Act Two
Luka Kotova
The exact layout of my suite is the same as the last one, but two things are noticeably different.
One: the window-view is of the Vegas strip, not the hotel pool.
Two: three other people live with me now.
That’s four people total in the same sized space.
I didn’t focus on this detail until I entered my new bedroom, and I was met with a bunk bed like I’m at summer camp. No box springs. Not even a real mattress, just some blue vinyl-wrapped foam insert that pretends to be one.
I prop my arm on the doorway, my gray eyes plastered onto the atrocity that Corporate calls a bed. My older cousin paces the length of our tiny, shared room and rubs his unshaven jaw and chin. Completely distraught.
“What…I…what…” He lets out a gnarled sound. This might be the first time I’ve seen Dimitri Kotova lost for words.
“Hey,” I say with a nod and shake my box of Junior Mints, dumping candy in my palm. “You can take top or bottom, whichever you want.”
Dimitri is tall, not just for an acrobat’s standards. Everyone calls him “the tank” for his muscle mass and towering height.
He’s 6-foot-5-inches like my older brother Nik, but the difference: Nik is more agile, more natural—a gifted, talented artist. He out-flips, outmaneuvers, and outperforms everyone.
Except for Timo.
Dimitri tries ten-thousand times harder to do what Nik can do in one breath. I know what it’s like to be second-best to people you love. Hell, not even second-best.
Third best. Fifth best.
In some scenarios, the worst.
So yeah, I like Dimitri, even if he has a lot of undesirable qualities.
Dimitri stops by our plain dresser, the only other furniture in here. He blinks a few times, and I pop a Junior Mint in my mouth. Waiting for him to wake the fuck up.
When the shock escapes him, he finally acknowledges my presence. “Are you looking at me?”
I nod again, brows raised. Wondering where this is going.
Dimitri points to his chest. “Do I look like a third-grader? Huh? What in the fuck is Aerial Ethereal smoking?” His face nearly shatters at another thought. “How am I supposed to have sex on this thing? As soon as a woman sees this, she’s going to laugh right in my face.”
Dimitri sinks down on the “mattress” and the whole structure creaks. He looks simultaneously murderous and wounded. Covering his face in his hands, he’s one step away from proclaiming my life is over.
My cousin loves sex, women, and the teeterboard. Not always in that order.
In his family, Dimitri is the oldest of ten children, and at twenty-six, he’s six years older than me. But we were all born into the circus life together. Four generations. No other options.
Only one love.
By the age of five, I was a kid actor, collecting props. Clearing the area for the next act. Performing simple floor acrobatics in group routines.
Our job is to produce magic for an audience. No bunnies in hats or card tricks. With our bodies we do the unthinkable. Scale walls without handholds, lift people twice our size in perilous positions, slice through air with the strength of one arm—flips and twists that’d make most gymnasts go, “What the fuck?”
All while creating an aura of pure, raw beauty. Visceral, full-bodied magic thrums through our veins, and we hope it’ll reach an audience. I love the adrenaline, but even more than the rush—when I perform, I feel the closest to my family.
Hearts and souls are left on that stage, and by ten, I fought to leave mine too. I began specializing in a variety of high-risk acrobatics, a required milestone for all Kotovas. Russian swing, Russian bar, trapeze, teeterboard, and aerial apparatuses (hoops, silks, straps, metal cubes, chandeliers).
All the while, I spent two to three months in cramped hotel rooms before traveling to the next city, the next country, the next continent.
At thirteen, Corporate said that I’d settle down in New York City and join the cast of a new show called Infini.
I was happy. Like wish-upon-a-star, blow-out-all-your-birthday-candles kind of happy. For the first time, I’d live in one place. I could unpack my suitcases for real. I could memorize city streets knowing I wouldn’t have to forget them in a couple months. I didn’t even care that Corporate housed us in dingy apartments. For one brief second, I was happy.
Then the second passed. Stupidly, I never looked at the fine print.
The cast list didn’t include handfuls of my aunts, uncles, some of my cousins, and all the older generations. And most glaringly, my mom. My dad.
None of them were joining Infini.
Our huge overwhelming family was being split apart in several directions. My parents were recruited for Somnio, which would tour Asia, Europe, and South America for five years. Where Corporate says you go, you go.
