Page 2 of Wristlocked
Everyone’s favorite rumors say he was hustling on street corners in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district when she picked him up. It’s a great story—dirty and a little dangerous, with the perfect mix ofCinderellaand scandal. But the truth is, Celeste found him training with a social circus out of Kinetic Arts in Oakland and brought him back to ACCA when he was seventeen. Whether she was sleeping with him already at that point or waited until he was eighteen and officially enrolled is anyone’s guess. If she was, she was careful about it. Coaching careers don’t survive that shit anymore, and as the head of the top professional circus school in the country, she had a lot to lose. But now that he’s twenty, she parades him all over Vegas, and no one can say she didn’t recruit him for a reason. The guy is insanely talented.
Lyot thinks I quit trapeze because I was bored and wanted to give my parents the finger. He believes I picked up the straps so we could work together at ACCA and because it’s one of the hardest, most painful disciplines, and he knows my demons. It’s all true. But the real reason, the one he doesn’t know, is Gale Shepard.
Two years ago, Lyot and I snuck out to see the ACCA Holiday Showcase while my parents were in Vale. Gale wasn’t even a student yet, merely a curiosity, but Celeste gave him a spot in the show anyway. It was early in the first act, before anyone expected anything impressive, and the lights came up on this kid with a green mohawk, huddled in the center of the stage. Bound, hands already in the wristlocks hanging above his bent head, he looked chained, captured, beaten, and all I could feel in the darkness was this hollow, aching echo of my own life.
I know how it sounds. Poor little princess beating herself against the bars of her gilded cage. No one watching me on the trapeze back then would ever know my wings were clipped—that it had become safe, predictable. That the talent everyone marveled at had never felt like my own. I’d been drifting, pretending to chase something I was no longer sure was even there.
I sat in that theater, barely breathing, Lyot holding my hand with bright, excited eyes. The beat of the music broke, and this kid I’d never seen before exploded across the fucking stage. There was no finesse, no polish. The technique was messy and flawed and raw. But therage.The rage was exquisite.
This was pain I could break myself on.
He wound himself in the straps and beat against the air like a jailbreak until I drowned in his flames, and when it was over, I knew.Thiswas what I wanted.
Now I’m staring at him across the lounge. He’s older and has filled out, with the lats and shoulders that go with straps. Black ink peeks around the side of his neck from beneath the gray tank top hugging his muscular torso. The mohawk is gone, replaced by dirty-blond waves brushing his cheekbones, and he has a piercing in the center of his bottom lip that he runs his tongue over as he bends his head to whatever the girl is saying.
Something primal unfurls inside me at the sight of him, and heat prickles over my skin. My fingers tighten painfully around the poles of my trolley, seeking purchase. Or sanity. If he looks up—if I see what nightmare lives behind his eyes and gives birth to his incandescent fury—the undertow might consume me.
What happens when we meet our dreams, and our dreams are nightmares?
Lyot calls my name, the sound nearly lost to the rushing blood in my veins. Gale’s blond head snaps up at the sound and tracks to where I’m standing frozen and exposed, clutching my cart. I think I stop breathing when his green eyes snag mine, smoldering with that magnetic wrath. I am floored by the intimacy of it as my monster stretches and unfurls inside me, reaching for him.
“Gia,” Lyot says again, right in front of me now, although I never saw him move. He glances at Gale, frowning, then back at me. “Ready for that shower?”
I force a smile to show I’m with him. Lyot, who doesn’t deserve me keeping secrets, who’s done everything right since the day I met him. Who probably saved me from running away a dozen times during my adolescent years, when my hatred for my parents was a visceral thing that lived in my chest. Lyot, who took part of the monster inside me and didn’t try to tame it but instead surrendered and gave it a new name.
2
Gale
“Who’s the new hottie?” Carmen asks, watching Naomi run across the carpet and throw herself on a tall guy with dark ringlets skating toward the elevators on one of the luggage carts.
I shrug, ignoring the pathetic attempt to make me jealous, and go back to my phone. I couldn’t give less of a fuck if she thinks some guy is hot. Gia Laurent is starting at ACCA this year, and I have research to do.
After seeing her name in the admissions folder, I spent hours scouring the internet for every trace of her. What I found were several videos of a child prodigy, including clips of her early performances and interviews with her parents. I watched her grow from a tiny dynamo to a coltish pro, all too-long legs and tight ponytails, but in the last few years, there was almost nothing. One shitty audience video of a cabaret show last year from someone’s phone. She’s a ghost on social media. Private Instagram, no TikTok. I don’t know a single person in our generation trying to make a name for themselves in cirque who isn’t constantly self-promoting, but not this girl. She took her legend and disappeared off the face of the fucking earth.
I don’t find anything new, and Carmen won’t stop pestering me about what I’m looking for, so after a few minutes, I give it up.
“Nothing,” I say, dropping my phone into my lap and running a hand through my hair in frustration. Then a low voice calls, “Gia,” and my head snaps up.
Naomi’s hottie suddenly got a lot more interesting.
I track his gaze, and there she is. Gia Laurent in the fucking flesh.
The woman clutching another wheeled cart, staring directly at me, has definitely grown into the legs and hair.
She looks like a fucking wet dream, dressed in a black tank top that highlights her aerialist muscles and the creamy swell of her breasts. Blue leggings hug her ass and thighs, cropped to expose the pale arch of her calves, and bare toes peek from some kind of heeled sandals.
Her blue eyes hit me like a lightning bolt, clear and deadly, and a darkness surges inside me, dimming the world at its edges until it narrows to the two of us. All the blood rushes to my cock as Naomi returns and Carmen says something lost to the roaring in my ears.
What the actual fuck?
A gray T-shirt fills my view, blocking out those siren eyes and the wildfire of her hair. The face attached to the broad back looks my way, full lips pulled down in confusion. A sentiment I can sympathize with at the moment.
“That’s Lyot—Elliot Chace,” Naomi says like it’s supposed to mean something to me. Like I haven’t silently vowed to obliterate the guy. It obviously means something to Viktor, though, because he actually sits up from where he’s been ostensibly napping on the opposite couch and looks over his shoulder.
“Lyot Chace is gay,” he says. “Mattias hooked up with him after Viva last year. Called him the best fucking lay of his life. Wouldn’t shut up about it for weeks.” He sounds mildly grumpy, even though he and Mattias have never been anything but an occasional booty call.
“Who the fuck is Elliot Chace?” I ask, feigning boredom. “Besides a twink’s wet dream, apparently.” And someone who looks pretty fucking friendly with Gia Laurent, judging by the possessive way he’s hovering over her as they steer their trolleys toward the elevator.
