“I know it’s serious,” I say beneath my breath, blinking through my rampant thoughts and feelings. What more can I say? While I sit, my body bows forward. My emotions are teetering on a precipice, and I’m a second from falling off and puking.
“Do you?” Nikolai says, his muscles flexed. As tense as I feel. “Every single artist who has ever broken this rule has been fired from Aerial Ethereal. Not transferred to another show. Gone. Do you understand that? I can’t help you.” His face is full of brutal gravity.
And I think, fired.
The word still distorts in my head. A word with no meaning. With no context. I struggle to flip it over and make sense of it. I know the history of this rule.
I knew the inferno I was running through. Now that I’m burned, I try to sit numb instead of screaming in pain. “There are other troupes,” I say with no emotion. “High Flyers Company and Emblem & Fitz—”
“Aren’t your family,” Nik interjects. “Aerial Ethereal is the only troupe with your family, Luk—and it’s the best.”
He says it like I still deserve the best, but I don’t. An immeasurable amount of guilt fists my bare bones. Trying to shatter me. Trying to crush every limb. I’m not sure I can ever be absolved, and at the heart of it: I only regret being caught.
I don’t regret one day of breaking that rule. Because it’d mean regretting every moment that I spent with Baylee.
And I don’t. I just don’t. I can’t.
It feels like betrayal. Like a knife in the heart—and I’d rather gather her in my arms and shield her from this incoming misery than never feel what we felt together. Than never live as happily as we lived.
I stare at my cupped hands.
Fired.
I can barely picture losing my family. If AE sacks me, that’s what’ll happen. None of us have much time for people outside of the circus. And without this job, I won’t be able to afford room & board at the Masquerade. I won’t spend hours of every day working beside Timo and Katya. I won’t be tutored with them. I’ll need to go to public school—I’ve never even been inside a normal high school.
I’ll be on the outside looking in.
I’ll miss their lives, and they won’t really be a part of mine. To go from being in each other’s company daily, hourly, to being ripped out of their world—it kills me.
Everything that defines me resides in this place.
Everything and everyone I love is here.
Dimitri makes a wounded noise, seconds from screaming. He’s bent over, his hand splayed over his eyes. It takes me a second, but I realize that my unbreakable cousin—the one that everyone calls “the tank”—is breaking down before me.
I’m immobile.
Physically here, but drifting. Leaving. Somewhere else. Somewhere that feels more real than this unbelievable moment.
“It’s not your fault,” Nik tells our cousin. “Luka was the one who made the mistake. He has to take responsibility for his own actions.”
I’m unsurprised by Nikolai’s lack of sympathy. He’s always told me that same thing. He’s always been a stiff, follow-the-rules kind of guy, and he constantly tries to drill the same sentiments into me.
Even now.
When it’s too late.
Dimitri drops his hand, his face full of hard lines, and he nods rigidly in cold agreement. Of course he sides with Nik. Both the same age, Dimitri prides himself on loyalty, and as Nik’s best friend, he’d stand by his side to the death.
There’s no tender consoling happening. It’s not like there really ever has been. Before my family split apart, I never felt like my mom was mine. I saw her like a friend or a distant relative. My mom and dad wanted this corporation to raise us. To feed us. Clothe us, teach us.
I can see how they’d rarely call now. I can see how they’d feel like their jobs as parents were done once we landed a career. Once we learned skills that furthered us in the world. Only this happened when I was five-years-old.
Right now, I don’t have to look hard to know that there aren’t any gentle hands. No one is here to wrap their arm around my shoulder and whisper, “it’ll be okay,” in my ear.
I face hard jaws. Muscular bodies. Overpowering masculinity, and look, I’m only human. Sometimes I’d like a mom to hug me.
Just once.
Nikolai doesn’t blink, and his harsh gaze meets mine.
“Just say it,” I tell Nik, my eyes burning. Reddening.
“You valued sex over your career, and there’s no coming back from this.”
I shake my head repeatedly, my features contorting. I didn’t risk everything for sex. It was more than sex. It was always more. But how can I defend myself? The rule I broke was about sex—and that’s all they see. A fling. A hookup.
Not love.
I fucking love her—and that means nothing to everyone but me.
I ache for compassion.
Sympathy.
Everything that Nik can’t give me.
“Would you even care…?” I say so softly he can’t hear.
“What was that?” His gray eyes narrow on me.
I hoist my head, high enough to meet his intensity. “Would you even care if I got fired?” He’d be free of me.
His nose flares, suppressing a multitude of emotion. He believes that I am going to be fired. That there’s no other alternative.
(There never has been.)
He’s right to think this. I’m the one dreaming.
“No matter what happens,” Nik says, “I’m still your guardian.” He didn’t exactly answer my question, but he pats my shoulder, trying to be comforting. Gentle.
It’s a harsh pat, but I understand.
I see that he loves me, even if he has trouble expressing the sentiment outright.
No one says another word after that, and all my thoughts circumnavigate back to one moment. One night. Yesterday.
I wonder how long it’ll haunt me. How many times I’ll replay the past in my head.
After Infini’s show last night, Aerial Ethereal threw a huge cast party for their patrons. Attendance was required so investors could shake hands and chat with all the artists. In hopes that they’d make a donation by the party’s end.
I’d been to plenty before, and in my mind, the word “required” was a loose suggestion rather than an actual rule.
Wearing makeup and garments from the show, I snuck away with Baylee to the costume department. We had sex behind one of the dressing racks. A colorful array of sequined outfits shrouded us from sight.
My older brother will say that having sex was my mistake, but I believe my real and only mistake was not accounting on anyone else leaving the party.
Swept up in the moment, we didn’t hear Dimitri or the Marketing Director of Aerial Ethereal enter the room, but they heard us.
Apparently Vince laughed about the incident and said something like, “Looks like this room is taken.” Dimitri told me that Vince even motioned to leave, but my cousin was the one who stepped forward.
“Anton,” Dimitri called out, humored, “if that’s you, I’m going to tell everyone where you like to fuck.”
I had just enough time to grab a dress from the floor and throw the garment to Baylee. Then Dimitri pushed the hung clothes aside and caught us.
As soon as he saw me, his smile fell, and before he could yank the costumes back to conceal us, Vince careened his neck.
One glance from a member of Corporate and our whole world came crashing down. Vince reported us to his supervisors, and his supervisors reported us to Marc Duval, who’d been in Montreal. Apparently he took the red eye to New York, just to have this meeting.
Baylee and I had been secretly dating for about a year and a half, and in that time, we never really believed we’d be caught.
We felt invincible.
I’m fifteen.
She’s fourteen.
We’re young enough to make mistakes, but we’re old enough to be employed by a billion dollar company with strict, unbending rules.
Aerial Ethereal minors (i.e. employees younger than 18) are not allowed to date or have sexual relations with other Aerial Ethereal employees.
The line in my contract wreaks havoc on me.
On us.
Exactly 48 minors were caught breaking that rule in the past forty years. Exactly 48 minors were sacked from Aerial Ethereal.