Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Justin woke on Sunday morning to the sound of the lorikeets in the bottlebrush tree outside the window squabbling, his usual Sunday alarm clock.
He lay for a few minutes listening to the colorful birds shriek and squawk as they hopped from branch to branch feeding out of the long, fluffy red flowers.
They had rainbow lorikeets back home, too, and though he never went back to Hillstone if he could help it, he didn’t mind this reminder of the place where he’d grown up.
He’d been in the city over a decade now, but he never stopped missing the hot stillness of the bush, the way you could stop in the middle of a clearing and hear nothing but the leaves stirring in the feeble breeze and the careful rustle of small creatures in the brush.
As a kid, Justin always wanted to be moving, but when he could stand still enough to listen, the bush rewarded him with a million whispered secrets.
He stretched under the covers, feeling yesterday’s company class in his hamstrings and lower back.
Peter had decided that the company needed to work on its arabesques, and the result was twenty minutes of long, slow extensions in the center, until Justin thought he’d never be able to lift his leg up behind him again.
Justin rolled over as one of the birds let out a particularly emphatic squawk, relishing the feeling of simply lying there.
Sundays were precious for dancers, the only day with no demands on their bodies.
For years after he joined the company, Justin had a regular Sunday routine with Missy.
They’d sleep late, then wander down Willoughby Road to a cluster of cafes that did a roaring brunch trade.
They’d eat a slow meal—Missy was usually recovering from a night out, and during the performance season, he was recovering from a night on the Opera House stage—then stop at the supermarket on their way home and stock up for the week.
In the evening they’d cook something easy, watch a movie, and get an early night.
In the last few years, though, the routine had become less reliable.
Missy would sometimes spend Saturday nights at her girlfriend’s place, or Justin would wake up on Sunday morning to find her and Beth already dressed and caffeinated and chattering happily in the living room.
When that happened, he’d take advantage of the solitude and go for a long bushwalk.
This morning, he rolled himself out of bed and walked tentatively to the living room and found Beth sitting on the couch with a mug in one hand and her phone in the other. She looked up when he entered and smiled, her face still puffy with sleep under her messy black bun.
“Good morning, slugger,” she said, and he shook his head.
“Don’t,” he said. “Not before I’ve had caffeine.”
Beth grimaced apologetically and climbed off the couch to join him in the kitchen. “Sorry. I didn’t realize that was still a sore spot. There’s plenty of coffee left.”
Justin nodded and emptied the French press into a mug. “What did you two get up to last night?”
“Birthday party for one of my co-workers that turned into a bit of a pub crawl, and we didn’t get home until pretty late. You?”
“Quiet one. I’ve been trying to avoid pubs lately.”
“Right.” Beth nodded knowingly. “You doing okay? Missy said they’re trying to do some image rehab at work?”
Justin took a long gulp of coffee. “They certainly are trying.”
Ivy Page was trying so hard it looked like it hurt. Her presence pissed him off, but no one could say she wasn’t giving it her all. If she were anyone else he’d almost respect the effort, he conceded, against his will. But she was her, and her persistence was infuriating.
“Well, that’s good. Is it working?”
“Not really,” Justin grumbled.
“Why not?” Beth frowned.
“Because I’m not going to give her—I mean them—the satisfaction.”
“I see,” Beth said, eyebrows raised in obvious skepticism, and disappeared into the kitchen to refill her mug.
Justin followed her, already ready for more coffee himself. As he poured milk and stirred in some sugar, Beth leaned her back against the counter.
“And why aren’t you giving her—I mean them—the satisfaction?”
Justin scowled. Because Ivy didn’t deserve it.
What she did deserve was every grudging thought he’d had about her in the last five years, every time he’d mentally called her Poison Ivy, and avoided her when she’d come around the studios looking for her next story.
Her next victim. “The woman they picked to work on it, she’s a former journalist. And I don’t trust her. ”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s—” Justin started, then he heard how sharp his voice was.
He let out a breath and tried again. There was no need to bite Beth’s head off.
“She wrote a really shitty review of me a few years ago. And she’s the one who wrote about the video in the first place.
I don’t trust her not to screw me over again. ”
Beth tipped her head thoughtfully. “But she’s not a journalist anymore, right? She works for the company now?”