“It’s our living,” my dad would tell all of us. Fight back and Aerial Ethereal could easily replace us. What kind of life would we be living outside of the circus? No one toyed with the idea.
I figured I’d lose some contact with my mom and dad. Halfway across the globe, too busy, all the time differences—so much separated the touring side of our family from us. Now I barely speak to any of them, and not long after my parents left, Nikolai became my legal guardian.
He was just twenty.
He was the age that I am right now. I think about that a lot. Could I’ve done what he did? Could I’ve taken care of Timo, Katya, me, and all of our emotional baggage in a big, brand new city?
(Not at all.)
I barely have my own head on straight. Sadly, too, my brotherly relationship with Nik disintegrated the day our parents left. Sometimes I wish he could be more like Dimitri.
More of a big brother than a dad.
Then I hate that I think it—because I’m sure he wishes he could’ve filled that role over the parental one.
I swallow my Junior Mint almost whole and focus my attention back to Dimitri. Who still mourns the dismal future of his sex life.
“We have a couch,” I remind him. “Just screw there.” He knows I don’t care.
Dimitri drops his hands from his face, strong-jawed and broad-shouldered like all of us, but his ocean-blue eyes contrast the usual Kotova gray. “Let me do that, and then watch our two other roommates cock-block me and take a steaming dump on my work life. I don’t shit where I eat.”
When I was eleven, he told me that fucking anyone who works for AE is like swimming in a “polluted pussy ocean”—his ineloquent way of saying: extremely dangerous. And in some cases for our careers, fatal.
I didn’t listen to his advice.
I usually don’t.
I straighten off the door frame. “Speaking of that other roommate…” I can’t even say her name. I think of B. Wright and all of my muscles tense. I shake the rest of my candy into my mouth.
Dimitri scrutinizes me. “Huh.” He stands up. “That roommate? Are you talking about Baylee Wright?”
I shrug. Don’t think about her. My stomach overturns, and I have to clutch the doorway. I crumple the Junior Mints box in my other hand.
“Little Kotova,” Dimitri jeers when he thinks I’m being an idiot. “You’re out of your mind if you believe HR put Baylee in our suite. For one, she has a cunt.”
His crudeness is a second-by-second occurrence. With that kind of consistency, I’ve become overly desensitized. And maybe I shouldn’t be.
“Second…” He seizes my gaze like he’s trying to pry this fact into my skull. “She’s Baylee Wright.”
I feel sick.
My past—with her—tries to burrow deep into my body. (I can’t let it.) I lower my baseball cap so he’s unable to read my features.
Dimitri still appraises me, and he wedges his towering build into the doorway.
So I have to confront him head-on.
“But you do realize she’s in Infini?” He cocks his head and waves his hand at my face. “You there, hello?”
I roll my eyes as I lift my gaze. “Leave it alone, dude. I don’t—no, I literally can’t talk about her.” When I say that I can’t speak about Baylee, it has nothing to do with our feelings. They could be good feelings. They could be miserable, and it still wouldn’t change this one fact.
I literally can’t talk about Baylee Wright.
And she literally can’t talk about me.
“I just want to know,” he says roughly.
“Know what?”
“If you auditioned for Infini forgetting that you’d have to work with her again.”
“I didn’t forget.” I’d never forget. When Infini moved to Vegas and I jumped to Aerial Ethereal’s Viva, Baylee stayed in Infini. She’s one of the few original cast members from its inception.
I never really believed Corporate would shift me back to Infini. Even if I auditioned, I always knew it was a long shot. Now that it’s actually happening, it’s still hard to process the reality. We have two entirely separate acts, so I’ve prepared for our paths to parallel—not intersect.
Now we have new choreography where I may actually work with her.
Now she’s living in my suite.
I shake my head to myself but I say aloud, “I didn’t mentally prepare for her to live with me.”
“Good because she’s not,” Dimitri says with certainty. Off my confusion, his brows knit and he makes a face like he’s about to disown me. “Don’t tell me you forgot she has an older brother.”
“Fuck,” I say.
Fuck.
My whole face drops. I never put the pieces together. When I see those initials, my mind cements on Bay.
Not the obvious answer…
Brenden Wright.