Slowly, as she came to her senses, another truth devastated her.
They could never, ever do this again.
*** *** ***
Rubio thought he was crushing Petra. He was almost sure of it, but he didn’t care. He wanted to crush her. He wanted to put her in a cage in his loft and keep her there whenever he wasn’t using her. He wanted to put his cock in her mouth and shove it in balls deep. He wanted to fuck her again, tonight, tomorrow night, every night until she begged him to leave her alone. He wanted to do every perverted and sordid thing in the world to beautiful Petra.
“
Meu bem
,” he whispered against her ear. “What were you saying? You don’t want me?”p>
She smiled, but then she shook her head and buried her face in her hands. This reaction befuddled him. He was still drifting in the afterglow of their luscious, mind-altering sex, but she looked unhappy. Why?
Jesus Cristo
, he’d hurt her. He must have hurt her too badly. He must have misread her signals.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered in frantic repetition, checking over her slender frame. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what you liked. I was too rough. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t that.”
“What then?” He pulled out since he was going soft, but he still held her in his arms. “What’s the matter? You are angry? Hurt? Please, tell me.”
“It’s just…” She turned away from him. “We can’t do this. It’s even worse than I thought.”
With patient, gentle pressure, he managed to uncurl her from her fetal ball. He nudged her hands away from her face. “What do you mean, worse than you thought? What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
She stared up at him, her eyes hard now, and bleak. “I thought, just one time. Just once would be okay, to satisfy my curiosity. I didn’t realize it would feel so...perfect.”
“Is bad? To feel perfect?”
“No. I mean, yes! Don’t you understand how dangerous this is to me, to my career? I don’t want to fall in love with you, and end up heartbroken and used, and get knocked up with some baby you don’t want, and spend the rest of my life crippled with regrets. Crippled and angry and bitter and resentful.”
He tried to follow the miserable tangle of her words. “But...” He shook his head. “I didn’t make a baby in you. I used a condom. Petra, look.” He held up the used, filled receptacle before it occurred to him it was pretty disgusting. “Here, let me up a minute.”
He went to the bathroom and threw it away, and washed his hands. When he returned, Petra was propped up against her pillows, huddled in her blanket. He went to sit beside her. He wanted to comfort her, but he was afraid to even touch her in her current mood. “Petra, I know your concerns. But I liked what we just did. I liked it a lot. Didn’t you?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. I only want to dance with you. We should be dance partners, that’s all.”
“Sure, we are dance partners,” he said to soothe her. He pulled her against his side, and when she didn’t shove him away, he pressed a kiss to her temple. “Listen, we can make this work. We don’t have to make a baby, like your mother and father. We can dance and then we can have sex sometimes if you like. We can even play at Liam’s party, or here, or at my place—”
“No, we can’t do that,” she cried. “That’s what I’m trying to explain to you.”
“But it was so fun. You liked it when we played. You liked it just now, when I spanked you and fucked you,” he said in sultry flirtation. “You were so wet.”
“I know. It felt really good, all of it.”
He scratched his forehead. “Is this because I called you a naughty little slut? Because that was just doing dirty talk. It’s a sadist thing, to say nasty names and threats and all that. I didn’t mean it for real.”
That made her bury her face in her hands again, and he decided he better shut his mouth before he made things worse. He ran fingers up and down her arm, resisting the urge to grope her tit. He breathed in the scent of her sugar-vanilla hair and sighed.
“Ah, Petra. This makes me very sad, your rejection. I’m sorry,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. “I thought you wanted it. I’m sorry I made you angry.”
“I’m not angry.” She flung her arms around his neck. “The sex was good. Too good. It was spectacular. That’s why we can’t do it again. I don’t want to lose my head and act stupid, and go chasing after you—”
“You don’t have to chase me. I’m right here. If you like, we can do it again. And again.”
She made an irate sound and got up from the bed, taking the blanket with her and revealing the fact that his cock was stiff, ready for an encore.
He pulled the corner of a sheet over the evidence. “I would like to do it again,” he said. “But I understand you don’t want to. Okay. Because you don’t want to get hurt or...because I will do to you like Petr Grigolyuk do to your mother? But I don’t like when people say I’m like him. I’m me. Different person.”
