19. Cutting In
cutting in
LEXI
Back in the ballroom, the orchestra had kept playing classical waltzes, and nothing had seemed to change for anybody in the crowd.
The several hundred people wearing black-tailed penguin suits or subtly glittering white dresses milled and chattered, drinking champagne and waltzing in rehearsed steps.
I still saw unparalleled wealth and privilege, but I was also beginning to see what Nicolai meant about everyone positioning themselves with what they said.
At dinner, half of the deep, dark secrets that people had told me had ulterior motives. Most of the things they’d said were about other people, other people’s secrets that made them look bad. Some were meant to show themselves in a good light or to warn me about how much power they had.
None of it seemed funny anymore.
Nicolai led me toward the wide dance floor, where he used our joined hands to swing me into his arms, the skirt of my dress billowing out behind me.
His arm slipped around my waist to catch me and stop my trajectory, and the orchestra started up a new song as he bent his head and whispered in my ear, “Back-side-together.”
With just that cue, I got it. The rhythm of the music made the steps feel obvious, and I moved in his arms in a simple waltz, but he made me feel like I was a princess at the ball.
Being with him was so glorious and easy that I didn’t notice the time passing, the songs changing, just the one-two-three of dancing in Nicolai’s arms in the waltz.
A tiny tremor ran through Nicolai, a slight adjustment of his shoulders and turn of his head, and the tremor flowed from his hands into my arms.
“May I cut in?”
Nicolai and counting the 1-2-3 of the waltz had so thoroughly occupied my thoughts that all the rest of the waltzers’ black tuxedos and white dresses around us had faded into the background, swaying like a swarming herd of zebras.
However, that voice, so alike in timbre to Nicolai’s and yet a lighter tone because he was years younger, was all too familiar as I looked up.
Konstantin was standing next to Nicolai, his age-shifted twin, wearing a similar white-tie and black-tails tuxedo. His expression was solemn, as if he had to explain his actions to a priest.
“I’m not sure this is appropriate,” Nicolai said, releasing my waist but pulling me slightly behind himself.
The change of his voice to an acidic monotone startled me, and my fingers tightened around his in a reflex.
Konstantin’s eyes fluttered upward. “I’m not going to make a scene. This is the first time I’ve seen you two since yesterday morning.”
Nicolai stared straight and level into his brother’s eyes. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Geez, Nico. I want to apologize. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“And that’s all?”
Konstantin leaned forward and whispered, “I watched the video a few more times. You didn’t appear to be under duress in the slightest. Lexi kept looking around the church for somewhere to hide or to bolt out the doors. If you say it was all your idea, I believe it.”
Nicolai swiveled toward me and leaned down near my ear. “If you are not okay with this, I’ll tell him to talk to us later. There’s no reason this has to be discussed now, in public, on a dance floor. Kostya is young and can be impetuous.”
Konstantin leaned down, too, and suddenly my head was in the middle of a Romanov sandwich. He whispered, “I really am sorry about yesterday morning. I just want to discuss it with you for a minute. I swear to God, I just want to apologize.”
I turned my chin a little bit toward Nicolai. “It’s okay. I think we’re becoming the center of attention by standing here. Maybe just let him cut in for the rest of the song, and then come find me.”
Nicolai straightened, but he growled at Konstantin, “Do this right.”
He walked into the crowd toward the nearest sideline.
Konstantin bowed slightly from the waist and offered me his hand. “May I have this dance?”
I didn’t know if I was supposed to curtsy like they did on The Ridgertons, so I just dropped a small curtsy. “Surely, my fine sir.”
I had no idea if that was how Regency people spoke, but it seemed better than “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
Konstantin chuckled, and his low laugh was so similar to Nicolai’s that I felt more at ease. He lifted my right hand and stepped in to put his arm around me, and that’s when things got a little weird.
He was as tall as Nicolai. Looking up at him, I had the same parallax view as of Nicolai. His eyes were the same amazing ice-teal blue as Nicolai’s. His step toward me was as fluid and graceful as his brother's.
But he smelled wrong.
He didn’t smell bad. It wasn’t B.O. Indeed, Konstantin smelled a little soapy. He had obviously freshly showered and was wearing deodorant.
