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“I know!” Releasing tension about Aleks loosened my usual restraint in other areas. “So how’s your relationship with Sadie going? Does she not mind you sitting in here with me?”
“It’s not a relationship. She just doesn’t hate me like, you know, usually happens.”
“Well, that’s progress.”
We sat in silence for a moment and then began to laugh.
“Who are we kidding?” I giggled. “We’re going to end up doing that alternative arrangement of Justin’s, aren’t we? I can see it now. You and me at home, raising his and Simone’s kids.”
“So you don’t see anything like that happening with Zolotov? No happily ever after? He’s not the great love of your life?”
“He’s about to break up with me.” There. I’d finally voiced it, the very plain fact that I’d been avoiding since the start of term.
“I don’t believe that.”
“The vibes have been coming off him for a while.”
“Prick.”
“He’s not. He’s a good person, Will. Intense. Dramatic. But fundamentally good.”
“Where was he yesterday, then?”
“Working. Doing his thing. He has this incredible ability to be completely focused, to exclude everyone and everything else but the task in hand. I think you need that to be successful in ballet. I don’t have it, not to that degree anyway, else why would the fear get to me so? He knows it. The more he learns about me, the less he likes me.”
“Bollocks. For starters, you’re the best at ballet; you can do anything you want. And he’s still well into you. You’re warm, you’re funny, you’re cuddly. I bet Michelle was none of those things.”
“He would appreciate her single-mindedness about the work. He’s called me out on being ‘all about my friends.’ No, I have to face up to this, Will. He doesn’t feel for me what I feel for him. He can’t help that. I’m the selfish one.”
“No, babe.”
“He’s not going to finish it now while I’m injured. I could, though, couldn’t I? Tell him we could just be friends? Let him off the hook? But I won’t, because I’m holding on to every single last moment I can get of him.” I disintegrated into a teary mess on Will’s shoulder.
“D’you think he’ll go back to Michelle?” he asked.
“No, but thanks for that thought. Gonna take a big pain pill and knock myself out.”
Aleks was sitting on the stairs below my room. Various sentences suggested themselves to me: I thought you’d still be working; sorry for being so mean; you’ll get cold sitting there; sorry for clinging to you like a leech because I love you so much and don’t want you to tell me it’s over and please don’t leave me ever, ever, ever. But he was sad, and I could make it right.
“Aleks. I know that—”
His finger silenced my lips, and he whispered, “Just us.”
We were so very gentle, so different from how we had been lately. I cried. He spoke earnestly in Ukrainian between kissing my tears, and my belly, my breasts and my throat. Maybe I had been wrong. So many kisses couldn’t lie.
But neither did the soft kiss in the morning. The air was thick with goodbye.
I did his class and found gentle kindness there too. Bekah and her classmates were gratifyingly delighted by my presence in their midst.
Days passed quickly without the dungeon. Nights continued to feel like a tender endgame. Maybe it was Aleksandr Zolotov standard practice to finish things as sweetly, as softly, as possible? I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell.
Colin approached me on his knees at breakfast, with hands clasped, to give a greatly dramatised apology.
Justin took a photo of the incident. Later at dinner, he told us: “Got a caption competition going on socials. Funniest one wins a photo of me naked. It’ll be tasteful, don’t worry, though some are asking if it can be of you instead, Phi. I don’t suppose…? No? Well, probably better not. Your feet would ruin it. There’s lots of entrants. Everyone wants to know what it’s like up here. Agog, that’s what they all are. I think it could go viral…”
His prattle did little to disperse the mist of sadness, not that he knew anything of it. Bekah had attached herself to Justin, and they laughed and chatted like we used to. It was Will who saw, and squeezed my hand, and I noticed something wrong in him too.
“Michelle hates me too,” he told me. “Says I’m a brainless caveman without you. It’s a real downer.”
