5. The Rules Of The House #2
I looked at him. He looked back. His face gave nothing.
But the fact that he’d had this floor installed – three weeks ago, before I’d arrived, before the Ledger, before the gold ink – told me everything the House Rules hadn’t.
He’d been planning. He’d been planning for a dancer, a woman who needed this room the way other people needed air, and he’d built it into the house like a trap that looked like a gift.
He left. The door closed behind him. The studio was mine.
I didn’t dance.
I stood at the barre and wrapped my fingers around the smooth wood and felt it creak, once, like a greeting.
I breathed. The rosin smell was sharp and familiar and it pulled from some deep, buried place in my body a feeling I didn’t have a name for – something rawer and less dignified than relief.
Something that belonged to the girl who had stood at a barre at age ten and understood, before she understood anything else about herself, that this was where she was real.
I tested my knee. Small pliés in first position – the most basic movement, the first thing you learn, the foundation of everything. Down, slow. Hold. Up, slower. The joint shifted, settled, held. No grinding. No catch. No pain.
I did it again. Deeper. The plié moved through my thigh and my calf and into the arch of my foot, and my body remembered the language of it the way your fingers remember a phone number you haven’t dialled in years.
It held. It had been holding for weeks. Three weeks, roughly.
I’d known this. I’d been testing it privately, carefully, in Duncan’s flat during the nights he didn’t come home – small movements in the kitchenette, relevés on the cold linoleum, the cautious, secret reclamation of a body I’d been told was broken.
It wasn’t broken. It was fine. It had been fine for long enough that the limp was now a choice, not a condition.
I did a demi-pointe sequence. Both feet, then the left alone. The scar tissue stretched. The joint tracked true. I held the position for eight counts and then lowered, and my breathing was steady and my eyes in the mirror were wet.
I cried. Very quietly, in the studio with the perfect floor and the merciless mirrors, I pressed my face against my arm on the barre and let it come – not much, not long, and not the choking, ugly kind that came when the surgeon had said career-ending in a consulting room that smelled of hand sanitiser.
This was smaller. Tighter. The kind that happened when something you’d been holding released, not because you felt safe, but because you were too tired to hold it.
Then I stopped. I wiped my face with my sleeve. I straightened my spine. I did two more pliés, and then a tendu sequence that used the full length of the barre, and by the time I finished, the mirror showed a woman who looked composed and precise and entirely within her own control.
The cage had better equipment than the ballet company.
I stood at the barre and looked at my reflection and I thought: what do you do with a prison that knows you better than freedom did?
An hour later, Ewan appeared in the studio doorway.
He leaned on the frame and said nothing for a long time.
He had a mug of something in one hand. He was wearing the kind of clothes that said he’d either just woken up or hadn’t slept – a soft hoodie zipped halfway, joggers, bare feet on the wood floor.
His hair was less styled than it had been last night, falling across his forehead, and without the armour of his charm he looked younger and softer and considerably more dangerous to me, because I could see the shape of him underneath the performance – the actual man, unhurried, unguarded, and attractive in a way that had nothing to do with silk shirts and everything to do with the way he leaned against a doorframe like it owed him money.
I stood at the barre. I didn’t move. I was very aware of the heat in my face and hoped it looked like exertion.
He looked at the studio – the mirrors, the floor, the barre – and then he looked at me, and something in his expression settled. Not warmed. Settled. The way water settles when the hand that disturbed it withdraws.
“The rules are largely for your safety, for what it’s worth.”
“And for Lachlan’s satisfaction.”
He grinned. It was the same grin from the night before – wide and undisciplined and carrying the heat of genuine amusement, the kind that made you forgive things you shouldn’t. “Oh, definitely that too.”
A pause. He took a sip from his mug. His eyes didn’t leave mine. I held the barre tighter.
“The studio’s good, by the way. He had a specialist come up from London.
Argued about the timber density for three hours.
Three hours, Morven. The man argued about timber .
” He shook his head, but the smile underneath it wasn’t mockery.
It was something else. Something that looked, if you tilted your head, almost like affection.
“Why are you telling me this?”
He considered the question. He gave it more weight than I expected, which told me the answer mattered.
“Because you should know that he doesn’t do things by accident.” A beat. “None of us do.”
He tapped the doorframe twice with his knuckles, pushed off, and padded away down the corridor, barefoot and unhurried. I listened to his footsteps fade. The studio was silent.
I stood at the barre and looked at my reflection and I thought about three men in a house on a cliff and a ledger full of gold ink and a floor that had been built for me before I knew I was coming.
The barre creaked under my hands.
I didn’t let go.