I’ll tell my brothers that it reminds me of how they take care of me when I get sick.
Then I’ll tell them that like them, he buys me Peanut Butter Blossoms.
One day we were driving by Buttery Blossoms — he gives me a ride in his Mustang almost every time I go to their house to visit Tempest on weekends; at first, I thought she’d be mad at me for ditching her but she encourages it, me spending time with her brother — and I pointed it out through the window and told him all about it.
“So the special thing about them is that the crumb is peanut butter and the frosting is chocolate. When usually people have a chocolate crumb and peanut butter frosting. See? Special, right? But I can’t eat too many. Ballet and all that. And the other day my partner told me that I was getting too heavy for him to lift. Can you believe that?” I chewed on my lips. “Maybe I should go on my juice fast this weekend. I can easily –”
I stopped talking when the car suddenly came to a halt and in a flash, he climbed out of it. I climbed out after him and watched him stride over to Buttery Blossoms.
A minute later, he came out holding a familiar pink box.
“Your partner is a pussy,” he growled, thrusting it into my hands. “And juice fasts are fucking stupid.”
And like an idiot, I hugged that box to my chest, blinked up at him and whispered, “You know, you shouldn’t really curse this much, Roman.”
His jaw clenched at that and his eyes grew all hot for a second before ordering, “Just get in the car.”
And I did.
Yeah, I’ll tell them about that.
All my brothers would love it because they think my juice fasts are stupid too.
And maybe if I tell them all this, they won’t hate him so much.
Maybe Ledger won’t fight with him.
Like he does one day at practice.
I’m not sure what happened because I wasn’t there but when Reed shows up at the auditorium with a nasty split lip, I know.
That something happened between the two of them.
But the worst part is that he won’t take care of it.
He absolutely refuses to take care of it in the coming days. Every time I ask him to, he goes, it’s fine.
So one day I decide to take matters into my own hands and after my practice, as he’s helping me pack up, I lock the door of the storage closet like he did that first time.
It’s a bad idea, I think.
Because when he turns at the sound, glances at the door before glancing at me, the space shrinks and grows darker.
“Did you just lock the door?” he asks, his wolf eyes alert and pretty.
“Yes.”
He leans against the shelf, folding his arms across his chest. “What about your brother who’s waiting for you in the library?”
His hoodie’s off and so I try not to look at the tiny hills that his biceps make under his light-colored t-shirt. “Well, he can wait another ten minutes. I don’t care.”
A smirk appears on his lips, all split and still pretty. “Ten minutes, huh. Living on the edge, are we?”
I stand on the stepstool to get my hands on the first aid kit on the storage shelf by the door. “Yeah. He’ll be fine.”
“I don’t think ten minutes is enough.”
When I get it, I step down and turn to him. “Oh, it’s enough. Trust me.”
He hums, almost thoughtfully, still looking at my face. “I mean, sure. I could take care of you in ten minutes.”
“Take care of me?”
Licking his lips, he nods. “Yeah. Twice.”
“Twice what?”
“Fair warning though,” he goes on, ignoring my confusion. “I’ll want to do it one more time just because I think I’ll be fucking addicted to your taste. I’m already fucking addicted to your scent. Jasmine, is it? But you’ll be trembling, and you’ll tell me to stop so I’ll decide to have mercy on you. Just this once.”
Taste.
What…
My eyes go wide when I understand, when I get what he means.
And when I do get it, his features grow sharp, dangerous… seductive. “But then it’ll be my turn, Fae. And trust me when I say that ten minutes is not going to cut it.”
“It’s n-not?”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’m not so easy to take care of. When you’re done taking care of me, you’ll be going home with scraped up knees and swollen, dripping lips. Your brother will take one look at you and call the cops on me for doing bad things to his sister’s pretty mouth in a storage closet. Not that I mind. But yeah, your math is slightly off there. I don’t think ten minutes is enough.”
The first aid kit’s digging into my ribs by the time he finishes.
And I think I already have bruised knees and a swollen mouth, just because of the picture he’s painted with his dirty words. I think my brother would know it anyway, that I was with him in a storage closet.
“It’s geranium. And sugar. M-my scent.”
“Geranium.”
I nodded. “Yes, it’s rare. It says on the bottle. I like rare body oils.”
“I bet.”
I hug the first aid kit to my chest even more tightly. “I…”
I don’t know what to say except, I’ll do it.
Oh my God, that’s what I want to say, isn’t it?
I want to tell him that I’ll take care of him for as long as he wants.
I’m a ballerina. I’m not afraid of a little pain in my knees and bleeding skin.
I’ll take care of him just like I dance for him in the woods when he puts on the music in his Mustang and sits on the hood to watch me.
Like he’s the king of the world and I’m his slave girl.
Like he’s my villain and I’m his ballerina.
But then he moves away from the shelf and approaches me, taking away all my thoughts.
He glances down at the first aid kit and my blinking, blushing face. “Do it.”
My heart stops beating. “What?”
“You want to take care of my split lip, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do it then.”
Then without me having to say it, he drags the stepstool over with his foot for me to stand on. So it’ll be easier for me to reach his injury. And all the while I take care of his bruise, my knees feel sore and my mouth feels swollen.
But I guess most of all, I want to tell my brothers how he helps me with my routine.
They all know my love for ballet and my ambition to go to Juilliard once I graduate from high school. It’s my dream to dance for the New York City Ballet Company one day and all four of them have always been supportive of it.
So I know they’ll definitely approve of the fact that Reed helps me practice.
Sure, it takes a little convincing on my part to get him to agree because when I first proposed the idea, his exact words were, “I’m not fucking twirling.”
“Hey! That’s extremely offensive,” I told him from the stage. “Ballet isn’t just twirling. There’s like a hundred different things, techniques, that you do –”