CHAPTER 5
Sasha
Three and a half hours later, with red-rimmed eyes and a weepy sigh, I turn to Vaughn, who is obviously trying to suppress a grin as the theater lights come up.
“What?” I demand.
He shrugs. “I’m out of napkins. Want me to get more?”
I sniffle pathetically and shake my head, using the neckline of my T-shirt to wipe the moisture from my cheeks. “No. I’m okay.”
“You’re soaked.”
He left twice to get napkins for my tears, pressing them lightly against my arm each time he returned.
He also asked the popcorn guy— twice —if either the oil used to pop the popcorn, or the butter-flavored oil used to season it, contained any dairy products.
He also paid for our tickets and stood by the aisle of the row I chose, waiting for me to sit down before taking the seat beside me.
I know that technically this is just two friends going to the movies.
It isn’t a date.
But it feels like a date, and I like that so much, my stomach is buzzing and my body, which has been acutely aware of Vaughn beside me for the last several hours, is longing for things I have no business wanting.
When I suggested we see the movie, I thought it was the 1960s version that my grandmother showed me as a pre-teen, but it wasn’t. It was an updated version starring Keira Knightly and much more graphic than the first. When Yuri returns from the war, for example, Lara bathes him, then climbs into the bath in only a nightdress to join him. Then later, with their naked bodies bathed in golden light, they make love.
During those scenes, I felt a tightening at the apex of my thighs, deep internal muscles clenching on their own and a divine heat pooling below my belly. Beside me, Vaughn shifted in his seat, and his breath grew shallow and fast, audible in my ears though the soundtrack of the movie swelled loudly. I didn’t look over at him, but I felt him beside me, like invisible threads of electricity connected us, and our bodies were speaking to each other on a level to which our minds weren’t invited.
“Should we get going?”
I turn to him, looking at the cheekbones I so recently suggested were catwalk ready. I could see it in his eyes when I said that. He didn’t believe me. And my heart broke for him because the only reason he wouldn’t believe me is because he’d been convinced otherwise at some other time in his life.
I give him a smile. “I guess we should. My call is for five.”
“I know. I’m working at five tonight, too.”
“I have to go home and change,” I say, grabbing my purse and standing up. “Do you…I mean, would you like to come over to my apartment? I need to change and then we can go to the theater together.” I pause, refusing to feel awkward about my invitation. If we’re going to be friends—or whatever we’re becoming—I don’t want to agonize over every word I say. I just want to be myself. But when he doesn’t answer, I add, “I have iced tea.”
“Sure,” he says, standing up beside me. “I’ll walk you home.”
“And stay for a few minutes while I change.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
He follows me into the theater lobby, reaching over me to open and hold the door that leads outside. When he does, his forearm brushes my shoulder. It’s our first contact since he last handed me napkins with a gentle nudge, and I feel it all over.
Once we’re outside, I take off my sweater and stuff it into my backpack before swinging it onto my shoulder.
“Want me to carry that?” he offers.
“No,” I say, pointing us toward my apartment. “It’s light.”
We walk in silence to the end of the block, where we have to wait for the light to change. Vaughn turns to me. “Who was your favorite character? In the movie?”
“I always liked Tonya best. Poor Tonya, she was kind and good and nice, and she ended up losing everything.”
“Do you like Lara?”
“No. Not much. I mean, I’m sympathetic to the fact that she’s poor and her father’s dead. It made her easy prey for Komarovsky,” I say, crossing the street with Vaughn in step beside me. “But she’s a predatory woman, and I don’t like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“By ‘predatory?’ On the prowl. A husband-stealer. A home wrecker. She slept with Yuri Zhivago. On purpose. Willfully. She knew he was married to Tonya, and heck, she was married to Pasha! But that didn’t stop her. She slept with Yuri anyway. I don’t like women like that.”
“Wow. That really bothers you.”
“Yeah, it does!” I look up at him. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“I don’t know,” he answers. “In theory, I like the concept of fidelity, but…”
“But what?”
“I mean,” he says, “I generally like to give opinion based on experience, and I haven’t had a lot of experience with healthy married couples.”
“Well, society gives unhappily married people an option. It’s called divorce. If Yuri and Lara wanted to be together so badly, they should have gotten divorced from their spouses. That would’ve been the right thing to do.”
“In the middle of the Russian Revolution?” he asks. “Yeah. That would’ve been a breeze.”
“Then they should have waited. They didn’t have to cheat. They decided to cheat. It was a choice,” I tell him. “And it’s the worst choice. They could have chosen to be faithful. You know? My grandparents are still together. My parents are still together. My brother got married a couple of years ago, and he’s still with his wife, too. They all choose to be faithful. Every day, after every fight, or challenge, or provocation, they still choose fidelity. I’m going to choose it, too.”
