CREATURE

・chapter 11・

'He did what?' Julian squeaked from the bathroom, poking his head into the bedroom to flash her a wide-eyed look.

'I'm not exaggerating Jules, he went bloody ballistic.' she replied, turning her head from side to side to inspect her reflection in the mirror before rummaging through the scattered makeup in front of her. 'He looked like he was going to strangle Ivan.'

'Your trio has so much drama.' he chuckled, strolling past where she sat cross-legged on the floor while he rubbed his wet hair dry with a towel. 'Ours is practically a snore-fest compared to all that.'

'I just hope they keep it professional this afternoon.' she sighed. 'I'm not breaking up another fight.'

After her confrontation with Zharnov in the passage she'd come upstairs and taken a long hot shower to try and relax. She was definitely a little shaken by the whole incident, but absolutely refused to let it interfere with her headspace, not when she was less than two hours away from performing alongside ballet royalty in the season's most exclusive tour.

She needed to focus.

Her little rituals helped, the familiar habits and things she always did before performances to get herself in the right frame of mind. The shower had helped clear her head and afterwards she'd changed into an oversized t-shirt and some comfortable pyjama shorts to do her makeup in, with Julian kindly providing the tunes to set the pre-performance mood.

As she counted down the minutes to showtime she could feel the first drops of adrenalin simmering in her veins, her body's way of letting her know it was on her side and that it would do what she needed it to on stage. If the past week had taught her anything it was that high stakes didn't break her, they showed her how far she could push before she found her tipping point.

And by that Friday she'd come so dangerously close to her limit that she was on top of the fucking world.

In between makeup and warming up she was supposed to be eating her lunch, a creamy tomato pasta the hotel had delivered to them. She was having more trouble getting it down than she cared to admit, having done nothing more than poking around it for the past twenty minutes instead of actually eating it.

A knock on the door disturbed her half-hearted attempts to eat something, and she clambered to her feet to see who it was. The entire cast's rooms were in the same passage and she figured it was probably someone looking to borrow something, but when she opened the door she found herself face-to-face with Ivan.

He gave her a quick once-over, seemingly choosing his words before he spoke.

'We should talk about this morning.' he said, a hint of impatience tainting his voice.

'There's nothing to talk about.' she replied nonchalantly. There wasn't, not as far as she was concerned. They'd been managing the lift just fine in rehearsals, and so long as the both of them watched their timing it would go down without a hitch on stage, like it always did.

'Fine then.' he replied, tucking his hands into his pockets. 'Just watch yourself.'

'Hey, you're the one that fucked up this morning.' she snapped back. 'So let's not pretend I'm the one that needs to-'

'Don't bloody argue with me.' he cut her off. 'Anyone else would've dropped you from a lift like that, you're lucky I-'

'I didn't do anything wrong and you know that!'

'Know your place.' he breathed. She clapped her mouth shut and bit her tongue, knowing that picking a fight with him about something like a lift wasn't even close to worth it.