Their voices drifted, back to the front of the club where she could not hear. Her alleged betrothed never bothered coming down the hallway to where her apartment was, never knocked on the door or inquired as to how she was doing, and she was glad for it. They left not long after,notbringing her along, and Jude was so relieved she nearly cried.
The next day she found she could not spend another afternoon cooped up in the same two rooms. The big room beyond the dim hallway was empty and silent. Jude wondered if her shadowy watcher was gone, whoever they were, whatever they were. It was folly, but she couldn’t help it — that they spoke to Vin with such derision made her slightly less afraid. And then there were the uncle’s words, the last she’d been able to hear — I have a job for you. A job! She wondered if that meant another job, a different job, something other than watching over her, leavingher alone at last.You might actually be able to get out of here! She still needed to figure out where she would go, but first, she needed to make this place liveable, even if it was only for the short term.
There was a sofa at the end of the hallway, brand new and covered in plastic. She wondered if it had been purchased for the club before it had shut down, or perhaps purchased for the apartment. Regardless — it had been left behind and that made it hers now.
Beneath the work sink behind the bar, she found a half-empty bottle of glass cleaner and a stepstool, and did her best to move around the space of the strip club floor, cleaning the block glass windows around the perimeter as best she could. Her meager efforts helped, and more sunlight streamed in through the privacy glass once she was finished, brightening the space, leaving the dark corners where the sunlight didn’t reach even darker. Still, it was bright enough that she didn’t need to turn on the harsh overhead fluorescent lights, and could snuggle up with one of her books.
Her tentative explorations of the area surrounding her temporary home had proven her initial suppositions correct — the neighborhood was rundown and low income, but since she herself was rundown and low income, Jude didn’t feel as though she were in a position to judge.
She had ventured to the food mart around the block to make it through that first handful of days, and while it had proved more than adequate, it was overpriced. She didn’t know how much money was in the account Vin’s uncle had given her, and the thought of draining it too quickly, of having to beg for more and risk this small measure of freedom was not one she was willing to risk.
There had been a giant roll of bills in the bottom of the drugstore bag he’d carried with him, more money than she’dever had to herself at one time. She’d flattened it, counting it and then counting it again before rolling it tightly, securing it with a rubber band she found behind the bar, and hiding it in her tampon box.
Peeling off a single bill now, she pulled out the bus route she’d obtained from the food mart, finding the bus stop just a little ways up the street. There was a superstore on the route where the groceries were cheaper, and peering out the window on her return trip, Jude spotted the sign for a public library. She didn’t have the required identification for a card, but her scattershot upbringing had taught her that minimarts selling alcohol would have teenagers hustling in the parking lot. She would contribute to their delinquency in exchange for a library card, a more than fair trade, she thought.
She had food, she would have books, a space to herself . . . if it weren’t for the threat of Vin and his uncle coming back, she would be content to stay forever.
Several more days of silence passed, and Jude didn’t know if the shadowy presence was gone for good. They had never spoken to her, never stopped her when she left, and if they were reporting back to the pack, she never heard about it. She decided, sometime towards the end of her second week, to accept they were gone. She didn’t know if that was strictly true, but she hadn’t felt that heavy weight ofwatchingin the days after Vin and his uncle had made their visit, so she thought perhaps the voice had made good on its supposition that guarding her wasn’t worth the time and had gone off to the next job they’d been given.
All that changed the day of the storm.
She had always loved the rain. The rhythmic sound against the windows and roof, the gloom that would fill the room like a comforting grey blanket, dulling the rest of the world in its deluge. Everything slowed down, and the noise in her headquieted. That day was no exception, and Jude settled into the corner of the sofa like a cat, pressing her cheek to the cool leather and losing herself in the non-stop patter of the afternoon downpour, pushing reality away.
She stayed curled up in the corner of the sofa in the strip club’s main room, snuggled under the fuzzy blanket she bought from the superstore with one of her newly acquired ill-gotten library books, listening to the rain’s unceasing noise throughout the morning. The deluge showed no signs of stopping, punctuated every few hours with lightning and thunder. As the storm persisted, growing in intensity as the sky darkened until lightning split the sky, Jude rose from her curled position. She had lazed like a cat all day, but once upon a time ago, she’d leapt like one.
As a child, she’d hidden in the attic during storms, wanting to be as close to the sky as possible, at the apex of the lightning, and would time her jumps and leaps to coincide with the booming thunder. Her tiny levés and sissonnes would be absorbed into the storm, free for the moment. She had always loved to fly, even more than she loved the rain. She’d only ever felt at home while she was in the dance studio. There were no broken dishes in the ballet studio, no slamming doors or raised voices, no stolen money or disconnected utilities — nothing but the placement of her feet and the extension of her arms, and a rare, perfect quiet.
