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That was the million-dollar question, and Juliette bit her lip, holding back what was on the very tip of her tongue. None of these people saw Katarina, none of them understood her. Then Juliette realized how silly her thoughts were and shook her head. Katarina seemed impervious to everything around her, including Juliette, and they were all better off leaving well enough alone. Katarina didn’t need her protection.
As the rehearsals started in earnest and Juliette had to make more and more room in her schedule for an extra afternoon session to work with Francesca and Katarina on the pas de deux from the second act ofSwan Lake, she knew her face showed mostly apprehension. The steps and the moves were more than risky. They were downright risqué.
She said so one evening when Katarina had long departed after a strenuous and demanding rehearsal and she was alone with Francesca, who kept adding more components to the movements.
“You just don’t see what I see,” Francesca answered, pushed her chair toward Juliette, and perched on it, looking down and not even disguising her perusal of her former lover.
Juliette wasn’t so sure they were former anything anyway. Could they be exes if they’d never been together properly?Francesca didn’t seem to be bothered at all, neither by the fact that their arrangement seemed to have ended, nor that neither of them had acknowledged that it had.
“You’re about to tell me that you are betting on the lust that I refuse to acknowledge, aren’t you?” Francesca’s smirk in response was decidedly lurid, and Juliette slapped the knee closest to her. “Don’t. I am not protesting anything, but do you not see that she hates me?”
The teasing was gone, and a thoughtful expression took over the beautiful features.
“Amor, Katarina Vyatka doesn’t hate you. She’s a cold fish. I doubt she’d work up the energy it takes to have that strong of an emotion for anyone. I’d watch my back for sure, but more because she seems highly feral to me. I guess living your entire life behind the Iron Curtain under unmitigated control of a totalitarian state and being the politicians’ favorite plaything and prisoner would do that to anyone.”
“Plaything? Prisoner?” Juliette refused to regret asking, even if Francesca’s face was glowing with something akin to “gotcha.”
“She’s been kept under wraps for over a decade, amor. Despite being the absolute best ballerina the Soviet Union has ever produced. Don’t you wonder why? She had to beg for her life, humiliate herself in front of you, me, Lalande. What was she escaping, the biggest star of her country, with hundreds of thousands of clamoring fans? Whatever she was running from that warranted such humiliation must have been quite something indeed.”
It took Juliette a few seconds to process Francesca’s words, who, undeterred by her rumination, continued with a grin.
“Or maybe she is just a garden-variety bitch. A superiorly gifted one, but a bitch nonetheless.”
“I don’t think she can be garden-variety anything, Cesca. And wasn’t it her own countryman Pushkin who said that genius and evil are incompatible?”
Francesca laughed out loud and leaned forward to give Juliette a one-armed hug.
“My darling, darling girl. I often forget that underneath all your talent and all your otherworldliness, a twenty-five-year-old is hiding. Keep thinking your thoughts and believing your Russian poets, but I would not stop checking my shoes for glass, amor.”
Juliette tsked. “Is this why you treat her like she has the plague?”
The silence that met her question stretched for longer than Juliette would’ve liked. She’d much prefer that Francesca dismiss her query as nonsense. When the answer did come, Francesca’s voice was all steel.
“I’d treat her better if she had the plague, Jett. I’d know what to expect. Fever, sores, imminent death. With Katarina Vyatka? I have no idea, and that is what I don’t like about her.”
The words rang in Juliette’s mind all through the afternoon and her evening class with the injured dancers.
That night, Juliette was particularly late returning home. A young ballerina, once a very talented prospect, seemed to have lost her sumptuous skills despite numerous tutors and classes. Juliette knew the issue had to be an old hamstring injury, but so far, her endeavors to discover the extent of its remaining impact on the range of motion and the correctness of steps, especially the tendus, were futile.
The ballerina was moving perfectly, but in the middle of the extension something was shifting almost imperceptibly and the next step would be out of alignment, disrupting pose and range. Juliette had a feeling that the calf was affected by the weakened hamstring, thus derailing everything. But the girl wasstubbornly rejecting every attempt at assessment of the entire leg, insisting there wasn’t any issue.
The eerie similarity with Katarina dismissing any kind of injury with the viciousness of an angry—yet graceful—blonde mongoose gave Juliette pause. The image her tired brain had conjured made her grin, then she caught herself. Her entire day had been spent trying not to think of Katarina. She needed a hobby of some kind.
As she exited Palais Garnier, her luck stayed rotten. The sudden storm, so out of season, left Paris—and by extension, her—soaked and moody. The Rue de Rivoli was quiet, the luxury of a wealthy neighborhood silent at night with the absence of tourists. In a few hours, the hotel next to her building and the world-famous Angelina, the neighboring tearoom, would begin their preparations for the day. The sumptuous gardens across the street would awaken from their slumber and welcome throngs of people. Joggers would muddy their running shoes. The construction workers would yell and gesture as they broke ground on the Louvre Pyramid. Pigeons would clamor for crumbs, and Paris would shake off the rain and the thunder.
But for now, everything slept. Juliette very much wished herself to be in a similar state. The day had been long, and the emotional toll of having someone in her space, in her classes, in her rehearsals—dammit, in her head—was beginning to weigh heavy.
The key turned smoothly in the lock, the darkness around her scraping the already abraded nerve endings raw.
“I was told the apartment next door will be ready in three weeks and then I will be out of here.”
Juliette nearly jumped out of her skin.
“My fucking… Jesus! Vyatka, what the hell?”
Arms wrapped around her chest, back against the far wall of the foyer, Katarina stared at her with visible displeasure.
“I can ask the same.”
