ICYMI, Brooke recently opened up about the intimacy she experienced while she was partnered up with Derek during the show’s seventh season. “I would have actually hoped we would have had a love affair,” she admitted during said on the Oct. 8 episode of Cheryl Burke’s Sex, Lies and Spray Tans podcast. “You are intertwined with someone’s body when you’re a dancer. There is no way that I have ever been so connected—besides with a lover or a husband—than I was with Derek.”
And while she and Derek, 38, still have an “amazing” relationship, Brooke views him as more of a sibling.
“Of course, I’ll always be crushing on Derek, like he’s adorable—not quite literally,” Brooke told E! of the choreographer, who wed Hayley Erbert in August. “It was nothing.”
These two were simply meant to heat up the dance floor together as partners.
“People don’t realize what a connection is required, and the audience sees that,” she continued. “You can’t fake that, so I think Derek and I will always have a relationship and it was just exciting and it was new and scary and romantic.”