Vaughn is quiet for a few minutes, and I’m about to fill the silence with chatter when I remember what he said at the Orange Spoon, that sometimes he’s quiet because he’s processing. And I realize, as we walk side by side, that I like the fact that he takes a minute to listen and absorb everything. He gives weight and meaning to my thoughts and words by processing them. It’s unusual in this day and age for someone to be as thoughtful as Vaughn.
“Have you ever been in love?” he asks after a few minutes of quiet walking.
“I thought I was once,” I admit. “But I wasn’t. Not by a long shot.”
“Details, please.”
“A high school boyfriend. It didn’t work out.”
He clears his throat. “Have you had a lot of boyfriends?”
“No, and no one special for a while now. It’s hard to date someone when you’re devoted to your work.” After a second, I realize I don’t want to leave my statement there, as though ballet owns my soul, and my heart can’t be touched. “There are exceptions, of course, but most professional ballerinas don’t make it past thirty before retiring, so it’s important to give dancing everything I’ve got while I’m young and able.”
“What about after you retire?”
“Oh,” I say, feeling wistful. I glance up at his profile, marveling at the distinct lines of his cheeks and jaw. Something about Vaugh Cigno is beautiful, no matter what others have made him believe. “That feels like a long way away, but I’d love to get married and have children someday. You?”
“I don’t know,” he says softly, like he hadn’t thought about it before now. “Maybe. Someday.”
“And you can bet when I do get married,” I tell him, “it’ll be for life. No Laras coming around to steal my man. And no husband who’d fall for one.”
He chuckles softly, and when I look up at his face, he’s grinning down at me.
“Woe to the Laras of the world if they tangle with Sasha Collins’s husband, huh?”
“Woe to my husband if he lets a Lara get close.”
His smile fades, and his voice is knife point sharp when he says, “Any man dumb enough to cheat on you deserves the agony of losing you.”
His words surprise me, and I smile down at my feet as my cheeks flare with heat. I like this side of Vaughn, protective and masculine. If I was more forward, I’d reach for his hand and thread my fingers through his, but I’m not, so I don’t.
“You know,” he says after a couple of minutes, “I can’t decide if you liked the movie or not.”
We’re stopped at another crosswalk, and I look up at him. “I do like the story. I always have. The other version—the earlier version with Omar Shariff?—it’s one of my Bubbie’s favorites.”
“Bubbie. Your grandmother, who was born in Russia.”
“I’m named for her, actually. My real name is Alexandra. Александра . Sasha is just a nickname.”
“Alexandra,” he says reverently, holding my eyes as he stares down at me. “That’s your full name? God, that’s…” He sucks in a short breath. “That’s beautiful.”
Behind me, a woman talking on her phone slams into my back without warning. I fall into Vaughn, my breasts colliding with his chest, and my forehead plowing forward to land under his chin. I vaguely register her curt “Sorry,” as Vaughn slips his arm around my waist to steady me. It lingers there after I’m still, strong as an iron band around my tiny waist. I stand inside the protective harbor of his body, inhaling his smell (soap and clean laundry, for the record) and feeling the hard muscles of his chest under my palms.
When I tilt my head back, my eyes find his, and I’m held captive by the intensity of his gaze. His chest pushes into mine with every shallow breath he takes. My tongue darts out to lick my lips, and his eyes flick down to follow the motion, an urgent question in their storm cloud-colored depths when they slide back up to mine.
Yes, I think. Kiss me. Please, Vaughn. Kiss me now.
“Light’s changed. Can you two move it?”
I blink as the woman with the phone taps me on the shoulder. Taking a deep breath, I step away from Vaughn so that she can pass between us.
“S-Sorry,” I say, running my hands through my hair, then lowering my sunglasses. “I didn’t mean to body slam you.”
“I’m not complaining.”
Around us, people are coming and going, and if we don’t “move it,” we’re going to miss the light again. Besides, the moment is gone. As I turn toward the crosswalk and start across it, I wonder what would have happened if we’d had ten more seconds. Five. Two. One.
Things definitely would have gotten more tangled between us. That’s for sure.
And I’m still not sure I want to be tangled up with Vaughn.
Am I attracted to him? Yes. I can’t deny it anymore.
Do I like him? I do. More and more each time we’re together.
But I’m headed to New York in two weeks for my exchange with the Manhattan Ballet Theater, and ballet must be my number one priority and focus at this point in my life.
