Page 12 of Slow Burn

When I arrived back at the studio after rehearsals, Sedi was lounging on one of the armchairs, chatting with somebody on video call.

‘Oh, hey,’ she said to me before flipping her eyes back to the screen. ‘Lira’s back.’

‘Who’s that?’ I asked, wrapping my cardigan around my body.

I’d worn loose black trousers and trainers to leave the studio earlier because I’d told them I was going to see my GP.

Stupidly, though, I’d completely forgotten to change back after rehearsals and now I dearly hoped that Sedi wouldn’t notice I was wearing a skirt and a leotard underneath my thankfully oversized knitwear.

‘Nolo’s on the line. Here, look,’ said Sedi, flipping the screen around to show my youngest sister, who was sitting cross-legged on her bed. I was usually delighted to talk to her, just not right at this moment.

‘Wasn’t expecting to see you,’ I said, taking a seat next to Sedi, forcing her to shuffle over to make room.

‘Missed you, too,’ said Nolo sarcastically. ‘Anyway, I can’t chat for long, I’ve got rehearsals in forty minutes.’

Nolo was currently living the dream – although she assured us there was still much more she wanted to achieve.

She must have read the Misty Copeland autobiography about fifty times and was the most focused and ambitious person I’d ever met.

Nothing – and I mean nothing – was going to get in the way of what Nolo wanted, which naturally made her just the tiniest bit selfish, but we forgave her because she had lots of other amazing qualities and none of us were perfect, were we?

She was a member of the New York Ballet Company and had moved out there when she was a teenager.

Ballet had been her passion since she was two years old – I still remember me, Sedi and Mum waiting outside while she took her first class – and she’d always been brilliant at it.

She was brilliant at most things, as it happened, including life, generally, in my opinion.

She didn’t have a problem saying no to Mum.

She had no time for boyfriends and yet somehow had men begging to go out with her, and on the odd occasion she said yes to dating someone, she was the one who broke their hearts because they wanted to get serious and she didn’t.

Today, she looked every inch the prima ballerina in her tight black vest, black leather jacket and relaxed hair pulled back into a sleek bun.

Nolo was leaner than me, and taller, with a smaller chest and narrower hips and a long, slim, elegant neck.

Sedi was curvy like me, but because she was tall, too, nothing seemed quite so obvious.

It was like I’d come from a different set of parents (I hadn’t – I’d checked!).

I’d grown to love my more curvaceous figure over the years: my wide shoulders, my rounded hips, my nipped-in waist, the fact I was only five-foot-four.

I’d come to terms with my body and how it looked and what it was capable of – which was quite a lot, actually – and how I felt inside my skin.

The self-doubt had lessened now, and when I was on a dance floor, I felt sexy, attractive and desirable.

Off it, not so much, but that was a work in progress.

Unless somebody like Gabriele came along, tearing all the good work I’d done on myself to pieces, setting me back not just one step but several.

It had taken months for me to forget about him – or at least to not think about him every waking moment – and now here he was, cruising into my life looking beautiful, still, and dancing with me in the breathtaking way he always had.

But this time I would remain strong. I would be cordial, but aloof; friendly but guarded.

We would work together for rehearsals, the London run and then the performances in the European cities I couldn’t wait to visit, and then I would walk away from him.

Because, after all, I’d done it before, which meant I could do it again.

‘Everything okay with the doctor?’ asked Sedi, giving me a concerned look.

‘All fine,’ I said, brushing her off. I really did not want to have to make up a whole bunch of details about my non-existent appointment. I felt bad enough about lying to them as it was.

‘What doctor? What’s going on?’ asked Nolo, leaning into the screen to peer at me.

‘Just a routine check-up, nothing to worry about,’ I said, cringing inside.

Part of me wanted to tell them the truth there and then, but I was holding back until I was certain I wasn’t going to mess everything up and get fired from the show in my first week of rehearsals.

Plus there was the small matter of the studio – how was it going to run without me?

