Chapter 6 #3
“Uh, your colleague in the press and marketing department gave it to me. The one in the office next to yours… Oliver, I think?”
“Oh, they did, did they?” Ivy was never bringing Oliver a mid-morning pick-me-up brownie ever again.
“Don’t be mad at them,” Justin said quickly. “They didn’t want to hand it over. I had to beg for it.”
“Well, you’ve wasted your time. I can’t babysit you tonight, okay?” She started to close the door, but he shot his foot out into the gap between the door and the frame. A risky move for a man whose feet were his career.
“Please just let me talk to you for a few minutes.” Oh, so now he wanted to talk to her?
Ivy gripped the doorknob and looked up at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion.
He looked like he’d run here in the sweltering evening air.
His face was flushed and sweat glistened on his forehead.
She looked down at his sneaker, which was barring her from shutting him out and going back to the aggrieved women of musical theater.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now.” She had aimed for firm and professional, but it came out petulant. Her stomach grumbled, and she threw an arm across her ribcage, hoping he hadn’t heard. He pressed his lips together, barely suppressing a smirk. Dammit.
“Please let me in. I promise there’ll be no whinging and no pity party. I just want to talk.”
Ivy closed her eyes and let out an exasperated whimper.
She was too hungry to talk. She was too hungry to do anything.
“Fine. Come in. But I’m not talking to you until I’ve had something to eat, so you can either cook me dinner or sit quietly until my sushi arrives.
” She turned and walked back into her apartment, leaving him to step cautiously inside.
“Thank you,” he said as she threw herself back onto the couch. He followed her into the living room and stood there, awkwardly. “And thank you for not slamming the door on my foot.”
She glared across the room at him. “I considered it,” she lied. She wasn’t a monster. “Now stop talking. Food’ll be here soon.”
He nodded, eyeing her cautiously. She was still in her work dress, which was crumpled from the heat and from her spending the last hour on the couch.
When she’d arrived home, she’d pulled her hair up off her neck into a high ponytail, which had sagged sideways and let half her hair escape.
She shouldn’t care if Justin Winters saw her looking this bedraggled, but she pulled the ponytail out and redid it hastily anyway.
After a few moments, he pulled out one of her chairs and settled himself at her small dining table, fidgeting as Effie sang about how she wasn’t going.
“What the hell are you listening t—” he started, but she shushed him.
“Quiet until sushi, remember?”
“Okay, okay,” he held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Can I, um, have a glass of water? Please?”
Ivy nodded and gestured towards the kitchen.
She dropped her head back against the couch cushions and let the music wash over her.
Effie roared her rage and betrayal into the living room, tearing down the mountains, yelling, screaming, and shouting.
Ivy had grown up listening to Broadway soundtracks, because her opa had loved them.
A cheaper version of opera, he’d called it—plus tap dancing!
In truth, he’d have preferred opera, which his family had attended all the time in Vienna before the war.
But when he arrived in Sydney, he couldn’t afford the opera.
Tickets to musicals were within reach, though, and he’d come to love it.
Whenever Ivy and the boys visited his house, there was always a Broadway record spinning in his living room.
A few blessedly short minutes later the doorbell rang again.
Ivy sat up, but Justin was already on his feet.
By the time she stood and took a few steps towards the door, he’d already pulled it open and was accepting a plastic bag and handing over a five-dollar bill.
And then he was closing the door and pulling out the plastic containers and setting them all out on the table.
He unwrapped the chopsticks, snapped them apart, and placed them next to the food.
Then for good measure, he screwed the top off the wine bottle and topped off her glass.
“Eat,” he said. “Drink. Become human.”
Ivy scowled at him, but the smell of the gyoza took priority over telling him off.
She made quick work of the food and took a few gulps of wine.
Within minutes, her head felt less fuzzy and she had less of a desire to impale the nearest person on her chopsticks.
Or one particular person. Justin leaned over and collected the empty containers, and she watched, a little confused, as he carried them into her kitchen, then found her bin and threw them out.
“Thank you,” she said, warily, as he sat back down.
