Chapter 16
sixteen
The ballet studio on Wednesday was an incubator for pure misery.
It wasn’t just warm, it was a heavy, suffocating blanket of moisture that clung to the mirrors, fogged up the tall arched windows, and turned the air into something you practically had to chew before breathing in.
The ancient air conditioning unit in the wall had given two minutes into warm-ups with a loud, metallic clunk-shhh, leaving sixteen dancers trapped in a room that felt less like a pristine studio and more like a steam room built by someone who hated teenage girls.
Madame Laurent hadn’t even blinked. She’d just clapped her hands, pointed her wooden cane at the piano, and declared that true prima ballerinas danced through adversity.
I wasn’t a prima ballerina yet. Right now, I was just a human puddle.
“And six, seven, eight—pas de chat, grand jeté, landed,” Madame Vance called out, her voice cutting through the thick, wet air like a dull razor.
I pushed off from the floor, forcing my aching calves to spring into the jump, extending my legs as far as they’d go.
For a second, floating mid-air, I felt weightless.
Then gravity reasserted itself, and I landed, my pointe shoes hitting the wood with a dull, damp thud.
Heat surged through my chest, making my skin flush hot and prickle with sweat.
Sweat was dripping into my eyes, stinging like hell.
My black leotard was plastered to my spine, completely saturated, and my tights felt like they’d been dipped in warm soup before I put them on.
My slicked-back hair was escaping its pins in soggy strands that plastered themselves to the back of my neck.
“Ainsley, your shoulders,” Madame Vance barked, appearing beside me with the uncanny speed of a wraith. She tapped my collarbone lightly with her cane. “You look like you’re carrying the weight of the world. Open the chest. Grace, child. Not agony.”
“Sorry, Madame,” I muttered, rolling my shoulders back even as my muscles screamed.
By the time the two-hour block finally came to an end, I didn’t care about grace, all I cared about was not dying of heat stroke. When Madame Vance finally dismissed us with a crisp bow, the entire class collectively collapsed into a pile of limp limbs and desperate groans.
I slunk over to the corner where my duffel bag lay, unbuckling my pointe shoes with trembling fingers.
Even worse was that toSebastian couldn’t drive me home.
The thought of sitting on a crowded, un-air-conditioned bus for forty-five minutes in my current state made me want to lay on the pavement outside and wait for death to claim me.
I shoved my pointe shoes into their mesh bag, threw my oversized vintage t-shirt over my dripping leotard because I didn’t want to walk outside in just a leotard, and practically dragged myself out the back exit of the studio into the late-afternoon sun.
And immediately saw Rhys Montgomery waiting for me.
Even worse, he had a fan club. Five girls from the other ballet class that ran at the time were surrounding him, swooning over his car and batting eyelashes at him like he was the greatest thing on earth, while he just stood there and let it happen.
I wasn’t sure why it made a wave of fury crash over me, but it made me want to stomp over to the girls and tell them to scram.
But I guess I didn’t have to—because the moment Rhys noticed me, he stood up straight and beckoned me toward the car.
The petty part of me had me halting. I crossed my arms. “We better not be going to the gym again.”
Because that was the only reason I could think of why he would be here. Last week, he’d shown up and taken me to the gym. It seemed only natural he would do the same again this time.
“Nice to see you too, Ainsley,” Rhys smirked, pulling off his sunglasses and hooking them onto the collar of his shirt. His green eyes locked onto mine, sharp and assessing as they dragged over my sticky, disheveled state. “You look terrible.”
A couple of the girls laughed. He ignored them.
“And to answer your question: yes, we are going to the gym. Justin and Kelcey are expecting us.”
I groaned loudly, tilting my head back toward the sky but then walked toward him.
“Rhys, I’m serious. The AC went out mid-class.
I’ve been sweating through a two-hour rehearsal in what was essentially a tropical greenhouse.
I don’t know if you know anything about ballet, but it is actually hard work.
I feel disgusting. I need a shower, a bed, and to never see another human being ever again. ”
“That seems like a bit of an overreaction.”
“I hate you,” I said flatly.
“No, you don’t. Get in.”
“I’m not getting in your car to go sweat on a treadmill while Kelcey breathes down my neck,” I insisted, planting my feet. “I’m taking the bus home.”
