Amour Amour (Aerial Ethereal #1)(37)

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.