Elle
Gant’s wet locks fall across his forehead, draping his face in shadows. Time slows as I watch each water droplet roll off the strands and onto my wet face that’s quickly drying in the hot sun.
His black eyes aren’t the murderous abysses from our encounter in the theatre, but pools of sheer terror as he gazes down at me.
I can feel each of his fingertips pressing into my sternum, into the edges of my breasts as he pushes down with another chest compression. Then his full lips are on mine and he’s breathing for us both.
When he pulls away, a silvery string of saliva keeps us connected.
I should be repulsed.
“You came back to me…”
But I’m not.
The scene changes and the sparkling lake behind him turns into the navy, midnight sky sprinkled with starry diamonds. I gaze up at them with dry lashes through the filthy film of the greenhouse’s glass ceiling. But then something tugs at me.
A mouth.
Gant’s mouth is still on me, tonguing my pussy and sucking on my clit.
I reach for him, running my fingers through his undercut and holding him fast to me. The slippery smacking sounds of his kisses only make me wetter as my walls pulse, achy and desperate for something bigger. Something harder than his soft tongue.
Gant…
Please…
I shift uncomfortably, feeling more wetness, but it isn’t warm and sensual and sticky. It’s thin and runny and…
I bolt upright in bed and stare at the cold, dark stain spreading across my pyjama top. Without thinking, I whip it over my head and toss it onto the floor, desperate to get the freezing liquid off of me.
“Your tits are huge. No wonder Gant’s obsessed.”
I nearly throw out my back and neck as I whip to the side to see Aria. She’s standing over me, her eyes full of sleep and annoyance, an empty glass in her hand, a giant purple satin bonnet on her head. “I tried to wake you up three times without it, but it’s like you’re in some sort of trance.”
Stassi stares at me from her bed, her sleep mask hastily pushed up onto her forehead. “What’s that dream about anyway? It sounds like the same one you had last night.”
“And the night before,” Aria adds. “You were moaning.”
“Moaning?” I ask, nervously rubbing water from my eyes as I stall for a reasonable answer. Shaking the water droplets off my duvet, I throw it off me because, despite the cold, I’m burning up. That is until I realise I’m still exposed and grab the flat sheet instead, pressing it high against my throat.
“And panting. Like you were in heat.” Stassi says. “Who the hell were you fantasising about?”
“Or was it a fantasy at all?” Aria asks, settling onto the edge of my bed and tucking her foot beneath her. “I know you were in the old greenhouse with Gant a few nights ago.”
“How did you know that?” Stassi gets up, her peachy-pink satin nightdress floating around her ankles prettily as she scurries to my bedside, the satin curlers in her hair wobbling.
She’s asking Aria, but her eyes are laser-focused on me and I can already hear the unasked question. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I had plenty of opportunities because Stassi and I had been eating together behind the library and theatre for the past few days. Zedd’s been supplying our food or rather Stassi’s food, that she hands off to me. I don’t know much about Zedd other than when I witnessed him barking at that poor girl like she was a fellow canine, but his food alone tells me how much he cares about his sister. He’s obsessed with creating whatever she, or rather I, ask for to perfection. Like his Belgian waffles, I can’t get enough of. In fact, his food tastes better than the chefs’ dishes in the hall. Maybe that’s why I didn’t bother to venture back inside, despite Gant’s lack of orders to his minions. Lately, they’ve just resorted to gossiping about me, or ignoring me altogether which is the best I could hope for. I don’t want to be friends. I just want to survive.
But my omission about the greenhouse has nothing to do with Stassi or the fact that she’s still more of Gant’s friend than mine, and everything to do with me. Because I don’t want to talk about Gant regardless if I thought Stassi would go back and blab to him or not.
I don’t want to talk about him because then I don’t want to analyse, nor verbalise what’s slowly happening. The start of my obsession that’s mirroring his. Because I am becoming obsessed even in my subconscious mind when I’m dreaming and I can’t have that. I can’t have lines blurred and crossed if I’m strategizing on how to win.
