Shell Games
The One You Want
Luke settled over me, his hips square to mine, as we kissed. He’d stayed on his elbows when I wouldn’t let go of him. I ran my fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp, when our tongues collided. All I could taste was champagne. When he moved an arm and pressed on one of my hipbones through the fabric of my borrowed shirt, he sent a jolt of electricity through my body. I quickly decided that I wanted him closer and that he was wearing too many clothes.
I was pinned to the bed under his weight, but if ballet had made me anything, it was strong. Holding his shoulder for leverage, I un-trapped one of my legs from under his and bent it so my foot was planted firmly against the mattress. He groaned into my mouth as the movement caused every part of him beneath his shorts to be pressed up against me. Behind closed eyes, I smirked.
My hands roamed beneath his shirt. I could feel the muscle definition in his back as he supported himself on top of me. He was ripped all the way up, from his ribs to his shoulders. I really did wonder when he shed his potato chip baby weight and got so lean. But instead of giggling about it again, I went for his shirt, tugging it upwards. His hand left my hip and his lips left mine momentarily as he shrugged the garment off. I watched him and took in the scenery of his chest. I’d seen it before, but not with the new soft focus that my heavy eyelids granted me.
Once we were attached at the mouth again, I went for his chest instead of his back. My fingers grazed over his abs southward, softly and slowly, and Luke pulled away as his breath hitched for a second. He placed a kiss on my throat and nipped at my neck. I pawed at his cheek selfishly until I found his chin and got what I wanted. I wanted his lips touching my lips. I wanted his tongue on my tongue. He was too good of a kisser to waste it on sensation at my neck.
He slid his arm under the small of my back. I tried to hook my bent leg against his thigh and draw him closer but instead he outmuscled me, rolling us so that we were both on our sides. He ran his hand down over my ass and leg and kissed me hard before he stopped to speak.
“We can’t do this, Kaylie,” his voice was a combination of heavy breathing and a whisper.
I ran my hand over his sternum possessively and answered without opening my eyes, “Why?”
“This isn’t you,” he told me. “You’re drunk.”
My eyes flew open with a groan. “Ugh. Why would you wait until you’re half naked and we’re both horny to stop?”
Luke let go of me completely and created some space between us in the bed. I was suddenly furious. Drunken intimacy didn’t rattle me. The interruption of it did. Damn him for not getting wasted with me. Damn his conscience for kicking in. Luke was a certified heartthrob. I was pretty sure there wasn’t anyone else I’d rather give in to temptation with.
“I’m not the one you want,” Luke spoke gently. “Kris is.”
And just like that his words broke me. I remembered how amazing my night had been going until the party. I remembered hearing about Kris breaking a girl’s heart and then sweet talking another girl right in front of me, all in the same day. I remembered why I had gotten drunk off my ass. My heart jumped up to my throat as I remembered everything. Everything over my brother’s best friend.
Like the snapping of fingers, in an instant I went from being the drunk girl trying to have sex with Luke to the drunk girl ugly crying in his bed. I covered my eyes with my fingers as the first tears fell, but soon my shoulders were shaking and I was biting back sobs. I added more space between Luke and me, scooting as close to the side of the bed, away from him, as I could without my vision. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had a new problem to deal with.
“I—what—Kaylie—” he stammered. “Are you crying? Why are you crying?”
My intoxication had my emotions in complete disarray at the mention of Kris. The realization that his earlier actions had made me miserable was jarring. I was jealous and hurt and angry at myself all rolled into one.
“I’m just like her,” I sobbed, then clarified, “like that Rissa girl.”
“Uh…a crier?”
I almost wanted to laugh but the tears kept falling. Luke was right. Earlier I hadn’t had any sympathy for her, and I ended up crying, probably worse than she had. But that wasn’t what I meant about being like her. Not even close.
When I sighed it sounded like I was wheezing. “I just want him to pick me.”
It wasn’t just Rissa. The ‘other’ kind of girls that Kris hung out with, the ones who didn’t want to just sleep with him, the ones with feelings, who got their hopes up—they were just like me. Or I was just like them. There were a lot of girls like me in Kris’ world, and there were a lot of them who got closer to my goal than I ever did, because they didn’t wait years to act on it. I had my hopes up for him. I wanted my chance with him. I wanted to be the girl for him.
All of his supposed jealously had done me no good. At least those girls he shot down had a fighting chance when he kissed them and held their hands and took them home. Nearly two months’ worth of scheming and I hadn’t even gotten anywhere close to that.
