Page 53 of Barre Fight
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, Iwas 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 thedancers 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?”
