In the big scheme of life, those few pounds were costing her more than she’d fully calculated. Her health, her life, her long-term career, and Jordan. But—
“They’re overwhelming, aren’t they?” Pixie asked, quietly. “The five of them.”
There was no point in playing dumb. She knew exactly who Pixie meant. “Very.”
“I remember the day I arrived at that house for the first time. I had no idea they all lived together, and I was terrified. I even thought about going to stay at a hotel instead. But then I got to know them. And I get why they are so . . . united. Together. I don’t even know what the right word is.”
“Connected?” Lexi offered.
“Yeah. I haven’t told Dred you’re here, but I will. I can’t lie to him for you, I’m sorry. And I’m Jordan’s friend, too. But I can keep the dogs at bay for a little while. What happened?”
Uncertain of where to start, she asked the first question that came to mind. “Does Dred have, you know, stuff like Jordan?”
Pixie sipped on her tea. “They all do. Different kinds of issues. It’s public record that Dred’s mom overdosed in front of him when he was younger and he couldn’t save her. So he loses his nut when it comes to drug use. And because he couldn’t keep her alive, he sometimes tries to wrap me and Petal up tighter than Tutankhamun. I fear for his sanity when Petal is a teenager.”
They sat in silence as Lexi absorbed what Pixie had told her.
“I think my and Jordan’s issues crash up against each other though. They are just so at odds.”
Pixie smiled. “I’m a former addict, so I know just what you mean.”
“Wow. That must have been . . .”
“Yeah. It was. We broke up over it because we were both too stupid to talk it through. Well, Dred was a bit more stupid than me.” Pixie laughed sadly.
“I’ve been starving myself,” Lexi blurted suddenly. Saying it out loud made it real. Saying it out loud solidified it as a problem, not the solution she’d been hoping for.
“That doesn’t sound healthy. But then, when my stepdad abused me, I used drugs to get through it, so I know all about self-destructive behavior.”
Lexi looked over at Pixie. Self-destructive behavior. Her father. Abuse. Was that what it was all really about? Suddenly it felt as though solving that part of the puzzle was crucial to understanding why she was currently sitting in a rock star’s over-the-garage apartment falling to pieces on a woman she barely knew.
“What do I do?” she asked.
“I’m not going to pretend I know the answer to that, but it’s possible to figure this out, Lexi. With experts. With Jordan. It just depends how badly you want it.”
* * *
Jordan stormed down Parliament Street, trying to ignore the knowledge that he’d just been the dumbest shit on the planet, despite his best of intentions. Plans to nurse Lexi back to health had evaporated the moment he’d realized she was deliberately starving herself. Which probably said more about him than it did her. His issues were getting in the way of helping Lexi with hers, which made him the biggest shit and prick on the planet.
Eating disorder. The words kept crashing into his thoughts, and he shook his head to clear them. If that’s what it was, then what she was doing was more than simple vanity. Perhaps it had started out that way, but the sheer look of terror on her face at the prospect of having to eat food he put in front of her said that it was something way more. He, more than anyone else, understood the importance of a proper clinical assessment before bandying around mental health terms, but he was willing to run with the idea that Lexi was struggling. And he’d just walked out on her when the going got tough. Again.
Fuck.
His chest tightened, his breathing difficult, as he thought about the tears streaming down Lexi’s face as he’d left. Hadn’t she just been telling him that she was now alone? But, shit, it had to be fucking food, didn’t it?
The lyrics to “Dog Boy” started to buzz around in his brain. One night, when he was locked in the attic, he’d been lying in bed when he heard a dog barking outside. It howled, and Jordan, amazed by the sound, decided to bark back in return. It had been a fun game until his father had marched through the door and kicked him in the stomach. “You want to be a fucking dog, boy?” he’d said. “Then we’ll treat you like one.” The next day for breakfast, he’d received dog kibble in a dog food bowl. Of course, he didn’t realize that’s what it was. How would he? All he noticed was that it was crunchier than the food he usually got. Harder to chew.
