My Ducky

She moved like the music owed her money.

For nine years, Narin has danced on the plywood stage of a Bangkok cabaret bar and worked its tables for tips, saving for a dream the bar can’t pay for: a studio of her own, where she is paid because she is good, not because she is pretty at midnight. Now, with six months to go before Meridian—the Singapore showdance that could finally open that door—her partner has taken a cruise-ship contract and their only sponsor with him.

Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Miller is forty-two, ten months from retirement after almost twenty years in the U.S. Army, and has no idea what comes next. He competed in ballroom in college. When his friends volunteer him like a door prize, he refuses to become that man—the lonely American colonel who rides into a Bangkok bar to fix somebody’s life. Then he types “I’m not scared,” deletes it, and types “one dance.”

Her terms: daytime. No whiskey. Real shoes. Come on time. When he offers to cover the costs, she insists on paying half—every Friday, in an envelope. Money helps, but money does not dance. Their coach takes one look—she is gifted and impatient, he is trained and asleep—and warns them: “Each of you is the medicine the other one will want to spit out.”

Narin has known she was a girl since before she had the word for it. Her passport still says M. Tucked inside Jeff’s old dance notebook is a chaplain’s card: “Purpose is discovered by loving the people God places before you.” He has never practiced it long enough to find out what it means.

“Like is cheap,” Narin tells him. “We need the other thing. The thing where you don’t leave when it gets ugly.”

My Ducky is a love story about a soldier learning that leading is not forcing, a dancer learning that following is not submission, and the question Narin puts to him plainly: will he dance with her, or with the word?

Content note: contains explicit sexual content. For adult readers.