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I WOKE IN THE MIDDLE of the night with a pounding headache and very little memory of the night before. I was barefoot and still in my dress. I remembered arriving for dinner, and Vasily ordering wine, but everything else was a blur. To make matters worse, my stomach woke me, and I barely made it to the bathroom before losing its contents into the commode.
“What the hell were in those pills?” I mumbled, holding my pounding head. “He said they’d just take the pain away.” I glanced at the counter, the towel was gone, and so was the bag with the rest of the mix Misha had given me. Panicked, but still dizzy and suffering from the worst hangover of my life, I scrambled to open the medicine cabinet above the sink. Where the hell had I put them?
“Who gave them to you, Jaqui?” Vasily was in the doorway to the bathroom, his blue eyes blazing. When had he come in the door to my room? Why hadn’t I heard him? I cursed in French, angry at myself.
Worse yet, he held the empty Ziploc bag in front of him.
Shit. He’d found them. I’d never seen him mad, save his outburst in Sasha’s room a few days ago, but this was bad. So, so bad. I sat on the open toilet, my knees pressed together, my head in my hands. “No one.”
“Who, Jaqui? Tell me, so I can tell Pytor. This cannot continue here!” His outburst made me jump. I had never expected his ire to be directed at me.
No, I couldn’t let him tell Pytor about the pills. I couldn’t let him tell him and have everything come out.
“You’re worried about the reputation of the school?” I snapped, looking up, even though the bright light of the bathroom hurt my eyes. I blinked against it, trying to focus on his face. Yet, he angered me. How dare he focus on something so trivial, when my life was at stake?
“I’m worried about you,” he spoke softly, but with an evident forcefulness. “You still haven’t told me where you got these.”
He switched directions on me so fast my head was spinning harder than before. I hung my head in shame, but I wouldn’t give up the name. It would kill him ... especially if he knew what I had to do to get them. What I had to do for him.
“Tell me, Jaqui! Or I’ll have Igor and Mira find out. You know they will. I’ll have the ublyudok expelled, and you’ll be fired. Do you want that?” My scrambled brain fought for the translation of the Russian word mixed with his rough French. I knew I had heard it before. Bastard. That seemed appropriate given our present situation.
“No,” I cried, rubbing my hand against my aching temple. “No, I don’t want to leave.”
“Then who was it?” His voice was deadly calm, but I could sense the anger there.
I sighed heavily, my head in my hands now. He was rabid, and not about to give up. I knew this much about him. Once he was determined to do something, he saw it through. Dance, dinner, and now this. “It was Misha.” I glanced up at him slowly to see his reaction. I almost winced, wondering if I’d pushed him over the edge. Wondering if or how he would react.
He stumbled back, leaning his forehead against the doorframe. “You paid Misha for these pills?” he wouldn’t look at me.
“No, I didn’t. I swear! He left them here, and I....” I wished he would look at me, so I could tell him what had really happened.
“Fuck, Jaqui. What have you done?” He still couldn’t turn his head towards me. He tucked the bag back in his pocket and I saw his fist curl at his side. He finally turned to me. “Did you ... did you sleep with him? Answer me!”
Too tired to cry, my stomach roaring it still had more to expel, and too exhausted to fight with him, I just hid my face in my hands. I couldn’t bear to see the look on his face. He wouldn’t believe me even if I protested. He surely wouldn’t understand I’d kicked Misha out because of what Vasily had said to me hours before.
“Blat,” he cursed loudly, interrupting my chain of thought like a blaring horn. “How could you? Let it be Igor or ... or ... anyone but Misha.”
I recognized the Russian word for whore easily. It was the harshest thing he could have said. It hurt. Worse still, I deserved it. My heart cracked, the carefully built walls starting to crumble. Not for Misha, but if it hadn’t been for Vasily, I would have just given in, like I always did.
“I did everything you ever asked of me, Jaqui. I did everything right. And you betray me like this?” He shook his head, confused, but even more, I heard the hurt in his voice.
I shook my head, still mumbling into my hands. “We’re not together, Vasily, there is nothing to betray. What I do with my body is my own business.”
“I asked you to come to St. Petersburg with me last night!” He interrupted. “I wanted you to meet my family! And this whole time you’ve just been ...” I couldn’t take the sound of his voice anymore. It was too much.
“Get out!” I yelled, jumping to my feet, despite the entire world spinning in slow motion. I was a whore, a horrible person, a disgrace to my family, to Tanets Academy, to him. He was right about everything. I should have never come here. My walls crumbled, burst into flames, and were razed to the ground.
He blinked at me, not understanding my French outburst. I tried again, this time in Russian. He clearly understood that, but he didn’t move.
“You really think you should be alone right now?”
That angered me even more than before, although part of me knew he was right. I just couldn’t stand the look of disappointment, even sadness, on his face. I advanced on him, pushing him out of the doorway as hard as I could. “Leave!”
Panting, he backed up against the hallway door, reached behind him and turned the knob. “I will go,” his voice was back to its normal range now. “But there is one more thing I wish to say.”
“I don’t care.” Even I was surprised at my calloused tone.
His face softened, with no effort to mask the hurt in his eyes. It was different than the pain I saw that day outside Sasha’s room. This was more than betrayal; I’d wounded him, kicked him like a dog that was already down.
“What a fool you are, that you didn’t know when we wrote to each other I was falling in love with you,” he said softly, shaking his head. “You had everything you ever wanted; you even had me. You threw it all away for what, Jaqui?” His voice trembled and his lower lip shook. I could see the tears clearly in his eyes.
