by Sara Cate
Jesus, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the forwardness of Lotte’s friends. I had Britta bent over the bed within the first five minutes of the party, but suddenly as I’m standing in front of a family friend and a man who knew me as a child, it’s jarring.
Then I feel Ellis’s eyes on me for a moment. There’s not a hint of nerves in his stance but calm confidence as he takes in my demeanor and shakes his head at the girls.
“Not tonight.”
"But—" the other girl stammers.
“Nash and I are catching up,” he says, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for the drinks though.” And as he puts the bottle to his lips, he adds, “Maybe next time.”
They both pout for a moment before nodding their heads and saying their goodbyes.
Once they’re out of earshot, he mumbles over his beer bottle, “So…you're not going to tell your dad we almost had an orgy at a party, right?”
What starts as a small laugh escalates until we're both red faced and biting back the sudden marijuana-induced hysteria. I don't answer him, but Ellis doesn't need to know my dad has done some way kinkier shit than he knows about, and he doesn't need to know how I know that.
1
"Aufrecht sitzen," my mother snaps while I browse the menu. On impulse my spine straightens obediently.
"What can I get for you?" the waitress asks, and before I can say a word, my mother orders a salad with grilled chicken and the dressing on the side for both of us.
Then it's silent at our table. Keeping a blank expression on my face, I stare longingly out the window. She browses through emails on her phone while I write verses in my head. Things I can never write down. Not so much words but images I want to commit to memory, feelings I want to assign names to.
The strange orange hue of empty pill bottles in the sun.
The sound piano keys make when you slam on them.
Things that cannot be unbroken and the way skin scars but is never truly uncut.
"Marina Vestenberg said she will see you next week for an audition."
I nod. "Okay."
"You're only twenty-nine, Hanna. Still a few years left if you don't waste them, but you have lost so much strength since you were sick. It’s such a waste. Finish your lunch and then go to the studio."
"Okay."
When our food comes, I peek up at her periodically over my bland salad. I'd murder her for a cheeseburger, and it may sound cliche or harsh, but I would literally wring her neck at this table for a basket of fries. I'm not quite sure when this happened. When I stopped making decisions for myself and I started accepting my fate as my mother’s puppet.
"You're pouting," she says flatly as I pick at my lunch.
"I'm tired."
"Get more sleep then."
"It's not that easy."
"Why not? You stay up too late, doing God knows what, and then you wake up with what, four hours of sleep. Of course, you're tired."
I don't respond because there is no arguing with her. She knows everything and is always right. She lacks the empathy to understand that at night I don't sleep because I lay awake wondering where my life went wrong. How eleven months ago I lost my spot in the ballet company—a spot I had to work twice as hard as every other girl to get. How I lost my apartment. How I ended up back under her roof, in her house, hating myself.
She likes to say I was “sick” but really, I was overworked, under-nourished, and so depressed that one day I showed up to the studio so panicked out of my mind, I blacked out in the middle of a run through. I didn’t even know someone could be hospitalized for three days for a nervous breakdown, but according to the press and my mother, it was nothing but low blood sugar.
“You don’t like your contacts?” she asks after catching me blinking my eyes, fighting against the foreign objects shoved under the lids.
“I don’t need them.” There is nothing wrong with my eyesight, but the colored contacts hide my heterochromia. My blue and brown eyes are another one of my physical traits she wants me to hide. Right along with the three shades of melanin I have on her. I am a walking reminder my mother fucked up in the nineties and could never face going back to Germany with a curly-haired, father-less baby. She’s never stopped making me pay for that.
At twenty-two, I was accepted into my first professional ballet company, and that night we celebrated. After two glasses of champagne, she confessed pushing me in ballet was her way of making the best of a bad situation. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning did it register how I was the bad situation she was referring to.
“Why can’t we just have a nice lunch?” she asks through clenched teeth in response to my complaining about the contacts I don’t need.
