But it’s opening night of Giselle and I’ve worked my whole life for this.
Dancing has been devoid of enjoyment for the last few months, but something inside of me is unlocked after five days of embracing pleasure. I know how to reach for it now. Without reservation. Smith has reminded me how to shine, how to leap. I long to be on the stage, even as I already miss being in his bed.
As soon as he drops down on the mattress beside me, his muscled back covered in sweat, his breathing erratic, I stand up on legs made of gelatin and wrap the blanket around myself, stumbling to the door. Before I can wrap my hand around the knob, Smith wedges his huge body in between me and the exit, his eyes darkening like storm clouds.
“What are you doing?” he asks warily. Coldly.
The temperature in the room seems to drop twenty degrees. “I’m opening the door. We can’t just ignore him.”
His breaths are cautious. Measured. Like he’s trying to control himself. “You’ve been successfully ignoring him for days, Posy. He’s been listening to you whine for my cock through the door.”
“You were playing music…you overwhelmed me on purpose…”
“You definitely didn’t mind,” he enunciates through his teeth.
This isn’t going to be easy. He’s not going to make this easy. I can see that. “You have to let me leave. You have to let me dance.”
“You said you wouldn’t leave,” he shouts, backing me against the door with wild eyes, bracketing me in with those rippling arms
“I will never leave you.” I reach up and frame his face with my hands. “Smith, you have to trust that I’ll come back.”
He’s breathing fast, hard. Eyes growing glassy. “Trust a female? Never.”
That statement is like a slap across the face.
I suck in a breath and push him away. He refuses to budge an inch, but his eyes are flooded with regret. Not enough to eclipse the panic and anger, but it’s there.
“Posy…” he whispers miserably. “I’m—”
“Let’s go, Posy,” Baker grits through the door. “Don’t let the understudy usurp you as principal dancer. We’ve worked too hard.”
I hear my coach. His words have an impact. But the man in front of me has my full concentration. “Tell me you trust me to come back,” I manage, heat searing the backs of my eyelids. “If we have any chance at all, there has to be trust.”
He opens his mouth…
Hesitates.
I flinch.
“You’ve broken my heart,” I gasp, ducking beneath his arms and collecting everything I can grab while still keeping hold of the blanket around me.
“No. You’ve broken mine. You’re ripping it out.” He stalks across the room in the nude and bring his fist down in the middle of the kitchen table, splitting it down the middle, the furniture collapsing in a pile of lumber. Even in the midst of his rage, he’s magnificent. Seething with muscle. More beautiful than any artist could depict in sculpture. “I’m going to die without you. I’m going to burn alive.”
My chest caves in. “Then come with me.”
He’s already shaking his head. Restless, he prowls from one end of the room to the other, raking his fingers over his shorn scalp. He wants to touch me. After five days of having our souls locked together, it’s obvious to me as breathing. In the end, though, I’ve asked too much too soon. Maybe we both have? “You’ve made your choice.”
Before I can respond to that ragged pronouncement, he’s storming into the art room—
And one by one, he destroys his masterpieces with a hammer, shouting expletives at the top of his lungs. I watch it happen with tears streaming down my face, my heart in pitiful tatters. There is nothing I can do to fix what is happening, though. Not without giving up everything that I am. All of my potential. I can’t remain here forever. I can’t trust my heart to someone who will never give me the same trust in return.
Nor can I give up dancing, the thing I love, because he’s too damaged to try and live in the real world with me. Eternal love weighs me down as I walk out of the warehouse, but I go nonetheless.
Eight
Smith
Reality—at least, the one I’ve created for myself—comes back to me in snippets of awareness. I’m lying on my side in the middle of the warehouse floor, surrounded by shards of glass. Some of them have buried themselves in my skin, but I feel nothing but the exit wound of my heart. The sound of dripping of water invades my catatonic state, the pain in my hands from smashing my artwork, the cold layer of sweat on my skin. And most of all, the hole in the center of my chest where my heart used to be. She took it. Stole it.