Page 8 of Unlocked Dive
So they’re understandably confused by my current change of heart.
“I was still on drugs in December.”
“Enough.” My father, less than amused by my flippant comment, slaps his hand down on the kitchen counter hard enough to rattle the decorative bowl of oranges against the marble. “You spoke to Regina yourself last week. You’re committed.”
“Echo,” my mother tries again, resting a manicured hand on his sleeve. “You told us you were ready. What’s happened in the last six days to change your mind?”
I drop my head onto my folded arms with a groan. I’m not ready. I was just willing to fake it and hope that somehow,magically, my confidence might reemerge if I got the fuck away from the scene of the crime. But somethinghaschanged.
Byrd fucking Baardwijk.
Regina “Call me Reggie” Blake, lord and master of my precarious future, was so excited to tell me who she’d recruited to handle my evaluation.
“He’s been one of the top talent scouts for Cirque du Soleil for the past six years, and he’s an old friend of mine and a Cici alumnus. He has a private studio in Mendocino where you can focus on your training without any distractions.”
Except, when I look him up online, I discover that my new “coach” is definitely going to be a serious fucking distraction.
His headshot on the Cirque website isn’t so bad—wavy chestnut hair pulled back from a face a little too fine to be called rugged, even with the short beard clinging to the strong line of his jaw. Full lips, curved up at one corner like the photographer caught him halfway to forgetting the professional setting, with the faintest crinkles tickling the corners of his clear hazel eyes. Almost devastating. Not quite dangerous. Sexy but approachable.
Thirty-two years old. Probably straight. Totally not my type.
But his bio says he performed on the rope for three years with Zircus Weber out of Germany, and since it’s the twenty-first century, I go internet stalking. There isn’t much from his touring days, but I find an old promo reel in the bowels of YouTube.
Byrd Baardwijk, shirtless on the rope in black and white, with wavy hair falling in his eyes and muscles coiling across his shoulders and along his back, dancing through the ether above a dark stage.
I jack off to it twice, and then another half-dozen times over the next few days, and nowhere in my filthy fantasies is the shattered, useless version of myself I now inhabit.
So I tell my parents no, but I lose that skirmish too, of course.
One week later, I’m standing in a cold drizzle next to a Charlie Brown statue outside the smallest airport I’ve ever seen, waiting to go to battle with the last of my pride.
5
Byrd
Iforgot about the idiots on the 128, gawking at the lush scenery and crawling past the turnouts at thirty-five miles an hour on their way back to the city. So I’m irritated, irrationally nervous, and twenty minutes late picking up Jericho Wash.
“He’s nothing like his brother,”Reggie had assured me.“I wouldn’t send him to you if I thought he was going to dig up old graves.”
From anyone else, I’d take it with a grain of salt and think they were placating me, but Reggie was the one who picked up the pieces when Gabriel and I went down in flames at the end of our senior year. I trust her judgment, the way I should have back then, but I’m still on edge. She sent me the kid’s file along with the contract documents, including a link to his first-round audition video, but despite her reassurances, I’m too chickenshit to watch it.
I tell myself it’s for all the same reasons I always go into auditions blind—I like my eyes fresh and my critical brain uncluttered by expectation. But my objectivity is unraveling with every winding mile, tidal memories undercutting the promise of novelty.
When I pull around the curb outside the airport, my eyes slide right past the young man in faded jeans, smoking a cigarette with his white Stone Island hoodie pulled up against the insistent drizzle. I’m looking for a slight build, for dark curls and drama. I’m expectingrecognition. But the Santa Rosa airport is ridiculously small—one gate, one building, with a pickup lane only four spaces long—and I’m late. After a quick glance at the shadowed overhang guarding the single entrance, I realize this guy is it.
I bring the 4-Runner to a stop in front of him and roll the passenger window down, then lean across the console to call his name.
“Jericho Wash?”
He lifts his head and meets my eyes, and something hot that should feel like relief but is too electric carves itself across my chest. He has the porcelain skin, but that’s the last resemblance. The eyes are still blue, but where Gabriel’s were dark and fathomless, these are bright and brilliant, the color as unreal as the shock of hair escaping beneath his hood to cling wetly to his face. He looks like a character from one of the video games James and I would play on Sundays while Lara was out with her girlfriends. Something out ofFinal FantasyorAssassin’s Creed; beauty like the edge of a knife.
Then he pulls the cigarette from his lips with a half smile, and the wide mouth breaks the illusion, rendering him human, if no less dangerous.
“Toss the cigarette and grab your shit.” It comes out colder than I intend, or maybe it only sounds that way through the pounding pulse in my ears.
He ignores me, leaning his elbows on the open window, filling my space with the rich, bitter scent of tobacco and, underneath, something liquid and clean.
“It’s organic,” he says, meaning nothing. Meaning the cigarette, meaning the way his shoulders fill the window frame and the cerulean tips of his hair drip water on the warm leather passenger seat.
