Gant
I emerge from the theatre and past Hale’s slew of waitresses that saunter by in custom-made satin corsets with silk ribbons tied neatly into bows above their asses. However, his addition of long sheer skirts added a sheer layer of class. So he had taken my suggestions about spending Bart’s massive check.
It was the least Bart could do, giving Hale a fraction of his would-be inheritance. The monetary part, anyway.
Hale was never interested in ballet. Ballroom seemed a natural choice as he was raised in Pierrot's with burlesque dancers and circus performers who fell down on their luck. People say Pierrot's is a strip club. I say it’s more like a circus, a zoo with wild naked performances. Hale’s decision to make Libellules more burlesque and less of a menagerie was a step-up in his eyes, and still outrageously tacky in everyone else's. But Hale knew parties. He knew fun. He knew how to get fucked, and how to fuck too. Fuck Stassi replicas Bae loved to watch. Fuck me over with my mother’s legacy without even knowing it. And would he just surrender it? A business that could give him so much prestige, the very thing he’s so desperate for? He said his mother always feared he’d abandon her, and she should. Who would want to be a Pierrot when they could be a Pelletier? A Parrish?
Not Hale. Not if he knew, and once he did? All this time, he’s been vying for the acceptance he was born with.
“Why are you here?” I hear Hale ask as I slip into the kitchen.
“I’m catering,” Zedd says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You organised this whole event and didn’t notice you had nothing on the menu but booze and glasses?”
Hale’s lips part, but it takes a while for him to find some words. Any words.
“You’re fucked aren’t you?” Zedd asks incredulously.
“Sorry for being sleep-deprived. Bart gave me three days. Thank God for my mother’s help. She lent me all the glasses.”
Zedd lifts a brow. “So you’re on good terms again?”
“She’s happy that I’m starting to see things her way. Your way.”
“And how’s that?” But he already knows.
“Exactly how it is. I’m a Pierrot.” He spreads his arms wide. “Pierrot’s party, they clown around. Why do you think Bart hired me for such an important event in the first place?”
“Because you were the only person available to plan an event in three days?”
“And yet here you are. What is this, Zooking with Zedd?”
“I’m thinking of becoming a chef once I’m done dancing.”
“Done with dancing?” Hale asks, taken aback.
“It’s just a hobby I’m extremely talented at. But graduation is around the corner.”
“Stassi wants to go for championships.”
“Then she better hope we make it this year.”
“ You’ve wanted to go for championships since forever.”
“I did.”
“Let me guess, Alistair is changing your mind?”
“Alistair has reminded me of my place like he reminded you of yours. A world champion tango dancer isn’t on his list of noteworthy accolades. He only let us go to Beaulieu because it made our mother happy. Same as with your mother. You said it yourself, she didn’t even care if you dropped out at sixteen, so long as you could read and count money. It was Marisol that convinced her to let you stay.”
I stiffen at that.
“Well, I still made her happy because I can do both. She’s really proud of me now,” Hale says smugly.
“It doesn’t take much.”
“Maybe one day you’ll feel the same acceptance from Alistair. Sure he’d never accept me , but I’m not his son.”
“What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m saying that at least my mother has come around. Has Alistair ever forgiven you for fumbling that deal with…” Hale snaps his fingers. “The Zaveris? The diamond empire’s daughter. Thanks to you, they pulled out of a collaboration with the Beaumonts, right? Wasn’t that worth a quarter-billion? And all you had to do was entertain their little bitchy brat for a summer.”
Zedd seethes. “That was a year ago.”
“Yet Alistair hasn’t forgotten. You should see how he’s talking to the Zaveris through his clenched veneers now.”
Zedd pales, dropping a chocolate truffle onto a silver tray that Hale tries to scoop up. “Silver trays are for guests. You're a worker. Eat from the golden ones.”
“What the fuck is the difference? It’s all food.”
But Zedd isn’t listening. “The Zaveris are here?”
“Don’t worry,” I say, plucking a chocolate truffle and Zedd’s lip twitches. “She isn’t here with them.”
“Why are they here in the first place?” He asks.
“The same reason Alistair is. Bart has a sudden interest in diamonds.”
“He’s seeing which company he wants to pick? That’s bullshit. Our families have been friends for three decades.”
“You can’t base a business on friendship. Besides, the Zaveris have those canaries.”
“ We have canaries.”
“But they aren’t quite as golden, and Bart’s feeling rather yellow about yours.”
Zedd’s jaw ticks, his eyes boring into me.
“You didn’t know they were here?” Hale asks, a glint in his eyes. “I bet Alistair didn’t either. Bart blind sided him.”
Zedd looks at me as if I’d blind sided him. We all have our secrets.
“Do they know you’re here?” Hale asks. “ Cooking? ”
“You say it like it’s dirty,” I instigate for shits and giggles.
“For them, it is. You could be a Michelin chef, and it wouldn’t matter. You’re just a cook . That won’t earn you a place on your family wallpaper, but marrying another diamond billionaire heiress and uniting those diamond empires,” Hale says, linking his fingers, “now that deserves a family portrait.”
“Never going to happen,” Zedd hisses.
“I wonder why? You’ve been trying so hard with their hometown cuisine, too.”
“You’ve been working on your cuisine too, huh?” Zedd retorts. “Need a spoon? A candle?”
“Crack is wack, Zaddy Zedd. You should know that.” He lifts one of the small powdered white doughnuts. “This will do just fine. Lately, all I need is a bit of white powder.”
Zedd smiles as the powdered sugar coats the tip of Hale’s nose. “Good.” He smiles, whipping out his phone. “Stassi needs to see this to take the hint, finally.”
“Send it to her,” Hale dares, blowing the powder onto Zedd’s camera lens. “You keep trying to tell her what a piece of shit I am, let’s show her. It’s time it sinks through her head.”