She walked over to get his clothes with the blanket wrenched tightly around her. “It’s not your fault, okay? It’s me. It’s my issues, my fears.”
“My cock was so happy inside you.” He stepped into his jeans, thinking about all the possibilities. “We could do it whenever you liked. Before class, after shows. During rehearsal breaks in my dressing room.”
“No.”
“I don’t care if you want to live your own life. I won’t make any demands. Only tease you and hurt you and fuck you, and maybe sometimes I’ll pee on you in the shower—”
“No!”
He frowned. “But...then...where will you get sex? From someone else?” He scowled at her as he shrugged into his sweater. “When you could be with me? This isn’t fair. There is so much more we could do together. Restraints and toys, and nasty sex, and whips, and all kinds of fun stuff. God, Petra. You would love it, to play with me. It makes no sense.”
“It makes sense to me.”
He glared at her with his arms crossed over his chest. “Right now, you are being a very, very bad girl.”
She looked apologetic but determined. “If you care about me, please don’t push this. Please, just pretend this never happened.”
Somehow that hurt him most of all. Pretend it never happened? Impossible, for him anyway. He could count on one hand the number of women who’d affected him this way since he’d come to London. One finger, really. There was so much promise between him and Petra, so many possibilities to explore. So much perversion to wallow in. But she was his partner. If she pouted and fussed at him all the time like this, they’d both go mad.
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t have a choice, do I? But I’m not happy about this, and I won’t pretend it never happened, because it did happen. I’m not good at pretending.”
“You pretend all the time. When you dance, and act on stage. That’s all pretend, isn’t it?”
He glared at her. Why was she doing this? He wasn’t Petr Grigolyuk, and she wasn’t her mother, and partners slept with each other all the time. It wasn’t exactly professional, but it was common.
It had happened with him and Ashleigh. Almost.
But that was ancient history, and he’d stopped thinking about Ashleigh that way as soon as he realized she loved his friend. Rubio had his quirks but he did have a sense of honor, of goodness. He didn’t want to be like his father, for instance, who abused women, and dealt drugs, and died in a hail of gunfire when he pissed off the wrong man. He was not his father and he was not Petra’s father, and all of this was a huge disappointment.
When he tried to kiss her goodbye, she turned her head so he only brushed her ear. He grabbed her face and made her turn her head back, then held her chin until he caught her gaze. “One kiss, damn you. That’s the price if you want me to forget.”
She stiffened and he thought she would refuse, but then she let him take her in his arms. Her lips opened and they got caught up in the same magic of their earlier kiss. She sighed into his mouth and he pressed her to his front, groping her strong, lithe silhouette beneath the blanket. His fingers stroked over her tight, heart-shaped ass. He’d barely gotten a chance to know that ass. It wasn’t fair to offer up an ass like that and then deny him further access. The kiss lasted a long time, but not nearly long enough to suit him.
It was the most mournful kiss he’d ever shared with anyone. All of this was completely unfair.
Petra’s sleep had gone to shit ever since the Rubio incident. Not only that, but her stalker was writing to her five, six, seven times a day. She stared at the number of emails that had accumulated in the “Paulsen” folder. If anything, he was writing her more, not less, no matter how much she ignored him.
Whenever news about her and Rubio hit the papers, the influx of emails doubled or quadrupled. Even if it was just some generic blurb about an upcoming ballet, or a review, or some interview about their partnership on a ballet website, Paulsen saw it and emailed her about it.
This Rubio guy is an ass. I don’t know how you don’t see it. Be careful—he’s bad news.
Another reason not to strike up some big relationship with Rubio. Any evidence of interaction between them seemed to incense Gary Paulsen, which was really scary when she thought about it. Her blood rushed faster whenever she saw someone with his coloring and build on the street. She checked the IP addresses of his emails the way Officer McGillivray had showed her, and scanned them for violent overtones, but the notes remained cordial. Cordial and creepy. She was creeped out all the time now, and lonely and sad. The only time she really felt okay was at the theater with Rubio, and then it was in a wistful way, because she still wanted him and he made it all too clear he was still available to her.
