“Do you ever quit?” he asks me, his tone serious.
Softly, I say, “I can’t.”
“Why? Even if everyone tells you that you don’t possess the right amount of talent, you’d keep trying?”
“Because I love it,” I say like there is no other option. In my bones, there isn’t. I feel like I’m fighting for my happiness. And no one else can sense it or see it but me.
“You’re cursed then,” he tells me. “There are people with far greater talent, who don’t love it the way that you do.”
The weight of his statement sinks in.
That’s just life
, my dad would say. People will always be better than you. Whether they enjoy it or not isn’t a factor. It’s superfluous.
“Do you love it?” I ask him.
His eyes fall as he contemplates this. “Not as much as I used to. But the circus is my only love.”
“What about your family?” I think of Katya and Luka and Timo. I can tell—just by the way he protects them—that there’s a tremendous amount of love there.
He smiles. “Circus is family.”
The sentiment washes over me, a second wave of chills. Not even a second later, the bartender pushes more vodka shots towards us. Timo knows him, so he’s been supplying us free drinks all night. I pick up a shot since my sunrise is almost empty.
“To finding your sister,” I tell Nikolai.
He raises his shot. “No,” he says, “to your first week in Vegas.”
My heart clenches. He remembered why I stopped by The Red Death to see Camila. I sway a bit, and the overflowing shot spills on my fingers. Fantastic. I try to peel the soggy napkin from the bar.
Then Nikolai smoothly takes my hand. And he sucks the vodka off my fingers.
I freeze as his eyes flit up to mine, while his lips warm my skin. Sex pops back in my brain. Especially as his tongue works with skill.
When he finishes, he even sips a little from the rim of my glass, so I won’t spill more on myself.
This happens in maybe less than fifteen seconds. It felt like eternity. He clinks his glass back to mine. I haven’t unfrozen yet.
He wants to have sex.
No, he doesn’t. He downs the shot, and his eyes flit to my boobs.
Yes he does.
“What are your plans?” he asks, out of the blue. Or maybe it’s been on his mind instead of sex. I can’t tell anymore.
“To practice every day before work at Phantom, audition for any openings that come up,” I say with a satisfied nod. I like this plan. It seems solid.
He tenses more. If the alcohol is doing anything, it’s making him even
more
touchy-feely than he already is. His large hand stays firm on my legs. But he’s still rigid, commanding. All masculine and man. What anyone would expect of a lead male in a show about love.
He checks on his brother with a quick glance before focusing one-hundred percent on me. “It’s unlikely that Amour will ever have another opening. What happened with my old partner…it’s rare.” He hasn’t ever mentioned Tatyana before now. I can tell it’s a sore subject, so I won’t surface it any more than he has.
“There are other shows besides Amour,” I say. “There’s Infini and Viva. Seraphine is traveling, but they’ll be in Los Angeles around May. Plus there are other troupes if Aerial Ethereal isn’t hiring.”
The charm drains from his features, leaving gunmetal eyes with no shine. “High Flyers Company isn’t safe, Thora. They hire riggers as contract employees, pay them close to nothing, and give them
days
to learn how to harness artists before beginning shows.”
“I think I’ll be alright in my discipline.” Riggers sometimes have an artist’s life in their hands since they fasten harnesses and work the wires.
“Aerial silk,” he guesses my discipline right. “But if you’re in group acts with intricate choreography and a new apparatus that
needs
a harness, you’ll be asked to wear one. You’re risking your life with High Flyers, so please be smart and don’t even entertain them.”
“Emblem & Fitz Circus,” I say, one that’s based in London. High Flyers is AE’s direct competition, since Emblem is known for their carnival shows. Elephants. A ring leader.
“That can’t be the circus you’ve fallen in love with if you’re here,” he says. “It’s apples and oranges.”
“So what do you suggest I do?” I ask, about to retract my legs from his lap, but he holds tighter.
“I’ll train you.”
My lips part. “What?”
“I want to train you.”
“You’re drunk,” I breathe, half hoping he’s not.
“I’m nearly sober.” He adds, “Every January, AE has auditions to find new talent, regardless if a show is new or not. Most contracts are renewed and cancelled every new year, so you have a better shot to fill a role then.”