When his parents had come in later on that day, they’d cried with laughter.
“He fucking ate it.”
“Useless little shit.”
“Cheaper than real food. Let him eat with the dog.”
They’d fed him dog food for nearly a week but had continued to serve his food in a dog bowl until the day he’d been rescued.
In a moment of madness, he’d allowed his asshole parents to ruin his present. He didn’t need to be that kid again. He didn’t need all those boxes of cereal in the cupboard, and not just because intellectually he knew he could get food any time of any day. It wasn’t worth any more of his time to worry about it. It was the most freeing thought.
He stopped abruptly and took in his surroundings. He was already at the bottom of Parliament Street, and as the mad wore off, he realized he was freezing. This wasn’t where he needed to be. He needed to be with Lexi. Without a second thought, he turned and began to run back toward home. The sooner he got there, the sooner he could ask Lexi to forgive him and the sooner he could get on with being strong for her.
A horn honked behind him and he paused to see Elliott’s car pull up alongside him. Elliott jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran around the front of the car to give Jordan a two-handed shove that sent him backward.
“You are a fucking dumb shit, sometimes,” Elliott said. “You want to know about compulsion, look at me, asshole.”
“I don’t have time for this, Elliott. I know full well I was a shit.”
Elliott gripped one of his fists and then the other. “I think you need to listen before you go back to see her.”
Jordan began to walk back up the street, and Elliott followed him. “You know you left your keys in the car and the engine running?” Jordan said over his shoulder.
“So fucking what? You are more important to me than my car.”
Jordan stopped and turned to him. “Say what you got to say,” he said, heading back toward Elliott’s car, “then give me a ride back to the house.” He pulled the door open and climbed inside where it was warm. For good measure, Jordan jacked up the seat heater.
Elliott joined him and they headed north. “You have to give me hope, Jordan. You have to show me there is a way for us to get through this. Watching Dred and Pixie fall in love was the start, but Dred wasn’t as broken as we were. I’m not trying to get into a pity-party race to the bottom, but if you can’t do this, then I’m fucked because you know I can’t control the shit I do sometimes.”
What was he supposed to say to that? He couldn’t exactly tell Elliott that he’d be fine, not when he was sitting in Elliott’s car after fucking up his relationship with Lexi. “Wish I had some big words of comfort, El. But I’m kind of making it up as I go along. And I think I just made shit a whole heap worse. Pretty sure the way you go about helping people is not to tell them their problem is fucking bullshit,” Jordan said, rubbing his face in his hands.
They pulled up in front of the house and Jordan ran inside. “Lex!” he yelled from the hallway. He ran into the kitchen, expecting to see her still sitting on the stool. But it was empty. Her glass was still there, red wine still in it. Their plates were left untouched. Even the knife was still on the breadboard.
“Lex, where are you, sweetheart?” he called out as he hit the stairs, taking them two at a time. He pushed open the door to their new room, but it was untouched. The roses in the vase and the rose petals he’d put on the bed in an att
empt at romance were as he’d left them. The light was off in the walk-in closet and bathroom, but he checked for her anyway.
His heart began to race as he tried to bury the rising panic, the certainty that she’d left him. Jordan sprinted up to the attic, only to find that she wasn’t there either.
Where could she go?
Running back down the stairs, he pulled out his phone.
I’m so sorry, Jordan. I need a little time to sort myself out. I’ll be in touch soon, I promise.
“Elliott,” he yelled, running through to the mudroom where Elliott was just taking off his coat. “Lexi’s gone.”
“You sure?” Elliott said, shrugging his coat back on.
“Yeah. Got a text from her and checked everywhere. How long has she been gone now, like twenty minutes?” Jordan asked, pulling on his own coat, hat, and gloves.
“Okay, let’s go look.”
He dialed her number as they climbed into Elliott’s car.
