Elle
When I walk into Libellule an hour later, I’m immersed in a sea of blondes from strawberry to platinum, to golden, to ash, to dirty blonde. That seems to be the only requirement aside from being a woman and drop-dead gorgeous.
Girls from the palest pales to tawny to deep ebony shimmy around the club, all in sage green corsets with long silk ribbons and emerald glass beads. They look worlds apart from the cheap plastic one I’d worn on my first and only day on the job.
‘I hate this outfit.’
‘Fuck, this corset is cheap.’
I shake away Gant’s words.
There aren’t enough corsets to go around because only half the women are wearing them. The other half are topless, prancing around in emerald thongs, lacy black stockings, and spiked stilettos. They’re rotating the corsets with similar-sized girls clustered in groups because they’re all auditioning with the new uniforms. If it can be called an audition.
They're taking turns on stage, where the live band normally performs. They’re twirling with trays in each hand, on their heads, and on their heels, as they slip onto their backs and use their legs as tables.
Hale’s on the floor beside an Asian girl who’s balancing a tray full of tequila shots, one hand tangled in her yellow blonde hair. The colour contrasts starkly with her jet black roots.
“Don’t laugh,” he says, leaning up to grab a shot before pouring the clear liquid over her tits. “You laugh, you lose.”
She giggles, but quickly bites her lip as he leans down to suck on her nipples. Immediately, her tray wobbles as her legs shake. Two seconds before the tray crashes down, another girl catches it, though two shot glasses rattle to the floor, splashing the giggling girl across the face. Not that it’s a problem because Hale licks it off her lips.
“Fail,” he says simply as she rolls over, and the watching crowd erupts into a chorus of fake awwws.
“I can pass at something else,” she says, still on her hands and knees.
“Like what?” he asks daringly.
“The no gag, no choke challenge.”
My stomach twists for an invisible Stassi. I’d heard a lot about Hale being obsessed with women. The king of any party. Community cock, Aria had called him on my first day at Beaulieu, but I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I’d seen him glued to Stassi every chance he got when Zedd wasn’t around.
Seriously, what happened between the birthday party and now?
Hale doesn’t look like himself. He looks like a fiend ready to devour because his bloodshot eyes are thirsty, hungry. It’s so different from his restlessness when I’d visited him fresh out of the hospital. Then, he wouldn’t sleep because of the renovations. Now, he can’t sleep because something otherworldly is fuelling him.
I watch the dying, wispy rays of sunlight that manage to enter the club through the blackout shutters. Just how long had these auditions been going on?
He locks those hungry, half-hooded eyes on me, and although they shine, I swear there’s nothing behind those blue pools. I want there to be nothing behind mine. Because if there’s nothing, there’s no pain.
“You came,” he says.
The women cheer as another blonde balances a tray on her ass. If nothing else, they seem blindly accepting as they dance in the cages and on the bar.
“What happened to not being like Pierrot’s?” I ask as he gets to his feet.
“I’m not fighting who I am any more. I’m doing what I do best, and it makes everyone happy.”
The girls cheer again at some other trick.
“Why would I be something I’m not? Why would you? It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“I have nowhere else to go.” Technically, I can go to a hotel, I just don’t want to be alone.
It’s like Hale can hear my unuttered words because his smile broadens fiendishly. “Welcome home. You’re right in time for my inauguration.” He walks to a loveseat across from the stage and settles between two blondes, one ash, one strawberry, both wigs. “Do you want to be indoctrinated? There’s a place for everyone at the menagerie.”
Menagerie. Like a human zoo. The opposite of the sophisticated blue bloods.
I take forever to answer him, and the girl rubbing his chest stops her massaging to pout at me. “She’s killing the mood. Fire crotches never live up to their fiery reputation.”
“Why was she even allowed in?” another girl calls. “Didn’t you get the memo? Blondes only before ten.”
“Maybe that’s what she’s missing,” a passing girl says, ripping her wig off to reveal fried blonde hair as she dumps her wig on my head. “Blondes have more fun.”
It reminds me of when Aria put the curly black wig on my head while she donned a blonde one and spilled her heart out to me about Etienne. She got the words out because she wasn’t herself any more. Maybe I could be someone else, too.
“,” Hale says. “Don’t you want to have fun tonight? I know what it’s like to be chewed up and spat out by the blues.”
“You saw the article. I did the chewing,” I say, gripping the duffel bag tighter.
“Look into my eyes.”
I do.
“That’s nothing to the Auclairs. If you think you’ve won, I want you to know that you haven’t and you never will. The Auclairs are the Auclairs with a scandal that will blow over in a few days. But you? Who are you?”
