Chance. Alex Hines

did I! Well, I did ballet – just after the ping-pongers.’

      She looked away. Stop telling him this stuff …

      ‘Oh, those ballet girls! The 12-year-old me used to dream of catching a glimpse of them on our way out of ping-pong. Wow, I was a real dork! I’m sorry, you don’t need to know any of this.’ He laughed sheepishly. Was he embarrassed too? ‘It sounds like it!’ Ava laughed. ‘We ballet girls were not impressed by the ping-pong dorks! We thought we were the bee’s knees. In fact, I’m pretty sure I thought I was Ola Jordan at the very least. By the way, we could see you looking in the window at the end of our lessons – none of you were very subtle.’

      ‘Busted!’ As if wounded, he put a hand to his chest. ‘So cruel, the ballet girls! And it turns out even today they remain heartbreakers. That’s my childhood you’re trampling all over.’

      Ava giggled again. For a moment she was unsure what the noise was before realising with sadness that she had become unaccustomed to the sound of her own happiness.

      ‘Suck it up, Dork – the ballet girls rule!’

      Her exuberance was bubbling over, she had to catch herself and remember he was there for flowers. Now she set about making the bouquet, carefully selecting the stems, greenery and the twine. She put it together deliberately, concentrating on each movement, proud of her art. The man watched as she did so, silent as last time. There was no sulky tension here, though – he seemed perfectly comfortable without speaking, happy to watch her work without needing to comment on it or to make polite chit-chat. It was a sort of collaborative concentration. Ava remembered the silences that she and Rob had shared over the weekend, how they seemed so leaden, as if their words had been locked in an airtight room. This silence was very different: the longer it lasted, the more nervous she became about saying the wrong thing. All weekend she had been afraid the wrong words would appear too heavy and crush the mood, now she was afraid words would be too ephemeral, too unknowable, fizzing with uncertain electricity.

       Whatever else, she mustn’t ask who the bouquet was for.

      When he came to pay Ava, the man patted down his trousers and realised his wallet wasn’t in one of his pockets before bending down to search for it in his overnight bag. Ava made a point of looking away, not wanting to see a flash of his boxer shorts, or an intimidating scrap of some other woman’s silk negligee. Then she looked back immediately, eager to see exactly that. Her desire for clues as to who this mysterious – yet local – charmer was now consumed her. But she saw nothing, and he paid for the bouquet in cash. Denied a glimpse of either his name on a bankcard or the contents of his bag, she was none the wiser. Should she ask?

      She picked up the bouquet, ready to hand it to him and by now convinced there might be an actual crackle if they touched.

      This is a man with an overnight bag, who regularly buys flowers for someone else. Don’t ask, she told herself. Just don’t!

      ‘Thank you,’ he said, with a gracious sincerity that unnerved her more than the lighthearted flirting ever had. He took the flowers but there was no crackle. ‘They’re beautiful,’ he told her. He looked up, smiled at her and then left, quietly.

      Ava watched him go, noticing how broad his shoulders were, really lovely and broad. Not in an ironic super-hero way, just capable looking.

      She sat at her desk, staring ahead and strummed her fingers a couple of times. Something good, for me, she thought to herself. It had been so long since she had considered this that she really didn’t know what she wanted. She glanced down at her nails, stared around the shop again, uncomfortable with this moment of deliberate self-examination then looked for something else to do.

      Anything. She reached for the pile of junk mail that had been below the door when she had opened up and idly flicked through it. Just like last week, there was a flyer for the local arts centre. She plucked it from the pile and turned it over, knowing she had thrown away an identical one last week. They were advertising dance classes: one week Latin, another ballroom, 12-week courses.

      Uptight, judgmental Emma, who had made Mel’s life such a misery at times, crossed her mind. She remembered Mel’s exasperated reports after discussing Strictly with Emma at the school gates – always she had some arch comment about how she could do better than the celebrities, they just weren’t training hard enough. ‘Why can’t she just enjoy it like the rest of us?’ shrieked Mel one evening.

      Always keen to impress some imagined external adjudicator, Emma had apparently bitten the bullet and was now by all accounts a model of relaxed womanly confidence, whether or not she was up to no good with her dance instructor! Ava remembered the fun she’d had with Mel over the years, so much of it on a dance floor. She thought of the times she had tried to dance with Rob at various weddings or Christmas dinners but he wasn’t at all interested, thought it faintly ridiculous. Ava realised that for as long as she’d been with him she had barely danced. This was it, this was what had to change: her ladder out of the rut.

      She glanced at the website address running across the top of the flyer, above an image of a tanned man swirling a blonde, smiling woman round on his waist. Eagerly leaning in towards the screen, she typed it into her laptop. The website was very bright. Couples dipped and twirled across the page, while boxes with times and prices opened and flashed. More information than it was possible to absorb but she quickly realised that she would have to start as a beginner; the embarrassment of trying to keep up with lithe young dancers might be too much. Ava chewed her lip in a moment of hesitation – did she really want to do this? Of course she did! She imagined herself floating across the dance floor, supported on shoulders as wide and capable as those belong to the sweet pea man. Or dancing a Samba, out of her dreary jeans and T-shirt, wearing something short and bright, her skin glistening with tan and sweat, thighs like Beyoncé. She thought of the jaunty Strictly theme tune and how it brought a smile to her face even when she was entirely alone in the house.

      These images alone were enough to cheer her up. She brought up the music selection on her laptop and changed the track in the shop to a CD of something Brazilian sounding – as close to Samba music as her personal collection could provide. Then she whacked up the volume, grabbed her wallet from her bag and started to fill in the details for the course. Grinning and jiggling her legs in time to the music, she bent over her desk, tapping away at the laptop. The door to a world of possibilities had just been thrown open, it seemed. I will force a large spoke of dance into my Wheel of Tedium, she chuckled to herself. She flicked the music another notch louder, fingers almost tapping the keyboard in time to the beat now.