Savage Vandal (82 Street Vandals #1) - Heather Long Page 0,9

seconds of perfection.

Hopefully, I would be back there once I was in the silks. For now, I stood in the rafters, alone. No one came with me. I would climb into the silks and descend in them without anyone hovering above. Another diva move, but I hated the idea of someone messing with my silks. If I were going to be vulnerable, I would do it on my terms.

So little else in my life conformed to such measures.

While the chorus girls danced, twirled, and performed their lifts, I searched the crowd. The theatre was not fully dark like it was when I was onstage, rather low lighting helped the servers who moved in and out, delivering desserts and coffees.

When I’d given Kestrel’s name to the box office, they’d not even blinked. I never asked for tickets. Not once during this show. They probably couldn’t know I didn’t offer them to anyone else. Why was it important for me to see him out here? To see if he took me up on my offer?

I balanced my damaged ankle against the railing, keeping my legs warmed while I kept the ankle elevated. I’d gone to the medic for a cortisone shot. I didn’t even have to make up a story about what happened. I just said I needed it and he did it. I shouldn’t be performing on it, he told me in a tone so bored, I knew it was just a warning he had to say to cover his own ass.

There.

Dark hair illuminated under the lights as he waved off the waitress flirting with him, her hip jutting and her chest pushed out. Kestrel barely looked at her. Instead, he focused on his… Oh, he had his phone out. I glanced at what the chorus girls were doing. I didn’t have enough time to shift my position, but he’d come to see the show, and warmth blossomed inside of me.

Absolutely ridiculous, like some schoolgirl crush I was far too old and jaded to indulge. Crushes would always result in hideous disappointment if allowed to get too close.

But he couldn’t get close, could he?

In fourteen hours, this town would be in the rearview mirror and I’d forget about it. I didn’t even remember the name now.

I could only hope I forgot Kestrel as easily.

A new town.

A new hotel.

New stagehands.

New drivers.

Same Eric.

Same pain.

For another few months.

Then I was free of it all. I could write my own ticket. No parents to appease. No agent to bow to. No producers to…

A single light flashed from the other side of the rafters. My cue. The silks hung suspended from their moorings, and I loosened the first length to wrap around me as I stepped up onto the railing. The music shifted below, and the audience applauded as the last of the chorus finished.

I’d chosen new pieces to open and close with tonight. Marta would have an apoplexy. So would a few others. I didn’t care. I had to test them out somewhere, and here was where I would do it. Art, I tried to remind them, not that they cared, wasn’t about commerce.

It was about emotion.

As I stepped off the railing and let the silks take my weight, I closed my eyes. My art let me break free from the shackles biting in my skin and the chains weighing down my soul. They let me fly, and a savage sort of satisfaction burst in me as the music began and I rolled downward, the silks unraveling until I hung, suspended.

A body.

A corpse.

A shell.

As I went slack, the silks twirled and I floated in midair. The lights didn’t highlight me so much as leave me in shadow as the blues came up. Gasps of sound. But the audience faded as the first eerie chords of music began to play.

Haunting.

I stretched one arm upward as though awaking from that dark dream where I lived and arched my back. I lifted my eyes to the dark rafters above, but I didn’t see scaffolding and catwalks, but rather a mystic wood and beyond them, the stars.

As I stretched my arm, I wrapped it around the silk and then straightened my whole body. The silk moved around me, shifting with my weight as I increased or decreased the tension. Back arching, I hooked the silk around my calf and dangled so I mimicked a shadow of night falling from the sky. Then a twist, and I turned, gliding as if I’d caught wind, and everything faded except for the