I don’t have the time and space for a romantic relationship with Vaughn, and I don’t want to hurt either of us by leaping into something that could end up breaking both of our hearts.
Still, when our hands brush together on the next block, and he takes mine, I don’t pull it away. I let him weave his fingers through mine, and I relish the contact of his strong tapered fingers laced through mine. We are an odd pair, me and Vaughn Cigno, and I have no idea where we’re going, but it feels too nice to hold hands with a man I like. I enjoy it right up until the second we arrive at my apartment building.
Pulling my hand away, I push my sunglasses onto my head and look up at him. “Are you still coming in?”
He shoves his hands in his pockets. “No.”
“Oh, I thought—”
“I have to change into my work clothes at the theater and punch in before I start.”
I feel certain there’s more to it than the reasons he’s offering, but I decide not to push him. My emotions are all over the place. Maybe his are, too.
“Gotcha. Well, thank you…for the movie. It was fun.”
He nods. “It was.”
I’m not sure what else to say, but I’m not eager to leave him. “I guess I’ll see you at work?”
“I guess so.”
I unlock the iron gate, and I’m about to step down to my apartment when his voice stops me.
“Alexandra.”
I turn expectantly and face him. “ Da ?”
He stares at me hard for a moment, like he’s about to do something daring, something that demands courage. He clears his throat and swallows.
“Uh. Have you ever been to The Parks? At Walter Reed? They have, um, these jazz concerts on Sunday evenings, and you can bring a blanket and picnic, and I mean—I thought maybe if you were free—”
And suddenly, there it is—a jeté in my heart, a wild fluttering in my belly, my lips tilting upward until my cheeks are tight, and I know exactly what all of it means. It means happiness. It means that being with Vaughn Cigno makes me happy.
“I’d love it,” I blurt out, interrupting him. “Yes, I’m free.”
He grins back at me, but his eyes are serious. “So…it’s a date?”
We haven’t called any of these meetups a date yet. But whatever’s happening between us, I can’t call it “friends” anymore. It’s gone past that now…and we both know it.
“ Da ,” I agree. “It’s a date.”
We stand across from each other on the sidewalk, a foot of space between us and goofy smiles on our faces.
“Awesome,” he finally says, nodding at me. “See you at work?”
“See you there,” I reply, watching him walk away in the direction of the theater, and wondering if a part of my heart—the first of many pieces—is going with him.
***
Vaughn
For the next three days, when I pass her in the halls of the theater, instead of looking away as I once did, I lock eyes with her. I drink in my fill until her cheeks bloom pink, until her perfect lips turn up, until she looks away first. We share a secret. We like each other.
I lie in my bed at night, staring at the ceiling, and turning over her words about fidelity, love and marriage. I remember how it felt to stand on that street corner, holding her in my arms. I see her eyes answering my question and wish I’d leaned down and pressed my lips to hers.
And then I flip onto my side and realize I’m grateful I didn’t.
I don’t deserve to kiss her. Not yet anyway.
Nothing material about my life has changed since that terrible day I took razor blades to work. I’m still a janitor who lives in the basement apartment of my foster parents’ house. I still don’t know who I am or where I’m from. I have no college education, no flush bank account, no future prospects, nothing to offer someone like Alexandra Collins.
Yet somehow, though it should be impossible, at the same time that nothing’s changed, everything’s changing inside of me.
Lately, I feel like a different person.
However unlikely, I might even be a different person.
Tonight is our fourth date in three weeks.
As we walk from the Takoma Metro Stop to the Great Lawn at Historic Walter Reed, Sasha’s hand slips into mine, and I know in my heart, in my soul, that I’m changing into a—different, better, new—version of myself.
This evening, she’s wearing jeans with a light pink tank top, her shoulders mostly bare and her sunglasses perched, per usual, on her head. I’ve seen her bare shoulders on stage many times, but there is no stage tonight—only her and me, and a blanket on the green grass, and jazz music under the setting sun and shining stars.
I’m in love with her.
I’m madly, irrevocably, irreversibly, forever and ever in love with her.
That’s something I know in my soul, too.
“How about here?” she asks, taking the blanket from under my arm and spreading it out on a patch of grass under a tree. “Just in case it sprinkles? Perfect, right?”
Yes. Da. Perfect.
I help her smooth out the corners and place a large, insulated Trader Joe’s bag in the middle.
“What did you bring?” she asks, dropping to her knees and looking up at me with anticipation.
I kneel down across from her, unzip the bag and unpack it.
“Challah,” I say, pulling a loaf from its depths. When I purchased it, I realized I’d been spelling it incorrectly in my mind and have edited that mistake for all future references. I pull out a small tin and place it beside the bread. “Caviar.”
