The Favor

Chapter 2

Monday mornings meant dance elective, which meant forty minutes of standing in a half circle on sprung flooring while Professor Iyer decided whether we were worth her time.

"Partner work starts today," she said, not looking up from her clipboard. "Which means some of you are about to discover you've been coasting on your partner's rhythm all semester."

A ripple of laughter. Reese, beside me, muttered, "She's looking right at you."

"She's looking at everyone. That's just her face."

"Uh-huh."

Professor Iyer set the clipboard down on the piano and clasped her hands together, the way she did right before she said something she considered important. "For the next unit, you'll be working with a senior. He's finishing a second degree here, has a background that's, frankly, more interesting than anything I could teach you about partner connection, and he's agreed to sit in for the next four sessions."

She said a name.

It went past me the way names do when they don't have anywhere to land yet — one more thing to half-hear over the sound of forty people shifting their weight and whispering to the person next to them. I caught the shape of it, not the weight.

The studio door opened.

He walked in like he'd walked into a hundred rooms like this one, unhurried, hands in his pockets, and said something to Professor Iyer that made her actually laugh, which I hadn't known she was capable of. Reese's hand found my arm and gripped.

"That's him," she whispered. "That's him, him."

I looked at him properly for the first time. Regular clothes. Nothing about the way he stood suggested the murmuring crowd from Friday, the way people had gone quiet around him, like the weather was changing. Here he just looked like someone's TA. Unremarkable, almost. Which was its own kind of strange, given what I'd seen him do to a room three days ago without lifting a finger.

It wasn't until Professor Iyer said his name again — properly this time, introducing him to the room, gesturing for him to step forward — that it landed. That I placed it. That the name from Friday, the one Reese hadn't wanted to say out loud, and the man now walking to the center of the floor were the same fact, arriving in my head half a beat too late to feel like a coincidence.

"He'll be taking the class with you and walking you through lead-and-follow basics," Professor Iyer said. "Pair up now.

The room dissolved into its usual scramble — best friends grabbing best friends, the two people who'd been flirting since September finding each other with theatrical casualness. Reese turned to me, already reaching, and I saw the exact moment her hand didn't make it to mine.

"Ava, right?"

I hadn't heard him cross the floor. He was just there, closer than I'd have let a stranger stand if I'd had any warning, and he said my name like he already knew it belonged to him in some small way — not a question so much as a confirmation.

"...Yeah."

"Professor Iyer asked me to even out the numbers." He didn't say the numbers were uneven. He didn't need to; the room had paired off cleanly, everyone but Reese and me and, apparently, him. "You mind?"

It wasn't really a question. I understood that even as he waited for my answer, the way you understand a door is a formality when someone's already holding it open for you.

"Sure," I said. "Fine."

Reese caught my eye over his shoulder, and her face did something complicated — worry and curiosity fighting for the same real estate. I gave her a small shrug. It's just a dance class.

He held out a hand, and I took it, and it was warm in a way that felt almost deliberately unremarkable, like he'd calibrated it not to startle anyone.

"Frame first," he said, adjusting nothing about my posture, just watching it. "You're holding yourself like you're bracing for something."

"I don't know how to dance."

"That's not what I said." Something in his mouth moved — not quite a smile, more the idea of one, filed away for later. "Most people who don't know how to dance hold themselves like they're about to fall. You're holding yourself like you're about to be caught doing something."

I didn't have an answer for that, and I don't think he expected one. He guided my hand to his shoulder, positioned his own at my back — not low, not presumptuous, exactly where a hand belonged for this — and the music started somewhere behind us, low, unobtrusive.

"Follow," he said. "That's the whole job today. I'll do the rest."

He led. I followed, badly at first, then less badly, my feet catching up to some rhythm he seemed to already know I had in me. He didn't correct me out loud again. He'd just adjust the pressure of his hand, a fraction, and I'd find myself somewhere different than I'd meant to go, and it would turn out to be the right place.

"You're better at this than you think," he said, after a while.

"You don't know what I think."

"No," he agreed, easily, like it was a fair point and not a correction. "I don't."

The song ended before I was ready for it to. He stepped back, releasing my hand at exactly the moment it stopped being appropriate to hold, no lingering, no lean-in, nothing I could have pointed to later in a moment. Just a dance class ending the way dance classes end.

"Same time Wednesday," Professor Iyer said to the room, dismissing the class.

Reese appeared at my elbow the second he was out of earshot. "Okay," she said. "Okay, what was that?"

"That was partner work."

"Ava."

"It was a dance class, Reese."

But I was still looking at the back of him, across the studio, adjusting some other girl's hands like he hadn't just spent four minutes learning the exact pressure it took to move mine.