“Hey, you reached Lexi. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Fucking voice mail. He dialed again and got the same thing.
The thought that Lexi had gone back to her own home had him close to throwing up as Elliott navigated the side streets to her house. If her father had touched a single hair on her head, he’d fucking kill him. He was just in that mood. But then he remembered his promise to her to not touch her father. And his promise to make this about Lexi, and not him.
Fuck.
He needed to get there quickly. If he was driving, he would have committed every traffic infraction to get there. “I need to learn how to drive,” he said.
“Problems with my driving?” Elliott asked with a smirk.
“None at all. If I felt like a Sunday drive out to Oakville.”
“Funny,” Elliott said. “This is exactly how the judge said I should be driving if I don’t want to lose my license. But in all seriousness, I’m already doing double the speed limit. If I lose my license, you’re hiring me a limo and driver.”
“Fine,” Jordan snapped. He dialed Lexi again.
Nothing. The pit in his stomach dropped lower.
Elliott pulled up alongside Lexi’s house, and Jordan raced out of the car and down the side of the house to try her apartment first. “Lex!” he shouted as he hammered on the door. “Let me in, sweetheart.”
He waited a moment and then slammed his fist against the door. “Lex, please.”
“She isn’t home,” a voice called from the porch.
Jordan jogged back up to the front of the house. Alexei stood wrapped in a gray cardigan with holes along the seams and a button missing. For a moment, he considered asking where she was, but then he wondered if she was inside. “How about you let me check that for myself?” he said, pushing past Alexei as he made his way up the stairs.
Alexei grabbed his arm more forcefully than Jordan had anticipated. “Keep out of my house,” he said.
“It’s Lexi’s house. And we both know it,” he said, easily shrugging out of Alexei’s hold.
Jordan raced into the house. “Lexi, are you here?” he shouted, charging through the rooms. He hurried up the stairs but found nothing. When he checked the main floor, he found a cane propped up against the wall. It had a solid handle at the top but narrowed into a thin reed at the end. Angrily, he picked it up and snapped it over his knee into progressively smaller pieces. When finished, he allowed the pieces to fall to the floor.
Once he was certain that Lexi wasn’t there, he brushed past Alexei on the stairs and got back into the car. “She’s not here, either. Where the fuck would she go?”
If only he could figure it out.
* * *
Sunlight.
Lexi stretched under the soft covers and turned over, attempting to prevent the glare of the sun from waking her from sleep. It felt as though she had slept for days. She rolled over, straight into a warm chest.
Jordan.
She snuggled up against him and he embraced her in his strong arms, pulling her close to his side. Lexi sighed contentedly as her legs tangled with his and his fingers ran through her hair. Waking up with Jordan was one of the—
Jordan!
Her heart cracked into a million pieces all over again. The fight. He’d left her. Lexi tried to move, tried to pull away from his arms, but she was no match for his strength.
“It’s okay, Lexi. I’ve got you,” he said, gruffly.
Unable to break free, she opened her eyes and studied him sleepily.
Jordan rolled onto his side so he faced her, their foreheads mere centimeters apart.
“I can’t fight you again,” Lexi said wearily. It had taken hours to calm down the previous evening, even more before she’d found the safe refuge of sleep.
“I don’t want to fight with you either,” he said calmly, placing his hand on her hip. “I’m sorry, Lexi. And that’s just the start of my apology. I never gave you a chance to explain . . . well, not explain, but to speak. I didn’t listen to what you said because I dropped straight into my own shit. It dawned on me about ten minutes after I’d left the house, once I was done yelling at you for your shit, that I was just as guilty. So please, Lexi. Help me understand. I promise I’ll listen.”
Lexi slowly exhaled. “I did this once before,” she said on a yawn. “When I first joined the company.” Her eyes found Jordan’s, and she saw nothing but understanding there. It gave her the courage to share her darkest moments.
“Oh, Lex,” he said softly, kissing the tip of her nose sweetly.
