Kelsey woke up alone, with no idea what time it was. The drawn blinds admitted only thin slivers of light on either side, and at the bottom. She had enough light to see that Theo was gone, the space beside her a mess of rumpled sheets.
She picked her clothes up from the floor and stumbled to the bathroom. Her body felt uncharacteristically heavy and sore. She tried to clean up as best she could, and dressed quickly. She twisted her hair into a severe knot on top of her head in an attempt to regain her composure, and washed her face again. She could still taste him on her lips. She could still feel the pressure of him between her thighs.
She had to leave. She had to get out of his place, run home and shower it all away and figure out what the hell had transpired between her and her gypsy king.
Where was he anyway? It was silent in the house, but she smelled the faint odor of cigarette smoke. She walked down the hall to the living room, past blank walls, over cold hardwood floor. He sat at a table near the kitchen, next to a window. Those blinds were drawn too. The orange flare of his cigarette was the only color in the scene, the only color in his bleak, dark home.
“You shouldn’t smoke.”
He looked over at her but didn’t acknowledge her words. Instead, he gestured to the chair across the small table. “Come. Sit. I have toast and café au lait.”
Wow. It seemed weirdly domestic, him gesturing her to coffee and slightly charred bread. Café au lait. She remembered irritating her tutor at the gym, oh, years ago. Flabbergasting any and all efforts to teach her anything useful. She’d only ever learned the food names in French. Café au lait. Croque-monsieur. Crepes Suzette. She’d spouted them off in a heavy accent in answer to any lesson questions. She’d found it hilariously funny. Her tutor, not so much, but that hadn’t mattered to Kelsey.
From the age of four, she’d trained and competed in gymnastics, and that was all she’d cared about. Now, at twenty-four, she was seeing the world from new, unbalanced angles, like the angle of Theo Zamora’s muscle-bound chest and thrown-back arm as he lounged and stared at her. She put a hand to her hair and sat across from him, feeling his gaze on her like prodding fingers. The smell of coffee was edifying, and he had those big wide mugs that were more like bowls. They still looked small in his hands.
Kelsey waited for him to speak, wondering what he had to say after the night before, but he said nothing, and Kelsey stubbornly decided not to talk either. Two could play at that game. She drank the coffee and milk and had toast with some kind of maple butter that tasted sinful. Nearly as sinful as last night.
In the silence, her inner voice screamed. He’s there, right there. After masturbating relentlessly to the thought of him...after stalking him around the practice facility like some lovesick puppy, here she was, sitting at a table with him. She’d actually slept with him last night--the reality a hundred times more intense than her fantasies and daydreams.
“You eat a lot for a little girl.” His murmured comment drew her from her thoughts. She stopped with her third maple-butter-slathered piece of bread halfway to her mouth.
“I’m not a little girl. And yes, I eat a lot. I have a crazy metabolism. I’m enjoying it while I can.”
“While you can? It’s going to go away?”
“Maybe. Sometimes things change without warning.”
“Yes. I know.” There was nothing in his lackadaisical tone or distant expression to signify he was thinking about Minya, but all of a sudden, Kelsey was. She desperately wanted to ask what had gone wrong, what had happened in those last moments when they’d grasped for one another. She thought about bad hands and falling trapezists, and her throat felt tight and hot. She choked down the last bite of bread and brushed the crumbs from her fingers.
“Thank you for breakfast.”
He nodded slightly, not looking pleased or displeased. Just...looking.
Kelsey took a sip of coffee for fortitude and squared her shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve decided. I’ll work with you,” she said in a rush of breath. “I’m not afraid and I’m not superstitious about your bad hands or whatever. I’ll work with you if you want.”
Theo pushed away his coffee and stretched his legs out. His dry, brittle chuckle landed like a boulder on her ego. “You are the last person on earth I would work with, if I even wanted to work. Which I don’t.”
Kelsey’s face flushed with humiliation. “That’s a pretty rude thing to say, especially to someone you fucked last night.”
He shrugged, avoiding her gaze. “Yes, we fucked. Sorry, I owe you nothing else.”
His words hurt, but they didn’t surprise her. What surprised her was the fact that she kept poking at him. “I’m not talking about you owing me anything,” she said. “Mr. Lemaitre said he would hold a spot for your act for two months. You can come back. I’ll work with you.”