“Oooo!” she says, eyes shining. “Fancy!”
“There’s also dairy-free egg salad, summer berries, a bottle of wine, and…I tried baking something.”
“You did?”
“With Lottie’s help,” I tell her, pulling out a Tupperware container. “It’s called vatrushka .”
“I love vatrushka !” she says. Her face falls. “But—”
“Lottie helped me make it with coconut milk,” I tell her. “It’s safe.”
She sits back on her heels, her smile sweet and wide, as she murmurs, “You’re wonderful.”
“I am?” I whisper. No one’s ever said this to me before, and it stuns me to hear her say the words.
She leans forward, over our little picnic, reaching up to take my cheeks in her hands and pressing her lips gently to my forehead.
“You are.”
She breathes the words against my skin, and for a second, I feel like I might die. Life can’t possibly get any better than rightnow , thismoment, so what’s the use of tempting the fates by hoping for another? I close my eyes, memorizing the feel of her palms on my cheeks and the smell of her body—talcum powder and lavender—so close to mine.
When she pulls away, I take a deep breath and open my eyes to find her sitting across from me, her smile in place, her cheeks pink.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly with a little shrug of those perfect shoulders. “Impulsive.”
“I’m not complaining,” I say, as I did on Wednesday when she fell into my arms on the street corner.
“I’m starving,” she says, reaching for the bread and tugging off a chunk. She swipes it into the egg salad, then shoves the whole bite into her mouth, grinning at me with a dot of mayonnaise on the corner of her lips.
I reach forward and swipe at the white goo with my middle finger, then stick it into my own mouth to lick it clean.
She stares at me for a second, her eyes dark and wide, before flicking her gaze away. “L-Lottie sounds super nice. Tell me more about her. And Dom.”
As the music starts, I tell her about Dom and Lottie’s emigration from Italy, and how they found a home for me in their house when their son went to college.
“Do you like him?” she asks, holding a glass of wine in her hand. “Their son?”
“I do,” I tell her. I’m lying on my side, popping berries into my mouth one by one. “He’s a good guy. A social worker. He works with kids, which I think is amazing. And his wife’s nice, too.”
“Do they have kids?”
“Three daughters.”
“You like them?”
“Yeah. They’re polite. Good kids.”
“Do you like kids in general?”
“Sure. Someday I’d like to—”
“Have some?” she asks.
“Help them,” I say at the same time.
“Oh. Help kids? How?”
I shrug. I’ve never verbalized this dream to anyone—to do what Berto does as a social worker or to figure out another way to help kids like me, whom everyone had abandoned, and no one had wanted—and I don’t have the words to express it.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Like Berto? As a social worker?”
“I didn’t go to college,” I tell her.
“Well, that’s easily fixed. You’re what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
“Twenty-four.”
I think.
I don’t actually know my real birthday, so I could be anywhere between twenty-three and twenty-six, but my social worker had to estimate my age when I was retrieved from the hospital, and she chose four.
“You’re young!” she says. “Enroll in some classes. There are great community colleges all over D.C.”
“Maybe. Someday.”
“No,” she says, plucking a strawberry from my fingers and popping it into her own mouth with a sassy grin. “Now. Soon. You can start in September when classes start up again. If you want to do something, Vaughn, do it!”
“Just like that, huh?”
“Just like that.” She nods. “So, you went to live with Dom and Lottie when you were…”
“Fourteen.”
“And before that?”
I almost never tell people more than that. I don’t like remembering my life from age four to fourteen. I have almost no good memories and many bad ones. But Sasha’s different. I want to tell her a little more.
“Foster care from age four,” I say. “I have a few vague memories from before that, but honestly, they don’t make a lot of sense.”
Doo-sha. Ma-ya.
“Ten years in the foster care system,” she says softly. “How many homes?”
“Not including Dom and Lottie, three.”
Three. Two bearable, and one—
“In ten years,” she says. “That couldn’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t.”
She cringes, her jaw tightening for a second before releasing. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Then we don’t have to,” she says gently. She opens the container of vatrushka and lifts a piece of dairy-free Danish to her lips. “Oh my god, Vaughn! This is good!”
I take a piece and devour it. She’s right. It is good.
“Thank Lottie for helping you make this, okay?”
“I will.” She holds up the bottle of wine, and I give her my glass to refill, wondering about her family. “You mentioned you have a brother, right?”
“Actually, I have two,” she says, pouring a little more wine into her own glass, too. “They’re twins. Danny and Greg. It’s their birthday over Labor Day weekend. They’re turning thirty.”
