Page 33 of Teach Me to Fly

She hesitates, taking a sip before setting her mug down. “Yeah, how about you?”

I consider her for a moment. Should I pretend like nothing happened? Or should I bring it up and see if she opens up to me? I stand and walk over to the sink.

“I was,” I say lightly, rinsing my empty cup and placing it in the sink. “Until I heard you scream and figured someone must have broken in to kill you.” I raise an eyebrow, attempting for humour to soften the delivery. “Then I stayed up the rest of the night wondering if I was next.”

She spins to face me, eyes wide with alarm. “I screamed?”

“Loud enough to wake the dead,” I confirm with a nod. “Do you do that often?”

She swallows hard, gaze falling to the floor. “Sometimes,” she says quietly. “But I usually wake myself up before it gets bad.”

I face her and lean my hip against the counter, crossing my arms over my chest.

“I thought I heard you say the name Alec at one point,” I say, testing the waters.

She takes a shaky step back as soon as his name leaves my lips, her hip hitting the side of the counter. She has the same look of panic on her face that she had yesterday when we almost tried the lift.

“I was starting to wonder if you’d broken one of our rules and brought a guy over.” When she doesn’t say anything, I keep going. “He was your partner at the Big Apple, right? Were you two dati?—”

“I decided on another rule,” she says quickly, voice trembling. “No more asking about anything to do with New York.”

She turns on her heel and walks out the front door, leaving her steaming coffee behind on the counter, and I know then and there that whatever happened in New York was bad. I stay frozen for a beat, staring at the door she left open, long enough to let in the morning chill before I pick up her mug and walk it to the sink.

Her reaction said more than any answer could have. Whatever Alec did, it’s something that buried itself inside her and stayed there like rot. My mind won’t stop building its own narrative, stacking possibilities of what he could have done.

Did he hurt her during rehearsal? Like drop her during a lift?

My grip tightens on the ceramic as I try to breathe through the rising anger and keep from letting the storm inside of me spill out, but then I picture her flinching away from me in the studio, and lying in bed, twisted in the sheets, crying, begging him to stop.

Did he force her to do something she didn’t want to?

I see it—and I feel it. The violence of it; the violation—and I know that in that moment Alec took a piece of her she’ll never get back. Something inside me snaps as I close my eyes and clench my jaw so tight my teeth ache. I slam the mug into the sink harder than I intend, hearing the sharp crack of ceramic on porcelain followed by a shatter.

Glass fragments burst in every direction like shrapnelwhile I stand there, chest heaving, my hands braced on either side of the basin, staring down at the broken pieces. If I find out Alec laid a hand on her—if he’s the reason she’s like this—God help him if I ever see his fucking face.

I findAngelique at the estate studio ten minutes later. She's already stretching at the barre when I walk in, her posture tense. She doesn’t see me yet, so I say nothing, choosing to watch for a moment instead.

Her energy used to be so loud when we were younger, and I remember watching her curiously back then, too. I couldn't understand how someone could light up a room the way she had. I'd always been jealous of Lando for having someone like that in his life, someone to brighten up the dark days.

But she's different now, more guarded. Grief did that to her when her dad died. I remember how empty she looked afterward, like the light had been siphoned out and no one noticed except me. Losing him hollowed her out in ways I think only I fully understood.

She still looks empty inside now, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with her dad, and all to do with why she moved back to Marlow. What would happen if she ever trusted me enough to let me in again and tell me what happened in New York? But what if she tells me something horrible? What then? Do I fly to New York? Beat the shit out of the person who hurt her?

Yes, I growl in my head.

But even I can admit that’d be an overstep on my end. She’s not my friend, and she sure as hell isn’t mine. Not anymore. Yet I can’t help but feel protective of her, curiouseven. But curiosity can turn cruel when you don’t have the heart to follow through.

I don’t believe in love, not the way people talk about it, like it’s some kind of salvation. Not since I’ve learned that love is just another word for leaving. For breaking things that don’t deserve to be broken. I've lived under the philosophy that people always leave. No matter how tightly you hold them, they find the door eventually. Because love is a temporary, fleeting feeling.

And Angelique? She already looks like she’s barely holding herself together. The last thing she needs is someone like me getting too close, because if she ever lets me in again, I don’t know that I’ll be able to give her anything real, and I sure as hell don’t want to be the one who ruins her any more than she already is.

I watch her closely, noticing how she avoids looking at the mirrored wall, avoids looking at herself. If she had glanced that way, just once, she would have seen me already.

"There you are,” I say, pretending not to notice when she startles. “Wasn’t sure you’d still come.”

She stands up straighter and wipes her hands before tugging her sleeves lower.

“Yeah, well. The show must go on, right?” She looks around the studio, her eyes softening. “I never had time to say it last time we were in here, but this place hasn’t changed much.”

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