It didn’t matter that she had never changed. It didn’t matter that she could not connect with the wolf beneath her skin. Her saut de chat was flawless, her fouettés without equal in her class, and once she felt the breath leave her body, arcing through the air as free as a bird in a grand jeté, Jude had known there was nothing left on solid ground that would ever satisfy her again.
The club had no barre for her to prepare her form and stretch her long-neglected muscles and ligaments, but she did her best on the back of the sofa. Her arabesque was sloppy, her form evenmore so, and she was long out of practice. So, too, it seemed, was her discipline. The club had no barre, but it did have an adequate stage, and she was eager to leap. The security lights did nothing to illuminate the space below, creating nothing more than a dim glow, making the darkness beyond their shallow halo seem denser, an impenetrable inky black that seemed to almost have form, but Jude ignored the dark corners of the room, too intent on her task.
Her form may have been sloppy, but her feet remembered her training, moving from third position into fifth, her arms raising as gracefully as she could manage. Plié to elevé, arms held aloft, the landing of her sauté as heavy as what she might expect from an ogre, with none of the cat-like grace she’d once possessed. Her saut de chat was just as ungainly, and it should have come as no surprise when she bobbled the landing, losing her footing and falling hard on her ass.
Jude cried out as she hit the ground, whether in pain or frustration she wasn’t entirely sure, and the darkness responded in kind with an answering exhalation, as though the shadows had been holding their breath as she hopped around like a lumbering fool.
She continued to stretch and leap, finding her footing slowly but regaining none of her younger self’s grace. These things took time, Jude reminded herself, approaching the pole at the center of the platform determinedly. Ballet was the artistic expression of form and strength, and her form had lost all of its previous strength in the near decade of no practice. She’d allowed herself to grow slack and weak, but her hands remembered their positioning on the pole.
This is what you need. Refind your balance, restrengthen your core. You were good at this once, and you can be again.
Her legs remembered the way they needed to swing, curling around the bar to lock her into place. It would take time toregain her jeté, but her pole work came back easier. She fell several more times, hard on her side, banging her shoulder, and she’d wear the bruises the following day. It was hard and she fell, but getting back on the pole was not as impossible as she’d feared. Muscle memory kicked in slowly, and her body moved in the right direction before she even needed to think through the action.See, you’re not a noodle yet. You just need to get back into practice.
That was, until she attempted a trick her younger self had been able to do with her eyes closed. Jude swung her leg up, curling her calf around the smooth wood, throwing herself backwards to spin.You’re as fucking stupid as Vin, she thought fleetingly, as her grip on the pole floundered.
She was going to land on her head and break her neck, and that was how they would find her. His uncle would be able to dispose of her as neatly as he probably already wanted to, and it was due to no one’s aggression but her own aggressive stupidity.
Jude braced herself for the impact, but the floor never reached her. She was cradled in arms; long, strong arms.Numerousarms. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized she hovered scant inches from the floor, a near miss if there ever was one. The arms lowered her gently to the ground, the black shape above her peering down in concern. His eyes were pinpricks of white, his entire form as inky black as the shadows he’d pulled from.Thiswas who was there watching her. Had maybe been there all along, despite her suppositions to the contrary.
Her breath was ragged as he took several steps away from her, once she was safely on the ground, and she watched his form shift and change rapidly — horns, wings, a number of hands attached to a sea of arms like writhing tentacles, at one point two heads — until they arrived on the shape of a man. He was still horned, still pitch black, and she was certain he had only chosen this humanlike appearance to put her at ease . . . whichit might have done, had she not witnessed the confused jumble of appendages on the path to getting there.Too fucking late for that.
“Are you all right?”
She was once more struck by his voice — a silky, satiny glide, like a snake moving through water. For all that he was pitch black in appearance, his voice was like an icy white waterfall, clear and ringing, and she shivered at its incandescent chill.
“I-I think so.” Her heart was beating so hard that her lungs were scarcely able to expand.Breathe in, breathe out.As she watched, his features took on a more deliberate sharpness, cheekbones and hair, eyebrows and creases around his mouth. She wondered if any of them were actuallyhis, or if he was merely copying features he’d seen on others. “I guess I’m better than I would have been if you hadn’t caught me.”
He chuckled, a low, sinuous curl, and she shivered again.
“That would’ve been a nasty fall. Perhaps you ought to begin with lap dances before you move on to anything that complicated.” He made a show of looking around the empty room. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to help your tips much, so no sense in risking your head.”