But the scent that emanated from him was sharper, fresh but acrid, an aggressively citrusy lemon that itched in my nose.
His cologne wasn’t unpleasant in the slightest, just wrong.
Nevertheless, I lifted my chin and smiled, not like I was anticipating him to say something terrible to me, but just open to whatever happened.
On the music’s downbeat, Konstantin stepped forward, and I did my best to waltz.
He looked up at the white ceiling crisscrossed with gold lines of trim moulding and studded with gilt chandeliers, thinking.
I didn’t interrupt his thinking. If he didn’t say anything in the few minutes remaining of this particular dance, that was fine, too. The sentiment was enough as far as I was concerned.
Minutes passed. Back-side-together, forward-side-together, and again, and again.
“Hey, look, Konstantin. It’s fine. We don’t need to talk.”
“Call me Kostya.”
“I don’t know, man. That seems kind of like we’re buddies or something,” I whispered.
“You’re Nicolai’s wife. You’re family now. Family calls me Kostya.”
It felt like I was forcing a familial relationship on him. “Okay—Kostya.”
Konstantin sucked in a deep breath and said, “I was very far out of line yesterday morning. I apologize for everything I said and the way that I said it. It was uncalled for. I have an explanation. People are constantly trying to weasel their way into Nicolai’s and my lives to take advantage of our backgrounds or financial resources.
Nicolai has lectured me all my life on how I must constantly be aware of everyone’s ulterior motives, and I must never trust someone who pretends they care about me. ”
Oh, the poor babies. That was no way to live. Maybe being poor and destitute was better. At least I knew that if people were nice to me, it wasn’t because they wanted something from me.
“It’s always a trick. It’s always a trap,” he continued.
“We really can only trust people we met at boarding school because they have their own resources and because we’ve known them long enough to know who they really are.
Even at college, at Harvard, I have to be careful about whom I associate with because someone will try to use me.
No, everyone will try to use me. It’s only a matter of what I will allow them to get and what I will receive in return. Everything is a transaction.”
“Oh, Kostya. I can see why you would want to protect him.”
“And Nicolai is so cautious. He never gets suckered. I’ve only been out of Le Rosey for two and a half years, and he’s had to rescue me twice.
I’m such a sucker that I would believe people were my friends, then find out what they wanted from me and wouldn’t be able to extricate myself.
Nicolai had to step in and tell me I could not tap my trust fund to invest in a crypto pump-and-dump scheme.
He had to drag me out of an apartment with three other guys just last year, move all my funds so my so-called friends couldn’t access them to buy drugs anymore, and pack me off to rehab. ”
“Yikes.” The poor kid.
And the really dumb kid. You’d think his expensive boarding school would have warned him about people like that.
“It seemed impossible that Nicolai, my older brother, the white knight who rides to my rescue, could be taken in as stupidly as I have been, and yet it seemed like you had all the hallmarks. You were new, unknown, no connections, and living on Nicolai’s dime.”
Not a particularly charitable description, but it might have looked like that from the outside. I tried to remember that this was an apology, or was going to be at some point.
“I should’ve trusted him to know better,” Konstantin said. “I should have trusted him to be a better judge of character, and I’m sorry that I suspected you of being like the people who took advantage of me.”
Okay, there was the apology. I could overlook the previous part.
Kostya seemed so much younger than Nicolai or even me. He looked like a poor, lost little soul, probably a beacon for unscrupulous people. “I’m so sorry all that happened to you. They shouldn’t have done that. I’m just glad Nicolai was there for you.”
“I felt like I must rescue him as he rescued me, but my methods sucked. I got mad instead of being logical or doing something practical. The thing is that I can’t control his money.
He can control mine and keep me from blowing myself up, but I don’t have any leverage over him.
All I had was panic that turned into anger, and I said everything in the worst possible way. ”
Okay, then I got it, the poor kid.
My heart was breaking for him, and I didn’t know what to say to let him know that he could stop now because I didn’t want to burst into tears in the middle of this ballroom.
“That’s okay, Kostya. Apology accepted. I forgive you.