Ignoring her, I focus instead on more things without names, writing meaningless poetry in my head until the waitress clears our table and hands my mother the check, even though I’ll be the one paying.
As promised, I go to the studio. It’s an empty dance space we rent from a German woman who owns the building and leases it out for sparsely attended yoga classes on the weekends. My mother will say she’s a friend, but it was a form of manipulation, weaseling the woman out of her rentable space by befriending her and only occasionally inviting her over for schaufele dinner on Sundays.
It’s dustier than ever now, and even though I play the music through the speakers, I never put on my shoes. Instead, I spend the next two hours lying on the dirty floor, scrolling through my phone.
I could go see Zara at her studio, but I feel like a virus in her happy life now. Married, with a new baby, in a perfect house in the suburbs. She runs the studio effortlessly and never looks tired or complains. It’s exhausting to watch. She’s a year younger than me, and I already resent her for how much more she was handed the day a billionaire showed up on her doorstep to change her life. Where the fuck is my billionaire?
I’m being a petty bitch. She’s been trying to get me to teach a class at the studio since the incident last summer, but I don’t have the heart to tell her the last thing I want to do is fill the shoes of my dementors. Even if I never worked them to the point of exhaustion, starved them, slapped them across the backs of their legs with wooden canes when their arabesques weren’t straight, I’d still feel that abuse every day of my life.
Fuck this. I need to get out of this studio. The walls are closing in. I could use some actual food, but I’d prefer a drink instead. Changing quickly back into my dress I wore to lunch, I skip the leggings and shawl and dig a pair of high heels out of my messy locker in the storage room behind the studio.
The evening is cool as I step out into the dusk, quickly ordering an Uber as I walk toward the city center. For a moment, I feel free. She’ll think I’m still practicing, and she won’t bother checking up on me. For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-nine years old. I don’t need to check in with my mother, and I can do whatever the fuck I want, but there’s still a hint of guilt in my chest as I climb into the white SUV and head toward the nearest club so I can get drunk as fast as possible in hopes someone will strike my interest and make me feel something.
For a Saturday, the bar is quiet, but it’s only seven-thirty. After a couple dry martinis, I get a few come-ons, mostly from older men which is fine. I have nothing against a sugar daddy—worked out great for Zara, but there’s no real zing with any of them, so after short, stiff introductions, they all leave with their tails between their legs.
Finally, a group of four women sidle up to the bar next to me. They’re already drunk from presumably day drinking because they also have sunburns, but they’re still coherent enough to order.
“Oh my god, you’re gorgeous!” one of the girls announces next to me, and I feel a soft hand drift down from my shoulder to my elbow.
“Jesus, Mia, you’re cut off,” the woman next to her says. Mia is short, blonde and straight as a board, but the woman who pulls her away from me is not. And how I can tell that is the level of confidence she exhibits as she checks me out not once,
but twice.
I’ve been with a woman before. It was fun, nothing serious, and right now I'm in the middle of such a dry spell fun and nothing serious sounds like exactly what I need.
Plus, dry spell is putting it lightly. Ever since my breakdown, the state of things downstairs has been far worse than dry. It’s like the whole system is dead. Even by myself with the kinkiest porn playing on my phone, I can’t seem to work out the weakest of orgasms. Nothing.
“You need a drink?” she asks, putting herself where Mia once stood.
I hold up my nearly empty martini glass. “Good timing.”
The next thirty minutes crawl by in basic pleasantries between two people who obviously want to fuck but need to know the basics first—name, status, confirmation the other person isn’t a total psychopath. Her name is Ally. She’s thirty, a retail manager, bold, tall with shoulder-length brown hair, and presumably single since she made a questionable face when I asked if she had a girlfriend. If she does, her girlfriend isn’t here tonight, so I don’t give a shit.