I’d always prided myself on keeping everything ticking over with as little fuss as possible – perhaps it was eldest child syndrome, but pleasing my parents and making things easier for my siblings had always felt like a priority.

And they were grateful for the work I put in at James Jive, I knew they were – it allowed them to go off and pursue their own dreams. Somehow, I was going to have to find a way to keep the studio running while I was working on the show.

There had to be a way around it and the last thing I wanted was for them to worry.

We all relied on the money the business pulled in – living in Shoreditch wasn’t cheap and Manhattan even less so, and if the studio wasn’t packed full of lessons and classes, that probably wouldn’t happen.

‘So, how’s life?’ asked Nolo.

I shrugged. ‘Same old, same old.’

How could I even begin to tell them how much had happened in the last forty-eight hours?

It would be Gabriele they’d be most shocked about – I’d told them about him in detail over and over again, the three of us only teenagers at the time I’d met him.

I had been the most experienced when it came to guys, but in the end even Nolo, who had only been fourteen, had told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to have to get over it; that there were plenty of other boys out there in the world, and that if it had been meant to work between us, it would have done.

I wondered what they’d say if they knew I’d just been dancing in his arms at Pineapple Studios.

Nolo narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Something’s wrong. Look at her, DJ.’

Sedi looked at me. ‘Oh yeah, I see what you mean. Come on, spill,’ she insisted.

I wanted to be vulnerable in front of them, to ask their advice, to scream from the rooftops about this amazing job opportunity I had and ask them what they thought, and what they imagined our parents might say.

But talking with my sisters about my feelings wasn’t something I could do right now; not yet. Not when it came to this.

‘There’s nothing to spill. And if you’re done staring at me, you can tell me how it went today at the studio,’ I said to Sedi, changing the subject. ‘Did the toddler class go well? Did everyone turn up for their private lessons?’

Sedi looked utterly bored as she reeled off the details of how everything had played out at James Jive while I’d been gone.

Apparently, she’d sacked off teaching the toddlers a samba and had taught them street dance instead – fair enough, but I really hoped I wasn’t going to get a ton of complaints from disgruntled parents tomorrow.

But as she talked and Nolo joined in, my mind kept wandering back to earlier that day; to Gabriele, who had made my entire body fizz with excitement every time he took my hand.

Luckily, there wasn’t a lot of contact in the American smooth, but what was I going to do when we started working on the rumba?

There couldn’t be a more intimate dance.

And then, of course, there was the Argentine tango.

And the fact was, it didn’t really matter what I was feeling inside, I had a job to do.

We were going to have to work closely together to create the routines of our lives; the very best dances we’d ever come up with.

The chemistry Carlos had seen at my audition was going to need to be recreated again and again and again, for weeks ; for the rehearsals, then in front of a paying audience at the London shows and the European tour.

It would be fine, I reasoned – we could turn up the heat on stage and then, afterwards, we could dial it down again, go our separate ways, back to our hotel without giving it another thought.

Except, the idea of staying in the same hotel as Gabriele again made my cheeks turn a shade of pink that they definitely hadn’t been two seconds ago.

Aaargh, I had to get over this! He was arrogant and obnoxious – what had I ever seen in him?

! I forced myself to focus on listening to Sedi and Nolo gossiping about their careers, realizing I didn’t feel the usual pang of envy.

I was doing it too now. I was a professional, working dancer, just like them.

And I could not let this opportunity slip through my fingers.

After Nolo had rushed off to rehearsals and Sedi headed back to Mum and Dad’s, I put in some calls to every single dance instructor I’d ever worked with.

By the end of the evening, I had tentatively filled all the teaching slots for the next nine weeks, keeping the reason for my absence vague, and warning them that there was a chance the whole thing might fall through.

If it did all work out, Dad did the wages, so at some point I was going to have to come clean to him, otherwise the dancers would never be paid, and my own salary would need to be reduced while I was away on tour and not physically working at the studio.

But it felt good to have a plan in place and, starting from tomorrow, rehearsal times were all covered.

I smiled to myself, taking a moment to acknowledge that I was really doing this; that there was no going back now.