“Just leave me alone!” I screamed at him.
“I will always do what you ask of me, Jaquellyn Arnolt,” he whispered.
My heart crumbled around me, shattering like pieces of a broken glass. I sat down, shocked, at what he had just confessed. I had been wrong about everything; I had confused his despise for respect. He had treated me the right away, and he was absolutely right. I threw it all away for nothing. I sobbed harder than I had in my life, and he stood there, staring.
“Nothing to say?” his hurt voice was agony as he prodded me. “I confess everything, and you sit there as if my heart isn’t breaking, too? What kind of woman are you that a man speaks his love, yet you ignore it as if it means nothing to you at all?”
“What am I supposed to say?” I sobbed. His accusations rocked me to the core, not because they were harsh, but because they were true. The only man outside who had ever spoken to me true, and not because he wanted in my pants. But because he respected me, respected who I am, who I was.
“Don’t pretend you don’t feel it, too.” His gaze washed over me, warm, endearing. Every bit of love he poured into it devastating me even more. I couldn’t keep looking at him, I had to get him to go away, to leave me alone. I needed to think, to breathe, and I couldn’t do it with him standing here, his heart on his sleeve, the pain pouring from him in waves. Moscow wasn’t supposed to being me pain, it was supposed to being me happiness. This was too much.
“I don’t!” As soon as the lie left my mouth, I knew it was the final straw, the last thing I could have said to extinguish the flame within him. I couldn’t bear the truth. I couldn’t admit I had screwed up everything in Moscow, from the minute I had arrived and put myself in the middle of this mess. Admitting my feelings and letting those final walls down was something I wasn’t ready, wasn’t able, to do.
And what if I did? He would scoop me up and kiss me, and that would fix everything? No, it wouldn’t. It would make everything worse. It would be another escape into a physical relationship that had ruined me in the first place.
His face fell, his shoulders slumped, but the fire in his eyes never died. “You threw it all away for a handful of pills and a good fuck. I don’t even know who you are anymore. No wonder you don’t like to be touched; you’ve probably had most of France all over you.”
“Just go, Vasily,” I choked on my sob, swallowing hard. His words were the most painful of all. “You don’t want someone like me. You need something better. A damaged and broken ballerina isn’t something anyone should waste their time on.” I covered my face and cried once more, hiding the way only I knew how.
He knelt in front of me, pulling my hands gently away. “Jaqui, look at me.”
I did, but only because I wanted his strength to pull me out of this. I silently screamed for his rescue, his safety, even if it wasn’t what I needed.
“It matters not to me if you think you’re damaged or broken. Give me the pieces. Let me put them back together. I don’t know if I can restore you, but I’ll try. Let me put you back together again.”
I searched his eyes and found his honesty, which hurt me even more. He didn’t know what he was asking. “I’m not Humpty-Dumpty and you aren’t the Kings Men! You can’t, no one can.”
“But you won’t let me try?” His question was obvious.
“Leave me be, let me fix this on my own.”
“How often has that honestly worked?”
I shook my head. “Please.”
“I promised you I would always do what you asked, so I will. But I won’t give up on you, Jaqui. You mean more than the world to me. I’ll find a way to fix this.”
There was nothing left for me to say, so I watched as he opened the door slightly, and slipped into the hallway. The dorm room door shut behind him with a finality that crushed me my ever-breaking heart.
I stumbled out of the bathroom and slipped to the floor next to the bed as the tears ran freely from my eyes, and I let them go unbidden. I had the best thing in my life and I destroyed it, like I destroyed everything. A good fuck, he had said? I didn’t know what that was. I had been a fool for not telling him what had actually happened. I cursed—he wouldn’t have believed me anyway.
He was a good man, and I had shoved him violently away. Fix me? I almost laughed. I was un-fixable. I was a fiend for the release of the drugs, I craved the release of everything that was bad for me and I knew it. I swirled in a fragmented cycle, wounding myself like a creature in a cage no matter where I thrashed. I did this, I ruined everything I touched. I was dope-sick on heartbreak, either from pills or from the twisted pleasure it brought when I crushed his heart, I didn’t know.
Even at the expense of my own heart. I didn’t deserve a good man like him, and he didn’t need to waste his time on someone like me.
I recalled a memory from not so long ago, around when Darci was born six years ago. It was a far-gone memory that hovered like a dream, with only bits and pieces remaining in the recesses of my mind. My father, my real father, Marceau, was yelling at my mother as he did often those days the year before he died. Something about the family was curse, and that her difficult pregnancy had been that the result of it. Knowing what I knew now about Elijah, I was sixteen when I watched my parents’ marriage fall apart. That was their curse, after all. Father liked to talk about being descended from kings, but curses? I never believed it.
But I did now. I certainly felt cursed. Maybe that was what father passed down to me—unhappiness. That was my curse, to shove others away when I needed them the most. I wondered how my mother had survived, pushing away the man she loved for twenty years. I supposed in a way, Elijah was her blessing and curse all along.
I looked around the tiny confines of my room, feeling like a prisoner of my own demise. From across the room, I could see his jacket slung over the chair, his tie folded neatly on the table. The small afghan I’d brought from France lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.
I realized I hadn’t heard him come in, because he’d never left last night.
There was only one more thing left to do.
I wanted to go home. Forget the pills, the blackmail, Vasily’s confession, and the way he had looked at me when I denied him. I sobbed at the thought of leaving him, but the damage was done. I had sent him away, and I didn’t have the strength to face him again. I wanted to let it all stay in Moscow and flee back to Paris.