Page 18 of Burn Bright (Cobalt Empire #1)

BEN COBALT

M y first week in New York, sleep has been tough, and it’s not because of the pull-out. I haven’t slept well this entire year. My phone is blowing up beside me. Silent messages light the screen on fire, and typically, I’d reply to my friends as something positive to do.

Smile emoji. Laugh-cry emoji. Send.

Now I just toss the phone onto the mattress and rest my elbows on my bent knees, the white sheet stretching with the movement.

It used to be enough, knowing I was a good influence in the lives of others, but I’m plagued with the reality that I could be hurting the people I love most. My family.

My sisters. My brothers. It feels fucking…

irrational . Because I haven’t done anything wrong.

I’m not setting bombs in the living room.

But I can’t rid the thought at night when my mind spins.

Being here sends a quiet panic under my skin, but I must be a living contradiction. Because seven days in and I still feel myself longing to stay. To be more than a voyeur.

I’ve seen how Beckett is always the first to wake. Before the sun bleeds the sky in orange, he’s showered and opening the fridge for a hearty, high-protein breakfast. Turkey sausage, avocado, four sunny side up eggs, a slice of sourdough. Fuel for his rigorous ballet schedule.

He’ll make me an almond butter, banana smoothie before I even ask. We’ve eaten every breakfast together since I moved in, and there’s been no pressure to dig into the night I went postal.

Beckett is just interested about my life in this moment.

He’s been like that ever since he left for New York at sixteen.

He plays catch-up better than the rest of us because he’s done it for so long, and there’s such genuine intrigue in his need to know.

It’s as if my words paint a picture of all the moments he’s missing, and for a brief second, he can see it play like a film.

The fact that he wants to watch the movie of my life makes me love him even more, but I just wish it were a riveting one. Yesterday, I talked mostly about hockey. How I was considering trying out for Manhattan Valley’s team.

“Do you want to play?” he asked, his fork hovering over his eggs.

I thought about it for a second. “I want to be great at something. This is the only thing I’ve ever excelled at, Beck, and I’m not even that good at it.”

He made a face. “You are good.”

“I’ll never be that good.”

“In comparison to what?” he asked in confusion. “You’re not as good as the other guys on the team? Or you’re not good enough for the NHL?”

“Both, probably.”

“Are you sure?” He frowned, disbelieving. “You’re really good, Pip. We’ve all seen you play.”

“You’re family. You would see me as the best. It’s natural bias.”

His brows didn’t uncinch. It felt like he disagreed, but he let it go to ask point-blank, “Do you like hockey?”

“Do I like it?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Like it’s all you think about. All you dream about. You would lose sleep for it. You would wake up in pain and still get on the ice because you’re more afraid of the day where it all comes to an end.”

I stared at him for a long beat. “Is that what ballet is for you?”

“It’s everything,” Beckett said from his soul. “And hockey…?”

“Isn’t that,” I breathed. “I just like being better-than-slightly-average at something.”

I didn’t tell Beckett about my ultimate plan.

The one I’ve been constructing for a while now. No one would want me to go through with it, but it’s already been set in motion. The biggest derailment has been New York. I was never supposed to be here.

One new step: I need to drop out of MVU before the semester ends. Well before January. So there’s really no point in joining the team if I can’t stay through the season. I just want Coach Haddock to feel like his effort to recruit me wasn’t in vain. Maybe trying out can give him that.

But I hate this new step more than I ever did. Because of Harriet. Because I’ve already started getting attached to going to class with her. Because I’d rather be with this resilient as fuck girl than anywhere without her, really.

At breakfast, I changed the subject off hockey and asked Beckett, “Do you usually eat alone? Before I moved in, I mean.” No one had joined us this past week.

He glanced toward the hallway to Eliot and Tom’s rooms. “On occasion Eliot will wake early enough before he works out.” His yellow-green eyes darted to me, then to his avocado.

“And most of the time, Charlie would already be up, but not always.” He added fast, “He’s rarely in New York all seven days of the week. That’s not because of you.”

I’ve borne witness to that too.

Charlie has been MIA for entire days. I never catch him leaving the apartment, but suddenly, his suitcase will be propped against the door. His passport on the kitchen island. He’ll have returned from someplace outside the country.

“Where’d you go?” I asked on Saturday. It was past three a.m.

