Dance, Dance, Dance, Amy

A Transgender Mythology Romantacy

Agape Duro Universe

Eighteen: Attempted Assault

By Jo Dora Webster

How will Denise cope with her safety being compromised

in that Erida's agents attempted to assault her?

Author's Note:  

This book, in its entirety, is available on my Patreon. BCTS will get weekly postings on Mondays to complete it here. Patreon Free Members can read my new complete book by chapters, Things We Do for Love

Chapter Eighteen: Attempted Assault

[Tuesday Day Seventeen of the Enchantment]

The morning began with the thrum of jet engines miles above a quilt of clouds. Richard texted a wingtip photo from seat 12A, the airport tarmac foreshortened to a miniature city of carts and cones. His mother’s knuckles showed pale around a paper cup in the reflection of the window. Scholarship visit, he wrote. They’re flying us in. Crazy, right?

Denise stared at the photo while walking, thumb hovering over reply. In the image, his face was warped by the double panes into two almost-Richards. The effect made her chest go tight. She typed Have a smooth flight and erased it, tried Got this and erased that too, then sent a sticker of a plane leaving sparkle contrails. He sent a single blue heart back, then a row of dots that never resolved. When the dots vanished, she stuck her phone in her pocket and breathed, counting through the little nose-bridge routine Dr. Ariel had drilled into her. Four in, hold four, six out.

By the front doors, the alumni banners rippled in early breeze—welcome streamers for the day’s picnic, maroon and white snapping like tongues. The quad smelled like cut grass, sunscreen, and sugar from the bake sale tents. A brass quintet tested scales near the fountain; somewhere a PA crackled with mic checks. It should have felt festive. It felt like a stage dressed for an ambush.

She didn’t pretend she wasn’t spooked. She also didn’t pretend she was going to do the day alone.

Francine met her in the parking lot with her usual economy: black joggers, a plain tee, hair scraped into a no-nonsense knot. She handed Denise a bottle of water without comment. A beat later, Dr. Ariel lifted a hand from the passenger seat of Francine’s car, an understated wave. Her linen blazer creased when she stepped out; the corners of her eyes were tired, her attention honed.

“You asked for escorts,” Ariel said by way of greeting. “We arrive with sensible shoes.”

“Thank you,” Denise said. The words came out light, and her finger hooked automatically into her backpack strap the way it did when she needed ballast. “If I—if something is off… you’ll feel it?”

“I’ll be within line of sight whenever possible,” Ariel said. “Francine will be within arm’s reach.”

Francine nodded once. “Today, you dance last,” she said softly. “We move first.”

They walked in through the balloon arch and a fog of alumni nostalgia. Old letter jackets, new babies, faculty in polo shirts shaking hands like metronomes. The cheer squad had a booth near the big oak tree; Cookie sold ribboned hair ties with the team colors, Jazmine’s mom ran a raffle for merch. Denise took her place with the others for the first hour: smiles and small talk, the touch-and-go of familiar palms. Her mimicry did its work, but it felt like translation today rather than instinct. She laughed when Hailey riffed, nodded when Sabrina pretended to scold her for hoarding sunscreen, threw her weight into the group photo with her chin angled to catch the light.

If she held too still, she could feel the wrongness sniffing around the edges of the day, like a fox circling a hen yard.

When Chelsea leaned in to ask if Denise would run the alumni mini-routine with them again at noon, Denise shook her head. “Rain check,” she said, pitching it with a conspiratorial tilt. “I promised to demo a technique for a volunteer. Private lesson. Two counts of five. Then I’ll be back.”

Sabrina’s eyes sharpened, but she masked it with a shrug. “Don’t get poached by the alumni,” she said.

“Not poachable,” Denise returned, then slipped away between a cotton candy cart and a cluster of folding chairs.

She sent the text on the move. Picnic is stacked. Need five minutes with Veronica. Will head to the gym foyer. Alone at first. Meet if I’m not back in ten. She watched the bubbles form: Francine’s fast reply (Copy. Two-minute buffer.), then Ariel’s slower one (Understood. Keep to places with exits.).

The gym foyer was a wedge of quiet cool between noise fronts: polished trophy cases, a showcase of signed jerseys, the fusty sweetness of old varnish. Outside, the quad boiled; in here, her footsteps sounded very loud. Veronica was already there, as arranged the night before, perched on the edge of the bench under the banner that read Excellence Has A Body. She was a senior who’d graduated last year, home for the picnic, one of Francine’s former flyers. Denise liked her—liked the way she still came to watch, like the sport had left its fingers on her arm.

“Hey, stranger,” Veronica said, standing with a grin. “You look dangerous.”

