Chapter 3
VAL
When I was eleven, in one of the few foster homes that didn’t make me want to tear off my own skin, my foster mom read me Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”.
That’s the poem that starts “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”. We’ve all read it. But it stuck with me for ages.
I found myself gravitating to it a few years later, when I realized I quite liked the idea of grabbing a guy and kissing him on the mouth. I also liked the idea of doing the same thing to a girl.
Then I got older and realized I could have both.
Separately. Together. Mix and match, plug and play however you want.
At first I was confused. Liking guys made me gay, right? But what if I also liked girls equally?
Enter bisexuality, stage left. I’m not really a fan of labels, but goddamn I love that one, because it’s me in a nutshell—and not just the sex part, or the orientation.
I don’t want to trot out some clichéd shit like “there are two wolves inside me”. If there’s one thing I've never wanted to be, it’s a cliché. I’ve fought my entire fucking life not to be “the orphan”, or “the amnesiac”, or “the queer.”
But there are two sides to me, at times playing the same game and steering me in the same direction, and at others almost ripping me apart in their need to seek different horizons.
On the one hand, I’m fun Val. I like to party. I won’t say no to a drink. I love—I mean goddamn love—fucking. Orgasming and coming inside a hot mouth, a tight ass, or a wet, milking pussy is just about the single greatest feeling I’m pretty sure a human being is capable of.
Well, the second-greatest feeling. The absolute greatest—and I’ll fucking die on this hill—is dance.
Ballet, to be precise.
I don’t know what it is about it. Partly, it’s the precision and the rigorous discipline involved.
There’s also the history and tradition of it and how being a dancer makes you part of that history and tradition.
I fucking love the way we still use pretentious French words for the steps that are ten times harder to say than “jump” or “twirl”.
The way the teacher stands in front of the rest of the class because it used to be King Louis IV standing there.
It matters. The history and the tradition and the discipline of it matter.
Because they ground you to something beautiful, elegant and utterly unimportant which is yet somehow one of the most important things of all when it comes to the human condition: art, and the way that art expresses the soul.
Without art, I’m not actually sure you can express what it is to have a soul.
Well, maybe fucking would do it. But it’s a distant second to dance, in my humble opinion.
Short answer, I was lost before I found ballet.
Or maybe it was ballet that found me. Add the fact that “Billy Eliot” was the only VHS tape at one of my foster homes, and the glamor of the stage, with the costumes and lights—I can be a fancy fucking bitch when I want to be—and you have the initial pull.
And the feeling I got the first time I stepped into a studio and stood at the barre?
Indescribable.
Pure. Fucking. Peace. A respite from the endless screaming in my head that had been filling the void my lost memories left behind since I could remember.
That’s not to say that ballet changed my whole life right there on the spot. I mean, you wanna play life in hard mode? Go into the New York City foster care system as a queer kid and tell them at ten that you want to dance ballet.
Yeah.
But get tough or die trying, and I refused to fucking die.
Not when the other kids tried to kick my ass for being a “princess”. A “ballerina”. A fruit. Far worse names. Not when the foster dad at my next home told me in no uncertain terms that ballet was for girls, and that he’d be damned if he kept a sissy homo under his roof prancing around in a tutu.
Not even at the house after that, when the devil would come to my room at night.
I. Refused. To. Die.
When I got beaten up, or someone put their hands on me, I learned to fight. And when some prick asshole told me the one fucking joy I’d found in life wasn’t allowed, I snuck out of the house at night and took lessons with the adult class at the church community center ten blocks away.
Ever since then, ballet has been my anchor. It’s what’s kept me sane and prevented me from straying too close to the darkness that swirls inside me, or the looming, jagged edges around the holes in my memory that I’ll never get back.
These days, at least, I have a better understanding of those. I know now who I used to be during the time I can no longer remember. That happened several months ago, when Vaughn came into my life.
The brother I never even knew I’d lost.
He was the one who filled in some of the gaps for me, though I still can’t remember them.
We were born to addict parents in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
Dad stole cars and Mom turned tricks to feed their heroin addictions.
And one winter night, after they’d both disappeared for longer than usual and the house was below freezing inside, Vaughn got us both bundled up and out of that place forever.