He stared me dead in the eyes. “I’m not the one who just got home.” He’d heard me come inside the apartment. I’d just returned from my first shift at the End of the World with Harriet.

“I’ve been out,” I said.

Charlie studied me for too long.

So I added, “At a bar. And you?”

“Montreal.” He walked to his room and shut the door. Leaving it at that.

It was honestly a bigger answer than the usual Charlie brush off.

This past week, if Beckett occupies my mornings, then Eliot tries to seize my nights.

“Come to a play with me, Ben.”

“You’ll love Duke’s on 10 th , Ben. Best fries of your life.”

“Have you seen Chicago yet? I have an extra ticket that has your name on it, Ben. What say you, brother?”

I said no.

I said I have to study. Which, I kind of did. Over the phone with Harriet, we talked about downloading The Odyssey on audio for our mythology course.

I said I’m meeting up with friends. Also, met up with Harriet at work.

It hurt each time I declined Eliot, but he’s the brother who’d take several stabs to the heart and keep walking toward you and the blade. He would die before giving up on any of us.

Being the resident of the living room, I’ve caught glimpses of Eliot and his nights without me in them.

He’ll bump inside at two a.m. with a giggling girl at his waist. He’ll playfully shield her eyes with his hands—just so she can’t see me on the pull-out when they go to his bedroom. He’ll even give me a wink.

When she leaves a few hours later, I’m usually in a half-sleep, and I hear him wish her goodbye at the door. It’s nearly a nightly occurrence, but not with the same girl. Never more than twice.

Beckett was more discreet the Friday night he brought a girl home. He thought I was sleeping. His quiet footfalls wouldn’t give him away, but her awed voice did. “Whoa, this is your place?” She gasped. “Is that your brother?”

I couldn’t make out his whispered reply. He carted her toward his bedroom. I never heard her leave, but it’s not like she evaporated. Knowing Beckett, he likely insisted she be quieter on her exit.

When I asked about her at breakfast, he said, “She was just a girl I met at Pink Noir.” It was a club where all the dancers frequented after performances. Beckett invited me to go out with him that night to meet his friends in the ballet company, but I bailed on him too.

That one still fists my lungs painfully. Even if Beckett hasn’t acted like I’m the worst brother alive, it’s pretty clear that I am.

“Will you see her again?” I asked him.

“No,” he said definitively. “Relationships are work, and I have too much going on at work with Leo .” The uncommon bite to Beckett’s voice was reserved for his rival at NYBC. “The company is casting him as Albrecht in the first cast of Giselle in a couple weeks.”

Giselle is Beckett’s favorite ballet to dance in, and as a principal, he’s been given the lead spot before.

But he competes with Leo Valavanis for the top-billed male roles in every production.

Most have double casts, and I know that Beckett being relegated to the lead role in the second cast is like being kicked to the JV team.

I was about to offer him some words of affirmation. My siblings and I know that the New York Ballet Company loves pitting Leo and Beckett against each other to drum up drama, which has increased ticket sales before. It’s not a reflection of our brother’s talent.

But he added, “There is no room in my life for the complications of love. Sex is simple.” He cut his eggs with a fork and knife. “L’amour romantique est une maladie.” Romantic love is a disease.

I wondered if that’s what’s happening to me.

Have I been unwell since I met Harriet? The times I’m with her, where I’m even thinking of her, the panic subsides. The restlessness inside me goes so still. The crawling beneath my skin begins to freeze.

Every breath I take is deeper. Every smile is bigger.

If romance is a disease, then I want to be stricken with whatever malady she’s plagued me with. I feel myself chasing after it like a drug.

It’s why I’m on my bed now and staring at my phone. Debating whether to text her at an obscenely late hour like a junkie needing a hit.

Don’t suffocate her. You’ll scare her off.

Harriet seems to startle easily, and if I come on too strong at the start, I might chase her away. Most people I talk to absorb into my sphere like they plan to make a home there.

Harriet, though, she’s more guarded. Balanced on her tiptoes, prepared to sprint and save herself.

I wonder if someone hurt her.

That kills me.

The urge to talk to her intensifies, but baby steps, maybe.

I drag myself off the pull-out. Unable to sleep, I near the built-in shelves. Only wearing dark-blue boxer-briefs, the cold air from the AC chills my warmed skin. I notice French novels like Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. More French writers: Proust, Voltaire, émile Zola.