Chapter 13 #2
“Can I ask you something?” he said quietly.
“Sure.”
“Is it hard to watch us dance all the time?”
“Only when the corps is out of sync,” Ivy smiled. “And that’s not very often.”
Justin chuckled, but it sounded like he was humoring her. “I mean, does it make you miss dancing?”
Ivy sloshed a little of her drink over the lip of the glass as she set it back on the table.
She hadn’t been expecting that. Yes, she wanted to say.
Part of me burns with envy every time I watch you put your hands on Alice’s body.
But she knew that wasn’t what he meant, and she didn’t want to answer his question.
“What makes you think I used to dance?”
“Didn’t you?”
Ivy picked up her napkin and wiped the sweet, sticky liquid that had dripped onto her fingers, buying herself a little time.
She avoided Justin’s eyes as she spent far too long making sure there wasn’t a trace of liquor left on her skin, but when she looked up, he was still watching her. “How did you know?”
Justin tipped his head to the side slightly, considering her.
“You knew the difference between a high passé and a regular one. You said the painting looked like dancing feels. And,” he reached across the small table and stroked the fingertips of one hand lightly down the side of her neck, over the place where, under her dress, lines of muscle connected her neck to her shoulders, “your traps are extremely strong. I noticed that this morning.”
Ivy shivered, whether because of his touch or the mention of the way they’d devoured each other this morning, she didn’t know.
For a moment, their eyes locked, and she knew he was remembering it too, and thinking about touching her again, without the barrier of a table or a dress between them.
His eyes flicked back down to the place he’d stroked, and something in her stomach twisted bitterly.
“Betrayed by my traps yet again,” she muttered, reaching for her drink again.
They weren’t as pronounced as they’d been the day she met Liv—after more than a decade, her body had softened and expanded and rounded in ways ballet hadn’t permitted—but he’d noticed them anyway.
She’d probably wear the remnants of ballet in her body for the rest of her life, she thought, a permanent tell for people who knew what to look for.
But they didn’t see the full story when they looked at her.
It didn’t matter that she’d given her body over to ballet, shaped it for the artform in all the ways she could control; ballet had found the one thing that was out of her control and used it to disqualify her.
“What do you mean?” Justin asked.
“It’s nothing,” Ivy said quickly. She tried to inject some levity into her expression, even though his list of things he’d observed about her made her feel somewhat exposed. “You sure think you know a lot about me,” she joked, looking at him over her glass.
He flicked his eyebrows up briefly, as though she’d issued a challenge and he was accepting it. “I reckon I do.”
“Oh?”
“I know you used to wear black glasses, but a while ago you switched to these gold ones. I know you like to sit quietly and wait for people to speak rather than peppering them with questions. You’ve done it to me a few times and it works. And I know you used to be a dancer.”
Ivy stared, but he wasn’t done.
“I know you like contemporary art but only when it’s brightly coloured.
I know you’re an excellent writer, even if I don’t always love the things you write, and I know you’re very good at throwing a journalist off a story that isn’t a story.
” He glanced around the edge of the table and nodded at her feet.
She’d worn Em’s stiletto-heeled boots tonight, for confidence and for luck.
“I know you almost never go anywhere without a pair of high heels on, except out into the bush. And honestly, I was surprised you didn’t show up to that bushwalk with a pair of platform sneakers on. ”
Ivy gave him a weak smile. “I considered it,” she admitted, and he grinned that room-lighting grin again. Part amusement, part triumph, all directed right at her.
Ivy swallowed. “I guess you do know a lot about me. I didn’t know you’d noticed all that.”
“I didn’t write it all down in a notebook or anything, but…
I noticed.” He took a long drag of his drink, and she found herself staring at his mouth.
When he spoke again, it was to the tablecloth.
“I used to like reading your stuff, before… that review. Then I stopped. Gave you a nasty nickname and everything.”
Ivy’s stomach dipped. “Oh? How nasty?”