When she rests her arm along the back of my chair, I swivel my knees toward her. The gin is hitting me hard, and I’m feeling more bold than usual. And a good deal less patient. That’s when I notice we’re getting dubious glances from her friends she has neglected to spend time with since I stole her attention.
I don’t have time for this shit. I need to get laid, and it’s about that time of the night.
I glance down at my phone. Fuck, it’s only eight-forty-five.
“It’s getting crowded. Want to get out of here?” I say after I feel her hand land on my bare knee.
“Where did you have in mind?” she asks, her eyes trailing down to my low-cut neckline.
“Your place.” Her eyes shift quickly up to meet my gaze.
“I wish I could,” she replies, biting her lip. She does have a girlfriend, then. Or a boyfriend, who knows. I know I don’t care, especially when a low, subtle warmth starts to build between my legs. It’s the most action my body has seen in months, and I’m not about to waste it now.
I spot someone coming out of the bathroom in the back, and I get an idea. Standing from my barstool, I let my hand graze over Ally’s waistline as I walk away toward the dark, back corner of the bar. At least this place is clean and upscale. I would never do this in a hole in the wall.
What am I saying? Yes, I would.
It only takes one “come fuck me” glance at Ally before I disappear through heavy, black swinging door. She’s on my heels in seconds.
I know the gin’s behind the wheel now because I don’t remember kissing her for the first time. I remember her shoving me against the tiled wall and the way it fired up a mini arousal in my belly, enough so by the time she reaches up my dress, there’s at least some moisture there. Then she’s pounding two fingers into me, and I’m too busy searching my body for the heat and arousal that’s only a memory now I don’t think to do anything for her, and I feel bad for it. Well, almost.
She’s kissing my neck, kneading my breasts aggressively, and the roughness helps.
“Harder,” I gasp, latching onto her neck and rubbing my leg between hers. It’s working. There’s a slow build of heat at the base of my spine, and for a moment I’m relieved I won't have to fake it.
But the black swinging door of the bathroom hits the wall so hard, it makes me jump. Ally and I are hidden inside the handicap stall, which is a futile defense against the angry woman who shouts, “Ally!” as soon as she enters.
She tears herself away from my body, and I slump in defeat. I was so fucking close.
I assume it’s her angry girlfriend who is violently jostling the stall door enough it finally pops open. The girl who appears on the other side is as tall as Ally with long blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, an athletic build, and a strikingly gorgeous face. Fuck, Ally. Why are you messing with me when you have this girl at home?
Ready to make my exit and let these two work it out, I realize I’m not getting away that easy when the blonde stops screaming at her girlfriend to focus her rage-filled expression on me.
“You fucking bitch!” she screams as her open hand comes flying across my cheek. I’m stunned for a moment. Between the gin, the hit, and their nonstop arguing, I’m disoriented. The room is spinning, and my brain is lost in a fog—a fog much like the one I drifted off into last summer when they had to sedate me during my maniacal fit. It’s a welcome fog where I don’t feel useless, worthless, nothing.
Then, the fog clears as quickly as it came, and I’m still stuck between these two fighting women. Something in me snaps. Everything in me snaps. The next thing I know, I have blondie’s hair in my hands while I swing at her with the other. Ally is holding me back, yelling in my face, and I’m lost in the rage. I barely register being carried out by the security guards and deposited on the street.
Fifteen to twenty minutes later, I’m walking alone down a busy city street and shivering from the cold. Ally and her girlfriend are gone. My head is pounding. My face stings, and my hand aches from where it ricocheted off the stall door as I pounded a girl I don’t even know and will never see again.
What is wrong with me? When did this happen? One year ago, I had my shit together. I was working full-time which is a blessing for a dancer in her late twenties. Every night I closed each show with roses and applause. I had my own apartment, and my mother’s control existed only in the footnotes of my life.
Then, whatever had been holding me up all those years just...crumbled. I withstood the pressure and trauma for so long one day, the foundation cracked, and the structure imploded. I don’t remember much about that day, only that I was so hysterical, I had to be put in a medically induced coma.
