Page 49 of Burn Bright

I saidno.

I saidI have to study.Which, I kind of did. Over the phone with Harriet, we talked about downloadingThe Odysseyon audio for our mythology course.

I saidI’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 attwo 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 onatwork withLeo.” 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 ofGisellein a couple weeks.”

Giselleis 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 eventhinkingof 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 novelslike Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. More French writers: Proust, Voltaire, Émile Zola.

They aren’t unfamiliar to me. Neither is the language. We all learned French from our parents, who were taught at a young age in school. They fostered our knowledge through carrying conversations at home and our travels to Europe. It feels like I’ve always known French, the same way my siblings have.

Another book draws my attention. Tugging it out, I thumb through a hardcover titledGrandes Esperanzasby Charles Dickens.

I can speak Spanish better than I can read it—thanks to all the time I spent with the Meadows. My Uncle Ryke is fluent from learning in school as a kid too, and he helped teach some of us, including his daughters (Sullivan and Winona) and Maximoff Hale and me.