“Well, yeah, but…” He shrugged. “That’s just her job.”
Beth made a circular motion with her hand, like she was urging him to complete the thought. “Right, that’s her job. She’s getting paid to help the company now. To help you. So why don’t you trust her?” She was looking at him like she was missing something obvious. Or like he was.
Justin shrugged. “I just don’t, okay?”
Missy wandered into the kitchen. More of a stagger, really. She was wearing a threadbare old Twilight T-shirt with the sleeves cut off over a pair of Bonds boxer shorts and she looked a little worse for wear, her mop of curls sticking out at all angles.
“You just”—yawn—“don’t”—yawn—“what?” she finally managed to complete the question. They were all getting too old for pub crawls.
“Justin is explaining to me why he’s refusing to work with his company’s PR team on the image rehab they’ve—”
“It’s not the team, it’s her,” Justin interrupted. “I don’t trust her. The journalist—”
“Former journalist,” Beth interrupted him right back, her eyes on Missy, as though her girlfriend was now the judge and they were both pleading their case.
“Fine, the former journalist they scraped off the bottom of the barrel to follow me everywhere I go and find something nice to write about me for a change,” Justin said, imitating Beth and speaking only to Missy.
“She’s the one who got me into this mess in the first place, and now she’s going to fix it? ”
New jobs or not, people didn’t change overnight.
Ivy Page was still the same person who wrote that review, who called him vapid and lacking substance.
Like she was so substantive, he thought, angrily.
Like she hadn’t seen a viral video and slapped a clickbait headline on it, knowing people would eat it up even if it ruined his life.
Missy screwed up her face and held up her hands. “First of all, it’s too early for this.”
“It’s almost 11,” Beth said tartly, but she reached into the cabinet for Missy’s favourite mug and filled it nearly to the brim with coffee.
“Second of all,” Missy continued, accepting the cup and pausing in delivering her verdict to take a sip.
She sighed and muttered a quick declaration of love, whether to Beth or to caffeine, Justin couldn’t tell.
Even half-asleep and hungover, and in the middle of a disagreement, his cousin and her girlfriend were gone for each other.
Not something Justin had ever experienced, or had any desire to.
“Sorry, babe, but Justin is right. I don’t trust that woman. ”
“Not as far as I can throw her,” Justin added, which, to be fair, was pretty far.
She was petite. A full head shorter than him, and shorter than most of his colleagues, though she was curvier.
The dresses she wore, belted at the waist, often exaggerated those curves, and…
what the hell was he thinking about Ivy Page’s body for?
He gave his head a little shake as Beth sighed beside him.
“You’re both ridiculous.”
“We’re both right,” Justin scoffed, and Missy, mouth full of coffee, nodded in agreement.
Justin mulled the conversation with Beth over for the rest of the day, though, as the three of them did an abridged version of the Sunday routine—brunch, supermarket, no movie—and as he cooked himself a lean steak with a big green salad.
He didn’t want to give Ivy the satisfaction.
He didn’t want her coming within ten feet of him.
But the thing was, Justin needed some image rehab.
He couldn’t afford for people to think of him as “slugger” for much longer.
He just didn’t want her to be the one responsible for that rehab.
After all, it was her fault the entire country had seen that video in the first place.
Sure, the ballet world was a gossip tinderbox, but it was small and insular.
Without Ivy’s interference, that video would have stayed confined to that gossipy little world.
Now Beth and her colleagues at the hospital knew all about it.
He’d have to let Ivy do her job a little, he concluded, as he washed and dried his dishes. The company was leaving for New York in three weeks, and if he didn’t give Ivy something to work with soon, it was going to leave without him.
The next morning, he walked into Studio B fifteen minutes before the start of morning class, foam roller under his arm, and was entirely unsurprised to find Ivy waiting at the front of the room, pen in hand and pad on lap.
“You’re incorrigible,” he sighed, as he walked past her towards his preferred spot at the barre.
“Like Kurt von Trapp,” she replied, barely glancing up from her notepad.
“Who?”
“Kurt von Trapp? From The Sound of Music?” she said, looking at him as though randomly name dropping a singing Austrian child was normal behavior. He stared at her blankly.