Page 6 of Unlocked Dive
Reggie studies her nails, pointedly ignoring his narrowed gaze.
“I was just asking Coen about his own audition piece. Coach Fleming has been hounding him. He’s being annoyingly secretive,but I’m sure you’ve been helping him come up with ideas?” Her blithely feigned innocence fools exactly no one.
“You want to audition?” Gabriel rounds on me. “I thought you decided against it.”
“I did.” My fingers skate over his jaw before he bats my hand away, and I swallow the dull sting of rejection. Rebellion flickers in its wake. “But I am getting a lot of pressure to change my mind. Not just from Reggie.”
I shift awkwardly in the silent standoff that follows, the futile hope that the two of them might someday stop tugging me apart beating against the mounting pressure in my ears. With his uncanny knack for knowing when I’m approaching critical, Gabriel breaks the tension with one of his electric smiles.
“I guess you should do it, then.” His arms snake around my waist. “But let’s talk about it later. Right now I need a shower. Wanna come help me get all nice andclean?” His tone promises scandal and sin, and my ears heat as blood rushes to all the inconvenient places.
“I’ll let Fleming know to add you to the list,” Reggie calls as he drags me away, but I barely notice through the eager thrill hijacking my limbs. My brain is already drowning in images of wet, naked Gabriel.
I win the spot.
Gabriel is understandably furious, raging against my selfishness and accusing me of putting my fledgling career before our relationship. Only the withering disappointment in Reggie’s eyes when I dare to broach the subject keeps me from turning the Circolo showrunners down.
The weeks leading up to the performance are a torment of casual cruelty and sullen withdrawal, chipping away at my precarious pride. My act becomes a liturgy of heartbreak, every move wrought to the cadence of lonely desperation that fuels my hours.
My rehearsals leave Reggie in tears, but the coaches and the audience eat it up, and my parents are beamingly proud on opening night. Even my teenage sister manages to attend without adding any heedless drama.
But the one person I needed to show up is conspicuously absent, and none of the accolades can protect me from the fallout.
I spend my last six months at school nursing a shattered heart and graduate with only the merciless final lesson etched beneath the pieces:
Holding on to love means giving up the spotlight for a brighter flame.
4
Echo
“I’m not going.”
“Jericho.” My father is losing patience.
“Echo.” My mom’s voice is softer, pleading. “You already agreed to it. You’ve known since December that this was coming.”
“I was still on drugs in December.”
That’s a lie. I flushed the painkillers three days after getting home from the hospital, on the day I should have been flying to Amsterdam. It was that or down the whole bottle.
Instead, I got way too drunk with my friend Asha until it seemed like a good idea to go through the NCC student social accounts and pick out all the guys I would’ve fucked if I’d actually been there.
I should have taken the fucking Percocet.
When Regina Blake herself called my dad before Christmas to lay out the conditions of her offer, of course I said yes, even though I despised the idea. It felt like auditioning all over again, only this time, I wasn’t confident about passing. My father was so smug that the school was willing to pay forfour months of personal training to make sure I passed the evaluation. It proved they were invested in me and had faith in my full recovery. All I had to do was show up and do what I always did—be perfect. Be Echo.
I’m starting to hate my fucking name.
The cast was two months gone at that point—two months of occupational therapy to get me back to the point where I could close my fingers tight enough to feel the fiber core of the rope through the canvas sheath—and Regina gave me until the end of March to get ready. To build back the corded strength in my forearm and remember all the ways I could fly.
I haven’t been back to the Center. I’m still too much of a liability for their insurance. It’s also full of people who’ve never seen me falter, and I can’t fucking face it. Can’t bear to see myself rendered small and ordinary where I’ve always been larger than life. My dad bought a new mat, four inches thicker and twice as wide as the one I cursed with my calamity, and tossed me back in my studio, careless with all the confidence I no longer possess.
Start small.
Start safe.
Start over.
