13. Act Thirteen
ACT THIRTEEN
4 :01 a.m.
Bubble machines blow out shiny orbs, multi-colored lights casting pink, blue, and yellow shades all around us. Timo dances in the center of Hex like nothing can ground him. Full of energy. Of life. Most of the Kotovas are at Sublime down the street, but we’ve stuck around this bar.
“You’re trying to get me drunk,” Nikolai says after I push a fifth vodka shot towards him. I lower my butt on the stool next to his, empty glasses scattered in front of us. I’ve been nursing another tequila sunrise and supplying him shots for the past thirty minutes.
“I’m not trying to take advantage of you,” I say, no filter.
He grins with raised brows like you’re serious? When he realizes I am, a full, gorgeous smile overpowers his features. And then he tilts his head at me. “That’s highly unlikely. First, I’m six-five—”
“I guessed right,” I say to myself, resting an elbow on the cold bar in delight.
He says something deeply in Russian.
“What was that?” I ask, not as scowly I hope.
“I said, you’re cute. ” He throws back the shot, not even a little tipsy yet.
“Like an unsexy friend?” I blame the tequila for that. Never would have I said it sober. I think.
He licks his lips and leans closer than before, his mouth next to my ear as he breathes, “Why do you think you’re unsexy?”
Because that was sexier than anything I’ve ever said or done before. I heat all over. “…that’s what cute means. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Your friend is an asshole,” he suddenly says, “whichever one told you that.” His gaze darkens.
“He’s my best friend.”
“It’s a guy?” His brows shoot up. “Even worse.”
I shake my head. “He was just making a point,” I defend.
“That you’re unsexy and only his friend?” He cocks his head. “That point could’ve been made a better way.” He downs another shot. “And secondly,” he returns to the main topic, why I can’t take advantage of him, “I’m Russian. We drink until the bottle is empty.” Meaning he can hold his liquor.
Still, I have my motives. When we first arrived at Hex, he acted like Timo’s chaperone, hawkeyed and on alert, prepared to spring from the stool and break up an impending fight. There is no storm, I’ve decided. And it’s pointless to stare at the sky, waiting for one.
“The shots are a distraction,” he says, gripping my attention again. “I know.”
“Is it working?” I ask.
We face each other. His back isn’t to the dance floor. He still has a good view of his brother out of his peripheral.
“Not completely, but it’s cute of you to try. And by cute I mean the opposite of your best friend’s definition.” He says “best friend” very bitterly, like I need to find a new one.
I take the plunge. “Do you want to be my…” new best friend. I chicken out. That’s the right hook or line or whatever to sound smooth and cool—something Camila would’ve said in response. And I effed it up.
He drums his fingers on the bar as he studies me, knowingly. “Do I want to be your best friend?”
I open my mouth to say yeah , but I lose the words by his amusement. “…maybe.”
“Maybe?” He gives me a look. “No, that’s definitely what you were going to say.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Tell me I’m wrong then,” he challenges.
I surrender. I’m weak in the face of lies. “Okay, you were right. Do you? Want to be my new best friend, I mean?” I wait for his answer, wishing I would’ve just had the bravado to unleash that from the beginning.
He takes his time, sipping a shot, very slowly. He’s doing this on purpose.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
When he finishes it, he licks his wet lips and sets down the glass. Then his eyes unhurriedly meet mine. “No.”
I frown. “No…about the question or being my best friend?”
He simply stares at me, knowing very well that he holds all of the cards. I’d rather not be at the mercy of this question and his vague answer. So I speak up again.
“I change my mind,” I say. “I don’t want to have the devil as a best friend.”
“So says my demon.” His finger runs along the rim of his shot glass, absentmindedly. I wonder if by slipping into the cab, I agreed to sleep with him. More than just on the couch. Sex. With a twenty-six-year-old Russian athlete.
I’m on my period , my inside voice shrieks in horror. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked if he saw me as a sibling. The answer has altered my perception of little things—like how he watches me intently. How his gaze dips to my coat, the straps beginning to unknot and reveal my risqué costume.
