27. ~Vex~
~Vex~
The last of the evening class trickles out into the dusk, gym bags slung over tired shoulders, and the owner flips the sign on the door with a wink in my direction before vanishing into his back office with a pointed lack of subtlety that tells me precisely nothing and absolutely everything.
I assume the date is over.
That’s the reflex—assume the good thing has an expiry, brace for the lights to come up and the magic to be packed away in its case. I reach for my bag.
“Leave it,” Lucien says.
I glance up.
He’s standing in the center of the emptied studio, jacket already shed, shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm with that maddening precision of his, and the low house lights catch the copper-and-gold of his hair and the cool steel behind his glasses.
The space around him has gone cavernous and hushed now that the crowd is gone—just the chrome poles gleaming in their patient rows, the mirrors throwing the two of us back at each other a hundredfold, the floor polished to a black-ice shine.
“The studio’s closed,” I point out.
“It’s ours,” he corrects, and the possessive lands somewhere low in my belly.
“For the next few hours, the owner’s gift.
I thought—” and here, remarkably, the unflappable Lucien Graves hesitates, the smallest catch in a man who never catches, “—I thought I might teach you. Privately. If you’d let me. ”
The offer hangs in the chalk-dusted air, and the strategist in my skull turns it over for hidden edges out of pure habit and finds none, finds only a man who flew before he ever learned to feel nothing, offering to hand me the one language he buried deepest. The empty building exhales around us.
It becomes, in the space of a held breath, ours alone.
“Fine,” I say, dropping the bag, aiming for indifference and missing it by a mile. “Impress me, Pole King.”
He arches a single brow at the title, the one the owner hung on him weeks ago and that I have refused, with great dedication, to let die.
“You’re never going to stop calling me that.”
“Not in this lifetime,” I confirm sweetly. “Possibly not in the next. Silas tells me we’re all reincarnating together, so I intend to be insufferable about it across multiple realities.”
Something flickers across his face—amusement, and beneath it that warmer thing he’s been letting surface more and more lately, the one that makes the strategist in me deeply nervous and the rest of me deeply, dangerously content.
He doesn’t answer. He just turns toward the nearest pole and crooks two fingers at me, an invitation and a dare folded into one economical motion, and the game is on.
He does not impress me by showing off.
That’s the first surprise.
A lesser man—Riot, bless his feral heart—would have launched into a display, all spectacle and challenge.
Lucien does the opposite. He teaches. He starts me slow and builds with the patient incrementalism of a man who understands that a body learns trust the way a mind does, one small successful risk at a time.
We begin with the simple things, drills I half-remember in my muscles, and then he raises the difficulty by careful degrees—climbs that demand more, inverts that ask me to hang my whole weight from a grip I’m not sure I still own. He spots me at every step.
His hands find my hips, my ribs, the small of my back, never lingering into anything indecent, always exactly where they need to be a half-second before I need them there.
His scent wraps the work in warmth—blood orange and honeyed pear, old books and black tea, that deep amber base going rich with the effort—and I find myself breathing it in like a steadying drug between movements.
“Partner lift,” he says, and positions me, and explains the mechanics in that low even voice, every instruction precise as a scalpel.
“You’ll commit your weight fully to me. No hedging.
A half-commitment is how people get hurt—the body tries to save itself and fights the lift.
You have to give it to me completely or not at all. ”
“Give a man my whole weight with no guarantee he won’t drop me,” I muse, arching a brow. “You understand who you’re asking.”
“I understand exactly who I’m asking.” He doesn’t smile, but something gentles at the corner of his mouth. “That’s why I’m asking it slowly.”
So I commit.
I give him my weight—and he takes it, lifts me into the air as if I’m made of paper and intention, holds me suspended and weightless and utterly dependent on the strength of a man I have spent weeks trying to solve.
We move through catches, balance exercises, transitions that require me to let go of the pole entirely and trust that his hands will be there.
And every single time I fall—every wobble, every overreach, every moment my body outruns its skill—he catches me.
Without hesitation. Without a flicker of doubt.
As if catching me is simply the thing he was built to do, a reflex installed at the factory.