“éti told me,” Aria says simply. “He tells me everything.”
“And yet he can’t manage more than three words to anyone else,” Stassi mutters, settling onto the mattress, and I have to curl my legs so she can fit onto the twin bed. Then she turns to me. “Why were you in the old greenhouse with Gant? Nothing good happens there…or am I mistaken?”
“Nothing,” I mumble, and it’s the truth. Despite my dreams of Gant going down on me, the reality was far different. He’d edged me as a punishment and ever since, it’s only made me want him more. So much more that I’m revising reality with fantasy in my dreams.
Pathetic.
I just need a little distance to get my mind right again, so I’ve been avoiding him by staying in the dorms, but I won’t be able to hide for much longer. Our first private lesson is coming up.
He said he wanted to play twenty-one questions, probably as a way to find something useful to use against me. But two could play that game. I just need to curate twenty-one questions of my own.
“It didn’t sound like nothing,” Stassi presses.
“At least it wasn’t a nightmare this time,” Aria says. “Your screams are blood-curdling.”
My eyes snap to hers, then Stassi’s. “You know about those?”
“I’m sure our entire floor knows,” Aria says. “Who’s Jarett anyway?”
My face burns with embarrassment. I didn’t realise I was so vocal.
“My father,” I mutter, drawing my knees up to my chest.
“Fucking hell. Your own dad’s the one torturing you in those nightmares?” Aria asks incredulously. “The guy from the sex tape?”
I nod. No matter how hard I try to get rid of Jarett, he always finds a way to creep back into my life some way or another. “I’m sorry. I thought it was all happening in my head. I didn’t realise…”
The silence stretches between us forever before Stassi says kindly, “It’s not like you can help it.” Then she reaches over to my night table and cuts on the lamp, bathing us in a warm yellow glow, though it isn’t necessary. Outside the massive diamond pane window behind my bed, the sun is creeping up the horizon in shades of pink and bluish purples. “But it’s fucking up my beauty sleep. I can’t go back to bed now.”
“Do you always have night terrors? Or does something trigger them?” Aria asks before explaining. “It’s just lately they’re becoming more frequent. Did something happen?”
Before I can stop myself, I mumble, “Yeah, Gant fucking Auclair.” I’d always suffered from nightmares, but ever since I set eyes on Gant, tons of memories have suddenly resurfaced.
Like my near drowning at the pool. Then the lake. That’s probably the nightmare they’re hearing the most.
Stassi and Aria exchange a pitying look.
“He’s the source of everything. This bullying, my ruined textbooks, my soiled uniform, my constant state of starvation.”
Almost drowning again.
I rub my arms, hoping they haven’t figured out my aquatic secret already, depending on what things I’d screamed about. Because despite their sympathetic gazes, I worry that they have loose tongues. The last thing I need is word getting out that I can’t swim. What if it got back to Rin? What if it already had? Had Gant told her? No, if he wants to keep me here, he can’t tell anyone. I looked up the swimming rules, and it is a mandatory skill. That aside, swim season starts next month.
What the fuck am I going to do?
I’d been so focused on the midterm play and becoming Cinderella that I’d ignorantly pushed swim season into the recesses of my mind. Whatever plan I come up with, I need to do it in secret and fast.
Triggers, Aria’s earlier words float in my ear.
Yes, I have triggers.
Jarett.
The sound of beer cans crumbling.
Embers that remind me of the tip of Jarett’s cigarettes that dropped ash onto me.
Scratchers. So many freaking scratchers I could wallpaper the entire house with them.
Then there’s Gant, who induces unimaginable pain and pleasure.
An image of Gant’s smirking face between my thighs surfaces at the front of my mind so strongly that I want to reach out and claw it from the air.
“Oh, you’re starving alright,” Aria says with a chuckle.
“For dick,” Stassi adds. “You say Gant is your trigger, but he’s shooting far more than bad memories through your brain. What the hell did he do to you in that greenhouse? If you’re still obsessing over it in your sleep, it must’ve been good.”