He gave her looks, glances, touches she knew were meant to remind her. They plowed through rehearsals for
Giselle
, a ballet that required a lot of angst and soul-gazing. Rubio danced Albrecht, the handsome, playboy duke who toyed with Giselle’s affections and broke her heart. As Giselle, Petra got to stomp around the stage in a soul-broken fit before dying at Albrecht’s feet. A lot of dancers found the ballet cheesy and melodramatic.
For Petra, it was the perfect time to play a role about losing her shit.
“Giselle is easy for you, no?” Rubio asked one day as they took a break from practice. “Easy for you to play the crazy lady.” He teased, but his voice held a brittle edge.
“And you’ll be good at Albrecht,” she said to get in her own dig. “You’re more or less playing yourself.”
Ruby ignored her comeback, tipping into a neat handstand before he vaulted down and sprawled beside her on the floor. His showy handstands and flips used to impress her, but they’d grown familiar over the past weeks. He gulped some water and then helped her stretch, offering resistance as she pushed with each leg. “Albrecht is not so bad,” he murmured. “He redeems himself in the end.”
“Because she forgives him? He’s still an asshole. It would be a better ballet if she didn’t forgive him.”
He narrowed his eyes as she lowered her legs to the floor. “She has to forgive him. It only has a happy ending if she forgives him. Otherwise, is just depressing and sad.”
“Like real life.” She picked at the edge of her pointe shoe.
He touched her knee, a soft, fleeting touch. “You sad, Petra?”
She shouldn’t have looked at him. If she hadn’t looked at him, he wouldn’t have seen the longing in her gaze. She looked away and busied herself re-tying her ribbons. “I’m not sad. No.”
“You thinking about when we were together?”
She shook her head, taking refuge in stretching even though she was already warmed up.
“I think about it,” he said. “Constantly.” He bent down until he caught her eyes. “You seeing any other guys? You getting sex? You probably need sex.”
She sighed and turned her back on him, but that didn’t dissuade him. He popped his head over her shoulder. “We could be together, you know. I think you’re out of balance. Too much work, not enough play. You have sad, horny eyes.”
She tsked. “I do not have sad, horny eyes. That’s not even a thing. Some crazy shit comes out of your mouth, you know that?”
“If you let me come back to your bed—”
She clapped her hands over her ears. “I know. Believe me, I know. Don’t say it.” She stayed like that until he drew back, a ponderous frown on his face. Let him frown. She didn’t need the temptation of hearing how fun and sexy it would be to hook up with him on a regular basis. She didn’t need to hear it. She
knew
.
He leaned back on his hands, studying her. She wished Gennady, the director, would call the rehearsal back to order.
“Hey, Petra,” he said in a more serious tone. “Is that man still bothering you? The one who sent the dead flowers?”
“No,” she said shortly. “Well, I’m managing it.” She didn’t want to pitch into that conversation, not when she already felt so bleak.
“He send you any other things? Things that are weird and creepy?”
She hesitated a moment. “No.”
That miniscule hesitation was enough. He could read her subconscious signals like other people read print in a book.
“What?” he prompted. “What did he send?”
“Nothing. He hasn’t sent anything else.” She didn’t know why she was lying. Maybe because confiding in him would bring them closer, endanger this necessary distance between them. She wanted to confide in him, especially when he looked so concerned for her, but she was afraid she’d end up throwing herself in his arms and acting like an idiot.
Rubio watched her, seeing far too much with his acute gaze. “If you need help—”
“I don’t need help, okay? Everything’s fine.”
He took a swig from his water bottle and flipped back into a handstand, clearly unconvinced.
*** *** ***
A month went by, and another. They did their final performance of
Romeo and Juliet
and opened
Giselle
to rave reviews. Three or four nights a week Ruby watched in awe as Petra danced the “mad scene” in front of a sold-out house, her arms flying, her long black wig streaming wild down her back. That damn wig taunted him. Too many memories. Sharing the stage with her was bittersweet bliss. During performances, she was his to control and to grasp, to hold and manipulate until the final curtain call—then she’d vanish into thin air.