Free The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale

from the discount racks—What are you doing, Becky? Focus! You’re dancing with Felix Callahan. You need to be enjoying this on behalf of every woman in America.
    She snapped back. He was still there, holding her. Back, hand, thigh. Back, hand, thigh. Felix Callahan. Felix Callahan?
    It had seemed safe to have a crush on Felix Callahan from the sanitized distance of the screen, but having him this close was . . . well, a little confusing. She’d fallen in love with characters all her life—Gilbert Blythe, Mr. Rochester, Harry Hamlin as Perseus. Then she’d met Mike. Real men had thinned into the scenery; fictional men were briefly entertaining but faded out of her consciousness as soon as she closed the book or emerged from the movie theater.
    So her only dalliances were inside those story moments. There was that pesky romance gene that needed a little twanging from time to time, and crushing on a fictional character or unattainable movie star was completely kosher. Everyone knew those rules. Of course, those rules assumed that said Unattainable Crush would never actually step into your very real life. So, how to deal with the disorientation when the man you’ve blushed about from a movie seat is suddenly quite real and leading you in . . . what dance were they doing now?
    It was the waltz (one-two-three, one-two-three . . . ). The music had a rubbery, echoey tone in that large, round room, the wails from the stringed instruments bouncing off stone. That particular waltz wasn’t as circusy as some, nor as stately—it was a tender tune. The melody rolled under her, made her feel as if she were dancing on water. It curled around her, wrapped her up, and spun her out, till it seemed the music itself was moving her body. The waltz . . . there was something about the waltz she used to know . . .
    The Waltz (according to Desdemona Yap, instructor of “You Can Ballroom Dance!”): “The Waltz took Europe by surprise, the first dance where the man holds the woman to his body. To dance it properly, you must feel the romance of that music. Mike, hold her tighter there. Becky, relax your upper body. Surrender yourself to the movement. It is intimate, it is erotic, it is—”
    “Ack!”
    Yes, Becky said “ack” right then on the dance floor of the Valentine’s Ball. She was in no way a fan of the word “erotic,” and she had just thought it while dancing with Felix Callahan. (Felix Callahan!) She let go of him as if of hot metal and took a step back.
    “Maybe we shouldn’t dance anymore,” she said.
    “All right.” He gestured with his chin toward the far part of the rotunda. “I glimpsed some interesting statues that way, and I wouldn’t mind removing myself from all the—how would you say?—rubberneckers.” He offered his crooked arm. “Walk with me?”
    Even though she was still thrumming with that e -word, she didn’t want to interrupt the evening. It never entered her thoughts that walking with Felix might be dangerous in a moral sense. For one thing, she was clad in that hideous pink maternity dress she’d purchased in 1987. It wore like armor. Besides, she trusted herself absolutely, as much as she trusted Mike with those most perfect breasts west of the Mississippi. He wouldn’t be biting into any off-limits apples, and neither would she.
    On top of that, she was sleep deprived (Baby Sam was a cutie, but he still had day and night confused), she hadn’t put on makeup or gone farther than the grocery store in six weeks, and before she cracked and went completely insane, she wanted to see where this crazy night was going. Because it was going somewhere, and on Felix’s arm. So she took it. And they walked toward the edge of the room.
    She caught Mike’s eye and waved so he would see where she was going. He nodded, still dancing.
    Moving into the quiet corner was as much of a relief as walking into shade on a blazing day. She’d never in her trimmed-and-tidy life been so accosted by stares—except