I’m seventy-five percent sure that he might be thinking about sex. About the devil screwing all of his demons. On red sheets.
Okay, I’m one-hundred percent thinking about sex. Not the act of doing it. But all the baggage that is attached to it. And I’m on my period. And he knows it. Which is so much worse.
Now I’m thinking about him thinking about my period.
This is too much.
I chug my tequila sunrise. It burns. I set it down roughly, about a quarter left. And I gasp for breath like I downed lighter fluid. Slowly, I look at Nikolai.
I shouldn’t have. His brows just rise, his lips slightly upturned. I’m overly aware of how much older he is than me. And of his it’s complicated status.
I think I need to change mine.
This is so complicated my head hurts.
…maybe that’s just the tequila.
He reaches down and seizes my ankle, lifting my leg onto his lap. I watch him unbuckle my stiletto heel, revealing a battered foot with three blistered toes, nearly bloody. But they’re free, the air stinging the sores. He gives me a disapproving look—since I didn’t tell him how badly they’d been hurting.
Then he removes the second stiletto and keeps my legs draped across his lap. “Better,” he knows, sipping his next shot. He soaks in my long legs and then says, “When you perform, you have beautiful lines.” He pauses. “It’s what every director said after you auditioned. It’s why you were brought here.”
I stiffen. I’ve shut out the audition, filed it away in that dusty folder.
Now that he’s retrieved it, a nauseous pit wedges between my ribs. Sex is a better agonizing thought, I realize.
But I take the opportunity to ask him, “What do I need to work on then?”
“They said that you were just background. Others onstage would outshine you. You don’t have the passion.”
My throat feels dry. I don’t have the passion. I’ve flown across the country to be here. I’ve risked everything. What is that if not passion? I know it’s not sexual or sensual, the passion they mean, but it’s something. There’s something in me.
I just have to translate it to everyone else.
“Okay. I’ll work on it.” Somehow.
“Do you ever quit?” he asks me, his tone serious.
Softly, I say, “I can’t.”
“Why? Even if everyone tells you that you don’t possess the right amount of talent, you’d keep trying?”
“Because I love it,” I say like there is no other option. In my bones, there isn’t. I feel like I’m fighting for my happiness. And no one else can sense it or see it but me.
“You’re cursed then,” he tells me. “There are people with far greater talent, who don’t love it the way that you do.”
The weight of his statement sinks in.
That’s just life , my dad would say. People will always be better than you. Whether they enjoy it or not isn’t a factor. It’s superfluous.
“Do you love it?” I ask him.
His eyes fall as he contemplates this. “Not as much as I used to. But the circus is my only love.”
“What about your family?” I think of Katya and Luka and Timo. I can tell—just by the way he protects them—that there’s a tremendous amount of love there.
He smiles. “Circus is family.”
The sentiment washes over me, a second wave of chills. Not even a second later, the bartender pushes more vodka shots towards us. Timo knows him, so he’s been supplying us free drinks all night. I pick up a shot since my sunrise is almost empty.
“To finding your sister,” I tell Nikolai.
He raises his shot. “No,” he says, “to your first week in Vegas.”
My heart clenches. He remembered why I stopped by The Red Death to see Camila. I sway a bit, and the overflowing shot spills on my fingers. Fantastic. I try to peel the soggy napkin from the bar.
Then Nikolai smoothly takes my hand. And he sucks the vodka off my fingers.
I freeze as his eyes flit up to mine, while his lips warm my skin. Sex pops back in my brain. Especially as his tongue works with skill.
When he finishes, he even sips a little from the rim of my glass, so I won’t spill more on myself.
This happens in maybe less than fifteen seconds. It felt like eternity. He clinks his glass back to mine. I haven’t unfrozen yet. He wants to have sex. No, he doesn’t. He downs the shot, and his eyes flit to my boobs. Yes he does.
“What are your plans?” he asks, out of the blue. Or maybe it’s been on his mind instead of sex. I can’t tell anymore.
“To practice every day before work at Phantom, audition for any openings that come up,” I say with a satisfied nod. I like this plan. It seems solid.