I thought I was a daughter.
I thought I was in love.
I thought someone could love me.
“I thought I was a dancer,” I say, finally glancing at my feet. “But who knows now.”
“Then we should find out,” Hale says, gesturing to the makeshift stage behind me. “Rie?”
Rie may be legally blind, but her hearing is impeccable because she clomps over in her thigh-highs and takes my duffel to safety at Hale’s command. Did he know it was filled with… I meet those dead eyes again. Of course, he knows.
“ Hale, ” the girl whines to his left, her arms crossed over her breasts like she’s freezing, but the club's almost unbearably warm. “She didn’t wait her turn.”
“She’s a special audition,” Hale says, pulling the girl onto the couch, and she squeals with delight as he makes her sit behind him so that he’s in the cradle of her thighs, and her tits cushion his head. “. Show them how it’s done.”
“H-how what’s done?” I ask, dumbfounded.
“You’re a dancer.”
“A ballet dancer.”
“The most flexible kind of dancer. Get up there and do what you do best. Dance for us. Entertain us.”
“Why would I do that?”
He cocks his head and a tit in the process. “What else will you do? To be a part of the menagerie, you have to become an animal. Let your primal urges take over.”
I just stare at him, at this Hale I’ve never met.
“She looks so lost,” the girl behind him giggles in his ear.
“I’ll help her find herself again.” Hale extends his palm to me, a gold, engraved bracelet glimmering around his wrist, reminiscent of his mother’s. “Come here.”
I’m on a string as I walk over to him, and he points to the ground, gesturing for me to get onto my knees and between his feet.
Has he lost his mind? But then again, I’ve lost mine because I follow his instruction.
“Some liquid courage,” he says, grabbing a shot. “Open your mouth.”
What am I doing?!
I’m tilting my head back and letting him pour a shot down my throat.
“Swallow,” he commands.
Then another.
“Swallow.”
And another.
It’s warming me and numbing me simultaneously because the more I drink, the less I care. The more his frozen blue eyes reflect that nothingness into my soul.
“Ballet is your safe place right?” he asks petting my head and fucking hell I get the appeal of the girls draped over him. It’s different from Gant’s penetrating look, which is terrifying yet exciting. Hale is…magnetic, comforting though he shouldn’t be, as I lean into the small human contact of his palm on my head, so like Rin’s foot on mine. “It’s where you can lose yourself. Don’t you need to lose yourself right now?”
I nod slowly.
He puts another shot glass to my lips, and I drink.
“Go dance for us.”
For him and his sea of Stassi’s.
The music changes to a combination of classical and trap music that’s jarring at first. Everything is jarring.
“It’ll feel good,” he assures me.
I think he could assure anyone that anything would feel good.
But for how long?
What am I doing?
My blood warms at the liquor, and I like the rush, the feeling of something.
I let the girls pull at Bae’s turtleneck, and I don a corset behind their backs. With the wig and the costume, I do feel like a completely different person. No, like a beast ready to join the menagerie.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing as I dance. I don’t know if it’s cute or cringy as I twirl and leap to the music, with trays of shots balanced on each palm like I’m auditioning, too. My mix of flexible ballet moves and guzzling shot after shot has the girlies hyping me up, though it’s Hale’s look of approval as I join his circus that makes me give it my all.
The club’s filling up, and through my haze, I recognise faces from Beaulieu for the back-to-black event. Some are shocked to see me, others impressed, others livid, and Beaussip’s heated comment section comes zooming back to me. But before I can figure out if they want to maul or praise me, Hale guides me to one of the gilded, golden cages and locks me safely inside with a half-full bottle.
Those frozen pools watch as I ascend to the ceiling where no one can reach me. Where I’m alone without actually being alone. I grip the bars, watching the ocean of people below me move and ripple with the music, and I truly feel like the little dove he always said I was. But he isn’t here, and he isn’t the one that trapped me.
Still, I feel like I’m waiting for him to free me, to transfer me to his cage instead, but those black abysses never appear in the crowd. But every time I look down, I find those baby blues looking up at me. It’s like Hale only sees me tonight because I’m the only one that sees him. Because for all the kisses he’s getting to his throat and dick, he’s transfixed on the cage, my cage Stassi had lept from.
I let the music take over again and sway to the beat. Song after song. If I exhaust myself, I can rest, and if I rest, I can dream. I can have a nightmare that’s more bearable than this one.
Below the floor is nothing but a moving sea of gold, and I keep waiting for a speck of black to invade it.
And it does come, but with a blanket of darkness.