Page 115 of Tendu: Dancing in the Castle

She looked small. And sad and lost somehow. I moved closer to Will and indicated that she could sit. Everything was quiet. Everyone was listening.

Michelle sat down as Aleks arrived beside us. He stood behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders.

Michelle ignored him and looked at me. “I need to work with you again,” she said.

“What?” said Aleks. “Where is the apology?”

“Yeah, what the fuck?” added Will.

I held up a hand. I could speak for myself. And I did. “I’m surprised you would want to work with a whore.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “If I could go back in time and undo comments I made in anger, I would. But you are the star that the research has uncovered. The potential for discovery, the potential for good, is immense, Amalphia. Would you give me ten minutes a day?”

“She will not,” Aleks replied. “You have no right to ask this. The research is over.” It was. Only Simone had still been willing to take part in it, and she wasn’t enough. We were to continue out the year as dance students, nothing more.

“You would be employed on a private basis,” Michelle continued, never taking her eyes off me. “Some have been helped greatly already, of course. Many more people could be benefitted in the future with this work. If only we can complete it.”

It had helped Aleks. I knew that. “What would it involve?” I asked, deliberately looking straight into her eyes. They were blue.

She looked straight back at me. “Brain monitoring with different amalgamations.”

“Pointe work?”

“No.”

“Negative stimuli?”

“No.”

“Ten minutes a day?”

She gave a quick nod.

“Okay,” I said. “Ten minutes. Before dinner. After my other classes.” That way it wouldn’t take anything from them, or drain me for the rest of the day. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but somehow it felt like it was.

“Thank you,” she said and touched my hand, her long red nails indenting the skin like blood-stained claws. The instinctive recoil was unavoidable. She twitched slightly as I pulled back my hand.

“I don’t believe this,” said Will.

“I also am not agreeing that you should do it,” said Aleks. “But if it is what you want, I will sit in. Observe.”

“That’s fine,” said Michelle, still only looking at me. “You usually have a private lesson in the dungeon at the end of the day, don’t you? I’ll come down after that.”

I tipped my head back against Aleks’s stomach to look up at him, realising I hadn’t thought my suggestion through properly. Those lessons had so far ended in various types of hilarity-inducing bossy sex. The computer desks had been put to new use, as had the piano. The earth had literally moved when a piano foot went through the floor. I’d never seen Aleks out of breath with laughter before. And I wanted to see it again.

Michelle got off the bench. I watched her walk away. She stumbled slightly as she reached the doorway, going over her ankle on her high heel, but she carried on walking.

“Is she okay?” I wondered. “She doesn’t seem her usual self.”

“This is not for you to worry for,” said Aleks.

“Maybe not,” I agreed. “But is anyone checking on her? This is the first time I’ve seen her down here since it all.”

“You’re a more forgiving person than me,” said Justin. “Whatever she’s going through, she brought it on herself. But I do fear the balancing of the universe may have begun.”

The ten-minute research sessions turned out to consist of a few simple arrangements, easily done. They were so basic, I suspected they were being made up on the spot. Aleks expressed exaggerated disinterest as he wrote up his class notes at the piano. Michelle always thanked me politely once we had finished, and the day progressed in its normal sexy way as soon as she departed the dungeon.

The new teacher arrived, Aleks’s old friend that he hadn’t seen in years.

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