The Wednesday dance class

The studio sits above a chemist's, and on Wednesdays at eight in the evening the floorboards are still warm from the afternoon. Tomás climbs the two flights with his shirt already sticking to his back. It's the fourth time. He counts.

His sister paid for the eight-class package in April, the month he went eleven days without leaving the flat, and called it a birthday present. His birthday is in September. Neither of them dismantled the lie, because it suited everybody.

Cléo, who teaches, claps twice and the group falls into two lines. Men on one side, women on the other, and every eight bars everyone moves one place to the right. That's how the class works. Nobody stays with anybody.

Íris is third in the line opposite.

She isn't in his group. She's in the advanced class on Tuesdays and comes on Wednesdays to help with beginners, which in practice means she spends the whole hour correcting the arms of men who have never danced.

When her turn comes round, she takes Tomás's hand and repositions it without asking.

"Not there," she says, pushing his palm down from the shoulder blade to the ribs. "Here you're telling her something. Up there you're just leaning."

He tries to process this as technical information. It works for about two bars.

She smells of eucalyptus. On the second Wednesday he works out why: she keeps a menthol inhaler tucked into her bra strap for her sinuses, and runs a finger along her wrist whenever her nose closes up. The smell stays there. It's the most specific thing he knows about her, and he knows more than he'd care to admit.

Eight bars go by. She moves one place to the right. He gets a woman called Dulce who dances looking at her own feet and apologises whenever she gets it wrong.

Between one Wednesday and the next, Tomás practises in the kitchen. He works out that the cold floor helps and the table doesn't, and starts shoving the table against the fridge on Monday nights. The woman downstairs banged on her ceiling with a broom handle twice in May. He didn't stop practising. He started practising in socks.

He counts the steps under his breath. One, two, three, hold. He always goes wrong on the hold.

Third Wednesday. Cléo puts on something slower and tells everyone to stop counting.

"You're not dancing," she says. "You're sitting an exam."

When Íris reaches him, she corrects nothing. She just brings her forehead close to his shoulder without touching it, and waits.

"Shut your eyes."

"I'll stand on you."

"You will."

He shuts them. He stands on her. She doesn't complain. On the second attempt he feels her weight shift half a second before the step and understands, without anyone explaining it, that leading isn't pushing, it's warning. Her body answers. It's the first time in four weeks that he and the music are in the same place at the same moment.

When he opens his eyes she's looking at him with an expression that isn't a teacher's.

Eight bars. She moves right. Dulce apologises for nothing.

Fourth Wednesday. It's been raining since five.

There's a sheet of paper taped to the glass door downstairs, at handle height, in biro: NO CLASS TONIGHT — Cléo's boy has a bug. The tape has been put on badly and one corner has already lifted.

Tomás reads it twice. His shirt is soaked from shoulder to elbow, his umbrella turned itself inside out on the corner of Bento Freitas, and he stands there in the doorway without knowing why he isn't leaving.

"Nobody told you either."

Íris is behind him, under the chemist's awning, hair stuck flat to her forehead.

"Nobody told me."

"She put it in the group chat at twenty past seven."

"I left the group."

Íris laughs. She takes a ring of three keys out of her pocket, because she helps lock up on Tuesdays and never gave the copy back.

"Come up."

The studio is bigger with nobody in it. With the fans off you can hear rain on the skylight and the chemist's freezer humming up through the floor.

She props her phone on top of the speaker rack and puts something on. The sound comes out thin, no bass at all, and it makes no difference whatsoever.

"Come here."

He goes. His hand finds her ribs, the right place, first time, and she raises an eyebrow at him for getting it right.

They dance four minutes without speaking. Nobody moves to the right.

She is half a head shorter than him and even so it's her deciding where the two of them go. Tomás works this out on the third turn and decides not to mention it, because mentioning it would spoil it.

There's a strip of old masking tape stuck to the floor, which Cléo uses to line the rows up. They cross it four times.

When the track ends the phone rolls into the next one, and neither of them shifts to meet the change of tempo. They stay where they are in the middle of the floor, fitted together, and the only thing still happening is her breath against the base of his neck.

"I came here thinking there'd be a class," he says.

"I came knowing there wasn't."

He takes a second with that. She doesn't let the second finish.

The back wall is mirror, and it's against the mirror that he puts her, which means he sees his own hands twice: one at her waist, the other reflected, arriving from behind as though it belonged to some other man.

She pulls at the collar of his wet shirt. The fabric resists, she laughs at the fabric, and the laugh dies in his mouth.

He notices, with a clarity that will bother him later, that she is barefoot and that her toenails are painted a red so dark it's nearly black, chipped on the middle one. Nobody paints their toenails to teach a dance class on a Wednesday.

The eucalyptus is on her wrist, in the crook of her elbow, behind her ear. He finds all three.

The floorboards creak in two particular places in that room. They locate both.

The rain doesn't stop. The emergency light over the door lays a green stripe across the mirror, and every so often the headlights of a car climbing the street pass over it. Beyond that, dark.

At twenty past ten she goes down to help the night man pull the chemist's shutter, because she promised, and comes back up with two lemon ice lollies he gave her.

They sit on the floor with their backs against the mirror.

"There's a class next week," she says.

"There is."

"You'll go on changing partners every eight bars."

"I will."

She bites the ice lolly instead of sucking it, which he considers an atrocity and does not mention.

The following Wednesday she's there, third in the line opposite, correcting the arms of men who have never danced. When her turn comes round she puts his hand on her ribs and says here you're telling her something, exactly as the first time, in exactly the teacher's voice.

Tomás never found out whether she'd seen the note on the door before she left home. He asked once. She changed the subject to Cléo's boy, who got better.