“No worries. It was mostly self-preservation. You’re clearly one of those people who turns into a terrifying monster when they’re hungry. My cousin’s the same.”
“I don’t turn into a monster,” she objected, choosing not to mention her chopstick-shiv fantasy. “I just… Don’t have a lot of patience. Especially for people who have already tested my patience.”
He cleared his throat. Message received, then. “At the risk of testing it again, I want to talk to you about New York.”
She rolled her eyes. “There’s nothing to talk about. I don’t want to do it.”
Mabel Normand was now singing about going wherever he ain’t. Fitting, Ivy thought.
“You won’t even consider it?” Justin sounded disbelieving.
“I didn’t say that. I considered it. But I’m not a nanny.”
“I know you’re not, and I don’t need a nanny.”
“Well, I guess that settles it, doesn’t it?” Ivy crossed her arms.
“But I do need you.”
Ivy stared at him, her cheeks suddenly warm.
In another context those words would have been…
no. Must have been the wine making her face feel flushed.
She reminded herself of what he was asking her to do.
What the company was asking her to do. Em had been right, she thought again.
She wasn’t a good fit for this job. But she’d been desperate and hasty and she’d taken it anyway, and now here she was.
She must have been silent for a while, lost in her wine-tangled thoughts, because Justin spoke again.
“I need you,” he repeated. “I can’t go on tour without you.”
Right. He needed her to make his professional dreams come true, while her dreams were farther away than ever.
“This is all so insulting,” she shook her head.
“And not just to me. Aren’t you insulted that they’re treating you like a child?
Peter’s clearly insulted by the board going over his head.
And I mean, isn’t this part of the problem with ballet, that men get to do whatever they want and face no consequences for it? ”
Em had opened Ivy’s eyes to a lot of ballet’s problems over the years, things Ivy had taken for granted until she’d quit dancing, and this was one of the big ones.
Men in ballet were rare and precious, and they could get away with a lot, whether it was lower standards of dancing on stage, or poor behavior off it.
Women were a dime a dozen, and they couldn’t get away with anything.
She glared across the table at Justin, whose eyes were wide with surprise and, if she wasn’t mistaken, a little bit of fear.
“I am facing consequences for it,” he said, voice low and serious. “In case you haven’t noticed, my career is on the line. In your hands.”
Ivy crossed her arms tighter, unwilling to admit that he had a point.
“If this is so important to you, why not just apologize?” Ivy asked. “You don’t have to mean it.”
“I can’t. I know you don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to you, but you have to believe me when I say it’s not an option. Not for me. You’re my only option. Please, Ivy. Do you want to go to New York or not?”
Hearing her own words thrown back at her made irritation spike in her stomach. “No, Justin, I’m an arts journalist who doesn’t want a free trip to New York City, global capital of the arts,” she retorted.
“Okay, so… say yes.”
“If I ever go to New York, it won’t be to keep you out of trouble. It’s the greatest city in the world, and they want me to spend my time there traipsing after you? No, thanks.”
“I know I haven’t made your job easy in the last few weeks, and I’m sorry. But this time you’ll have my full cooperation. If you agree to come on tour—not as my nanny, but as the company’s PR professional—I’ll make your job as easy as I can. I’ll do anything. Please.”
Something about the near-crack in his voice gave her pause.
It wasn’t self pity or whinging, it was just…
desperation. She thought about what would happen when she said no.
The company would scramble to rehearse another dancer for Justin’s role, to fit them for Justin’s costume, to prepare yet another dancer as understudy.
Justin would stay behind in Sydney. She would go to the office and collect news clippings about the company’s performances in New York.
If she said yes, none of that would be necessary. If she said yes, Justin would owe her, big time. And most importantly, if she said yes, she’d get to go to New York.
The company needs you. Justin needs you. That means you have leverage. You just need to figure out what to do with it.
Em was right. Em was always right, damn her.
She could go to a Broadway musical, and see the Degas dancers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She could go to the jazz clubs where jazz was invented. She could watch a ballet at Lincoln Center, on a stage she’d grown up dreaming about.