January.
That’s seven months away from now. He’s willing to train me for
seven months.
“You don’t have time,” I say. “You have a new partner—”
“If I don’t train you,” he says each word like it’s uniquely important, “you will fail, Thora. You’re
not
good enough. I can’t put it more plainly than that. I’m sorry.”
I want to be the better person and not accept it—knowing how much he has on his plate. But this is a dream offer. He has so much experience, the kind that I need to survive in this industry. “Why help me?” I ask softly. I expect him to say,
I don’t have an answer.
“I admire your courage. I know what you’ve given up to be here. I know the kind of artist it takes to land a role. I know that you won’t receive one on your own. And I imagine you, myshka, two years from now, working at Phantom with the same aspirations, the same dreams, in the same place where you are now. It’s wasted courage. And wasted love. You shouldn’t have to waste those things.”
I’m speechless.
And overwhelmed. When someone reaches out and gives you a hand—for no other reason than to see your success—it’s powerful. And rare.
He wipes beneath my eye with his thumb. “I’d rather feed your hunger than watch you starve, and you’re foolish if you say no.”
I shake my head, another tear slipping. “I wasn’t going to.”
He cups my jaw, tilting my head up so I stare right into him. “Good.”
* * *
4:54 a.m.
My head spins. Buzzed. No wait—I teeter, sans heels, on my bare soles. The sidewalk hot, even in the summer night. Definitely beyond buzzed. I drank past my limit. They just kept comin’ and I kept grabbin’. I think I was dazed and confused by Nikolai’s offer.
“It was a real offer?” I ask him, his hands firmly on the crook of my hips beside me. I think I slurred a bit of that. But he smiles in my foggy vision and mutters out a response. I only caught: …
again
… I’ve asked it multiple times?
I’m the sloppy drunk.
And judging by his roaming hands, he’s the flirty one.
It’s everything I imagined in life.
At least my sarcasm is internally on point right now. My mind is amused. I think we’re waiting for a cab, his cousins—lots of cousins—and Timo surrounding us.
We’re back in a group.
It’s hot.
I shed my coat and sling it over my forearm. It whips out of my possession and into Nikolai’s. He blazes me with his intensity, searing trails down my corseted waist, pushed-up cleavage and my thighs in black fish-net. He’s thinking about sex. I’m thinking about sex.
We’re all thinking about sex here.
“Those eyes…” I point a finger at him, my breath shallow. “…are bad.”
His lips rise. And all I hear from his response is
myshka
. My nickname, whatever that nickname means, has never sounded more sexual off his lips. And then his hands fall low to my hipbones, too close to more sensitive places.
He knows this.
Right?
I rest my palms on his sculpted abs. “You’re touching me.”
“I’ve touched you before,” he says huskily.
Truths.
Lots of truths tonight. Barefooted, my head reaches his chest. Literally. His bedroom eyes are things made from sin. “The devil is…very, very…hot.” I wonder if that went smoothly or not.
Probably not.
I feel his lips brush my ear with the heat of his breath. Then he lifts me, so effortlessly that we may as well have been on stage.
I’m closer to his jaw, his mouth…
One of his hands clutches my ass, and my legs hook around his waist. “What am…I doing here?” I say aloud. Did I say that out loud?
“You’re in my arms.” He holds the back of my neck, his thumb putting the right pressure on the right tender muscles. A pleasured sound tickles my throat. I’m not even sure if I contained it.
His cousins begin to shout. I think. I hear a couple car horns and laughter.
“Why am I in your arms?” my drunken, sloppy-self asks.
He tries to hide his smile, but I see it peek from the corners of his lips. “Because you’re little. And I’m not.” He combs my flyaway hairs, and he rests his palm on my cheek, sliding it to the back of my neck again.
His touch electrifies my skin. I shiver. Or shudder. Maybe both.
Timo speaks, somewhere close to us. “You’re a Grade-A flirty drunk…”
Nikolai replies in Russian, and my thoughts fly with the scene. I become fragmented. Like snapshots of a whole night, and I vividly recall only certain moments.
