LITMIR.BIZ

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my heart wasn’t supposed to be involved in this.

      “After university, we decided we should take it a step further and go into business together. Our success would be yet another two fingers to the old man. We each put up half the capital. Ash urged caution. He wasn’t sure he liked our potential investors or the fine print. But I didn’t care. I wanted to get the deal done, so I could throw it into my father’s face.”

      He was silent for a long moment, a faraway look on his face that struck me as…sad.

      I wanted nothing more than to go to him, and hold him, and try to somehow make him less alone than he seemed then. But I didn’t quite dare. He was too remote. Too self-contained and forbidding. I liked those things about him, especially during sex.

      But for the first time, I wondered what it must have cost him to become those things. And what he’d lost.

      “I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”

      I tried to keep that ache out of my voice and off my face.

      “We lost everything.” He shook his head. “But when I say that, what I mean is that Ash lost everything. I lost my savings, my father’s respect, and the confidence of the corporate world. But Ash didn’t have what I had. My father might have paid for his schooling, but he didn’t pay for anything else. Whatever I might have lost, I still had a roof over my head and my job in the family company, no matter what. I was not only reckless and out of control, it had literally never occurred to me how much more Ash had to lose.”

      He winced at that, all these years later. And my poor heart kicked at me, foolishly.

      “Sure,” I said. “But you didn’t lose all your money at him, right?”

      Sebastian frowned at me. “As far as Ash was concerned, I was a liar. Untrustworthy and despicable, just like our father, or how else could I have ruined us both so completely? Maybe on some level he was waiting all those years for me to prove that I was no better than the old man. And how could I argue with that? He didn’t want my explanations. Our father died not long after, and left everything to me. It doesn’t surprise me that Ash reckoned I might have known that would happen. Maybe I even went so far as to set him up to take that fall, knowing I’d have it cushy enough in a few years’ time.”

      “That sounds a little far-fetched to me. This is your life you’re talking about, not a soap opera.”

      He let out a short laugh. “You didn’t know my father. When I tell you he was cruel, I mean that. He held grudges forever, but none so potent as the grudges against his own sons. If he was alive he would tell you that had all been in aid of toughening us up. But I doubt it.” Sebastian shook his head. “I think he liked causing us trouble and pain, the more the merrier.”

      “He sounds awful,” I said quietly. Suddenly, my father’s cherry-picked stories and endless mustached years seemed almost cute in comparison. “And I know what it’s like not to have a brother, Sebastian. But I have to think it’s much worse to have one, then lose him. Is there no way…?”

      Sebastian’s expression shut down, like a door slamming shut. “None.”

      “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think my parents know how to love anything, either,” I said. Brightly, even. “Especially not me.”

      And it wasn’t until the words were sitting there between us, like a garnish on the omelet he’d made me, that I realized I’d never said it quite so baldly before. Not to another person, certainly.

      “Maybe that’s not fair,” I continued in a kind of panic before he could say anything. And before I could think better of it. “They might very well love their sophisticated friends. Their summers in Bar Harbor and their season tickets to the opera. But not their daughter.” I pretended I couldn’t hear the catch in my voice. “Definitely not that.”

      “Then they’re fools.” Sebastian’s voice was dark. Stirring. And when he looked at me, that shut-down look faded, to be replaced by a heat I recognized. “And you need to eat, little dancer. You’ll need your stamina.”

      The weeks kept passing. We spent what little time we had free with each other. And slowly but surely, we communicated more the rest of the time. He liked to call me before I went to bed, sometimes purely to hear my voice. Other times so he could whisper filthy things down the line, and the two of us could drive each other crazy while apart.

      I couldn’t possibly say which I liked better. Yes, I would think. Both.

      And it wasn’t until the run up to Christmas—which was to say, Nutcracker season—that I realized it had been more than a month. More than two months, in fact, and going on three. Now and again I daydreamed about throwing it all in and joining Winston’s company. But the bulk of my daydreams were spent on Sebastian.

      And in acting them out.

      I still wasn’t sick of him. He hadn’t irritated me at all.

      But the holidays meant the Knickerbocker put on The Nutcracker, which meant even more shows than usual to meet the demand for Tchaikovsky’s music and the traditional Christmas story. I was impressed that Sebastian had lasted as long as he had, really I was, but there was a reason we call it Nutcracker season.

      Because walnuts weren’t the only nuts it cracked.

      It took out would-be lovers left and right.

      “I’m exhausted,” Annabelle said as we sat on the bench in the studio one December afternoon in what little downtime we had between matinees. “I’ve hit that point when I’m so tired I don’t even want to have sex.”

      I laughed. “A fate worse than death.”

      Annabelle rolled her eyes. “You joke. But losing my libido is like losing a piece of my soul.”

      “Who gets the luxury of a soul this time of year?” our friend Bernard asked from Annabelle’s other side as he bandaged up the calf that was giving him trouble. “You’re lucky if you get to survive. Soul or no soul.”

      And a few nights later, after the third consecutive night in a row that I hadn’t gotten on the phone with him and hadn’t had the energy to respond to a text—after a previous week of much the same—I wasn’t particularly surprised to find Sebastian waiting for me at the stage door after our last performance.

      “Bye-bye, Mr. Penthouse,” Annabelle murmured in my ear as she left me there to deal with the stern, beautiful man in his exquisite suit who stood there next to a long, low car that gleamed beneath the streetlights. But she didn’t say it unkindly.

      I hadn’t told her that I’d met Sebastian at the club. I doubted I would tell anyone that I had ever been to M Club, and certainly not what I’d gotten up to while I’d been there. Instead, I’d told her that I’d met him around the corner from our apartment in our favorite dive bar. Which wasn’t entirely untrue.

      Just my luck, she’d grumbled. I’ve slept with most of New York and I can’t find a man like that. All you have to do is have a single drink on your way back home from a tedious dinner with your parents and it’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, hello Central Park West.

      But she was Annabelle, so her grumpiness had quickly turned into support.

      We all knew how rare it was for something to survive our grueling schedule. I got more than a few sympathetic looks from other members of the company as they streamed past me, until they were swallowed up in the cold New York night.

      I was bone tired, so tired that I thought I might actually burst into tears, and I didn’t want that. Not when I was very much afraid that he was about to break my heart all on his own. You need to save your tears, Darcy, I told myself sternly.

      I let him usher me into his car, and slumped there bonelessly on the wide back seat as he slid in after me. The car pulled away from the curb and I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing that I had paid more attention to those rules he’d laid out at the beginning.

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