Emma
Pain blooms halfway through the adagio.
A sharp pain that demands attention and forces a reaction that I’ve learned how to hide. It’s a deep, aching pressure, grinding inside my ankle. A warning flare my body has been sending me for months now, quiet but insistent, like it’s begging me to stop pretending.
I ignore it. Breathe through it. Tell myself that it will go away if I can just get through this solo.
The music swells, strings lifting me into motion, and I let muscle memory take over. My arms float, soft but controlled, every line precise. I feel the familiar pull through my calves, the stretch, the balance. I’ve spent my entire life training myself to dance through discomfort. Pain has never been enough to stop me before, and I won’t let it be enough now.
The lights are hot against my skin, bleaching the audience into darkness. From the stage, they’re nothing more than a blur. Faces swallowed by shadow, bodies reduced to a single presence. I know they’re watching me. I can feel their attention, hear their breath catch when my body does the impossible and makes it look flawlessly easy.
But it’s not them that makes my skin prickle.
It’s the other feeling. The heavier one. The one that settles low in my spine. A slow drag of awareness that has nothing todo with the choreography and everything to do with the way my body tightens, instinctive and unbidden. Like I’m prey that’s being hunted by something just out of sight.
I miss a beat.
Only just.
I recover fast enough that no one notices, but my heart stutters anyway. I finish the sequence, landing cleanly, holding the final pose with my chin lifted and my expression serene. The audience exhales as one. Applause follows, polite and warm.
I don’t bow right away. I wait, because I know he’s there. Watching me.
I don’t look into the dark. I learned a long time ago that searching out his gaze only makes it worse. Instead, I let my eyes drift over the darkness, unfocused, as if I’m nothing more than another dancer soaking in appreciation.
My body quivers, reminding me it knows better.
When it started eighteen months ago, I thought I was just imagining it. Besides, ballet attracts a certain kind of devotion. People who come to every performance, who remember your name and what roles you’ve danced, who watch the way your feet leave the floor instead of your face. I told myself that was all it was. Admiration, perhaps.
Then the feeling didn’t go away. It intensified.
It followed me beyond the theatre. Into rehearsals. Into quiet moments when I was stretching alone, sweat cooling on my skin, mirrors reflecting a woman I barely recognised anymore. I’d feel it then, too, that sense of being seen too clearly, too deeply, in an otherwise empty room.
Then in my apartment. It stopped feeling entirely empty. It started to feel as though it was closing in on me. And still, I couldn’t bring myself to feel scared or uncomfortable. I learnedto live with it, made it as much a part of my life as ballet, or the pain in my swollen ankle.
I step offstage the moment the curtain falls, breath coming harder now that the adrenaline is ebbing. The pain surges in response, sharp enough this time that my vision blurs for a split second. I grit my teeth and keep moving, forcing my body to obey like it always has.
The dressing room smells like the cream that the physio recommended to ease the pain in my ankle and the yellow roses that appear after every one of my performances. I still don’t know who sends them, they always come without a card and no one ever owns up to placing them in here. I lower myself onto the bench and begin untying my ribbons with careful fingers. My ankle is already swelling, skin thick beneath my tights.
“You okay?” one of the girls asks, poking her head around my door.
I nod and offer a bright smile. “Yeah.”
The lie comes easily. Too easily. She doesn’t push. None of them do. They all know better. Ballet teaches you early that weakness is contagious. No one wants to catch it.
I finish changing and leave before anyone can guilt me into joining them for a last show drink. It’s tradition, they’ll argue. But I just want to go home and rest my ankle before tomorrow comes and we start rehearsing the next show. We only have two months before opening and it’s an entirely new routine.
Outside, the night air is a cool slap against my flushed skin. The city hums around me with traffic, distant laughter, the thrum of life going on without me. I pull my coat tighter and start down the sidewalk, each step measured and careful.
That’s when it hits me again. The awareness. Theknowingthat I’m being watched… followed.
It slides over me like a touch I never asked for, heavy and slow. My shoulders tense, breath hitching as I glance at my reflection in a darkened window. I look normal. A little tired maybe. Smaller than I remember being. There’s nothing about me that should draw this kind of attention.
I don’t turn around. I know he won’t be anywhere I can see. He never is. Which is why I feel like I should be afraid. Should report it. But what would I say? I feel like I’m being watched and part of me likes it?
I’d be laughed straight out of the precinct.
He doesn’t follow the way men do when they want to hurt you, take you. There’s no rush of footsteps behind me, no shout or grab. He’s never tried to speak to me as far as I know, never crossed that line from stranger to acquaintance. Which only serves to pique my curiosity.