We’re cool. I’m glad that we both want the best for Nicolai, and we’ll both protect him. ”
“I’m glad. We should put on a familial show of force over the next few days. I should squire you around a bit. Be seen, so to speak. This bachelor week of John’s is probably an excellent opportunity for others to see us closing ranks.”
“Oh, that’s a nice idea, but we’re not going to be here after tonight.
I’m not sure when we’ll be back. Nicolai has this plan to fly us to Verona, Italy, tonight and stay for a few days.
We met at one of the museums there,” I reminded him of the official story.
“At Juliet’s House, like in the play. He said we’ll be back for the last day or so of John’s party, but I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to be at this week-long bachelor bash. ”
Kostya’s eyebrows rose, and his smile was a little pinched. “We’ll do the best we can, then. Whenever you’re back, we’ll schmooze so everyone can see how well you're integrated into the family. And by family, I mean me, because Nicolai and I are the only family we have left.”
“I’m so glad we’re on the same page. It was really upsetting to come between the two of you because Nicolai mentioned that you’re his only family. Don’t you two have an uncle, though?”
“Michel. We don’t count him.”
“Or Clementine?”
“She’s our friend, but she’s rather distantly related, genetically. Quite a few horizontal branches between us on the family pedigree. If we needed a kidney or some bone marrow, it’s unlikely she’d match.”
“Well, then. The two of you must stay on good terms. In case one of you needs a kidney.”
The lines around Kostya’s eyes lightened, and his lips parted for a second before he smiled just a little. “Yes, we both want what’s best for him.” He leaned down and whispered, “According to what Nico said, you might be here for a good time but not a long time, but I am glad we can be friends.”
Dagger to my heart, but okay. “Yeah, we can be friends.”
And with that, we waltzed the rest of the song.
Kostya gently led me through the steps and even managed to hold my hand above me, letting me spin once before clasping me securely in his arms again, as we muttered, “Back-side-together, forward-side-together,” and got to laughing about it.
We danced between the other swaying couples and through the crowd, having a perfectly lovely time because we could become friends.
I felt like he believed me. I felt like, even though my marriage to Nicolai was doomed from the start, maybe I could at least have some friends at the end of this.
Maybe when we signed the divorce and annulment paperwork at the end, the friendships wouldn’t dissolve, too, I hoped.
After all, if we were all in this together, since we were on the same side, we were allies.
Friends.
And I danced with Nicolai’s brother, swooping and spinning, laughing as we figured it out.
At the end of the song, he backed off and bowed, and I fluttered into a ridiculously elaborate courtesy like something out of Swan Lake, which made Kostya laugh again.
His laugh was like Nicolai’s, but a little freer, at least out here in the open.
We stood side by side and looked around for Nicolai.
We both saw him at the same time, far away on the other side of the packed ballroom, his head and shoulders sticking up from the bobbing surface of people’s heads, and waltzing with a slim, beautiful blond woman in a palest pink gown who leaned in and drew him down, angling to kiss him.
A second metaphorical dagger stabbed me in the heart, but this one made me mad.
We were still married. If anything came of this floozy trying to kiss Nicolai, if he cheated, I would be in the quintuple money-or-nothing zone of the contract.
I tried to be happy about the massive amounts of life-changing money, but rage surged through me. I wanted to rip that watered-down pink dress right off of her and strangle her with it. I wanted to wrap her up like a rose-colored mummy and throw her in the aquamarine pool just past the balcony.
I could probably hoist her over my shoulder and carry her that far. When I was doing technical theatre in high school, I schlepped around sandbag counterweights to fly the sets all the time.
The floozy was still aiming for Nicolai’s mouth, and his hands moved around her waist toward the front, toward her ribs, toward her boobs.
My whole body flushed with fire.
“Oh,” Kostya said. “I’m sure that’s not what it looks like. She’s probably just someone we knew from school, maybe. There’s a lot of platonic social kissing in Europe. Cheek-cheek, bisous-bisous. It’s all very French.”
The woman smashed her face onto Nicolai’s mouth.
I stumbled back a step, shocked as heck that he hadn’t shoved her off.
Kostya glanced down at me, worry creasing between his eyebrows. “Well, that’s quite French.”
I wondered whether that post-nup contract would be invalidated if I murdered my husband.