Page 12 of Claiming Genevieve

I’ll do it,I promise myself. After.

—

I manageto find the time for a small catnap before I need to get ready for dinner, one that I desperately need. My body is tired and sore from the rehearsals that have amped up in preparation for the show, but I don’t sleep well, even with all of the blackout curtains drawn and a silk eye mask pulled down over my eyes to block out any remaining slivers of light that might manage to filter in. The rest that I do get is fitful and comes in small bursts, until my alarm goes off and I sit up with a sigh.

What I want is to stay in, take another hot bath, and maybe allow myself a glass of wine. But instead I pry myself out of bed and head to the shower, turning it up as hot as I can stand and letting out a sigh of relief as the heat sinks into my muscles. When I’m finished, I towel off and put my hair in rollers, letting the curls set while I go and find the dress that Chris requested I wear tonight.

It’s a tight black dress with off-the-shoulder sleeves, showing off my long neck, sharp collarbones, and slim shoulders—all Chris’s favorite features. It stops just a couple of inches above my knees, showing off my other asset that every man I’ve ever met has always loved…my long dancer’s legs. With a pair of high black Dior stilettos added, they’re shown off to their best advantage.

I keep my makeup and jewelry simple, the way Chris likes it—just a pair of sapphire earrings that he gave me as a gift and my diamond tennis bracelet. A small burn of resentment settles in my stomach at the need to dress for him, topleasehim when he’s so clearly given up on pleasing me, but I push it away. There’s no point in thinking about it right now.

After, I remind myself, and head downstairs to meet him.

But the resentment remains. It’s stoked when we go to one of my favorite restaurants, a gorgeous little French bistro, even though Chris should know that my diet is at its strictest right before a show. I look longingly at the menu, at the descriptions of rich French onion soup covered in Gruyère cheese, rich duck breast and lavender crème brûlée, and order a Niçoise salad instead, ignoring the potatoes and hard-boiled eggs as I pick at it and sip my water. Meanwhile, Chris orders the soup, digs into a perfectly cooked steak with Béarnaise sauce and crispy, thin fries dusted with salt, and finishes it off with a chocolate mousse topped with berries.

I look at him, half-listening as he chatters on about accounts at work and a client that he’s taken out to drinks and dinner twice now and is sure he’ll finish a deal with soon, and wonder how I ever found this man tolerable. How I ever thought that there was mutual affection and respect between us.

Or maybe there was, and it’s just that I didn’t see clearly who he really was—a man who would provide those things only as long as he wasn’t yet bored with his toy. That’s what I feel like now—a pretty doll to be dressed up and posed on the other side of a table, listening politely to him brag as he enjoys his dinner.

“Oh,” Chris adds, almost as an afterthought as he dips a teaspoon into his mousse. “I did go to see Vincent. Wrote him a check. He seemed quite pleased.” He looks at me across the table as he says it, his gaze flat, and I don’t miss the meaning behind it. “So I hope I won’t see that redheaded fellow sniffing around you again.” He smiles, the expression pleased, as if he’s won some game that I wasn’t aware we were playing. “You’re mine, Genevieve.” Chris reaches across the table, his thumb sweeping over the back of my knuckles. “My beautiful ballerina.”

My stomach clenches, swooping with a jolt of nausea that wipes away any remaining longing for the rich food I didn’t get to partake in. I’d thought that Chris was tiring of me as much as I was him, but suddenly, I realize that I’ve misjudged the situation once again. He’s clearly stopped caring about my happiness in the relationship, but he’s not ready to let me go.

Thank fuck I decided to wait to break it off,I think, reaching for my water as I paste a smile onto my face. It’s clear that this isn’t going to be the easy breakup that I envisioned.

Hours later, long after Chris has gotten his pleasure from me and I’m sitting on the edge of the bathtub as it fills up, that thought is still lingering in my mind.Should I be worried about breaking up with him?I glance towards the bathroom door, that unsettled feeling that I had when we argued in the theatre hall churning in my stomach again. I’ve never thought of Chris as someone violent, someone who I might need to be careful with if I upset him. I always assumed that if I wanted to end things, I’d tell him, there would be the usual emotional end-of-relationship discussions or arguments, and then it would be over. Painful, but brief, like pulling out a splinter.

