of it obscured to any curious onlookers.
“The thing about these sorts of boxes,” he said, putting his hand low on her back and guiding her inside, “is that you don’t have the best view of the stage. You are in front, which is prestigious, and if you sit in the center, you are on stage yourself. We even have our own curtain. People will look up here and wonder who we are. And that is what they’re designed for.”
“Very ostentatious,” she said.
“Very. But it’s what people do with money.”
“It’s not what you’ve done with money,” she said, taking a seat in one of the plush chairs, her fingers tracing the carved wood on the edge of the arm. “You’re hardly in the news, if you are at all.”
“Because attention has never mattered to me,” he said, taking his seat next to her.
“What does matter to you?”
It was a good question. As a kid, he had wanted to survive. To get up and live to see another day. As an adult, he’d grown tired. Had pushed back at life, challenged it. Now that he had Leena, things had changed again. “Life to me has often just been something I was doing. I was not dead, which meant I lived, which meant I was obligated to act. I never loved my life, was never so concerned with it as some people. So I went on dangerous missions no one else would take, rode motorcycles too fast, jumped out of airplanes.”
“You had a death wish, you mean?”
“Not so much. But there I was, alive. And I was trying to…feel it.”
“By courting death?”
“Makes a sick sort of sense, doesn’t it?”
She looked away from him, down at the filling auditorium. “Yes. It does. What is the name of the show?”
“La Traviata. She dies at the end.”
Jada shot him a deadly glare. “Spoiler alert!”
“It’s hardly a spoiler…it’s opera. She always dies in the end.” He leaned back in his chair, and Jada fell silent. They sat like that until the house lights dimmed, until the curtains below opened.
And the music started. And Jada was on the edge of her seat, her eyes rapt on the stage below them. While she watched the singers, he watched her, watched her shoulders tense, watched her expression contort dramatically when something would happen.
She was so beautiful to him then. So unguarded. He knew that was how people saw him. As unguarded. Perhaps he was, but it was simply because he’d never had anything to protect. He was too numb to hurt.
Jada was so soft inside. She had so much light in her, so many delicate intricacies to her that would be so simple, and so cruel to destroy. It made him worry for her. Made him feel all the more fascinated by her.
By the time intermission came, he found he could hardly breathe, and it had nothing to do with the performance happening on stage.
Jada relaxed, leaning back in her chair. “This is wonderful,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, his throat tight for some reason, “it is.”
She stood and stretched, arching her back, her breasts rising, pushing against the fabric of the gown. Her tension might have dissipated with the halting of the production, but his had not.
He felt like something was going to burst inside of him. Like he was suddenly aware that there was a dam inside of him, a great stone wall holding back the potential for torrential destruction.
And he had to stop it. Had to shore it up with something. Something simple. Something he understood. He stood, his hand shaking, his heart thundering.
Jada looked at Alik and froze. She realized, in that moment, what it was like to be a gazelle, stalked by a predator. Except, she wasn’t going to run. She didn’t know why, only that she wouldn’t.
The opera was mesmerizing. It was all feeling, feeling put to music, so rich and affecting. And even though she didn’t understand the words, it transcended language. It went down deep inside of her, tapped into a well of emotion, a well of need, that she hadn’t known was quite so immense.
And now Alik was looking at her like he wanted her. More than wanted, like he needed her. There was something dark and deadly in his eyes now. Something desperate. And she liked it, responded to it. It was different than the flat nothingness she usually saw there, different than that blasted, false, shallow front he usually put on.
In that moment, as his eyes met hers, everything fell