“You’re overthinking the catch,” he observes after the fourth time I stiffen mid-fall, bracing for an impact that never comes. “You keep trying to save yourself a half-second before I reach you. It’s instinct, I know. But it’s fighting me.”
“Forgive me for not having a deep reservoir of faith in being caught,” I shoot back, blowing a strand of pink-violet hair out of my face. “Historically, the catching has been a prelude to the dropping.”
“Then drop on purpose,” he says, and I blink at him. “You heard me. Stop trying to fall gracefully. Fall badly. Fall like you mean it, the worst, most uncontrolled fall you can manage, and find out what I do with it.”
It is, I think, the single most insane piece of therapy anyone has ever prescribed me—which is precisely why I do it.
I let go of the pole entirely, mid-height, no control, no grace, a genuine plummet—and his arms close around me before I’ve fallen a foot, gathering me out of the air so smoothly that the fear never even finishes forming.
He sets me on my feet, steadies me, and says nothing, because the lesson is the point and we both know it. The mastermind in me sits in stunned silence.
I just dropped on purpose, and the floor never came.
And somewhere in the rhythm of it, the rising and the falling and the catching, something in me begins to come apart in a way that has nothing to do with the burn in my muscles.
I have spent my entire life relying on exactly one person.
Myself.
I learned young and brutally that anyone who promised to catch me was simply lining up the angle to let me drop—my husband caught me at the altar and dropped me onto the corpses of my family the very next dawn; Dorian caught me out of the wreckage and dropped me the instant a prettier distraction wandered by.
The lesson was carved into me with a deep enough blade that I stopped offering my weight to anyone at all. You cannot be dropped if you never let go of the pole. It became the architecture of my whole survival: trust nothing, hold everything, catch yourself.
But Lucien has never once let me fall.
The realization arrives whole and unsettling, and the mastermind in me, who misses nothing, is forced to admit she’s been missing this for weeks.
He didn’t start tonight. He caught my finances before a single creditor could circle.
He caught my spiraling mind with nothing but a hand around mine in a garage, dropping the noise to a murmur.
Every reckless, self-destructive, deliberately-too-far thing I have hurled myself at since the day we met, certain no one would be there to break the impact—he was already there.
Already moving. Already reaching.
Beneath all that glacial control, beneath the obsession he wears like a tailored coat, there is a certainty so absolute it frightens me more than any threat ever has: this man will be there.
Always. Every time.
Whether I ask or not, whether I deserve it or not, whether I’m falling on purpose to test the floor or falling by accident because I pushed too hard—he will catch me.
The lesson stopped being about dance somewhere around the third catch.
It’s about the one thing I have never, in all my brilliant ruined life, been able to do.
Trust.
And the terror of it isn’t that he’ll fail me.
It’s that he won’t. Failure I know how to survive—I have built an entire self out of surviving it.
But a man who keeps his word, who catches me every single time until I forget to brace for the floor, who makes safety into a habit my body starts to trust without my permission—that is the one weapon I have no defense against.
If I let myself rely on it, truly rely on it, and it ever vanished—if the catching ever stopped—there would be no version of me left that knew how to land alone. He isn’t just teaching me to fall. He’s teaching me to need him.
And the most dangerous part, the part that should have me reaching for a blade and an exit, is that I am letting him.
Maybe he feels the shift in me, the way he feels everything.
He crosses to the sound system, and after a moment a song unspools into the empty studio—something slow and low and without words, all warm strings and a heartbeat of bass—and he dims the house lights another notch until the whole space goes amber and intimate, shadows pooling soft in the corners.
Then he does the most extraordinary thing I have ever watched him do.
He stops being my psychiatrist.
I watch it happen in real time, the way you’d watch a man set down a weight he’s carried so long he’s forgotten the shape of his own shoulders without it.
The clinical remove, the cataloguing gaze, the perpetual three-moves-ahead assessment—he lays it all down, deliberately, and what crosses the floor toward me is simply a man.
Not the doctor who studied me through a file.
Not the planner running contingencies. Just Lucien, with his sleeves rolled and his eyes warm and his hand extended, asking me to dance for no reason other than that he wants to hold me while music plays.
I take his hand.