“I could take a good guess if your pillow’s any indication. You ride that thing like it’s taking you on a trip of a lifetime.”Horror contorts my features. There’s no way I did that in my sleep. I only do that when I’m alone in the room…
“Is Gant any good?” Stassi asks, tipping her chin down and gazing at me curiously.
I look at both girls sitting on my bed, crowding the exit. It’s like the bathroom scene all over again, except this time I don’t feel caged in or nervous. I feel…like a teenage girl. Like this is what it must feel like to gossip at a sleepover I’d never had before.
There was no way I could ever invite a friend over to my house and risk Jarett making a drunken appearance. No, I had to protect them and since I had to go to such extreme lengths to do so, I didn’t have them. Not a singular friend.
Friends.I think about Stassi and I’s shared lunches, and my and Aria’s conversations before and after ballet class about frivolous things, or jabs at Rin, our common enemy. But I still couldn’t say we were friends yet.
And I want friends, desperately, but not just any friends. I want to be friends with Stassi and Aria, who have minds of their own, independent of their brothers. That aside, I admire both girls. I want to be like them. Girly and bubbly like Stassi, with the capability to exude the dark feminine aura that surrounds Aria. I can feel it drifting off of her in waves as she gazes at me with fox-like eyes.
But the first step to being friends is sharing, right? Getting deeper on a personal level. That won’t happen if I shut them out the very first time they tried being nosey with me.
Too bad I can’t give them the juicy details they’re craving.
“I wouldn’t know if he’s any good,” I grumble. “And I’m not being a prude. He didn’t touch me.”
Stassi shakes her head, her silk rollers flapping as Aria sucks her teeth.
“He edged you,” Aria says wisely. “That’s why you keep fantasising about it on a loop because you haven’t experienced the real thing yet.”
“Despite everything he’s done, I knew you liked Gant,” Stassi says, hugging my pillow before pitching it away when Aria’s former words about my riding time come back to her.
“I don’t like him. I hate him.”
“Hate fucks are the most intense.” Aria nods. “And the taboo ones.”
“You would know,” Stassi sings and Aria glares.
“Doesn’t brother’s best friend count as mildly taboo?” she asks me and I can tell she wants my alliance.
“A solid three at least,” I confirm. “Maybe more forbidden or naughty than taboo.”
Stassi tosses a curler off her shoulder. “You got me there. Do you think étienne knows?”
“Knows what?” Aria asks.
“That I’m in love with him. You know? My brother’s best friend?”
Before Aria can rip out one of Stassi’s curlers, I hold up my offending pillow between both girls and they immediately recoil.
When I say I want to be friends, I mean all of us. We have nearly a year to go and by now I’d hoped the ice between the girls would’ve thawed.
The fluttering uniform blouse that Stassi gave me hanging on the window ledge gives me an idea of how to change the topic. I’d hand-washed it myself after a group of giggling girls spilt their then cold, hot chocolate on me in second period yesterday. They’d been the only ones to not get the memo through the grapevine yet I suppose. Still, I couldn’t bear to see the pitiful gazes of the laundry staff for the third time in a week, so I took matters into my own hands. But all the bleach gel and spot treatments were already wearing down the fabric to the point that it now looked thin and gauzy. So unlike the thick Egyptian cotton, it’d been two weeks ago. I desperately need a new one, but once again I’m reminded of my reality.
I need money.
I need a job.
Behind the tattered rag, the sun’s showing more of itself and Stassi’s digital clock reads six-forty-seven. On weekends, I could barely get up before nine. But today I have plans to go into town on the school’s trolley, and it leaves at nine a.m. sharp, returning to campus by eight for those who leave on a day pass. Most students didn’t. They had their parents sign weekly permission slips for them to ‘go home’ and spend time with the family. More like time at the nearest five-star hotel where they could all party and drink in peace with their parents halfway across the globe doing the same.
