Page 30 of Two For the Show (Trapped On The Tightrope Duet #2)
It’s hours before I’m able to tear myself away from Matteo and Quinton. We only untangle ourselves briefly to move to the bed, where we fall asleep with our hands and mouths roaming over each other.
The next morning, when my phone goes off with an alert that someone needs their wrist splinted, it feels physically painful to leave their arms.
But I manage, because this is not just my pack, this is my job, and I have a duty to this circus to take care of its people.
Dario meets me outside the big top, where he and Dexter sit with Tony, the stagehand who drives the caravan my trailer is a part of.
“Hey, Doc,” Tony says tightly. “Don’t ask me how I did it. I don’t even know.”
Dexter snorts a small laugh, shaking his head. “You know exactly how you did it.”
“Yeah, but the doc doesn’t need to know that,” Tony grumbles back.
Dario leans to the side, holding his hand on the side of his mouth. In the loudest whisper I’ve ever heard, he says, “He doesn’t want you to know because it’s dirty.”
“It’s not!” Tony is quick to say. “I tripped over a crate ‘cus I wasn’t looking where I was going, and landed wrong, okay?”
I pat him reassuringly on the shoulder. “Happens to the best of us, Tony. Let me get you fixed up.”
After getting his wrist tightly wrapped and with instructions to take some ibuprofen, Tony thanks me and heads back to do whatever it is he does when he’s not driving the tractor-trailer that pulls our homes.
“So,” Dario says, pulling me into his lap. “Quinton, huh?”
“You felt that?”
“Felt what?” Dexter asks curiously.
“She bonded him last night. I could feel him ‘come online’ for lack of a better term.” Dario nuzzles into my neck. “It’s pretty cool to know all the guys are there.”
Speaking of all the guys, I miss Jude. I poke at him down the bond and get a flash of amusement. I know he’s busy doing showrunner things and I’ve spent the last two nights nurturing new bonds, but that doesn’t mean I want to leave him out of things, either.
“Oh. You’ve bonded everyone, then?” Dexter’s voice isn’t quite dejected, but it is vulnerable. “I mean, except me.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean there is any rush for us,” I remind him.
“I know,” he says softly. “Well, that’s cool. Good for all of you.”
Before I can press him for more information on his feelings, Jude comes around the corner.
“You rang, Omega?” he says teasingly. “You know, you could just come talk to me instead of using the bond to poke me.”
“Ah, but what fun is that?” I hop to my feet, and for a moment it feels a little awkward, standing toe to toe with the big Alpha. He doesn’t let me bask in it, though, and wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me close, pressing a kiss to my lips.
We lose ourselves for a moment before someone clears his throat, causing us to pull apart.
“As hot as this is, I actually had an idea for how we could keep Alex safe from the assholes whose names I will not dignify with repeating,” Dario says with a wide grin. “Well, I had the basis of an idea, but Dexter fleshed it out, so if it’s bad, we can blame him.”
“I think I’ve got a track record of good ideas, as judged by the fact that Alex is standing in front of us,” Dexter gloats. “And this was decidedly a joint effort.”
“Should we get Matteo and Quinton?” Jude asks, his hand resting on my hip. Casual touches from someone who held me at arm’s length for so long are going to take a bit of time to get used to, but I won’t complain about it.
Jude makes me feel safe. Protected. Even when things with Rich were good, he didn’t invoke this feeling. I know, without a doubt, that Jude would never let someone hurt me.
“Definitely,” Dexter confirms, pushing to his feet. “Everyone is going to be involved in this one.”
Calling this plan hairbrained is an understatement.
But it’s the only one we’ve got .
Once Dexter and Dario laid their plan out in front of us, I immediately shot it down. However, after two hours of discussion, they managed to win me over.
Which means we’re beginning phase one of “Operation Get Our Omega Out Fast,” as Quinton has named it.
Operation GOOOF.
Quinton has named the plan Dexter made to hopefully rid me of my abusive pack forever “GOOOF”. If he weren’t so pleased with himself, I’d have thrown something at him.
On the surface, Operation GOOOF shouldn’t be so difficult to accomplish, but I have a feeling it’s going to take longer than any of the guys expected.
We have to find a circus act for me.
Or rather, integrate me into the others.
Which is why at two o’clock in the afternoon, I’m standing in the middle of the ring, arguing with Jude Oliver.
“No. Absolutely not. You don’t have to!”