Denise winced a smile. “Pure illusion.” She tapped the pocket with the crystal and tried to keep her breath easy. “Thanks for this. I know it’s weird.”

Veronica shrugged. “Dance made me a connoisseur of weird. What am I doing?”

“A grip check,” Denise said. “Breath, weight share—just a fast diagnostic.”

They stood for it like practice, palms fitting, eyes meeting, the subtle micro-nods of permission and trust. Denise slipped the crystal into Veronica’s hand on a cue that looked like clasping, then held their stillness for three slow counts while Veronica breathed with her. The crystal, when flicked into her palm again, lay dull and gray. Exposure. Not clean, not gone. But not swallowed.

Relief softened Denise’s jaw until she realized it came paired with a pit of dread. Gray meant within reach. Gray could tip.

“Your hands are shaking,” Veronica said mildly.

“Blood sugar,” Denise lied without art.

“Uh-huh.” Veronica tilted her head, then reached to squeeze Denise’s shoulder. “If this is about the weird vibe around the team lately… whatever you’re doing, do it fast.”

Denise swallowed. “Working on it.”

They hugged—brief, one-two pat—and Veronica headed for the door with a wave. Denise stayed to tuck the crystal deep, drawing her breath slow. She texted Ariel: Veronica gray. Not black. Felt watched.

The foyer doors parted. The air inside shifted, the way it does when someone big moves through it. Denise looked up and saw a man blocking the light, silhouette cut into the double doors. He was heavy through the middle but wide across the shoulders, a barrel of a man in a blue sport coat and a polo with the old logo stretched over his chest. He had a face that wanted you to agree with him in advance. His name tag bobbed on a lanyard: Richard Wallace, Class of ’98. Everyone called him Dick, because of course they did. He’d been on the alumni email threads for months, the loudest voice about tradition and toughness, the one who’d added smiley faces to sentences that made her skin crawl.

“Well, well, the famous Denise,” he said, as if they had a standing date. “You’re hard to catch.”

She did the polite recoil first, the friendly smile that retreats a half step to set a boundary. “Hi, Mr. Wallace. The picnic’s this way if you’re—”

He stepped sideways, casual, to keep between her and the exit. The hallway smelled suddenly like cheap cologne with a metal aftertaste. The hair on Denise’s arms lifted.

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” he said, eyes sliding down and back up with a proprietary weight that made her fingers want to break. “Heard a lot. Seen more. You’re… something else.”

“Thank you,” she said evenly. She shifted her stance, angling to the side. He adjusted, three inches of blocking. “I need to get back to my squad.”

“You will,” he said, and smiled, and the smile showed his gums. “After a kiss for an old friend.”

He leaned without warning, a sudden gravity, one hand coming up toward her jaw. Denise jerked back, chin down, hands up, a dancer’s defensive choreography. His fingers slid across her cheekbone anyway, hot and damp. The world narrowed to the place where his body pressed her space. Her stomach lurched.

“No,” she said, loud enough to bounce off glass. “Step back.”

“Don’t be coy.” The sing-song in his voice made her want to scrub her skin. “Girls like you—”

She didn’t hear the end of the sentence. She was moving, the way Francine had taught: weight under, foot back, shoulder angled, palm a wedge against the sternum. He wasn’t expecting the leverage. He rocked, surprised—but the surprise curdled at once, and he surged forward, catching her elbow, hauling her toward his chest as his mouth lunged for hers.

The air around him went wrong in a way that was horribly familiar: a waft of cold rot under the cologne, the pressure of a storm front in a room with no windows. Denise’s breath seized. The mirrors in the trophy case distorted his face into a pantomime grimace. The thing riding him—Erida, her mind named instantly, the jealousy-slick shadow that had brushed the squad—seemed to grin through his eyes.

His other hand came for the back of her head, fingers spread to cage. Denise twisted hard, chin tucked and turned, teeth clamped, and his mouth hit her cheek, wet and forceful. She shoved again, heel scraping on the polished floor. “No,” she said, louder, voice cracking on the second syllable. “Get off me!”

“I like a fighter,” he panted, and the words sounded too many, like a chorus of one. For a heartbeat, her vision stuttered into double speed, and a whisper like wind under a door hissed You think you can have what you were not given.

She would have kneed, raked, screamed—the emergency list unspooling—except her breath ran out and her throat closed around noise.

A sound struck the room that wasn’t a sound, exactly: a rhythm that wrapped around the heartbeat of the building and found its place. Denise’s eyes went to the doorway. Dr. Ariel was there, hand lifted, mouth moving. The voice that came out of her wasn’t loud in the way shouting is; it was precise, syllables struck like clear glass bells and threaded back together with something older than the school’s bricks.