“Poison Ivy,” he said ruefully. He glanced up at her, then looked away again.
“I’ve heard worse.”
“Really?” he sounded skeptical.
“I’m a woman who expresses her opinion on the internet, of course I’ve heard worse. Come on, I thought you were a feminist.” She gave him a sly smile. It was true, but still, Poison Ivy stung a little, even if he called her Kurt now.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling his eyes up to meet hers.
“Me too,” she said, and for a long moment they looked across the small table at each other, regrets and unsaid things swirling between them.
“I used to have a pair of platform sneakers, but they look ridiculous,” she said eventually, to break the tension.
“And they’re unstable. I would have rolled an ankle out there in the bush and you would have had to carry me. ”
He raised his eyebrows as if to say that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, and her cheeks went warm. “You don’t need the heels all the time anyway. You have Tall Woman Energy.”
Her cheeks were burning now—because of his compliments, or because of how much she liked them, she couldn’t tell.
Self-consciously, she tucked her hair behind her ear, and her fingers brushed over the arm of her glasses.
She frowned, then pulled the glasses off and studied them, then looked up at him.
“I got these two years ago. You’re saying you noticed when I got new glasses two years ago? ”
“Yes.”
“But you hated me two years ago. You hated me two weeks ago. You’ve hated me since… since that review.”
He shook his head ruefully. “I didn’t want to notice, but I did. You’re hard not to notice. And I didn’t hate you.”
Ivy put her glasses back on and raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Yes, you did. It’s okay, I get why.”
“I didn’t hate you,” he said firmly, and a little heatedly. “I just didn’t understand why you didn’t see me. All of me. You were smart and beautiful and observant, and I hated that all you could see was my feet. It made me feel small and angry and—”
“And bullied,” she supplied.
He didn’t say anything. He just breathed out hard through his nose and looked at her, his hazel eyes glittering in the dim, dancing light. She let him look. She was starting to realize that he’d been looking much longer than she’d ever imagined.
“I didn’t hate you,” he said again after a moment. “I just wanted you to notice me the way I noticed you.”
Ivy nodded. They sat in silence, and after a moment, Ivy realized he was still waiting for an answer to his initial question, and that he was using her “shut up” trick on her.
She thought about the first time she’d visited ANB as a reporter, how she’d sat at the front of the room and years of training had rushed back in an instant, so that she realized halfway through the class that she was watching the ballet mistress instead of the dancer she was there to report on.
About the small but insistent pull of envy she felt in her gut sometimes when she watched the dancers now, remembering the days when her body had looked like theirs, moved like theirs.
She was still strong and fit, but a decade without dancing had left her softer and bigger than she’d ever been during her training.
Some dancers struggled when they put on weight after they stopped—Em certainly had—but Ivy had been lucky.
Her body was different now, and she was fine with it.
That decade hadn’t changed the one thing she wished she’d always wished she could change about her body, though.
“It is hard to watch sometimes,” she said slowly.
“When the women are doing assemblés during petit allegro, or when Peter sets a really gorgeous waltz combination. I miss that. The sound your pointe shoes make when they both snap down onto the floor into a tight fifth. And the floating. The way the air kind of wraps around your body as you move through it.” She gestured with one hand, her wrist fluid, and his eyes followed her fingers.
“I quit when I was 18, so it’s been a long time, but…
I don’t think that feeling ever leaves you. ”
“Mmm,” he hummed in agreement. “It gets in your bones.”
“And your muscles, and your ligaments,” Ivy added. “And your traps, apparently.”
Justin ran his eyes over the muscles in question, and Ivy could almost feel his fingers on her again. “Why did you quit?”
Ivy bit her lip. She’d known the question was coming, but she didn’t want to answer it.
She remembered those first miserable months after she’d walked away from ballet, when everyone in her life asked her why, over and over again.
Why Ivy the Ballerina wasn’t a ballerina anymore.
