CREATURE

・chapter 43・

Asya tiptoed around the carpet in front of her cupboard, flicking through the hangers to assess her options for the evening. She was fresh out of the shower, bundled up in a bathrobe while she tried putting together something suitable to wear. It was proving more complicated than she initially thought, but she had only herself to blame for that.

Well, herself, and the mildly self-destructive mood she was in.

She sighed, half-heartedly holding up an ashy lilac shift dress to her torso before putting it back on the rack. No, there was something about the final calendar day of the year that had her craving something a little more risky than she'd usually wear, and she had a feeling that none of the airy neutrals in her cupboard were going to do it justice.

'Find anything?' Roman called from the livingroom.

She glanced at where he lay stretched out on the couch. Seemingly for a lack of anything better to do to pass his time, he'd turned up at her door an hour earlier and asked if she needed help getting ready. She'd told him that she didn't, especially not from a man who had reverted to type and not even bothered with a tie for that evening. Although, to his credit, he did have a dinner jacket slung over his shoulder this time around. Regardless, she'd told him she had it under control and stuck him on the couch with a documentary about Antarctica to keep him occupied while she got ready.

'Not yet.' she replied, holding up yet another slip dress before sticking it back in her closet with a dissatisfied huff.

Besides company class that morning, she had the rest of the day off and put herself at Julian's disposal for much-needed moral support. She'd watched his afternoon run-through on stage and also gotten to see Max and Katherine's dress rehearsal, which proved to be quite a treat. The borrowed Bolshoi principal knew the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker thanks to a guesting he'd done two years prior, and it didn't take him long to brush up on cues and placements. Naturally, he turned up the charm for his Sugarplum fairy, and Katherine seemed confident that she was in good hands that evening, if the approving smiles and nods were anything to go by.

By late afternoon, Asya had dropped Julian off at his dressingroom with enough snacks to feed a family of four and was on her way home when Max cornered her in the Opera House's foyer. She half-expected to see Roman nearby, but to her surprise, he was nowhere in sight as Max questioned her about how she was faring with her injury, if his old friend was still as big a handful as he remembered, and promised that if she ever visited in Moscow he'd prove to her why his home city had the upper hand on Saint Petersburg in every way that counted. She was just about to say her goodbyes when he asked if she was taking to the cameras that evening with his former colleague. 

She laughed off his rather blunt question, and replied by saying that she wasn't planning on it. Roman's first public appearance since the scandal was bound to go down like the Titanic, not to mention that she was still technically under orders from Debbie to steer well clear of the Russian with the reputation. Well, that, and the fact that she had her own, very valid reservations about being publicly linked to his tumultuous image. To that, Max only laughed and said that there was 'no such thing as bad publicity'.

Stuck with a reminder that she'd somehow befriended the most controversial dancer of her generation and the troubling realization that she was in a mildly self-destructive mood, she had a bad idea. And before she'd even allowed herself a split second of entertaining said bad idea, she wrote it off as being totally out of the question and tried pretending it had never occurred to her at all.

The problem was that it had occurred to her. It had occurred to her that as of that morning she was back in training, and even though the pace was slow enough for now, it was only a matter of time until she needed to start focusing on her career again. Which meant making good decisions, living up to her own perfectionistic standards, and being the Nastasia Radzevich everyone expected her to be. Jam-packed schedules, a never-ending list of commitments and rules, chasing down her first principal roles, another record-breaking promotion for her tender age, and eventually, prima.