“By name and nature, unbind,” Ariel said, in a cadence Denise had only heard in whispers in the office. “By jealous hunger, untwine. By breath and blood, release.”

The air flexed. Dick Wallace’s grip spasmed as if shocked. The pressure on Denise’s elbow loosened half an inch.

Ariel stepped forward, voice continuous, the language shifting in her mouth—not English, not anything Denise knew, but the meaning of it sliding over her skin like cool water. She drew a line in the air with two fingers that seemed to catch, as if the space itself had texture. The smell of rot flickered and thinned. Denise gulped air and shoved, freed enough to slide sideways. Her shoulder banged the trophy case; a plaque quivered, chimed.

“By the right of refusal, stand,” Ariel intoned, and then her tone sharpened, a name dropping like a pebble into a bowl of still water: “Erida.”

The name landed. The man flinched and hissed, a sound that didn’t suit anyone’s throat. For a moment, his pupils blew to swallow the iris, then pinpricked to nothing. His mouth fell slack. Ariel’s hand turned, palm out. Something invisible snapped between her fingers.

“Leave what is not yours,” she said. The last word cut.

Dick Wallace’s knees went, as if the floor had yanked downward. He folded sideways into a heap, breath chuffing, eyes glassy. The smell of metal burned off without smoke. The hallway’s light warmed by a degree, or else Denise did. Her body realized all at once that she was shaking.

There were hands then, not grabbing but catching: Francine’s arms bracketing her under the shoulders, lowering her gently to the bench so she didn’t fold to the floor like he had. Ariel’s mouth went still; the ripples of something invisible unrolled and were gone.

“Denise,” Francine said in a tone she saved for when people were bleeding. “Look at me.”

Denise looked. Francine’s eyes were fire-hardened glass: hot, controlled, breakproof. The steadiness of them steadied Denise’s lungs. She found she was breathing too fast and tried to put a lid on it. It rattled. Tears hit before she knew they were coming, hot and humiliating, and slid and kept sliding; she pressed her palm to her face to herd them and felt where his mouth had smeared. Heat surged up her neck and she scrabbled for her sleeve.

Ariel was there with a square of cloth—soft, clean, smelling faintly of rosemary. “Here,” she said, and didn’t touch Denise’s face, just placed the handkerchief on her knee. Her other hand hovered near Denise’s wrist, a question. “May I?”

Denise nodded, once, and Ariel’s fingertips settled against the inside of her arm, over the hammering pulse. A low syllable unwound from her, too quiet to be for anyone but the skin. Denise’s heart did not slow, but it remembered what slowing was like.

Across the floor, Dick Wallace groaned, a miserable, ordinary human sound. He rolled to his side and curled, clutching at his stomach. The name tag flipped to show the blank back. For a moment, he looked small, the way adult men sometimes look when they’re asleep in chairs.

Ariel’s face was all planes and decisions. “He will not remember this as it was,” she said, low. “He will have the shame without the leverage.” She looked to Francine. “Will you handle the exit.”

“Always,” Francine said. Her grip on Denise’s shoulder was a point of conviction. She didn’t look at the man on the floor. “You stay here.”

Denise swallowed. Her mouth tasted like pennies and peppermint, the shampoo of the morning turned alien by fear. “What did you—what was—”

“Majick,” Ariel said simply, with that crisp j that made it a word and not a category. “The old kind. The kind in bones, not in stories. You’ve met its shadow. This is its spine.”

Denise stared. The syllables seemed to have weight even after the sound of them was gone. It should have made everything wobble. Instead, something inside her—the part that had been white-knuckling, that had counted breaths through impossible days—clicked into place. Naming things made them less. Not harmless. Nameable.

The world expanded enough to fit her again. She drew a breath that didn’t scrape, then another.

“I told you I would be within line of sight,” Ariel said, and there was apology tucked under the precision. “I regret that it took three breaths too many. Francine, please take him to the East Hall and keep him there until my call. I will seal and cleanse this space.”

Francine nodded and rose in one movement. She crossed to the man and hauled him up with the practiced leverage of someone who had moved people safely off dance floors. He blinked, disoriented, tried to speak, failed, and lurched where she directed. She was unkind in only the necessary ways—no gentler than she had to be, no crueler.

When they were gone, Ariel turned back to Denise. The handkerchief had become a small damp flag. Denise folded it into a smaller square, then a neat triangle, occupying her fingers while the rest of her caught up.

“I felt her,” Denise said, the pronoun a razor under her tongue. “Erida. She… rode him.”

“Yes,” Ariel said. “She’s adept at slipping into places where desire has already made a path. Old grudges, new appetites. What happened was not your fault.” The sentence held like a beam between two posts.