He broke into the furniture store downtown: it was heated and had warm beds, and we wouldn’t be sharing with addicts or criminals.
Or so he thought.
But as it turned out, breaking into that store to avoid freezing to death was the moment our lives swerved from one direction to a vastly different one. The furniture shop was a front for a safe house belonging to a group that would change the course of our lives: the Obsidian Syndicate.
I’ve got mixed thoughts about what I know now happened after that. On the plus side, the Syndicate took us in. They fed us, clothed us, gave us a place to live and a family, a brotherhood, to grow up in.
That said, we worked nine hours a day packaging up drugs for distribution.
But—shit. It was better than freezing to death in McKeesport or waiting for one of mom’s Johns to put his hands on us, or one of Dad’s buddies to go psycho and stab us.
Then one day the police raided the warehouse where we were working.
They came in guns blazing: SWAT team, armored car, the whole bit.
And when I got hit hard in the head by a bouncing tear gas canister and was knocked unconscious, Vaughn made a split-second decision to give me a chance at a better life.
As our Syndicate brothers were fleeing through the back door, Vaughn, knowing I’d be found by the cops, told the men that I was dead. He even slipped his wallet into my pocket, trying to give me what little money he had in case I needed it.
Then, he was gone, along with my memory of him.
I woke up not knowing who I was, why they’d found me where they did, or anything about my past. All I knew was I had a wallet in my pocket with fifty bucks and a gym ID photo that looked like me and said my name was Vaughn.
So that’s who I was for the next twenty-ish years.
Vaughn the foster kid.
Vaughn the queer.
Vaughn the ballet dancer.
Until the real Vaughn came back, then second-in-command of the entire Obsidian Syndicate.
I smile wryly as I slip the cigarette between my lips and look around at the gorgeous, dimly lit study in the vast mountaintop estate.
My gaze slides over the huge desk that screams power, the shelves of leather-bound first editions, and then out the enormous double-height windows that give a breathtaking moonlit view of the Adirondacks.
I shake my head with a low, quiet chuckle.
I mean, I do love my life, and the man I’ve become. But fuck. Me. The divide between my brother and me spans oceans. I’m a dancer who likes to party and until recently lived in a cramped, overpriced studio apartment in the West Village.
Meanwhile, my older brother is “the Marquis”: the shadowy, commanding leader of one of the most secretive and powerful criminal empires on the planet, complete with a fucking gigantic mountaintop castle retreat.
I mean, come on.
I exhale out of the corners of my mouth, shaking my head again as I flick the Zippo in my hand and bring the flame to the end of the cigarette.
“I believe I’ve told you that I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke in here.”
I hesitate, the flame an inch away from the tip, lifting my gaze past it. Vaughn stands in the doorway of the study, a dark brow arched as he eyes me.
He’s only seventeen months older than me.
Sometimes, even I have a hard time believing we’re not twins.
We’ve got the same build, though I’m maybe an inch taller.
Same sharp blue eyes. Same face. Hell, we even got similar tattoos in similar places at separate times, though he’s kept his forearms and hands bare, where mine are festooned with ink.
He keeps his hair short and slicked to the side, though, which contrasts with my usual shagginess. I like mine a bit longer; Vaughn prefers looking like a European aristocrat. Like he’s just waiting for the first hints of silver to grace his temples so he can really lean into that sugar daddy vibe.
“Prefer as in kindly do not, or as in—”
“Val.”
I sigh. Fair enough. It’s not my bazillion-dollar cliffside castle-mansion, I guess.
“You know,” I say, tucking the unlit cigarette behind my ear, “I think you should take up smoking.”
Vaughn smirks as he crosses the room to the bar cart by the cinematographer’s wet dream of a view.
“That's outstanding advice,” he says sarcastically. “You should start a health podcast.”
I grin as I give him a middle finger. “It would really complete your whole aesthetic, is all.”
He glances my way as he pours a splash of something I’ll bet costs as much per fluid ounce as my old apartment did per month.
“My aesthetic?”
“The Bond villain crib, the elegant clothes, the mysterious title.” I shrug. “Smoking would really complete the whole vibe.”
“Well, should I ever feel the burning desire to lean into a cancer aesthetic, I’ll take that advice.”
“He says, pouring a glass of literal poison.”