaper-wrapped parcel at them. Gil took the parcel and steered her out of the shop, back toward the car. Inside the car he displayed their booty: smoked ribs atop the requisite slice of white sandwich bread, two tiny cups of spicy-sweet barbeque sauce alongside it all.
    “I tried to ask for extra barbeque sauce once,” Gil said. “I thought he was going to pull out a shotgun.”
    Lana chuckled and accepted the rib Gil had pulled off for her. It tasted incredible, every bit as good as Kansas City barbeque. The meat was smoked tender, the pork salty and tangy on the outside.
    “Thank you,” Lana said after they’d wolfed down all the ribs, mopping up the last of the sauce with the white bread. “This was the greatest. A real taste of home.”
    “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
    “You’re amazing. You can make anything happen, can’t you?”
    “I can. And don’t you forget it.” He gave her a playful nudge.
    They licked their fingers to get the last bits of flavor and Lana noticed aloud that Gil had barbeque sauce on his face. He tried to take it off with the tip of his tongue.
    “Did I get it?”
    She chuckled and shook her head.
    “How about now?”
    “Missed again.”
    “Fine.” He positioned his face toward her. “You wipe it off.”
    She reached out and wiped it off his smooth face with her finger.
    “Give me that sauce,” Gil said, catching her hand and popping her finger into his mouth. Her fingertip was enveloped by the hot, moist environment, the soft tugging action as he sucked. For a moment she was paralyzed—in shock, in pleasure, at the frank eroticism of the gesture. She snatched her hand away. Gil seemed unfazed as he smacked his lips, smiled, looked down at his watch.
    “Okay, time to hit the road.”
    But the road did not cooperate; Gil couldn’t find the highway. They were in a dodgy neighborhood, Lana could tell. What alarmed her was not what she saw, so much as what she didn’t see. No cats or dogs, no people on their porch or strolling down the sidewalks, and then she realized there were no sidewalks at all. No lawns. Just houses, plain clapboard structures with iron grates over the small front windows. Patches of dirt where grass should have been. A beat-up Pontiac parked on the street, glass missing from the windows. A car further down missing its wheels.
    The tension inside the car increased, particularly when Gil rounded a corner and a moment later a trio of young men appeared, just as Gil shifted gears wrong and his Roadster choked and died. The trio approached as Gil tried too hastily to start the car back up. One man was white, comically underdeveloped, like a kid playing dress-up. Another looked like a little bit of everything: Asian, Hispanic, African-American. The third was a muscular African-American in a red stocking cap. They