When the gin wears off, I pull out my phone and instead of calling an Uber, I call Zara. I don’t know why. I need to hear her voice. Someone who likes me, who is my friend because she wants to be. Fuck, I remember when we first met the night Alistair brought her to the ballet. She actually looked up to me. I hate to think what she thinks of me now.
“Hey,” she answers after the first ring. I hear the baby crying in the background and Alistair’s voice before the clear sound of a door closing and silence on the line. "What's up? Are you okay?"
She's at home with her perfect little family and I'm drunk-calling her from a dark street in need of a ride. I want to hang up immediately.
"I shouldn't have called," I mumble.
"Fuck that. What's up? Tell me now." Ever since the incident, Zara's friendship has taken on a new edge, a protective one with a hint of meanness. Like she knows I am my own worst enemy and she has to protect me from myself.
"I just need a ride and a place to crash."
"Drop me a pin. I'm on my way."
"What about the baby?"
"She's fine. Alistair's here."
This vision of Alistair Wilde changing diapers and holding a baby still doesn't fit right in my head, and I've seen them all together hundreds of times. But somehow it works.
"Thank you," I mutter as I reach a dark intersection, so I turn around and head back toward the crowd and lights of the busy street. Quickly, I drop a pin and send it to Zara. Then, I pocket my phone and try to look natural as I pace back and forth, waiting for her to get here. The house isn't far from the city, and it shouldn’t take her more than twenty minutes, but it’s only been about ten when a familiar black sports car pulls up next to me.
I stiffen, moving away from the road as I wait for the window to roll down before I open it and get in. It doesn’t roll down, but the driver's side opens, and Nash Wilde pops out, glaring at me over the top of the car.
“Zara said you needed a ride. I happened to be in the area.”
My heart plummets. Why? Why did she have to tell Nash? Of all fucking people.
I try to paste on a casual, sober smile and act like everything is fine as I walk toward the passenger side. “Are you sure you don’t mind?
“Of course not,” he answers flatly.
>
“I could take an Uber, really.”
“Just get in, Hanna.”
He disappears into the car, and I let a deep exhale melt down my spine before I open the door and fall into the seat. The inside of the car is immaculate, high-tech, and expensive as hell.
“How’s your night?” he asks nonchalantly as I try to pull down the hem of my dress to hide my thighs, so I don’t look like a cheap hooker.
“Uneventful,” I answer, squaring my shoulders and trying my best to appear as if I have my shit together as much as he does. It’s impossible not to steal a glance at Nash in the driver’s seat. How in only three years has he grown into an even more handsome, mature version of the reckless kid I first met? Back then I was the one with my shit together. And it grates my nerves to see how far he’s come in such a short time, and how far I’ve fallen.
I don’t know the specifics, but I do know from what Zara tells me, Nash took Wilde Aviation to the next level, expanding and adding so much to the company he’s now in a place to expand to airplanes as well as helicopters. Which means he’s rich as fuck.
“I’m taking you to Zar’s, right?”
“Yes, please.” I pick at the hem of my dress and add, “She and I have some serious catching up to do since Harper came along. Easier to just kill a bottle of wine at her house.”
He doesn’t respond. I feel like an idiot. It’s clearly an excuse for not wanting to go back to my mother’s house because I lost my apartment. Am I twenty-nine or nineteen?
It’s a quiet ride until we get to their large brick home on a quiet road with houses scattered far enough apart it has privacy but not so far we can’t tease them about moving to the suburbs. Zara is standing outside as Nash coasts up the circular drive to deposit me at the front door.
“Thank you for the ride,” I say with false confidence and a fake smile.
Finally he looks at me, his expression harsh and cold like he’s scrutinizing me, looking right through me, seeing right through the bullshit facade I put up.
“Good night, Hanna,” he replies coolly before looking forward.