“Big age spread between you and them.”
“I think I was an accident.” She winks at me. “Or a surprise, depending on your point of view.”
Surprise , I think to myself. It’s impossible to think of Sasha as an accident.
“Greg would say ‘accident,’ and Danny would say ‘surprise,’” she says with a little self-deprecating chuckle. “But Danny’s happily married, and I think Greg’s jealous, so he gives all of us a hard time. He hasn’t found his person yet.”
“Your family sounds happy.”
“It is, mostly,” she says. “Remember? I only watch clocks sometimes.”
Suddenly, she grins at me, handing me her glass of wine as she stands up. The music from the bandstand—a jazzy take on “Dance of the Knights” by Prokofiev—makes her kick off her white tennis shoes and spring into action.
Drums, trumpets, and a rogue saxophone approximate the familiar melody, and I sit back against the wide tree trunk and watch as she improvises a dance, which is all lunges and sharp movements between march reprises, but returns to a softer glissé during the crescendos.
With her eyes closed and her body in perfect unison to the rhythm of the music, I could watch her forever, but the band abandons Prokofiev so that a lone saxophonist can play Holst’s “The Planets—Jupiter,” with only minimal keyboard for accompaniment.
Sasha stops dancing as the clear, clean sound soars over the lawn. She stands still, barefooted on the grass, with her hands clasped under her chin. The sun sets behind the trees, bathing her all in melon-lavender twilight by the time the musician bows to the roar of applause. When she turns back to me, there are tears in her eyes. “Wasn’t that beautiful? ‘The Planets!’ And right at sunset!”
“ Da ,” I say, nodding at her. “It was beautiful.”
When she returns to the blanket, she chooses to sit next to me, which makes my heart race with happiness. I hand her the half-finished glass of wine she left in my keeping.
“Thanks,” she says, taking a sip as she stretches her legs in front of her, crossing them at the ankles. I move over a little so she can share the tree trunk with me, our arms flush and hips touching.
“Have you always done that?” I ask her. “Jumped up and started dancing when music plays?”
“If I love the music? Yep. Always. I took my first dancing lesson when I was six and never looked back.”
“And is the Washington Ballet where you want to be?”
“For now? Yes. Forever? I don’t know,” she says. “There are two companies in New York. The Royal Ballet in London. The Paris Opera Ballet. The Bolshoi in Moscow. Right now, I’m only an apprentice. If one of those companies offered me corps or principal, I couldn’t say no.”
My heart sinks. It hadn’t occurred to me that her time in D.C. was so impermanent.
“You’d leave,” I murmur.
“Yes.” She nods without giving it a second thought. “Of course.”
Of course. I gulp over the sudden, painful lump in my throat.
“In fact…” She starts saying something, then stops.
“What? Tell me.”
She looks up at me, her eyes uncertain. “I’m leaving for New York soon. I’ll be dancing with the Manhattan Ballet Theater for three weeks in August.”
And there goes a knife through my sunken heart.
New York. Fuck.
I do some quick calculations. New York is four hours from D.C. by car or bus, and three and a half hours by train. I don’t have a car, and I work almost every day…at a theater that’ll no longer include Sasha.
It hurts to think of losing her, even for a few weeks. Fuck me , but it hurts.
“When do you leave?” The words scrape from my mouth, bitter-tasting and dry. I take a sip of wine, but it doesn’t help.
“Ten days.” She puts her empty wine glass in the Trader Joe’s bag and folds her hands on her lap. “It’s a great opportunity.” When I don’t say anything, she adds, “I’ll be back by Labor Day.”
I still don’t say anything. I’m trapped in agony, rigid and miserable beside her.
And Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which I’ve always rather liked, is suddenly the most brutal and garish mix of sharps and flats I’ve ever heard
But then…her head drops against my shoulder, and that little bit of contact softens something inside of me. And I realize that despite my disappointment—or because of it—I’m being a self-centered jerk. Dancing in New York City will be amazing for her. And heck, compared with the other places she mentioned—London, Paris, and Moscow—it’s not that far away. Sure, I’ll miss her. But she’ll be back.
“Hey,” I say, pulling my arm out from between us and putting it around her shoulders to pull her closer. “That’s amazing, Sasha. Congratulations. You’re going to have a great experience.”
She must approve of my words because she exhales the breath she must have been holding. Her whole body relaxes, and she nestles against my side. I clasp her shoulder, rubbing the soft skin gently before stilling my hand.
A few minutes later, when the band starts playing a jazzy version of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” and the beautiful girl beside me stays curled up into my side, I know she’s asleep.