He tenses more. If the alcohol is doing anything, it’s making him even more touchy-feely than he already is. His large hand stays firm on my legs. But he’s still rigid, commanding. All masculine and man. What anyone would expect of a lead male in a show about love.
He checks on his brother with a quick glance before focusing one-hundred percent on me. “It’s unlikely that Amour will ever have another opening. What happened with my old partner…it’s rare.” He hasn’t ever mentioned Tatyana before now. I can tell it’s a sore subject, so I won’t surface it any more than he has.
“There are other shows besides Amour,” I say. “There’s Infini and Viva. Seraphine is traveling, but they’ll be in Los Angeles around May. Plus there are other troupes if Aerial Ethereal isn’t hiring.”
The charm drains from his features, leaving gunmetal eyes with no shine. “High Flyers Company isn’t safe, Thora. They hire riggers as contract employees, pay them close to nothing, and give them days to learn how to harness artists before beginning shows.”
“I think I’ll be alright in my discipline.” Riggers sometimes have an artist’s life in their hands since they fasten harnesses and work the wires.
“Aerial silk,” he guesses my discipline right. “But if you’re in group acts with intricate choreography and a new apparatus that needs a harness, you’ll be asked to wear one. You’re risking your life with High Flyers, so please be smart and don’t even entertain them.”
“Emblem & Fitz Circus,” I say, one that’s based in London. High Flyers is AE’s direct competition, since Emblem is known for their carnival shows. Elephants. A ring leader.
“That can’t be the circus you’ve fallen in love with if you’re here,” he says. “It’s apples and oranges.”
“So what do you suggest I do?” I ask, about to retract my legs from his lap, but he holds tighter.
“I’ll train you.”
My lips part. “What?”
“I want to train you.”
“You’re drunk,” I breathe, half hoping he’s not.
“I’m nearly sober.” He adds, “Every January, AE has auditions to find new talent, regardless if a show is new or not. Most contracts are renewed and cancelled every new year, so you have a better shot to fill a role then.”
January.
That’s seven months away from now. He’s willing to train me for seven months. “You don’t have time,” I say. “You have a new partner—”
“If I don’t train you,” he says each word like it’s uniquely important, “you will fail, Thora. You’re not good enough. I can’t put it more plainly than that. I’m sorry.”
I want to be the better person and not accept it—knowing how much he has on his plate. But this is a dream offer. He has so much experience, the kind that I need to survive in this industry. “Why help me?” I ask softly. I expect him to say, I don’t have an answer.
“I admire your courage. I know what you’ve given up to be here. I know the kind of artist it takes to land a role. I know that you won’t receive one on your own. And I imagine you, myshka, two years from now, working at Phantom with the same aspirations, the same dreams, in the same place where you are now. It’s wasted courage. And wasted love. You shouldn’t have to waste those things.”
I’m speechless.
And overwhelmed. When someone reaches out and gives you a hand—for no other reason than to see your success—it’s powerful. And rare.
He wipes beneath my eye with his thumb. “I’d rather feed your hunger than watch you starve, and you’re foolish if you say no.”
I shake my head, another tear slipping. “I wasn’t going to.”
He cups my jaw, tilting my head up so I stare right into him. “Good.”
4:54 a.m.
My head spins. Buzzed. No wait—I teeter, sans heels, on my bare soles. The sidewalk hot, even in the summer night. Definitely beyond buzzed. I drank past my limit. They just kept comin’ and I kept grabbin’. I think I was dazed and confused by Nikolai’s offer.
“It was a real offer?” I ask him, his hands firmly on the crook of my hips beside me. I think I slurred a bit of that. But he smiles in my foggy vision and mutters out a response. I only caught: … again … I’ve asked it multiple times?
I’m the sloppy drunk.
And judging by his roaming hands, he’s the flirty one.
It’s everything I imagined in life.
At least my sarcasm is internally on point right now. My mind is amused. I think we’re waiting for a cab, his cousins—lots of cousins—and Timo surrounding us.
We’re back in a group.
It’s hot.