Denise nodded. The nod hurt and helped.

Ariel glanced toward the doors, then lifted her hand again, drawing a shape in the air that made a faint sound like thread pulled through cloth. The foyer’s light shifted. For a moment, the trophies reflected nothing, as if someone had thrown a dark cloth over the mirrors. When the light returned, it was a degree warmer, as if the bulbs had been washed.

“Tell me where it hurts,” Ariel said.

Denise surprised herself by laughing, a cracked little thing. “Everywhere.”

“Specificity aids relief,” Ariel murmured.

“Here,” Denise said after a breath, touching her cheekbone, her elbow, the place under her ribs where fear had set a hook. “And here.”

Ariel’s hand hovered a half inch from each place without touching. Words—small ones this time, domestic—threaded out. Even the handkerchief seemed to sigh. Denise felt foolish for wanting to cry again and decided not to fight it. The tears came in a gentler wave, and then they were done, leaving the companionable ache of a muscle that’s been properly used.

A knock sounded, three soft taps. Francine slid back in, closed the door behind her, and crossed to them. She kneeled to be level with Denise’s eyes, forearms on thighs, all angles made soft by intent.

“You did nothing wrong,” she said, echoing Ariel without collusion. “I want you to say it until it bores you.”

“I did nothing wrong,” Denise said, because Francine asked and because the sentence felt like laying a clean cloth over a wound.

Francine nodded. “Good. Again later.” Her mouth tilted, the ghost of humor, weight-bearing. “And if you need to break something that isn’t bone or glass, I know a place with plates.”

The image was so perfectly Francine that Denise’s lip did a helpless tremor that turned into a smile. “Noted.”

“Can you stand,” Ariel asked, not as a challenge but as a weather check.

Denise tested her legs. They trembled but obeyed. “Yes.”

“Then we will walk to the staff lounge,” Ariel said. “Tea, cold compress, and a plan.” Her gaze flicked to Denise’s pocket, the faint weight of the crystal there. “You are still carrying the instrument.”

“Yes,” Denise said.

“Good,” Ariel said. “Keep it close. And keep us closer.”

They moved as a unit, Ariel leading, Francine bracketing, Denise between like a candle between steady hands. The hallway looked almost the same as when she’d entered it, which felt obscene and correct. Outside, the world carried on—babies fussed, alumni laughed, the brass quintet hit a clean measure that made someone clap. The life of the place insisted on itself.

They turned a corner. Denise’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, pulse tripping, then easing: a text from Richard. Landed. Tour at noon. Mom says hi. Proud of you.

She stared at the words until they ghosted. Proud of you, a phrase that meant three things and none, in a voice that had been his and not his all week. She typed Be safe, period, then added Drink water and erased it, then sent only a heart. The tiny red icon ballooned in the message window, absurd and brave.

In the staff lounge, Ariel brewed tea with mechanical precision and a murmured word to the kettle that made it boil a minute faster. Francine handed Denise a cold compress tied in a dish towel. The chill leached heat from her cheek, took the rawness down to tender. Someone had left a bowl of grapes on the counter; Francine set it in front of her like an offering. Denise ate one because she was told to and found, to her surprised gratitude, that it tasted like something clean.

“I will file the report I can file,” Ariel said after a time, speaking into the steam of her mug. “Under the auspices I can name.” She lifted her eyes. “And I will ward the spaces we can ward.”

Francine’s fingers tapped once against her own cup. “And I will move the squad in pairs today,” she said. “No one pees alone. No one walks alone. We tighten the net.”

Denise swallowed. “Veronica was gray,” she said. “Not black.” The crystal’s weight tapped her thigh when she shifted. “She’s… within reach.”

Ariel nodded. “Then we reach.”

Denise set the compress down and sat with her hands folded, the way she did when learning choreography by watching. The old fear was still there, but it had a new edge: a clean one, honed by anger that didn’t burn her. Her mother’s words came back, from a kitchen morning: Don’t forget which parts are you.

“Which parts are me,” Denise said, not realizing she’d spoken until the sentence hung in the air.

Francine heard what she meant anyway. “The ones that chose to call for help,” she said. “The ones that said no. The ones that will say it again.”

Ariel added, gently, “The ones that will learn to say a different kind of no, with teeth.”

Denise nodded. Outside, someone announced the start of the alumni relay on the PA. A cheer went up, long and ragged. The day continued. The line in the grass had been drawn and stood, invisible and strong.

She picked up the compress again, set it to her cheek, and looked at both of the women who had arrived in sensible shoes and old magic. “Okay,” she said, the word grounded as a stance. “Let’s plan.”