A waitress saunters by, and Hale grabs her by the loop of her corset. One second a shot’s on her tray and the next they’re splitting it mouth-to-mouth and Zedd hits record.
“The king’s back,” Zedd suddenly hyped. “Get ready for his official inauguration at Beaulieu.”
“Concubine auditions are still ongoing at the club,” Hale says, pulling away from the girl and gazing directly into the camera lens. “If you don’t have a pussy, and you’re not auditioning, don’t fucking come.”
When Zedd ends the live, Hale says, “Think your little sister finally got the memo?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good.”
“He’s crashing out,” Zedd says, ending the live as Hale follows the waitress to the living room.
“And you have the evidence?” I ask.
“All backed up.”
“Good.” Great. Bart needs that.
Bart emerges from the powder room in the foyer.
“Hale’s the life of the party,” Bart says.
How would he know from the toilet?
“It’s what Hale does best,” Zedd says, rearranging a tray.
“Everyone can be themselves here,” Bart says.
“You didn’t tell Alistair I was here, right?”
“As per your request, no.” Bart smiles at the trays. “Zedd, you’ve made everything exactly as I requested?”
“Precise measurements,” he says, arranging a tray of just three drinks that he hands off to a server. One with curly brown hair. The only girl with curls. The only girl who’d been serving Hale, me and Bart.
“Wonderful. And it’s been what?”
“Twenty-five minutes since his first. At the party anyway. He just came from Libellule.”
“All the better.”
Zedd motions for all the silver trays to go out onto the floor, while the golden ones follow Bart and me. Glass jewellery displays dot the living room beneath arched, sparkling white light bulbs that make the diamonds and emeralds sparkle.
“I want to make a toast,” Bart says once we reach the room’s centre, drawing everyone’s attention. “To family and friends. As many of you know, I haven’t been in town much since Marisol’s passing. Much less inside the penthouse. The memories were too painful, and while I don’t believe time heals all wounds, it makes the unbearable easier to tote around.”
Fingers touch my shoulder in support, and I smile back at Delphine. Those eyes are so much like my mother's.
“We all have our pathways in life, but this isn’t a detour I expected to take. Even still, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t change the pathway I chose, the pathway Marisol led us down. She left me with so many memories. The greatest of which is embodied in my son, but there are others too.” He looks at Hale, who blinks back, a confused smile stretching his lips. “So many lingering memories. So many things left unsaid and undone.”
Delphine squeezes my shoulder. Her eyes are too light. Too much yellow in the green. Too reptilian.
“That’s my vow this year. To carry out the belated tasks that Marisol couldn’t.”
A serpent.
An imposter.
A Bart fucker.
“The first is continuing her ballet legacy and company that will head.”
My father didn’t give a fuck about ballet or that company. It’s an appeasement, one I can’t pretend I don’t want.
“Under the direct supervision of his aunt and Marisol’s estranged sister Delphine, a ballet mistress for over thirty years.”
Delphine’s smile widens.
“The next,” he pauses to look at me as if recovering a beautiful memory. “Those emeralds Marisol always wore. They’ve been hidden in a drawer for two years now, and it’s about time the world was blessed with their beauty.”
They’re more than just beautiful. They’re stunning, matching the eyes zoned in on me now across the room. At first, that’s why I was attracted to them, but as time passed, they weren’t just nostalgic for me any more. They were alive, windows to a soul I tied my soul to.
“They were her favourite. Most people don’t know this, but she was working with designers to create her own line. We still have some of her sketches, her ideas she’d scribbled on letters.”
The letters I hadn’t burned. How would Hale have felt to receive those letters intended for him? I suppose we’ll never know.
“And now we have family friends, the best of the best, willing to collaborate with us.”
Willing ? More like ferally enthusiastic.
The Beaumonts and Zaveris smile serenely, but the tension in their shoulders is obvious as their eyes flicker to their respective displays. The Beaumonts are on the right, the Zaveris on the left. Bart’s only going to choose one, and no matter how wealthy both families are, they have one business: jewels. But Bart Auclair is an entire enterprise. Fuck a jewellery ad. What about that jewellery being featured in movies? In car ads, the very same cars Bart despises me for not being able to drive.
“We’ll invest with a few friends to continue her jewellery line she never got the chance to complete. Now that Auclair Enterprises has more shares, we have more chances to make dreams come true, even if those dreamers are no longer with us. So here’s to Marisol.”
“To Mari!” the crowd says as the curly-haired girl offers us a drink on her golden tray.
Delphine’s at my ear. “To Mari.” There’s a tear in those reptilian eyes. “I miss her so much.” “Delphine?” I whisper.
She waits expectantly, a tear spilling down her cheek.
“ You have toilet paper on your heel ,” I hiss before turning to finish the toast. Bart’s toast. Bart, who’d just come from the powder room, too.
When I bring my glass down, Bart does something he’s never done before. He pulls me into a hug. Immediately, I know why. My front is smooth, but something small and round digs into my chest from his left breast pocket.
And when I offer him his drink to toast, he reaches for the other. He doesn’t trust me. But he’d trusted Zedd. I toast him, then Hale. Or I would have if my little dove hadn’t flown by, knocking Hale’s shoulder so hard that he spills half of his drink before it can touch his lips.
“I’ll get you another,” I slur as Hale gazes around for who’d bumped him.
“Never the matter,” Bart smiles, pulling another glass from a nearby tray Zedd emerges with because it’s gold. “There you go, Hale. Cheers. ”
“ No ,” it’s so hushed, so quiet as Dove grabs Hale’s wrists, her wide, emerald eyes frantic as she peers up at him.
But it’s too late. Because Hale’s already shot the drink back, and Bart and I have already done the same.