The admission took her back to those glorious days when, for a fleeting moment, she’d thought she’d made it. Getting into the ballet was supposed to make her father happy. “I had a salary, and was in the corps, desperate to start ascending the ranks, but my father was pushing me hard, constantly telling me I was lacking. He told me to pay attention to what different artistic coaches, and ballet masters and mistresses were looking for. But most of all, he reminded me, as he’d always done, that I was fat. There was a well-known rule in Russian ballet that a dancer should weigh no more in kilograms than their height in centimeters minus one hundred and twenty-seven. That meant I should be forty kilos, about ninety pounds. That’s nearly thirty pounds less than healthy.”
“Jesus, Lex. That’s fucked up.” Jordan reached for her hand and pulled it up between the two of them.
The sad thing was, lying here in this bed with Jordan so close to her, his tattooed hand holding her so tightly, she knew it was fucked up but that somehow when she looked in the mirror, it didn’t seem too bad. “I became convinced that it was the only thing keeping me back in the corps. That I could be a second soloist if I just lost a little more.”
Jordan leaned forward and kissed her lips softly. A warm comfort flooded through her and gave her the encouragement she needed to carry on.
“From the moment I showed talent in dance, my weight became a constant battle. My dad would weigh out food, and while I’ve never been in your shoes and starved, I’ve been deprived. And I guess I just got used to the feeling. You ever see the movie Notting Hill?”
Jordan raised his eyebrow. “I don’t do chick flicks, remember?”
“Or Julia Roberts apparently,” she said, trying to bring some lightness to the conversation. “Well, there’s this line in it where she says she’s been on a diet since she was nineteen, which meant she’d been hungry for a decade. I guess that was my life.”
“You didn’t get down to the weight, did you?”
The prickle of embarrassment rushed through her as she thought back to that day someone broke the pattern. “No, but I got dangerously close. I got down to forty-four kilos, or just under the magic one-hundred-pound mark. It fluctuated a little based on whether I’d eaten when I weighed myself. But a dancer, Verda Robles, who is now ballet mistress at the Ballet Nacional de España, called me out when I passed out in the dressing room. Told me to look at dancers like Misty Copeland, who were brilliant, strong, and vibr
ant, for inspiration. It was the first time I’d been told another way to dance.
“It was also around this time that my mom’s money ran out and we needed to sell our home. Dad had always controlled what we ate and how we lived. Without any money of his own, Dad expected me to pay for everything after his investment in me and my dancing for all those years. So we moved out and I took him with me, but I changed the way I approached my health. I decided what I was going to eat, and more importantly how much. Even though I put a little weight on, it made me feel like I was in control. I’m rambling, aren’t I?”
“No, Lex. I want to hear this. What’s changed recently?”
Lexi flopped over onto her back and placed an arm over her eyes. “Do you have any easier questions?” she said, irritated.
“We aren’t leaving this bed until we have everything sorted out,” he said. “And by that I mean that we’ve told each other everything, we have a plan to figure things out, and we’ve had make-up sex at least twice.”
She felt the bed jiggle beside her as he grabbed her arm and moved it from her face. Jordan was propped up on one elbow looking at her.
“Twice?” she asked, hope flooding her that they’d find a way through the mess.
“At least twice,” he said, leaning over and kissing her—slow, drugging kisses. His hand ran along her ribs and brushed the side of her breast that was clad in a thin vest. Jordan rested back on his elbow. “So you were saying?”
“You expect me to think after a kiss like that?”
“Stop stalling, Lexi.”
“Fine. I was struggling. With a partner in an upcoming ballet, and with my career. Vlad struggled to lift me yet didn’t seem to be struggling with a lighter dancer, so I assumed it was my weight. Then all the roles I wanted seemed to be being given to dancers who were lighter than I was. And Dad continued to be Dad. My weight felt like the only thing I could be in control of.”
Jordan placed his fingers on her chin and turned her face to look at him. “That’s not all, is it?”
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