Chapter 6 #2
“Like a handler,” Peter corrected. “Someone who can keep any eye on you and make sure that your behaviour reflects well on the company at all times.”
“So, a babysitter,” Ivy concluded.
Peter tsked in evident exasperation. “Like I said, I do not think it’s appropriate—or necessary, for that matter.” He looked at Justin, his gaze intense and authoritative. “You are a grown man who should not require handling in order to behave in a professional manner.”
“I don’t,” Justin retorted, but Peter was still talking.
“However, Ivy’s profile reminded us all of how well you perform the Pearson choreography, and it is important to me that we bring our best performers to New York.”
Well, that was a kind of victory, Ivy thought, even though it didn’t feel like one right now.
“So this is the position I find myself in. According to the board, I can only bring my strongest performer on our most important tour in years if I also bring a member of the publicity team with us to make sure he isn’t a liability to the company. Of course, an apology would be cheaper.”
And less insulting, Ivy thought.
“Not to me,” Justin shook his head. “Please, this tour is really important to me. I was just a kid last time we went to New York and…” He swallowed. “And we don’t know how long it’ll be before we go back again. Peter, I’m 33.”
Many men danced into their late thirties, if they were lucky. But injuries could happen at any time, and they could end a career in an instant. If another ten years went by, or even five, Justin would never dance in New York again.
Peter sighed and shook his head. After a moment, his gaze landed on Ivy. “The donor in question liked your profile. They’d want me to bring you to be Justin’s… to keep an eye on him.”
He’d just barely avoided repeating the word “babysitter,” she was pretty sure. Ivy looked at Peter, then at Justin, eyes wide. They wanted to send her to the other side of the world for a week to be a nanny for a 33-year-old man?
Next to her, Justin leaned forward and opened his mouth to respond, but Peter held up a hand to cut him off, and Justin froze.
“I suspect you have objections,” Peter told Justin quellingly.
Uh, as did Ivy. And as did Peter, by the sound of it.
“But we are out of time. And, frankly, this decision is not yours to make. It’s hardly even mine.
” Ivy watched as he breathed in sharply through his nose, and she was fairly sure he was holding himself back from complaining about the board and its meddling.
He let the breath out slowly, then looked at her.
When he spoke, his voice was steady and businesslike.
“I realize that this is outside of the scope of the job we hired you for, and you’d be traveling on short notice. So please take the rest of the day to decide if you’re willing to make the trip. I understand if you’d rather not, but if that’s the case, I’ll need to make other casting arrangements.”
In her peripheral vision, she saw Justin look over at her, and she felt, rather than saw, the panic in his eyes.
“Other casting arrangements” would mean rehearsing another dancer to go to New York in his stead.
It would mean Justin staying behind while someone else performed the role that had been created on him, and that he danced so beautifully.
“I… Fine,” Ivy said impotently, and Justin’s shoulders dropped, like he’d been hoping she’d agree instantly.
But Em had warned her not to rush into a consequential decision last time, and Ivy had ignored her, and now here she was.
Being asked to babysit a grown-ass man who wouldn’t apologize for punching someone’s lights out.
This time, she was actually going to take the time Peter had offered her.
“Thank you,” Peter said, mustering a tight smile that vanished as he dismissed them. “That’ll be all.”
Out in the hallway, Ivy and Justin stared at each other.
“This isn’t fair,” he said quietly, fists clenched, and for once she agreed with him. None of this was fair.
God, Em had been right. Ivy wasn’t cut out for PR.
In her previous life, she’d be writing a story about this, about the unfortunate reality that, without guaranteed government funding for the arts, artistic leaders like Peter were beholden to whichever corporate entity signed on as chief sponsor that season.
Maybe she’d even be joining the parade of think pieces about ballet’s gendered double standards, and the lengths companies would go to to protect their precious male dancers.
She could almost hear Em ranting about it now.
“I’ve played ball,” Justin went on. “I’ve cooperated with you, I’ve done everything the company’s asked of me, and I’m still being punished?”
Ivy rolled her eyes, all the irritation she’d kept leashed in Peter’s office suddenly too much to reign in.