“The bus?” Rhys raised an eyebrow, looking at me like I’d just suggested riding a unicycle onto the interstate. “You’re going to sit on a bus full of strangers, sweating like a pig, for forty-five minutes? Absolutely not. Get in the car.”
“I am not going to the gym like this!”
“Then shower at my house,” he said simply, as if he’d just offered me a stick of gum.
I blinked, taking a half-step back. “What?”
“We’re supposed to be at the gym in forty-five minutes.
You take the bus home, shower, and change, we’re going to be so late Justin is going to think we bailed, or worse, that we fought.
I can get us to my place in fifteen minutes—you come over, take a quick shower in my bathroom, steal some of my clothes to work out in, and then we go. Problem solved.”
I opened my mouth to tell him no, that was not the problem solved, when one of his fangirls decided to butt in.
“I’d love a ride in your car,” she purred. And then she put a hand on his chest.
Would it be entirely inappropriate for me to slap her hand away?
Probably but my hand itched to do it anyway.
But I didn’t need to. Rhys grabbed her wrist—using only the tips of his fingers, as if he didn’t want more contact than necessary—and let her hand drop back to her side. She stared at him, jaw agape and eyes blinking.
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding apologetic at all. He looked at me instead of her. “Offer’s open to one girl only.”
My heart thudded in my chest. And even though I wanted to keep arguing with him—not even necessarily because I didn’t want to go, but because that was the game we played—I marched around to the passenger side, yanked the door open, and climbed into the air-conditioned bliss of his SUV.
The cold air hit my overheated skin like a miracle. I closed my eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath, sagging against the leather seat.
“See?” Rhys said, shifting the car into drive and pulling away from the curb. “Was that so hard?”
“Shut up,” I murmured. I turned my head to stare out the window, trying to ignore the way my pulse hitched every time his knuckles brushed the gear shift.
I was grateful to find that his house was empty when we got there.
I’d considered insisting that he just let me go home to shower and change, but I knew my house would most definitely not be empty and that meant, at best, being endlessly questioned about where I was going and at worst, not even being able to shower right away because it was already being used.
I still felt weird taking a shower in somebody else’s house, but I couldn’t fault him for saying it made sense.
Rhys led me into his room first to get me a change of clothes.
He spun around and closed the distance between us.
I, unfortunately, was already extending my arms for them.
I told myself it was because we were in too much of a rush to hesitate.
He laid the pile in my arms, his fingers brushing mine in the process.
“These should work,” he said, jerking his chin toward the door to my right. “Bathroom is through that door. Fresh towels are in the cabinet under the sink. Take your time,” he added, turning toward his closet to grab his own gym bag. “We’ve got about twenty minutes if we want to get there on time.”
I nodded, my mind still on the tingling still in my fingers. I turned for the door but only made it a few steps when Rhys called out behind me.
“Hey, Ainsley?”
“Yeah?” I asked over my shoulder.
His gaze dropped to the pile of clothes in my hands, then dragged back up to my eyes, a bright mischief in them. “Can’t wait to see you in my T-shirt again.”
My cheeks heated. My body buzzed. My fingers chose that exact moment to forget how to work and the clothes nearly slipped to my fingers.
I shot my hands out as quickly as I could to grab them all before they could hit the ground, because there was something more mortifying about picking them up off the floor than just catching them.
When I risked a glance back up at Rhys, I found him smirking, which only intensified that buzzing.
I pushed the smirk and the comment and the buzzing out of my mind and slipped into his bathroom and pulled the door shut, locking it with a quiet click.
The bathroom was spotless, tiled in dark slate with a massive glass-enclosed walk-in shower.
I finally peeled off my disgusting, sweat-soaked tights and leotard.
Dropping them in a pile, I stepped into the shower and turned the handle.
The water cascaded over me in a cool, merciful blast. Normally, I liked to take showers so hot that I felt like I was being boiled, but today, I was just happy to cool down at all.
I stood there for a full minute letting the water wash away the exhaustion, the sticky sweat, and the tension of the day before I reached for the soap that was sitting on the built-in wall niche.
It was a dark, sleek bottle that said it was sandalwood and cedar and as I lathered it on my hand, the scent bloomed instantly in the steam, thick and intoxicating.
My breath hitched as I breathed it in. It was him.