Page 9 of The Failed Audition

I shake my head.

“Straight-laced…” His hand glides along my spine. My pulse kicks up an extra notch. “Back rigid, legs locked upon landing.” His fingers brush the nape of my neck, and heat gathers across my skin. “Never split apart.”

I keep breathing deeply from my nose. “I take risks,” is all I say. I’m here. I’m in Vegas.That is a bigger risk than anything I’ve done before.

He digests this fact. Or maybe he considers it an opinion. “Tell me your name,” he says. “And speak loudly and clearly so everyone can hear.”

I lick my dry lips. “Thora,” I say proudly.

“Thora,” he repeats, that charming smile rising again. “You know the game.”I don’t.“But for everyone who’s just arrived, I’ll explain.” He rests his hand on my shoulder, and he addresses the gathering crowd. “I bet Thora, this cute gymnast…” I space out at that.

Cute.

Shay called me that once, and he added with a laugh, “That’s what you call an unsexy friend.” I pushed his arm, and he nearly tripped into a campus bench. Shay’s definition blinds me now.

An unsexy friend.

“…that she can’t beat me in a handstand competition.”

Wait. I blink a couple times, retraining my mind on the important parts of Nikolai’s statement. Backtracking:I bet Thora that she can’t beat me in a handstand competition.A handstand competition? It nearly squashes my fears. I can do that. Easy.

“One-handed,” Nikolai adds.

Okay…that increases the difficulty. And he’s a guy, but I can beat him. Right?Yes you can, Thora James.Pom-poms are waving in my brain (Go, Thora, Go!) My own cheering squad. Confidence builds. Maybe misplaced confidence, but I try not to think about that.

The crowd breaks to let a server pass through. She enters the circle with a tray of shots.

Nikolai gestures to the shot glasses, a shiny silver watch attached to his wrist. “Three for her, three for me.” His eyes drop to my feet. “The shoes won’t really help you, myshka. But it was a cute gesture.”

It clicks.

He thought I wore workout clothes for this specific reason—to participate inthisbet. Wrong place. Wrong time.

“I didn’t mean for it to be anything,” I tell him.

He remains stoic, not really commenting on my comment. He just passes me a shot and takes one for himself. “I’ve been drinking since ten, so I don’t have much of an advantage. This is as fair as it can be.”

“Okay…”

“Tattoo or piercing?” he asks.

Inside, I startle like a frightened cat. Outside, I can barely move enough to shake my head. I’m about to say,I have neither, but he speaks before I can.

“If you lose,” he clarifies, more to the crowd than to me again, “I tattoo or pierce you. I choose where. If I lose, though I never have before, you can tattoo me. Anything you like, any place on my body.”

I restrain this fear that swarms my insides. So the terms of the bet are more than a little steep. They’reinsane. I glance around, and the spectators watch in crazed anticipation, beady-eyed and alert.

The stupid thing: I don’t want to back out.

I want to obtain his power. I want his magic and his confidence. Maybe it’s my competitive spirit or Vegas insanity, but I stay put. It’s like watching a tornado through the window, the windstorm blowing the curtains and peeling off the roof. I don’t disappear into the basement for safety. I watch in curiosity, to see how near it reaches. Leaving means never feeling the pull, never seeing the mighty force up close—never experiencing something that I’ll always re-envision. I’ll construct that tornado piece-by-piece, a replica of what it really was. A fragment of what I could’ve seen.

I no longer want to live in fantasy.

I want the images in my mind to be real.

It’s why I’m in Vegas after all. Following my dreams.

I lick my chapped lips and straighten my back. “A piercing,” I choose. It’s more temporary than a tattoo.

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