Aria and Stassi rarely stay on weekends, so typically I’m alone in the dorm from Friday night. What changed this weekend?
“You guys are pretty familiar with the town, right?” I ask. “The cafes and stuff?”
They both nod slowly, as if wondering where this is going.
“Do you remember seeing any help wanted signs around?”
Okay, a lame change of subject. Both girls probably didn’t bother to read any signs, including price tags, so ‘help wanted’ ads are a stretch. But it couldn’t hurt. Maybe their blue-blooded connections meant they had a random cousin or uncle who owned one of the bourgeois French restaurants in the historic quarter.
“No,” Aria says. “Why?”
“I need a job. Like yesterday.”
“Ew,” Stassi says, scrunching her brows. “Why?”
I glare at her and she smiles sheepishly. Sometimes Stassi has the awareness of wet lettuce.
“Sorry,” she mumbles before clearing her throat. “Scholarship slut, got it. I take it you don’t get an allowance?”
“My mom sends me what she can, which only adds up to about fifteen a month.”
She sends it roughly every two weeks for pocket money in case I catch the trolley into town, seeing as food on campus barring the coffee bar is free. I don’t have the heart to tell her that it isn’t enough to even buy a large frappe around these parts.
Stassi’s eyes grow wide. “That’s more than my father gives me. I only get twelve.”
Aria rolls her eyes and holds up her fingers. “She means one five nitwit, not fifteen hundred.”
I pale. “Your dad gives you twelve hundred a month?”
“No,” Stassi frowns. “A week. It used to be two thousand, but Zedd got it cut down last semester. He snitched that I snuck out to a pool party without him. We have this rule in my family that I can go so long as Zedd does.”
“What about this summer?” Aria lifts a brow. “Zedd had no clue where you were either.”
“I told you, I was with my mother,” Stassi says defensively.
Lips pressed into a hard line, Aria gets off the bed and flounces to her computer desk before powering on her laptop.
Despite my gentle prompting, Stassi hadn’t told Aria about her surgery yet, and the tension between them had only grown tighter. But I have bigger problems to worry about besides their petty drama. Problems that started with mon and ended with ey.
Twelve hundred a week? My mind races. I knew these girls were rich, but just how rich boggles my mind and makes stars explode in front of me. Shaking them away, I grab my phone from beneath my pillow and scroll through the help-wanted ads posted online in our area. I’d fallen asleep with the tab still open last night.
“Part-time fry cook wanted,” I read aloud before saving the post. That sounds easy enough. I could flip burgers and deep-fry french fries. A little sponge under the sea seemed to love it.
“You can’t work at Smash Burgers!” Stassi says, tapping my pin so it unsaves. “It’ll be social suicide. Everyone at school goes there on the weekends.”
“She’s already dead socially anyway,” Aria says, clicking away on the keyboard.
I can’t even get offended because she isn’t wrong. Even the other scholarship kids avoid me like the plague. Enaj Zaveri, my bench partner, still wouldn’t spare me a glance in calculus as if mere eye contact could tip off Rin and infect her with my loserness.
As if she isn’t already a loser too, independent of what the other students thought. I’m still irritated with that stunt she pulled for Rin’s sake.
What the hell had she meant when she said Rin had already helped her? Rin never even acknowledged Enaj in public, so when had she ‘helped’?
Whatever.
I save the Smash Burgers post again. “I don’t care. I have to find a way to pay Gant back.”
Aria stops typing and whips around to look at me. “The hourly rate at a fast-food restaurant around here is like thirteen max. If you work doubles on Saturdays and Sundays, so say ten hours each day if you’re lucky, and a five-hour shift after school on Fridays, you’re looking at—”
Stassi grabs my phone and does the maths. “Three hundred and twenty-five for twenty-five hours of work per week! That should be illegal. That’s only…” She multiplies it by four. “Thirteen hundred for the entire month.”
“Maybe a few hundred extra if those doubles are closer to twelve or fifteen hours, depending,” Aria says.