As if the idea of Ivy without ballet didn’t make sense to them. It hadn’t made sense to her, either.
“I didn’t get a company contract, and I decided to go to uni instead,” she said. The truth, albeit a little sanded down and sanitized. She looked at him, waiting for him to ask more questions, but he sat quietly and watched her, his eyes curious but his mouth closed.
“I was too short,” she said after a long silent second, and wow, the tables had truly turned now.
He didn’t have a notebook, but if he had, it would be covered with “shut up, shut up,” and she was falling right into the trap.
She found she didn’t mind, though. She trusted him with this.
“I sent out lots of videos and was ready to audition anywhere that would let me, but I’m 5’2”, so I always got cut after the first round. ”
“Did you ever audition for ANB?”
She shook her head. “I sent in my video but I didn’t make it as far as an in-person audition. They were rigid about height requirements back then, before Peter. Missed the cut-off by two inches.”
“Fucking stupid,” Justin muttered.
“I know. Like anyone in the audience would notice if a few girls in the corps were a few inches shorter or taller than the rest. It’s not like all real swans are the same size, right?”
Justin shrugged. “So what if people did notice? Why should everyone have to be the same height at all? It’s so arbitrary, and it means the company misses out on talented dancers for no good reason.
And if it’s partnering they’re worried about, just hire shorter men.
Or taller men. Or whatever we need to make the partnering work.
It’s not rocket science, it’s just common sense, isn’t it? ”
Ivy looked across the table at him in surprise. He sounded like he’d been hanging out with Em.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to rant, especially when you probably know all this.”
“It’s okay,” Ivy said slowly. “I know it, but I guess I didn’t expect you to agree with it.”
“Well, I do. I’m glad Peter changed the policy when he took over. A bit late for you, though, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Ivy said quietly. “I’m happy for the women who are benefitting from the change now.”
“I wouldn’t be happy, I’d be pissed,” he said. “To miss out on the career I’d worked for my whole life because of a stupid policy that can be changed that easily? It’s bullshit.”
“Well, I’m happy for them,” she said firmly. And she was. Mostly.
Justin watched her like he knew what she was thinking.
That it didn’t matter how many times she told herself the rules were arbitrary and stupid, she’d still had to play by them, and she’d still lost. That she’d broken her own heart by foolishly hoping some company somewhere would bend them for her.
That she’d been so depressed and angry back then that she couldn’t get out of bed, or fathom stepping foot in a ballet studio ever again.
That she was happy ballet had made some progress, but it stung sometimes that she had been born too late, or given up too early, to enjoy it.
“Then I’ll be pissed on your behalf,” he said stoutly.
Ivy opened her mouth to argue but found she didn’t want to. The declaration was oddly touching, given how long he’d spent being pissed at her.
“What are you going to do, punch ballet in the face?” she said archly, but there was no real challenge in the words, and he chuckled.
“Careful what you wish for, we all know what these hands can do,” he said, clenching his fists and striking an exaggerated put-’em–up-pose, but Ivy found her thoughts slipping sideways.
I don’t, but I want to find out.
Before she could come up with something more appropriate to say aloud, a group of musicians started trooping onto the stage, two of them with instruments in hand.
The lights above Ivy and Justin’s table dimmed even further, and the chatter in the club petered out as the musicians, dressed in sharp suits that complemented each other but didn’t precisely match, took their places.
A tall Black man with a saxophone in hand stepped to the mic at the front of the stage and introduced himself as James Jefferson, and then introduced the bassist, the pianist, the trumpeter, and the drummer.
A moment later they started playing, and Ivy pivoted slightly in her chair so she could watch them at work.
But she could feel Justin’s eyes on her yet again.
Watching her, noticing her. She kept her eyes straight ahead, trying to focus on the music and the talent in front of her.
But even as she listened, letting the warm, lively music wash over her, she couldn’t stop thinking about the man across the table from her—and what his hands could do.