But now I’m starting to think it might be more like losing a toenail after months of pointe shoes. Excruciating… and something that has to be handled carefully, to avoid injury.

I bite my lip as I look at the door. I’ve been lucky in my life; I’ve never had to think about how to be careful around a man to avoid him hurting me. I never thought that Chris was that kind of man. But with the way he’s been behaving lately, showing sides of himself that I’ve never seen before—I reach up, touching the side of my cheek, almost still able to feel the pressure of his fingers when he grabbed my face the other day.

Maybe I’ve been wrong about more than I realized.

—

That unsettled feelinglingers until the day of the showcase. I push it away during rehearsals, throwing myself fully into focusing on the performance, but it comes back in the moments in between. I don’t see Chris much—the week before the showcase is full of long days, days where I come home too tired to do much more than manage a tired greeting and then head upstairs for an Epsom salt bath and sleep. Chris is kinder than before, leaving a bouquet of daisies on the counter for me one morning with a note, and late in the week I find a bag of lavender and orange blossom bath salts waiting on the bathroom sink, alongside a bottle of my favorite wine—wine that I don’t dare touch this week, but that I’m looking forward to drinking after the performance all the same. It makes me wonder if maybe I overreacted, if we were just having a fight that went a little too far, if maybe it was even a little bit my fault. I was cold to him, I snapped at him, I didn’t listen to his concerns about Rowan. And they weren’tentirelyunfounded. I remember lying in the bathtub, fingers sliding between my thighs as I breathed in Rowan’s imagined scent, and I feel my cheeks flush with shame.

Rowan pushed too far, but I wasn’t entirely innocent. Fortunately, for the last week, I haven’t seen so much as a single sign of him. He hasn’t popped up at the coffee shop, nor has he made another ill-advised visit to the rehearsal spaces.

Until, of course, the most inopportune moment presents itself for him to show his face.

I hear a knock at my dressing room as I’m getting ready, smoothing my hair back to pin it into a perfect, sleek bun. “Come in,” I call out, expecting it to be one of the other dancers, or Vincent, or even Chris, coming by to give me a quick kiss and encouragement. The way things have been the last week, I half-expect for him to drop by, as a way of continuing to mend things between us.

Instead, when I glance in the mirror to see who walks in, I see Rowan’s copper-colored hair and devastatingly handsome face, that familiar smirk on his lips.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I spin around to face him, seeing as I do that he has a spray of flowers held in one hand—a gorgeous arrangement of pink peonies, white roses, and yellow daffodils.

“Is that any way to speak to a man who brings you flowers?” His Irish accent flows over me like a wave, sending a flood of heat through my core. Even the way hespeakssounds like a smirk, like he never takes anything too seriously, and that thought sends anger quickly flooding after the desire, a different kind of heat.

My entire life has been serious. I’ve pursued one thing with a driven passion that has eclipsed all else, and right now, this man is endangering it—distracting me right at the moment when I need that distraction the least.

“Do they teach seminars on how to pop up when you’re least wanted?” I snap, rising to my feet as he crosses the room toward me. “Because if they do, you’d be an easy pick to lead them.”

“You wound me.” He presses his free hand to his chest, stopping just in front of me with the flowers between us, held outstretched. “I wanted to bring you these,milséan. You mentioned how important today was, and?—”

“If you understood how important it was, you wouldn’t have shown up!” I snatch the flowers from his hand, abruptly throwing them into the garbage can next to my dressing table.

“Genevieve.” Rowan’s voice is suddenly muted, and when I look back up, I see a flash of hurt—real hurt—cross his face. His gaze flicks from the discarded flowers back to me, and I feel my stomach twist, guilt piercing my chest at the sudden expression in his eyes, like a kicked puppy.

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