“Yes, you said that already.” Theo moved fast, up and out of the chair, and grasped her by the arm, lifting her to face him. “Why are you bothering me about this? About going back to work? Who cares? You got what you came for, no? And you liked it.”
She tried to wrestle away from him but he held her even tighter. She stared up at him, both angered and aroused. He took her chin in his free hand and stroked a thumb across her cheek. “You did like it. I remember.”
She pulled away and he let her go this time. She brushed at the invisible marks of his fingers. “You already did the scary-intense act last night. And yeah, I liked it. It was okay. Nothing to write home about.” She knew it for a lie, and he probably did too from the mocking look on his face.
Her breath was coming fast and hard all of a sudden. She could still feel the ache of his grip on her arm. She rubbed it and felt a similar ache between her legs. It annoyed her that he still--still--turned her on with just a look. Just a touch, the forcefulness in the way he handled her. She glared at him, trying to hide it all. “Do you have some kind of syndrome that makes you act this way, or are you just a rude, socially inept asshole?”
Theo turned away to clean up the breakfast things, handling her dishes as if she’d sullied them by touching them. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said over his shoulder. “You don’t have the skills to work with me.”
“I could do it. I could learn.” Kelsey snatched the cup out of his hand and carried it to the kitchen herself. “I watched you and her, many times. I--I imagined myself--” She steeled herself in the face of his withering gaze. “I imagined myself flying up there with you. I thought it was...just beautiful. The dynamic between you two.”
“Which dynamic? The public or the private one?” he asked. “And why do you imagine I care what you thought about us? Who are you anyway? Some second-string acrobat, nothing more.”
“I’m in the show now.”
“For a few minutes, doing some very unimpressive tumbling and stunt work.”
“How would you know that?” She crossed her arms over her chest, fending off his blistering appraisal of her. Second string. Unimpressive. Fighting words to an overachiever like her. “Did you find me unimpressive in bed last night? Cause it didn’t seem that way.”
“You’re a good fuck. But you’re a poor acrobat. You are a gymnast still. Too tight, too worried. You still try so hard to please, like judges will give you scores after the performance. You have no grace, no creativity, just bluntness and...how do you say? Duty. You are dutiful. No performance. No soul. No grace.”
“I have plenty of grace!”
He thought a moment, staring off into the distance. “You are like an acrobatic bulldozer.”
Kelsey gasped, outraged. “Oh, really? But you cared enough to watch me, enough to notice my work is ‘dutiful,’ whatever that means. Acrobatic bulldozer, my ass.”
He dropped the dishes in the sink with a clatter and spun on her, backing her against the fridge. “You know what? Can I be perfectly honest? You’re nothing to me and I feel nothing for you. There can be no partnership, no trust without a connection.” He fixed her with a
scornful gaze. “I’m sorry, but you’ve wasted your time in my bed, if this is what you were after. Keep working on your craft. Make friends with the right people and pay your dues. Maybe then you’ll get your own act.”
Kelsey stared at him, stupefied. “Really? You think this was all some ruse to advance my circus career?” She felt something, some lingering shred of lust or admiration for the man disintegrate to dust and fly away. “You know what? Suit yourself. Sit here in your dark house with your bad hands and be an asshole to anyone who offers to help.”
“I don’t need any help.”
“Maybe you don’t, but I obviously do, since I actually admired you once. I thought you were an artist, someone special. Now I see you’re just a self-centered asshole. I would appreciate--if you ever do come back to Cirque--if you would not mention last night to anyone.”
He laughed. “You are worried about your reputation? The circus is full of sluts. It’s okay.”
“I’m not a slut. I don’t need your shit, and I don’t have to concern myself with your problems. I have a lot of other things going on and I don’t need negativity like you in my life.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself. And for the record, I never asked to be in your life.”
“Ugh!” Kelsey threw up her arms and went in search of her bag. She turned back at the door, planning to fling some cool one-liner to put him in his place, but he was already sitting back at the table, pouring whiskey into a glass. In the dim light she could barely make out the look on his face...or perhaps it was just that his expression was unreadable.
Either way, she left saying nothing. She felt like that was all they’d done from the start--said nothing to one another in the cruelest way possible. She wasn’t about to start talking now. She let the door slam behind her to communicate how felt.