Page 15 of Claiming Genevieve

And here I am, still in my dressing room, arguing with my boyfriend.

“I need to go,” I say as firmly and calmly as I can. “I can’t be late, Chris. I have a performance to get to.”

He holds my gaze, and for a moment, I think he’s not going to back down, that there’s something else he wants from me. But he finally takes a step back, his expression clearing as if nothing ever happened between us.

“I’ll be out in the audience,” he says finally, his voice cool and calm. And then, a smile spreads across his face. “Break a leg, Genevieve.”

A chill runs down my spine. It’s a common enough sentiment. A normal thing to say, on its face. And that small voice whispers once again that I’m overreacting, even as I feel my stomach cramp with an uneasy foreboding as Chris stalks out of my dressing room.

I sink down onto my chair again, trying to calm my racing heart and trembling fingers. I smooth my hair back, focusing on making sure my bun is perfect, my makeup flawless, that everything about my appearance and my costume is exactly as it should be. I need to put both Rowan and Chris out of my head. Starting now, until the performance is over, there should be nothing else on my mind.

I have tofocus.

Taking a slow breath, I try to meditate for a few moments, to clear my head of everything except the routine that I’ve rehearsed over and over. I try to push all of the unease and foreboding and anger out of my body, replacing it with the joy and anticipation that I usually feel before a performance. But today, those negative feelings seem impossible to shake, and that just brings the anger back, because Iwantto enjoy this. I want to feel all the rush of emotion and the joy of performing that I usually do.

My entire life is devoted to this. No one should be able to take it away from me.

Taking another deep breath, I open my eyes and look at my reflection in the mirror. A ballerina gazes back at me, her stage makeup perfect, her dark hair smoothed back without a hair out of place, her body lean and lithe and ready for the challenge ahead.

I stand up slowly, take one more slow breath, and reach for my pointe shoes.

Backstage, I’m able to focus a little better. The dancers gathering brings an energy that feeds me, that makes me feel more alive, and it pushes the arguments with Rowan and Chris to the back of my mind. Marie is sitting on the floor, lacing up her pointe shoes, and I sink down on the chair next to her, checking my shoes to make sure that they’re perfect before slipping the first one onto my foot.

“You’re later than usual,” Marie says, glancing up at me as she secures the ribbons around one ankle. “Are you okay?”

My stomach tightens, the reminder bringing back all of the emotion that I’ve been trying to banish. “Fine,” I say quickly, a little more curtly than I mean to. “Chris just stopped by to talk. He held me up for a few minutes.”

“Oooh.” Marie waggles her eyebrows in a way that makes it clear that she’s imagining something that definitely didnothappen. “Lucky,” she whispers, and I force a smile that makes it seem as if I’m playing along. Better that than her figuring out we had an argument—gossip moves through the ballet company with the speed of sound, and the dancers love a good drama.

The orchestra is warming up, and I feel a flutter of nerves rush through my stomach. These feel different from my usual pre-performance nerves, less like excited butterflies and more like anxiety. I bite my lip, trying to focus on tying the ribbons of my pointe shoes, to find comfort in the familiar routine. But my pre-show routine has been completely thrown off, and my thoughts keep drifting back to Rowan and Chris…but Rowan most of all. Particularly the look of real hurt on his face when I threw his flowers into the trash.

Calm down. Focus. Don’t think about him. Either of them.I repeat it over and over in my head like a mantra, focusing on loosening my muscles, on calming my breathing, on running my steps through my head. On what’s just ahead of me, not what’s behind.

Usually, when I step out onto the stage, everything else disappears. The lights make it impossible to see anything but blackness if I look out toward the audience, except for maybe the very first couple of rows, so it’s easy to let them disappear, to lose myself in the character and the dance and become who I’m meant to be portraying. But tonight, I catch myself glancing out toward that black, cavernous void, and I know Chris is out there.

I used to love the idea of him watching me. I’ve always loved performing, and I can think of nothing better than performing for someone who loves you. My relationship with Chris has never been about love, but it was the closest I thought I would get to that feeling. With no family to sit in the audience and watch me, his presence was the one that made me feel as if I was dancing for someone who valued me for everything I had worked so hard for.

Now, I wonder if he’s watching me not with pride, but with a critical eye, determining if I’m still enough. If I’m worth what he’s paying to own me. Everything that’s happened since the night of the party has colored our relationship differently, and now I feel a sliver of nausea in my stomach at the thought.

It’s joined by a different kind of slithering heat as I wonder if Rowan is out there, too. If he left after our argument, or if he stayed to watch me dance—really dance—for the first time. That heat blooms through me at the thought of those emerald eyes on me, taking me in,wantingme, and for the first time since my first class at Juilliard, I miss a step.

It’s a small mistake. Something so tiny that even the most discerning audience member wouldn’t notice—and even the other dancers might not, though I know Mme. Allard certainly will. I force myself to refocus, to slip back into the choreography, but I know I’m thrown off. This is far from my best performance, and even if I can recover, it will be a disappointment.

A disappointment. All these years, all this work, and a man is your undoing.The needling, nagging voice in my head digs in, teeth sinking into my brain, chewing at me with an anxiety that worms under my skin and through my body. Even before I lift off my feet into the grand jeté, I know that something is wrong. That I haven’t executed it perfectly.

Some part of me knows what’s about to happen even before I land, and my foot crumples beneath me.

I hear the audience gasp as I fall to the stage floor, a ripple of sound passing through that blackness just beyond me. I hear the discordant sound of a violin as a player misses their note, distracted by what’s happening from just above the pit. I hear the orchestra slowly come to a stop, stuttering as instrument after instrument ceases, until there’s nothing but silence—and the low hum of the audience whispering.

And there’s pain. Shooting up my ankle into my calf, leaving me breathless as I lie there dizzy on the floor, my forehead pressed to the cool wood. The pain throbs through me, and I know I should move, ask for help, try to get up—but I can’t. The pain in my ankle is nothing compared to the greater pain in my chest, my heart fissuring and cracking as I try to fight back reality.

I have no idea how bad the injury really is, but I don’t need to know specifics to know that this is devastating. This is every ballerina’s worst nightmare. And it’s happening to me, right now.

I feel hands on my arms, helping me up. Mme. Allard’s sharp voice, directing the other dancers. As I’m helped up, I see the worried face of a paramedic—two paramedics, helping me onto a stretcher.I should make this easier on them, I think—I’m not so badly hurt that I couldn’t take some burden off of them getting me out of here, but I can’t seem to make any part of my body move. Not in a way that makes me think that I’m paralyzed, or anything so terrible as that, but I can feel that I’m numb with shock, frozen by it. The signals that my brain needs to send to my muscles to tell them to move don’t seem to be able to catch up.

“We’re going to get you to a hospital, ma’am,” one of the paramedics says, quickly shining a light in my eyes. “We’ll get that injury looked at, I promise.”

The woman next to me says something else, something that I think is meant to be soothing—about how the injury doesn’t look as bad as it probably feels, but it does nothing to ease the panic in my chest.Anyleg injury could be a career-ending one for me, particularly at the point in my career that I’ve reached.

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