I straddle Nikolai’s lap, my head on his chest while I listen to his heartbeat. His voice vibrates against my ear while a taxi bumps along a road. It takes a lot of energy to look up at him, but I do, tilting my head. He stares down at me, his hand stroking my tangled dirty-blonde hair, no longer in a pony.
“I can walk,” I whisper. Why am I whispering?
“Prove it,” he says deeply.
I place my palms on his chest again and try to lift myself off him, and I recognize that we’re in a taxi again. Where I cannot walk. Even if I tried.
He laughs.
I scowl.
His hand travels up my corset, to my chest, and his humor fades, replaced by a more desirous,
hungry
look.
Shockwaves course through my body, and a noise, like a high-pitched moan, rumbles inside of me. I can’t discern whether he hears the needy plea—one that I’ve never made before.
Not with anyone.
Not even drunk.
He pulls me even closer to his body, and I’m welded against him. In his care, and his lips close over my jaw. I swear they do.
I’m on a bed.
I’m
on a bed.
In my corset and stockings. Metallic-colored sheets and comforter beneath me. The corset wire pokes into my skin, and the weight of someone else undulates the mattress, rocking my body. I prop myself on my elbows.
Nikolai is shirtless.
He is very, very shirtless.
Even in the darkness, moonlight creeping through the white curtains, I notice the ridges and lines in his muscles, his perfect set of abs. A body that belongs to an athlete or vampires and werewolves, the supernatural in general.
He hovers over me, his fingers untying the front of my corset where it all binds together.
We’re going to have sex.
It’s a lingering thought.
We’re both drunk.
That is true too.
My mind soars to new heights. “I’m floating,” I whisper.
Or spinning.
“Close your eyes, myshka,” he breathes in a soothing, deep tone. I don’t close them though. His forearm rests beside my head, his body less than an inch from descending into me.
“What does that mean?” I ask softly. “Myshka?”
His eyes search mine, hypnotic, soulful. Ones that tether me here, to him. And his lips close over my cheek before drifting to my ear. “Little mouse.”
Little mouse.
I spin.
And the blackness of the night takes me completely.
Act Fourteen
My head pounds viciously.
I roll over, whirling. A soft, metallic comforter molds my body, like a fluffy pillow. I freeze. This is not my bed in Ohio.
I’m in Vegas.
And this is
not
Camila’s couch.
My blurry eyes begin to grow and clear. The never-ending night suddenly floods me in choppy, disjointed waves. What. Did I do?
I’m on my period.
It’s the first terrified thought I have.
Did I have sex?
Those two—sex and menstruation—they don’t mix. I’m going to look down and see a horrific bloody mess, something from a scary movie. Like
Saw.
The eighth sequel took place in Nikolai’s bed.
Before I agonize any longer, I take a peek. No blood.
No mess.
I pat my body for my phone, and it dawns on me. I’m wearing a men’s black button-down. Bra-less. Or rather, corset-less. No stockings. No—wait, I still have my black underwear on, the bottoms that matched the top.
I find my phone sitting on a pillow beside me. No other body is here.
He kissed me?
Maybe. Did he?
Did we have sex?
I want to turn off my frantic brain. Please. I stare at the ceiling, expecting to have a one-on-one talk with God, but this isn’t the time. And I don’t think He wants to hear me groan about my drunken black-out night.
I just hope it’s not one full of regret.
I check the time on my cell. 9:32 a.m.
Why am I up so early after going to bed so late? What’s wrong with my body? Doesn’t it understand that it needs sleep? I’m about to fall back into the pillow and force my eyes shut.
But a fist raps the door frame.
Nikolai stands with a glass of green slush, wearing black workout shorts and a gray shirt. Strands of his hair fall over his rolled, red bandana. Like usual, it’s distracting and more attractive than he probably realizes.
“How is your body functioning?” is the first thing I say, of all things needing to be said.
“I can handle my liquor,” he reminds me. “I’m assuming you feel like shit.”
I sit up, suddenly aware of last night again, the important parts. I anxiously pull at the hem of his shirt so it covers my thighs. I swallow, my throat dry. “Right assumption.”
His brows pinch as he studies me for a second. Then he approaches with the green mystery concoction. “Drink this.” He passes it to me.