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It all had to end. I would tell Aleks my feet were better enough to return to normal classes, and he would tell me what he had to tell me.
I ran over for one last hug when he came through my door that night, but revulsion scattered my thoughts and intentions.
“You smell like Michelle,” I said. “Her perfume. It’s as if she’s in the room with us.” The scent was cloying as ever, an evil encircling fog. His face, bemused by my reaction, showed red lipstick on both cheek and mouth. “Really?” I asked, astonishment muting heartbreak for a few seconds. This was how he was going to do it? “Well, I suppose you are being quite clear,” I said. “Thank you for that. Okay, go on then.” I opened the door and looked at the floor.
“You are throw me out?”
“Just go.”
Maybe it was better this way. There would be no conversation in which I might cry or behave in a pathetic manner. He held his hands up and walked through the door. I closed it as softly as possible.
Chapter 32
Itwasasurpriseto see the pink and orange sunrise. I looked at the sky in resentment. The stars hadn’t shone through the ceiling. The sun ought to know better. However, bright colours might be the way to go. Would a strappy red leotard distract the eye from my puffer-fish face or accentuate it? The many thin straps of the garment crisscrossed my back in a pleasing design. It was different. It was daring. I wore it.
Will linked his fingers through mine at breakfast as my back faced the staff table. I didn’t want to see anything of any of them.
“He’s a pillock,” said Will.
“He actually was,” I admitted.
Justin arrived with his toast. “Budge up, Phi, that’s my place. Oh. Is something amiss? Has there been a row?”
“Please don’t make a big deal, Just,” I requested. “Or be loud in any way.”
“Moi?”
“They’ve broken up, Bevan,” Will informed him. “Now, chill.”
“Are you sure? I mean, this has happened before. It’s maybe just how the two of you roll.”
I shook my head. “It’s different this time.”
Justin wasn’t convinced. “Okay, sweetheart, we’ll see.”
I didn’t want to see. Seeing him with Michelle would… I didn’t want to think either.
The dungeon was warm and muggy, the sense of something dark and bloody augmented in the strange and inexplicable heat. Colin’s warm-up routine was slightly more robust than usual. He shot over when I took off my knitwear, faux corrected my port de bras and murmured that I had dressed up for him. The third time his hands ‘accidentally’ got tangled in my leotard straps, referred to as ‘the web of desire’ by him, they crept towards the front.
“Get off me!” I yelled, frozen in horror.
“But I am caught, Miss Treadwell, entrapped by your feminine charms.”
“She said get off, McKen.” Will hauled him back.
Colin found it all very amusing. “Oh, I see. I see, I do.”
Whatever he saw didn’t improve matters. He said that fairy-tale princesses who lived in tall towers were not meant to be chaste forever. After a long combination that everyone else had learned in my absence, he commended me on picking up the choreography so fast. “I can see your true nature, Miss Treadwell. There’s passion, fire, a love of good sex, or maybe just a desperate need for it. Which is it, I wonder?”
“I want to hit him,” whispered Will.
“Then you would be in trouble, not him,” I whispered back.
The audacious leotard had a different, but equally unfortunate, effect on Michelle in her class. “Quite the little harlot, aren’t you, Treadwell?” she said in a low voice, unheard by anyone, except possibly Colin. “I knew you would be back down here today.”
Of course she had known.
“Fuck,” I enunciated carefully, “off.”