I shed my coat and sling it over my forearm. It whips out of my possession and into Nikolai’s. He blazes me with his intensity, searing trails down my corseted waist, pushed-up cleavage and my thighs in black fish-net. He’s thinking about sex. I’m thinking about sex.
We’re all thinking about sex here.
“Those eyes…” I point a finger at him, my breath shallow. “…are bad.”
His lips rise. And all I hear from his response is myshka . My nickname, whatever that nickname means, has never sounded more sexual off his lips. And then his hands fall low to my hipbones, too close to more sensitive places.
He knows this.
Right?
I rest my palms on his sculpted abs. “You’re touching me.”
“I’ve touched you before,” he says huskily.
Truths.
Lots of truths tonight. Barefooted, my head reaches his chest. Literally. His bedroom eyes are things made from sin. “The devil is…very, very…hot.” I wonder if that went smoothly or not.
Probably not.
I feel his lips brush my ear with the heat of his breath. Then he lifts me, so effortlessly that we may as well have been on stage.
I’m closer to his jaw, his mouth…
One of his hands clutches my ass, and my legs hook around his waist. “What am…I doing here?” I say aloud. Did I say that out loud?
“You’re in my arms.” He holds the back of my neck, his thumb putting the right pressure on the right tender muscles. A pleasured sound tickles my throat. I’m not even sure if I contained it.
His cousins begin to shout. I think. I hear a couple car horns and laughter.
“Why am I in your arms?” my drunken, sloppy-self asks.
He tries to hide his smile, but I see it peek from the corners of his lips. “Because you’re little. And I’m not.” He combs my flyaway hairs, and he rests his palm on my cheek, sliding it to the back of my neck again.
His touch electrifies my skin. I shiver. Or shudder. Maybe both.
Timo speaks, somewhere close to us. “You’re a Grade-A flirty drunk…”
Nikolai replies in Russian, and my thoughts fly with the scene. I become fragmented. Like snapshots of a whole night, and I vividly recall only certain moments.
I straddle Nikolai’s lap, my head on his chest while I listen to his heartbeat. His voice vibrates against my ear while a taxi bumps along a road. It takes a lot of energy to look up at him, but I do, tilting my head. He stares down at me, his hand stroking my tangled dirty-blonde hair, no longer in a pony.
“I can walk,” I whisper. Why am I whispering?
“Prove it,” he says deeply.
I place my palms on his chest again and try to lift myself off him, and I recognize that we’re in a taxi again. Where I cannot walk. Even if I tried.
He laughs.
I scowl.
His hand travels up my corset, to my chest, and his humor fades, replaced by a more desirous, hungry look.
Shockwaves course through my body, and a noise, like a high-pitched moan, rumbles inside of me. I can’t discern whether he hears the needy plea—one that I’ve never made before.
Not with anyone.
Not even drunk.
He pulls me even closer to his body, and I’m welded against him. In his care, and his lips close over my jaw. I swear they do.
I’m on a bed.
I’m on a bed. In my corset and stockings. Metallic-colored sheets and comforter beneath me. The corset wire pokes into my skin, and the weight of someone else undulates the mattress, rocking my body. I prop myself on my elbows.
Nikolai is shirtless.
He is very, very shirtless.
Even in the darkness, moonlight creeping through the white curtains, I notice the ridges and lines in his muscles, his perfect set of abs. A body that belongs to an athlete or vampires and werewolves, the supernatural in general.
He hovers over me, his fingers untying the front of my corset where it all binds together. We’re going to have sex. It’s a lingering thought.
We’re both drunk.
That is true too.
My mind soars to new heights. “I’m floating,” I whisper. Or spinning.
“Close your eyes, myshka,” he breathes in a soothing, deep tone. I don’t close them though. His forearm rests beside my head, his body less than an inch from descending into me.
“What does that mean?” I ask softly. “Myshka?”
His eyes search mine, hypnotic, soulful. Ones that tether me here, to him. And his lips close over my cheek before drifting to my ear. “Little mouse.”
Little mouse.
I spin.
And the blackness of the night takes me completely.