From their faces, I know I’m supposed to be crestfallen, but that’s way more per hour than I made in the next town over with Mum at the deli. In fact, I’d worked more than twenty-five hours a week and still got roughly the same amount before taxes, of course. I missed my meagre paycheck too.
Despite Mum’s refusal, I’d go behind her back to the power and water company and put something on the bill weekly. Power cuts and irregular baths and laundry throughout my childhood had traumatised me enough that I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. Even if it was only twenty here and there, it eased my mind that at least we wouldn’t get too far behind.
The only thing I didn’t have to worry about was food because the deli allowed us to take whatever scraps or newly expired food they were about to toss out home. It wasn’t always nutritious, but it was free and it was available.
“And you still need enough time for schoolwork. Namely dance. Forget a demotion to the intermediate ballet class, Beaulieu can kick you out midyear if you’re failing. They take their stats at graduation seriously.”
“Plus thirteen hundred a month can’t even get you a good weekly deep treatment, tone, and blowout,” Stassi says, unsaving the pin again.
I eye Stassi’s perfectly toned blonde locks and run my hands through my greasy ponytail subconsciously. Once again, I’m hyper-aware that we live on two entirely different plants. I’d never even gotten a professional blowout before. I’d been eyeing one of those round brush blow dryers for ages, but even on sale, I couldn’t justify it. Not even the knockoff version.
“Besides,” Aria goes on. “Shouldn’t you be filling your weekends with private dance lessons?”
I’m surprised she gives enough of a damn to even ask.
Surprised, but happy.
This is progress.
Or maybe she’s just tired of secondhand embarrassment as Mistress Errard singles me out constantly.
“Seriously,” she says. “Forget about paying Gant back. He’s the one that brought you here of his own free will. And with less than twenty grand a year in earnings, what’s the point of even trying?”
Despite my stubborn determination, I’m not a complete idiot. I know she’s right, even if I have delusional daydreams of handing that asshole a massive check at graduation next June.
That would be the ultimate, I don’t fucking need anything from you.
But I do. Including those private lessons Aria prompted me to focus on.
And I will, but I still need money regardless of Gant’s tuition.
I still need birth control pills to control my period. And tampons because pads showed up through my leotards. Still, I needed those too when I slept. I could try a menstrual cup, but damn did I hate the thought of fishing it out for five days and risking some horrible bout of yeast of BV even though I’d seemingly scrubbed my fingers raw with antibacterial soap beforehand.
I still needed deodorant, the good kind that could last through hours and hours of dance and stop the embarrassing pit stains. Stassi had suggested Botox injections, oblivious to the fact that I could barely afford the medical-grade deodorant.
Then there were the foot deodorants. The blue jelly skin pads that I needed to cover my toes with before stuffing them into my pointe shoes otherwise the pain would be so unbearable I could barely make it through another session, much less the six other mandatory classes of the week. Privates not included. And that isn’t the extent of the foot stuff. There are toe pads and bandages and nightly ointments, and the pointe shoes themselves that are already so broken I shouldn’t be dancing in them. But I can’t bear to put on the new ones I’d bought over the summer to wear them in the new term just yet. My old pointe shoes at my old school lasted nearly three months. Here, one month seemed to be the limit. With my private lessons with Gant about to start, maybe that’d drop to three weeks.
I already used all of my deli savings to buy two pairs of the cheapest pointe shoes on Beaulieu’s list of acceptable brands. My online dupes were only okay for solo practices in the dorm room or an empty studio I managed to sneak a twenty-minute session into before or after class. If Mistress Errard even saw them on my feet, I swear she’d know based on the colour alone. A colour she’d identify as being too cheap to be of quality, even though I couldn’t spot the difference myself for the death of me. But I guess that came with the experience of being around said quality for decades on end.
