Page 14 of Barre Fight
When class ended, he headed down the hallway to the cafe in the lobby, and there she was again, following behind him in her towering heels, pen and pad in hand. Ignoring her, he gave his order to Gina the barista and tried not to notice Ivy scribbling something out of the corner of his eye.
Once Gina handed over his coffee, Justin made his way down the hall to the physio room, where he had his standing bi-weekly check-in with Shaz. He could hear Ivy click-clacking behind. Annoyed, he took a deep swig of his coffee, and winced as the scalding liquid burned his tongue. Ivy followed him into the physiotherapy room and settled herself on a bench at the back, next to a rack of free weights and several large balance balls. When Shaz emerged from the little office at the side of the room and looked at her curiously, Ivy stood and introduced herself.
“Justin and I are working on a project together,” she explained to Shaz, giving her the same determined smile she’d shot at Justin in the studio. “We’re trying to drum up some good press for him.”
Shaz turned her tanned and deeply lined face towards Justin and shook her head, her short blonde ponytail swaying at her neck. “Yeah, you really got yourself into some shit there, didn’t you?”
That was Dr. Sharon Murphy for you. She was the best dance physio in the country, and she cared deeply about keeping ANB’s dancers healthy. But she didn’t pull her punches. Once, about a year after Justin had joined the corps, she’d watched him partnering someone in a rehearsal and toldhim stoutly that if he didn’t start engaging his glutes more when he lifted, he was going to need a double shoulder replacement by the time he hit thirty. When he’d looked at her in terror, she’d taken pity on him and spent the next six months helping him rebuild his pas de deux technique. In the years since, he’d never felt so much as a twinge in his shoulders.
Justin grunted in reply as he sat on the exam table near the front of the room, then lay back so that Shaz could test the strength and mobility of his hip flexors. His right hip had been bothering him lately.
“I see you’re feeling eloquent this morning,” Shaz said tartly, but she set to work testing his ankle and calves, rotating his feet and having him resist her hands as she pressed this way and that. “Usually he’s quite a chatterbox,” she said over her shoulder to Ivy. “Comes in and tells me about his mum and his aunt out in the country, and his cousin’s latest drama with her girlfriend.”
Justin gritted his teeth and stared resolutely at the ceiling. He did usually chat with Shaz during his sessions, but only because she made him feel at ease in a way few people could. Still, he didn’t need Shaz spilling all his business to Ivy. He couldn’t stop the irritating woman from following him all over the building, but he could make sure she didn’t get any more information out of him besides where he went and what he did there. He sure as hell didn’t need Shaz telling him about his mum and Steen and Missy. Or his childhood in Hillstone.
As Shaz moved on to his quads and hammies, he raised his head and glanced in the mirror. Ivy was frantically scribbling on her notepad, no doubt writing down everything Shaz had said about his family.
“What are you working on today?” Ivy asked Shaz from the back of the room.
Shaz glanced down at Justin, who had returned his eyes to the water stain on the ceiling above him. When he said nothing, she gave him a perplexed frown, then answered for him.
“He’s got an imbalance in his TFLs. His hip flexors. The foam rolling helps, but it’s not a magic wand. The left one is stronger, but the right one is more flexible and weaker, and it’s been hurting during battements and high passés for the last few months. It’s a wear and tear thing. Happens with dancers as they get older—no offense,” she added quickly, and Justin batted her apology away. He was getting older, no point denying it.
But then he heard the scratch of Ivy’s pen and irritation flared in his chest. Wasn’t there some kind of healthcare privacy law that prohibited Shaz from sharing this information?
“And what do you do about that?”
“Targeted strengthening exercises, mostly, to help the weaker side catch up with the stronger one. Lay off the high passés, keep the battements low so you don’t exacerbate the inflammation.”
“Hmm.” Ivy sounded thoughtful. “His passés looked pretty high this morning.”
Justin swallowed a groan.