“Because I’m the showrunner. Ringmasters perform with the troupe. Ergo, you’re the ringmaster.” He pushes the hat back into my hands. “So you have to wear the hat.”
The hat in question is a black sequined monstrosity, with a neon yellow ribbon around the brim.
Dario was quite pleased with himself when he came back from town with it.
Apparently, there was still one of those Halloween pop-up stores doing a clearance sale, and he got the ribbon from a fabric store.
“You need to wear the hat,” Jude says, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re the first woman to be a part of this circus. You have to play the part.”
“And the part includes a hideous hat?”
He smiles, and it nearly sends me to my knees. Jude is a stoic guy, but when he smiles, it’s enough to stop my heart for a minute, especially when I can feel his amusement and joy through the bond.
“Yes. Put the hat on.”
Reluctantly, I perch the ugly ass hat on my head, and he steps up beside me, putting a hand on my back.
At least his part is easy to rehearse, and we have a couple of weeks for me to practice.
As we go through the script for introducing each act, Jude starts to make jokes with me. He takes my responses and spins them, cleverly turning everything I say into something relating to the circus. I’m in awe of his improvisational skills.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I ask, after he manages to twist one of my simple responses into a deliciously dirty tale about the trapeze.
“Do what?” He tosses me a bottle of water, and we sit down on the front row of the stands.
“The whole improv thing. You can spin anything and relate it back to the circus in some way.”
His face looks a little sad for a moment. “I learned it from Carl. He’s the one who started this circus. I was a teenager when I joined the Cirque, and he mentored me. The old asshole was so fucking clever that I had to work to keep up with him.”
The way he speaks about Carl in the past tense, with a softness that he doesn’t carry most of the time, lets me know that not only was Carl important to Jude, but that he’s no longer with us.
“Now it feels like second nature. Being a showrunner for a circus is a lot like being a Master of Ceremonies at any program, except I’m not only telling the crowd who is up next.
I’m setting the tone, holding their interest. Like a comedy club, but for a dangerous circus.
” He runs his fingers through his hair before draining his water bottle.
“ If we rolled from act to act, the whole show would feel disjointed. I’ve got to weave them together, escort our crowd into the next phase. ”
I cross my legs at the ankles and pick at the label on my bottle. “Does that have anything to do with the order the guys go up in?”
He nods encouragingly. “Absolutely. Each act has a tone. As impressive as Rex is, he’s not a closer, you know? And going from his act to the motorcycles makes his act seem less impressive than it is. So I have to do a bridge act. That’s where Guy comes in.”
Guy is the Alpha whose act perplexed me the most the first time I watched the show.
He wears a full-faced black mask that glows with neon yellow stitches where his mouth should be, and he stalks through the crowd.
He doesn’t carry any items, and he doesn’t bend his body in fantastical ways.
He climbs over the backs of the stands, balancing behind people as he does this weird interpretive dance type thing.
I don’t understand it at all. But the audience went wild over it, specifically the women.
I think it’s meant to be a fear thing, like he’s a stalker who is close to taking them.
It seems like the people love a masked man.
“He bridges Rex’s act, which can get creepy and is almost a type of body horror to some people, with Quinton and Matteo’s act.
They’ve got that inherent feeling of danger that Guy inspires and some of the ‘how does the body do that’ incredulousity that Rex has with Q’s sword swallowing, but especially when they do the body suspension. ”
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way my stomach dropped when I saw Quinton hanging from the ceiling by his actual skin.
“That makes a lot of sense. You’ve put a ton of thought into this, huh? ”
“Did you think I drew their names out of that hideous hat?” he asks, flicking up the brim of the ringmaster hat teasingly. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years now. Designing the show and keeping it flowing and entertaining is as much of an art as some of these acts are.”
I position myself so I can lean my head onto his shoulder. “So you’re putting a lot of faith in me by letting me crash the show, huh?”
He tickles my side teasingly. “I sure am, so don’t mess it up, Omega.”
Once our laughter fades, Jude reaches over and grabs my hand without looking at me. “Alex, I want to apologize for the way I treated you when you first came here. It may surprise you to find out that I’m a little bit of a control freak, and you sure did upend things.”
“I never blamed you for it. I know I was cagey, and I did purposefully deceive you. Even if you made it really easy to do.”
“In my defense, you’ve seen how much these guys get hurt! I needed a doctor, and I didn’t have time to be picky.” He stands up and grabs my empty water bottle, tossing it into a trashcan that’s off the side of one of the aisles. “Now, come on. From the top, Omega.”