Feet products aside, I need more tights and leotards that don’t have runs and chai, no foam, skim milk, lite water, three pumps of something or another and extra hot lattes staining the pilled fabric. And those were just for the lower-tiered, mixed ballet dance classes. I needed more of the steely grey leotards and exact skin-tone matching tights that were the uniform for the advanced ballet classes. The speciality, stricter classes that felt so rigid, I could barely breathe, much less have a single strand out of place.
Then there are the upcoming colours of black, emerald green, and slate blue to represent each upcoming term period. And I plan to buy them all because I’m not leaving the advanced level and I refuse to put on any other colours.
They’re like badges of honour I need to earn by any means necessary.
And to earn them, I need a damn job.
I look at the matte black box full of panties that’s peeking out from beneath my bed. I don’t want Gant’s gifts. Neither do I want him picking out my toiletries.
I save Smash Burgers again, much to Stassi’s exasperation.
“If you have to find a job, who says you need a traditional one to make good money?” Stassi wiggles her eyebrows suggestively. “Are you eighteen yet?”
“Yea. Why?” I ask, already sceptical of where this is going.
“You could get a sugar daddy.”
“Ew,” Aria shudders.
“Or if you’re looking for zero physical contact, you could sell feet—” she pauses as she pulls back the sheet from my feet and damn near gags. “Nevermind. I forgot what ballerina feet look like beneath those pretty satin slippers.”
I sigh. I don’t want a sugar daddy. Another man to sell my soul to in order for them to take care of me the way Gant technically is.
“No sugar daddies.”
“Bottle service girls make quite a lot and you’ve got good tits,” Aria says as she and Stassi eye my cleavage. I shift under their scrutinising gazes, pulling the sheet up to cover myself even more. I still hadn’t replaced my soaked pyjama top with a fresh one. “Can you mix drinks? The drinking age is eighteen, so you’ll be allowed to bartend.”
“I can learn,” I say, my spirits rising a tiny bit. I could get comfortable mixing drinks and having men gawk at my breasts so long as the bar kept their grubby fingers a few metres away from me.
I think back to the shady advertisement I’d found in the girl’s bathroom and reach for the flyer still pinned beneath my bedside lamp. The one requesting that the workers be comfortable wearing fishnets and cufflinks. So long as it entailed an actual outfit too, it can’t be so bad, right? I mean, I wore leotards, shorts, skirts and tights for half the school day anyway.
My heart thunders faster as I consider the possibilities. With tips, maybe I could make some serious cash.
“Seeking cocktail waitresses for a brand new high-end club, Libellule,” Stassi reads over my shoulder.
“Libellule?” Aria asks more to herself as she minimises her essay and types it into the browser search bar. “Why does that sound so familiar?”
I’d never heard of it before.
“Looks like it isn’t too far from here,” Aria goes on. “Opening interviews start Sunday after next. But that’s pretty short notice if you don’t know how to mix drinks.”
“Well, she has two weeks to learn,” Stassi says, rolling off my bed and flicking on all the lights before scouring her clothing rack. “We should start getting dressed now. The trolley leaves in less than two hours.”
I didn’t need more than twenty minutes to get ready to go anywhere, mainly because I had two decent casual outfits to choose from.
“Get dressed to go where exactly?” I ask quizzically.
“To get some drinks, we’ll sneak them through the forest and then into the dorm. Ms Trix will be too busy stalking Mr Lexington to notice what we’re up to. Come on Aria, get to it.”
“And why do I have to go?” Aria arches a brow.
“Because I don’t turn eighteen for another month, and Elle will need help buying and carrying all that liquor. Come on, be a good roomy.”
Aria looks back at her laptop. “I’m not done with my paper.”
“Then it’s a good thing you have all weekend. What’s one night? Come on, this is our last year. Plus, you can’t stay mad at me forever.”
Aria’s expression says that remains to be seen.
“Please. I miss you, Ari...”
I can’t see it, but the way Aria eventually gets up and starts shuffling through her own closet lets me know the ice princess is slowly cracking.
So I’m not the only one suffering from a lack of female friendship.