“Are you going to shut up?”
“No. You’re going to listen. This time, you’re going to fucking listen. I was recruited as a backup in the New York City Ballet when I was sixteen. I thought me and Mom’s life would become rainbows. But no, the dancers there didn’t like me and made it known. They bullied me, changed my broken-in shoes with new ones. They stole my Band-Aids, toe pads, and my elastic bandages and tore my leotards before important performances to stop me from going on stage. But I had a friend who helped me. She gave me a hand and protected me. She let me dance on her behalf sometimes. She had my back throughout the years, and even though her skills were no different from mine, she became a prima ballerina at the age of twenty. I didn’t get very far. I only stayed there, in the background, like a nobody, but I didn’t resent her for it. I was happy for her. I celebrated with her and was thankful I could keep a roof over our head.
“But do you know what happened next? I found out she was the one who’d kept me in the background. All her nice behavior was a ploy to keep me under her thumb. I was so stupid. So fucking stupid. I hated dancing so much after that, so I quit. I left that world and everything that came with it. But she never left my mind. She stayed at the back of it and in my nightmares. She was there when I was a nobody waitress seeing her posters on the streets. She said she wanted one last favor. She had the fucking nerve to ask for a favor. But I couldn’t say no, and do you know why? Because my mom was dying, and I was knocked up by some fucking man whose name I don’t remember and my daughter was born with weak lungs. I took the hotshot ballerina’s offer, which included having my baby daughter ripped away from my hands soon after she was born. When I told my mom about what I was doing to ensure our future, she cursed me to hell, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t have the luxury of stopping.
“I didn’t succeed, though. I had an accident where my head was nearly cracked open. When I woke up in the hospital, my mother was gone.” I’m sobbing now, tears streaming down my cheeks. “My little girl’s lungs gave up on her and she followed soon after. That’s how I ended up on the streets. That’s how I became a shadow of a person, homeless, a nobody. So no, Adrian. I’m not Lia. My name and identity are the last things I have, so don’t you dare take those away, too.”
I’m panting by the time I finish telling him my story. I never expected to blurt it out as if the words were burning my tongue. The only other person who knows about my history is Larry, and I only told him in batches. Not in one go like I just did.
If I expected sympathy from Adrian, he shows none. His expression remains the same. “What was the favor she asked of you?”
“What?”
“You said she asked you for a favor. What was it?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Tell me.”
“N-no.”
He narrows his eyes. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not proud of it.”
“You said it didn’t succeed.”
“I wanted it to. I guess that’s what counts for me.”
He’s silent for a beat too long and I think he’ll ask me another question, but he doesn’t. His shoulders have visibly tensed beneath his light gray shirt and the subtle intensity in his eyes is sharpening by the second.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was angry. But for what? Because I didn’t answer his question?
“Get on the table, Lia.”
Any hope I had for him to call me by my name shatters and disperses in the background. It hurts worse than anything he’s done to me. Worse than the lashes of his belt and the slap of his hands. Worse than him depriving me of alcohol.
Because at this moment, I realize that he’ll never see me. That, just like in the ballet, I’m only a shadow of someone else.
An insignificant nobody.
20
Winter
When it takes me more than a second to get on the desk, Adrian loops his hands around my waist, lifts me up, and sets me on it.
I’m now in direct view of his unforgiving gaze. I want to scream and yell, to hit and scratch. I can feel a tantrum or a meltdown—or both—building at the back of my brain, but I rein them in as I stare at the wall behind him.
“Lift your legs and open them,” he orders.
I do as he says, my heels planted on the edge of the desk. My movements are mechanical at best and I’m thankful for it. I wait for the numbness to take me over, because that’s what I need right now.
If I’m numb, I won’t feel the sharp edges digging into my heart. If I’m numb, I won’t hate a dead woman because she still lives through me. Because she’s still alive for Adrian while I don’t exist.
“Look at me.”
I don’t, my gaze stolen by the white wall behind him.
“Lia.”
I’m not Lia. Stop calling me Lia. But I don’t say that, because it doesn’t matter. Not to Adrian.
“That’s nine.”
I remain silent. He can do whatever he likes with my body. He already thinks it’s Lia’s instead of mine, anyway.
“Ten.” He stares at his watch. “The count will go up with every minute you don’t fucking look at me.”
My gaze slides to his, and I hope it’s as dead as I feel. I hope he sees the cruelty of what he’s doing to me, of the way he’s erasing my identity. But would he even care if that were the case? Would he take a second of his precious time to think that the woman he brought from the street feels?
He doesn’t.
Adrian brings the glass of cognac to his lips, and most of the ice has melted away. I want a sip of it more than anything in the world. It’ll erase my feelings and make me numb again. If I’m drunk, it won’t hurt that he’s seeing another woman through me.
Seeming to notice my concentration on his drink, Adrian pauses before he stands. “Stay there and lift your dress up.”
I do as he says, watching as he heads to a minibar and fills his glass with more ice and some alcohol.
By the time he returns, I’m holding the dress to my stomach, sitting on the table, half-naked, with only my white lace panties covering my pussy. He slides to his chair and takes another sip of his cognac as if he’s taunting me. When he releases his lips from the glass, he rolls something in his mouth before he leans over and presses his cold lips to my inner thigh.
I gasp and brace myself back on one hand. He kisses his way up my thigh, running the tip of the ice over my heated skin. It melts in a matter of seconds, leaving chilling hot and cold trails in its wake. Adrian picks up another one, with his teeth this time, and paints a new trail, picking up from where the first one stopped.
I momentarily lose sight of the cognac, all my attention honed in on where the ice meets my skin, to how his lips slightly graze my thigh, his stubble creating unbearable friction.
My head rolls back and I bite my bottom lip as I try to close my legs.
“Keep them open,” he orders, with the glass halfway to his mouth. “How many?”
“W-what?”
“You forgot how to count, Lenochka?”
Oh, so this is his sick version of punishment today. I prefer the searing pain. At least then I can think of him as a perverted psycho I should hate.