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19
Pen
“So, girl. You and Mr Hip-Hop, eh?” Clancy asks me in tap class the following day.
She’s tying up her shoes and grinning up at me as I sit on the bench beside her, waiting for our teacher, Sasha, to start the lesson. She’s a brilliant tap dancer, no more than ten years older than us and hot as fuck. Seriously, if I wasn’t into men, then I’d be into her. Tall, with an hourglass figure, shapely legs, and dark cocoa skin. She has rhythm, soul, boundless energy, and endless patience. A perfect combination for dancing and teaching tap.
I watch, distractedly, as she chats with York on the opposite side of the studio. He’s giving her one of his smiles that he used to share in abundance with me growing up, but hasn’t thrown my way since we clapped eyes on each other again. It’s clear that she’s taken a liking to York, which doesn’t surprise me in the least because he’s hands down the best tap dancer at the school bar Clancy, who gives him a run for his money on a daily basis.
“Pen, are you seriously going to avoid the subject?” Clancy presses with a cheeky smile. When I don’t answer immediately, she sits upright and nudges me with her shoulder. “Like, I held off asking you about it the moment you snuck back into the Academy last night—”
“Wait, were you spying on us?” I laugh, shaking my head.
“What can I say, I was going to the laundry room and saw you snogging each other’s faces off.” She shrugs, giggling.
“You were going to the laundry room at midnight?”
“Yup, sure fire way to piss off Tiffany, given her flat is right next door to it. Nothing like a washing machine to keep someone up at night.”
“You’re brilliant, do you know that?”
“She fucking deserves it for what she’s done to you. Fucking bitch. I don’t know how you didn’t punch her lights out. I still can, if you want. Dax too. Just say the word.”
“Seriously, it’s fine,” I say, shaking my head.
“Anyway, stop avoiding the subject. I can’t contain my curiosity a moment longer. I mean, you don’t have to tell me all the gory details about your date or anything but, you know, just the fun ones.” She wiggles her eyebrows and I groan, realising I need to give her something or she’ll never leave me alone.
“It’s new, okay. We’ve called a truce—”
“What does that mean? Friends or friends that fuck?” she interrupts with a gleeful expression.
“Friends,” I reply adamantly, pissed that my cheeks are flaring and giving away what my heart so desperately wants, even when I can’t completely admit that to myself. “We’re taking things slow.”
“I’ll put that down as afriends that might be fucking soonthen?”
“Oh, shut up,” I respond, shoving her lightly.
She giggles, then stands and proceeds to perform a quick ball-heel shuffle sequence that boggles my mind at how fast she can move her feet. I grin up at her as she pulls a crazy face and flings her arms out wildly. I can’t help but laugh.
“You know you’re a crazy bitch, right?” I say when she finally stops moving.
“Me?” she questions, pressing her finger into her chest, then cocking her head to the side. “Yep. It’s why you love me.”
“You’re right, it is,” I agree, laughing as she pulls me upright and into a hug.
“All joking aside, just be careful, okay? I like your heart and I don’t want it broken,” she says, squeezing me a little tighter before letting me go. I see the sincerity and concern in her eyes, and it warms me up from the inside out. What she doesn’t realise is that my heart has been in pieces for three years, now a part of it is slowly being stitched back together.
“I will, you don’t need to worry. I know what I’m doing,” I say, sounding more convinced than I am. Truth is, I’m wading through a quagmire of emotions and memories so thick that I’m not sure how to just be in the moment. Not to mention, I’m on edge waiting for my brother to call, or Jeb to rear his ugly head again at any moment. This truce with Zayn not only serves to remind me of what I’ve missed these past three years and why, but also that whilst I may have Zayn back, I don’t have the rest of the Breakers. They all hold a piece of my heart and I’m resigned to the fact that it will never beat properly again unless we fix what’s broken which, let’s face it, isn’t going to happen. Xeno still hates me, and apart from my confrontation with Dax the other night, he and York have been avoiding me as much as I’ve been avoiding them. Not to mention the small fact my brother’s a fucking psycho and determined to murder anyone I hold dear if I don’t do what he wants.
“Come on, girl. Let’s tap all that frustration out, yeah?” Clancy says, snapping me out of my dark thoughts.
“Yeah, let’s do this,” I nod, following her and finding a spot at the back of the class and as far away from York as I can get.
After a good ten minutes warm-up that has my blood pumping and has relieved some of my pent up anxiety, Sasha asks us to fan out in a circle, leaving a wide open space in the middle of the studio.
“Right, ladies and gents, I’m going to do something a little different today. Most of you here already have many years’ experience in performing tap, and I’ve now gotten a good hold of your ability. So, I wanted to explore a little more. I want to see your improvisation skills. Every single one of you can follow choreography, but tap is so much more than just a sequence of steps and noise. It can be as emotive and as deeply powerful as any of the other disciplines if performed with enough intent.”
She smiles then and moves into the centre of the circle we’ve made and begins to tap in a way that wows me, proving her point. Like everyone else in the studio, I’m stunned by her quick footwork, but it’s her ability to tell a story through her steps that impresses me the most. Dance has always been about expression to me, and for a long time I assumed that tap could only really express happiness just like Fred Astaire in his movies. It’s why I was drawn more to hip-hop and contemporary as a kid, because with those two dances in particular I felt able to express my anger and pain the most clearly. I’ve learnt over the years, however, that tap dance isn’t always an expression of joy, that there’s a lot more depth to the dance than that.