“Oh, really?” Shaz said pointedly, looking down at him again, “well, that would be awfully counterproductive, wouldn’t it? Not much point in me doing all this work on you if you’re just going to go right back to class and make it flare up again, is there?”
Justin grimaced apologetically. He wanted to tell Shaz that Ivy was mistaken, but of course she wasn’t. She’d been watching him like a hawk through the entire class, and she hadn’t missed a bloody thing. He knew he should go easy on his hip, and usually he wouldn’t be brave enough—or stupid enough—to defy Shaz. But with the tour coming up and Peter already looking forreasons to leave him behind, he couldn’t afford to let his technique slide.
Half an hour later, Shaz had put him through his paces, set him a series of new strengthening exercises, and dismissed him with a warning about laying off his hip flexor.
“How the hell do you know the difference between a high passé and a regular one?” he growled in Ivy’s general direction, as he pulled his sneakers back on.
In the mirror, he saw her pause in the middle of scribbling something on her notepad. For a second, he watched her reflection as she looked down at the paper. She was totally still, but for her chest rising and falling under her snug black dress, and after a moment Justin realized that he was watching her chest and pulled his eyes up to her half-hidden face.
The silent moment stretched, and Justin fidgeted with the hem of his T-shirt, wondering if he’d offended her. Then he remembered that he didn’t care if he offended her. She’d chosen to be here—insisted on it, in fact. She was the reason Shaz had doubled the number of exercises he had to do and said he needed to do them with a harder resistance band. He was still mentally listing reasons why he didn’t care what she thought when she gave her head a little shake, scribbled a few more words, and stood up.
“If you’d bothered to ask me even one single thing about myself, you’d know the answer to that question.”
Justin frowned. He didn’t want to know even one single thing about her. He wanted her to leave him the hell alone. He was about to say as much when she asked, “Where to next?” and raised her eyebrows expectantly. Bloody hell, she was obstinate. He breathed out hard through his nose, then stalked out of the physio room.
Three feet behind him, his obstinate little shadow followed.
By the end of the week, Justin and Ivy had settled into aroutine. An annoying routine, but a routine nonetheless. Ivy sat in on company class. Ivy followed him to the cafe on his break and watched him eat lunch, even when he strong-armed Ricky and Matty into sitting at his table in the cafe. She wasn’t discouraged by their presence, and they did him no favors by regaling her with what they thought were hilarious anecdotes from their time as teens in the company school.
After lunch, Ivy followed him into the dancers’ lounge while he took a break, then followed him back down the hallway and waited outside the men’s locker room as he got changed for afternoon rehearsals. Ivy observed rehearsals, pen in hand and notepad on lap. No one but Justin seemed bothered by this. Ricky and Matty didn’t mind having her around to watch their after-class antics. The rehearsal directors, Sharon, even Gina the barista, all seemed charmed by Ivy, with her skyscraper heels and her studious glasses. She sat quietly, unobtrusively, and they all seemed to forget she was even in the room half the time.
But Justin never forgot. Justin always knew she was there, an ever-present, human reminder of how he’d fucked up. Her observant eyes and her sharp pen were always there, always waiting to see the worst in him and write it all down. It didn’t help that almost every room in the building had at least one wall covered in mirrors, so that wherever he was, and wherever Ivy was, he could see her from multiple angles. When she sat at the front of the studio, he could see the way she crossed her legs tightly at the knees, making her smooth, pale calves bulge, and he could see the way her glossy golden-brown hair sometimes fell around her face as she took yet more notes. But with her back to the mirrors, he could also see the bare, freckled skin of her shoulders when she wore a sleeveless dress, and the way her narrow, flared waist shifted under the fabric when she rearranged herself in the chair.When she turned her head to the side, he would see her profile from both sides. Ivy Page wasn’t just everywhere he went. She was everywhere in duplicate, and it was absolutely maddening.
Justin Winters, 33