She looked up at him, spearing him with the sharpest look she could manage.
“First of all, you have barely played ball. You made me beg you to cooperate and wasted precious time we could have been using to avoid this very situation. Secondly, you have not done everything the company’s asked of you, because you won’t apologize, even though doing so would make all of this go away.
” She threw an arm in the direction of the now-closed door to Peter’s office.
“Thirdly, you are not being punished, because you still get to go to New York and dance at—”
“So you’ll do it?” he interrupted eagerly.
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “But spare me the self pity and the whinging while I’m deciding, okay?”
And she turned on her heel and marched away from him.
Ivy was halfway through her second glass of white wine, and halfway through her playlist of Angry Broadway Songs.
Mama Rose had just finished belting about how it was finally her turn, Eliza Hamilton was burning her husband’s letters, and Ivy was still just as pissed off as she’d been when she’d arrived home from work and kicked out of her shoes, leaving a scuff on the baseboard that she’d have to scrub off this weekend.
She swigged at the wine, letting the anguish in the song stoke her own rage.
Anger didn’t feel good, per se, but it felt better than the bitter despair that had crept over her on her commute home.
She’d failed. She’d thrown everything she had at this project and it hadn’t been enough.
Is this what she’d left journalism for? To fall flat on her face in front of a ballet company that had already rejected her once?
To fail so completely that said company thought of her as little more than a babysitter?
She’d said as much to Em when they’d spoken on the phone an hour or so ago. Em had been… well, she’d managed not to say “I told you so,” but Ivy could tell it had taken a lot of self control to hold the words in.
“This is what PR is,” Em had said, with a shrug that bumped her earring against her phone.
Ivy pictured her holed up in her harbour-view office as the sun started going down, up to her eyeballs in legal documents.
Still, she’d taken Ivy’s call. “It’s making people look good because they don’t have enough sense or self-control to do it themselves.
You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff our in-house team has to do.
And I can’t tell you, because that would violate several NDAs. ”
“He called it a punishment.” The word still stung, though not nearly as much as being reduced to a chaperone.
“Oh, give me a fucking break,” Em snorted.
“If this is punishment then please, punish women in ballet this way as well. Imagine if a woman had done what he did in that pub! She’d be out on her ass before you could say ‘George Balanchine,’ and there’d be ten other women waiting to replace her.
But if a man can do half a pirouette, he can do whatever he wants and the company will cover for him like he’s some kind of naughty child. ”
“I know!” Ivy cried, and took another swig of her wine.
She’d heard this kind of rant from Em many times before, and this time it felt good to agree wholeheartedly.
And loudly. She should probably eat something if she was going to keep drinking like this.
She leaned her head against the couch and sighed.
She was too hungry to cook. But if she ordered delivery, she’d be starving by the time it arrived.
But she was also maybe too tipsy to cook safely?
“Although…” Em said, interrupting Ivy’s internal debate. “Have you thought about how you can turn this to your advantage?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I get that you’re insulted and everything, though again, this is more or less what you signed up for when you took this job.
” What an elegant way to say I told you so, Ivy wanted to snark, but she let Em keep talking, because she could tell her friend had already started thinking like a lawyer.
“But set that aside for a second. The company needs you. Justin needs you. That means you have leverage. You just need to figure out what to do with it.”
Right now, Ivy was too hungry to think about leverage. Too hungry, and too cranky, which was only exacerbated by the hunger. She pulled up the website of a local Japanese place and hastily placed an order, mouth already watering in anticipation of gyoza and sushi.
Barely ten minutes later, there was a knock on her door.
Frowning, Ivy looked down at her phone. That had been unusually fast. When the delivery person knocked again, she climbed off the couch and, on the way to the door, fished her wallet out of her work bag, which she’d dumped unceremoniously next to her shoes.
But the man standing on her welcome mat wasn’t a delivery person. He also wasn’t particularly welcome right now.
“You can’t be serious. Did you get lost on the way to daycare?”
Justin frowned and ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “Excuse me?”
“How did you get my address?”