Page 18 of Once Upon a Dream
“My father only wants one thing from me—to see me become a principal dancer—and he’d do anything to see it happen. Have me followed. Threaten me. Take away things I love. I’m used to it.”
She hugged her legs up to her chest, propping her battered feet on the seat of the bench. She leaned her head on her knees and looked at him, golden bun shimmering in the moonlight. She looked like a Degas painting, unreal and gauzily elegant. There was no approaching her, no reaching her dreamy soul through the paint. Forever untouchable.
“What will happen if he finds out about Persepolis?” Cal asked, even though he shouldn’t. It was none of his business, and worse, the more he knew, the harder it would be to do his job. And he wasn’t in a place where he could walk away from six hundred dollars and feel good about his month.
Tamsin lifted her shoulder in a gesture like a shrug, keeping her head on her knees. “He’ll be angry,” she said, voice blank.
It’s none of your business, Cal, none o
f your business. Don’t go there, don’t even ask—
“Does he beat you?”
Cal didn’t consent to the question leaving his mouth, it just did. But he suddenly needed to know, with gut-twisting urgency, whether Purkiss was hurting Tamsin. He couldn’t afford to lose the money…but he didn’t know if his conscience could afford six hundred dollars subsidized by this girl getting the shit kicked out of her by her teacher-dad.
Tamsin didn’t answer the question, just unfolded her long limbs and stood, grabbing for her pointe shoes. “Don’t worry about me,” she said shortly. “I’ll survive.”
“Tamsin.”
Her eyes flared in the dark and she stepped closer to him. In the daylight they were a soft gray, but now they were shimmering pools of silver. “Why are you so worried about it?”
Cal didn’t have a ready answer for that. Only the truth. “I don’t know.”
She studied him for a moment longer, silver eyes scorching across his face and down his neck to his body and back up again. He was fit, he knew that much, but it had been a while since he cared what a woman thought of the way he looked. And so it was like a gift when she met his eyes again and her face was flushed.
“Goodbye, Cal,” she said and left.
Cal watched her go with a clench in his chest that he hadn’t felt in years. He would be back tomorrow night, he knew that much for certain, but what he didn’t know was whether it was to do his fucking job or whether it was to screw this job altogether.
He only knew he couldn’t wait to find out.
2
Night Two
Tamsin
They weren’t in a show tonight, but Mistress Hell had said they could come any night they wanted, and so they did. The night after a man named Cal Dugan stepped out of the darkness to speak to her, they decanted themselves from a bedroom window onto a wide tree branch, dropped to the ground and escaped to Persepolis.
The other girls chattered and gossiped—who did they want to see tonight, who did they want to fuck? She stayed silent through all of it. She didn’t make it their business what she did at Persepolis, she didn’t make it her business to know theirs. And she hadn’t told them about Cal yet, even though he could bring hell raining down on their heads the moment he decided to do his job.
But she watched for him. As they crawled out of the window, as they drove, as they parked. She watched for him. She’d only gotten the barest sense of him in the moonlight, but it was enough to make it hard to shake the thought of him. He was older, forty maybe, and built like a fucking wall. Over six foot five, surely, with broad shoulders and wide swathes of muscle that his black T-shirt couldn’t hide. He could have picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder and disappeared with her into the dark, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.
It was shocking how inflaming that thought was.
His face, too—even hidden in the moonlight, there had been the stubbled edge of a proud jaw, the flash of eyes that spoke of experience and worldliness and knowledge—and all of that had been in his hard voice too. Everything about him screamed of the kinds of secrets she’d come to Persepolis to learn, only she hadn’t felt half as terrified, half as wildly aroused at the sight of canes and cuffs as she had at the sight of Cal in the dark. Cal was the kind of dangerous she’d been craving, Cal was the kind of knowledge she was so desperate to know.
And when she’d woken up and the day went as it should, teaching the classes of younger dancers, her father yelling at her but no more than usual, she knew that Cal hadn’t betrayed them.
Yet.
Persepolis was busy tonight—a high-profile Dom and sub were showing off tonight—and it was a Friday. The rich and powerful were out to play, and not for the first time, Tamsin sent up a prayer of thanks to whichever deity had seen fit to send Mistress Hell to their spring show. Whichever fit of attraction had compelled Hell to approach them and offer to introduce them to the club.
She supposed the line between kink and ballet was fairly blurry when you considered it. Pain and beauty in constant exchange. Entire lifestyles built on passion and discipline.
The girls flitted off the moment they stepped into the playroom, little wisps of sex on pointe shoes, caught by eager hands before they could drift very far. Tamsin herself, she decided to watch the show. She’d been back in a private playroom once or twice, and it’d never carried the taste of taboo she craved, not really. It all felt so…sedate. So safe. A leap with no risk of a fall. And so she was glad the other girls were happy enough here, but she didn’t need to engage in disappointing liaisons night after night to know that she wasn’t going to find what she was looking for.
“Back again?” a rough voice asked from behind her. It felt like that voice leaked into every crack in her armor; it blew in like cold, exhilarating rain.
