Leaps & Lies

Chapter Thirteen

T he mood in the car is silent but awkward as Julian drives her home in the flashy sports car from the day they first met. Her shoulder is sore but hurting significantly less now that it’s back where it belongs.

But instead of driving back to Ellapond so Vivian can pick up her car, Julian turns left and heads downtown.

“You’ll need to tell me when to turn.”

She absolutely does not want to tell him when to turn. Vivian has no interest in bringing Julian anywhere near her shoebox of an apartment.

“Just take me back to the studio. I have to get my car anyway.”

He scoffs without looking at her. “You’re supposed to rest your arm.”

“I don’t need two hands to drive, but I do need my car to get to rehearsal tomorrow.”

Julian scoffs again like an arrogant idiot. “What makes you think you’re rehearsing tomorrow?”

Vivian’s stomach sinks. Her shoulder aches, she’s painfully tired, and now he’s going to have her kicked out of Ellapond? Intellectually, it makes sense that she used up all of her body’s adrenaline after the fall, injury, and subsequent birth date revelation. It makes sense that she’s crashing now. Somehow, that knowledge still isn’t enough to stop the tears welling or the burning of her cheeks.

“That’s not fair. I know I lied, but I can explain. Let me talk to Ms. Renee. You don’t have to get me fired.”

The car jolts slightly as Julian pulls over suddenly, double-parking on a side road next to an ugly red minivan.

“I’m not firing you, Sugar Plum. You just dislocated your shoulder. You can’t rehearse tomorrow. You need rest.”

Rest?

She’s not convinced so she keeps silent, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I’m not going to tell Renee. Not now, anyway. But you need to take some time off. At least a week, and that ER doctor recommended even longer. You’ll need to ease back into it too. Don’t make me use Kelsey for opening night. Her pirouettes are atrocious.”

Vivian laughs, but it sounds closer to a sob.

“Fuck Kelsey.”

Julian shakes his head, refusing to agree, but Vivian desperately hopes he shares in the sentiment. Despite their strange, whispered meetings, he agreed—or at least didn’t vocally disagree—with Ms. Renee’s choice to cast Vivian as principal. Not Kelsey. That has to mean something .

She can’t help but ask. The question that has been burning a hole in her mind, in her heart, since the words first fell from him, tossed by the barre like scraps of sweetness for her to chase after.

“Why ‘Sugar Plum?’”

He pulls his hat off, runs a hand roughly through his hair, and then returns the hat to its backward throne atop his curls. Even through Vivian’s tears, he looks stupidly sexy.

“I’m only going to say this once, and then we’re never going to talk about it again.” He drums on the steering wheel, refusing to meet her teary-eyed gaze. Dread accumulates as a tsunami, building until it towers impossibly high above. An impenetrable wall of water, waiting to crash down and drown her. Vivian remains silent, trying not to sniffle too audibly.

“All this time—Fuck. All this time, I’ve been hating myself and trying to hate you. I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I was sick for lusting after a fucking child. There was no way—you have to understand that I would never —” He breaks off, gaze still fixed on the steering wheel.

“The Sugar Plum Fairy is joy. She’s compassion, confection, and—most importantly—out of reach. She’s childhood dreams and unattainable goals. During your audition, you landed your pirouettes as if you danced on a cloud. As if gravity was your champion, eagerly bending to your will. Fuck, Vivian, you showed up to the YA company class. What do you want me to say? You could’ve been fifteen!”

The veins in his hands surge as he strangles the leather steering wheel. It’s stupid that even his hands are hot. The fantasy of those long, deft fingers curling around her instead of the steering wheel is too tempting to ignore.

Vivian’s heart does its best to jump out of her chest and into his hands.

All this time? All this fucking time, he’s been nothing but rude to her because he wanted her but thought she was too young for him?!

“You’re an idiot. And an asshole.”

When he finally, finally meets her gaze, the tightening around his hazel eyes resembles anguish rather than anger. Frustration burns in the back of her throat.

“I don’t care how old you thought I was, that’s no reason to be cruel. You’re the ‘adult’ here—act like it.”

Tears still stream down her cheeks, but now they’re boiling from her frustration instead of fear. Whoever designed her body to cry when faced with heightened emotion needs to cut her some slack.

“Who cares how old I am if I can fill the seats?”

“You obviously care, or you wouldn’t have lied.”

“I don’t care. I might have lied to Ellapond, but I’m not lying to myself.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.”

Julian sighs, weighty and weary. “Well, that makes one of us.”

He navigates the car back onto the road and drives her home.

They don’t speak of it again, any of it. Not her lie, not his admission, not her sling, or even her car that’s sitting alone in Ellapond’s parking lot.

The only break in the silence comes when Vivian directs him to an apartment complex four blocks away from her own. It’s close enough to her real address to be believable but in notably better condition than her actual studio. She gets lucky and manages to slip into the lobby behind another resident—a real resident—when Julian insists on waiting until she’s inside before driving off. She nods at him from the lobby and waits until three minutes have passed after he drives off before she ducks back out of the building.

It’s raining lightly when she emerges from 1005 Custrel Complex and makes the five-minute walk to her real apartment on Glenmarie Street. Rain seeps into the thinning canvas of her dance bag and clings to her limp hair.

When Vivian collapses onto the lumpy, pea-green futon that serves as both her bed and couch, silence lingers, a gray cloud of emotion she can’t bring herself to clear away.