The Favor

Chapter 5

My calf was screaming by the second run-through, and "after hours" had officially become the worst idea I'd had all week.

Every time I put weight on my right leg, it twinged — not bad, not the kind of thing worth raising a hand about, just enough that I felt it climb up through my ankle and settle somewhere behind my knee. I'd woken up with it, tight and sore for no reason I could point to, and told myself it would work itself out by class. It hadn't.

"Again," Professor Iyer said to the room, and we started. Second eight count. I put weight on it.

Twinge. I didn't make a sound. I was getting good at not making sounds.

Luke's hand shifted at my back before I'd finished the thought. He leaned in, close enough that his voice didn't have to travel further than my ear.

"You okay?"

"Fine."

"That's not what your face is doing." Barely a whisper, the kind that didn't interrupt the music around us, the kind no one two feet away would have caught. We were still dancing — slower now, though I hadn't noticed him slowing it, only that the room had somehow stopped rushing past me. "You've been favoring that leg since this morning. And you're putting your full weight on the turn instead of shifting off it."

I looked at him. I don't know why — some instinct to check if he was guessing or if he actually knew, the way you look at someone to catch them in something. He held my gaze, unbothered, like he'd been waiting for me to look.

"You noticed that," I said. Not quite a question.

"I'm always looking at you."

My heart did something stupid and immediate, a beat too hard, too fast, entirely out of proportion to five ordinary words. His hand moved at my lower back — not correcting my frame this time, just pulling, a fraction, closing the last of the space between us — and we danced slower still, toward the back corner of the studio, until he was easing me down onto the bench there without ever quite asking if I wanted to sit.

"Let me see it," he said, already reaching for my ankle.

I should have told him it was fine. I didn't. His hands were careful in a way that felt clinical and not clinical at the same time, pressing along the muscle with a kind of certainty that made me wonder, not for the first time, what exactly a second degree in psychology and hypnosis actually taught a person about hands.

We hadn't interrupted the class. Professor Iyer kept the room moving, and most people were too busy with their own feet to notice ours. Most people. Not Mike.

I caught him over Luke's shoulder — arms crossed, jaw tight, watching us with an expression that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite anything else I had a name for. Distrust, maybe. The kind you wear when you've already decided something, and you're just waiting for the world to confirm it.

Luke said something then, low, about how I clearly didn't believe in stretching before I embarrassed myself in front of an audience, and it should have annoyed me. It didn't. I smiled — not because it was funny, not really, but because of the way he'd said it, like the two of us were the only ones in on the joke, like there was a version of me only he got to see.

Professor Iyer ended the session not long after. I thanked him — quietly, awkwardly, unsure what the right amount of gratitude was for a stranger who now knew the exact shape of my ankle. Reese appeared at my side almost immediately, looping her arm through mine, already talking about something else, and we left together.

I didn't look back. I didn't have to. I could feel him watching us go.

We ended up outside later that evening — me, Reese, Mike, the rest of our loose orbit of a friend group, sprawled across the low wall the way we always did when nobody had anywhere better to be.

"What happened to your leg?" someone asked, nodding at the black compression sleeve wrapped around my calf.

"Cramp. It's fine."

"Ava's dance partner gave her a whole physical therapy session mid-class," Reese said, and there was laughter, and I let it happen because correcting the shape of the story felt like more effort than it was worth.

That was when someone else — I want to say it was Priya, holding her phone up like evidence — said, "Okay, did anyone else see this?" and turned the screen around.

An article. Grainy photo. Something about an assault, someone beaten badly enough to make local news, no names confirmed. I skimmed it without really absorbing it until she said, "People are saying it's connected to Luke."

The wall went quiet in that particular way a group goes quiet when a name lands somewhere it isn't expected.

"Connected how?" I asked.

"I don't know exactly. Something about a deal. Like the guy had some kind of agreement with him and it went wrong." Priya shrugged, scrolling further, finding nothing else worth reading aloud. "I don't know. He seems so normal, though. Handsome, rich, whatever. What kind of deal would someone even have with a guy like that?"

"That's exactly the problem." Mike hadn't said anything until then, and his voice cut through flatter than everyone else's. "Don't let how someone looks tell you what they are. You could end up being the next one."

"Oh, come on." Reese sat up straighter. "Do any of us actually know him? We're just repeating stuff other people heard from other people. That's not fair."

"I'm telling you what people say." Mike wasn't backing down, which wasn't like him. "You ask him for something, he gives it to you, fine. Then he comes back for something bigger. And if you can't give it —" he paused, like he was choosing the words carefully, "— he takes it. However he wants."

Nobody said anything for a second.

Reese turned to me. "You're his dance partner. What do you think?" And then, softer, teasing, the tension breaking just slightly: "You two looked pretty cozy in there today, by the way."

"It's nothing," I said, smiling despite myself. "He was just checking my foot."

Someone — I don't remember who — went still first, eyes fixed on something past my shoulder, and the rest of us followed without meaning to.

Luke was there. Not close enough to have heard us, not far enough that it felt like a coincidence. Standing at the edge of the courtyard the way he always seemed to be standing at the edge of something, watching.

Except this time he wasn't alone. Two other guys flanked him, easy and familiar, the kind of posture that only comes from people who already know each other well. He said something to one of them, and they laughed, and for the first time since I'd started noticing him, he looked like he belonged to a world that had other people in it.

"God," Priya muttered, "that scared me for a second."

"That's just Luke," I said.

But I kept looking anyway, and this time, the lonely version of him I'd been quietly collecting pieces of — the one who stood apart, who watched from the edges, who vanished before anyone could ask why — wasn't the one standing there at all.