“He’s never gonna pick me,” I spoke again, sorrowfully, burying my face in the pillow.
I’d gotten Kris to notice me. I’d gotten his attention. So why did I feel worse off than when I was just in the background?
“Kaylie, baby,” Luke touched my back, “look at me.”
“Don’t call me baby!” my voice was muffled by the pillow but I was sure there was enough anger in my voice for him to hear me clearly.
It was a far cry from the way I reacted earlier in the night. I’d practically purred when he attached ‘babe’ to my name while we’d been getting ready for bed. But I didn’t feel floaty anymore.
“Look at me,” he repeated, void of any terms of endearment.
Begrudgingly, I whimpered and turned my cheeks from their cushion. I felt more exposed than I ever had in front of him—and I’d already flashed him. Luke looked at me and moved my hair off my face. “If you weren’t so into him, you could have any guy you want. You know that, right?”
With a scoff, I shook my head against the pillow. “You just turned me down for sex like five minutes ago.”
“That’s not because I don’t think you’re beautiful or clever or hilarious. You are all of those things,” he said. “That’s why I know five minutes ago…that’s so beneath you.”
I began to argue, “It’s—”
Luke pressed a finger to my lips, stopping me, and then brushed a fat tear away from under my eye. “Crying over some guy who probably wants you to pick him, that’s beneath you, too.”
My bottom lip quivered but I tried to smile. I wiped at my eyes and tried to swallow my heart back down to my chest. I must have been a mess and Luke was still his supportive, reliable self.
“Sorry if I ruined your night,” I sniffed. My voice sounded whiny from all the crying.
“Don’t worry about it.” Luke extended his arms out in the air to me as best that he could. “C’mere.”
He drew me into his arms once I scooted my way back to him. I settled in against his chest and took one long shaky breath. I was done crying but I needed some time to settle down. My hysterics were all over the place and Luke had talked me down from the ledge again. Kris had been the reason I felt insecure and desperate again.
I was thinking about how crazy Kris made me as my shallow breaths subsided into hiccups. Luke didn’t hold me tightly but instead stroked my back. I was sure that what was left of my party makeup had transferred to at least one of the pillow cases and the sheets but he didn’t complain. He just comforted me. Unlike Kris, he knew how to deal with the crying.
“I hate him,” I hiccupped.
Luke didn’t need to ask me to clarify. He didn’t believe me either. “You don’t mean that. I wish you were sober right now so it would make sense to you if I explained how letting him get to you like this is letting him have the upper hand in the game.”
“Well that’s just it,” I whispered, “I don’t think I want to play anymore.”
I had meant what I said.
I didn’t want to play the game anymore. I was over it. As I’d learned from my night of drunkenness, winning and losing didn’t feel very different. If Kris wasn’t into me, then he could kiss my ass and go to hell. Or heaven—it didn’t matter which one. I was lucky enough to have a demi soloist role in the National Ballet’s first cast for Giselle and lucky to have a friend like Luke who didn’t want my lows to be too low.
The morning after my attempt to sleep with my friend and my ugly crying, I was completely hung over. Luke had been to practice and back by the time I woke up. He’d had to refresh my memory on the past night’s events; I was hazy on some of the details. I was embarrassed that I’d basically stripped him down to his underwear. He shrugged it off easily but I got plenty of time to be mortified over the fact for the remainder of the week.
Truly, I was blessed to be in the first cast on opening night. There were eight performances of Giselle in twelve nights. The show distribution was different for principals, but being part of the first cast as demi soloists meant that Étienne and I got to do our pas de deux together for five of the performances: opening night and all of the weekend shows. The bright spot for the second cast soloists was dancing in the only Friday show, but their other nights were both in the middle of the week. It meant that my drunkenness had no repercussions on my professional life. I didn’t have a class, a rehearsal, or a performance the day that I woke up with a hangover. I just got to think about the stupid game I was playing with two of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
I thought about it a lot, even into the weekend performances. I decided that Luke was right. Of course he was. He always was. Letting Kris make me feel like shit, that was beneath me. He was a cute guy from my hometown but he wasn’t worth pining over. It was just a crush that had gotten out of control. I was awesome and I could find someone else awesome, too. A dancer or a lawyer or a musician. Maybe even a different hockey player.
So I was over and done with the game. I was sure of it.
Well, until I ended up hanging out with Kris on a Monday afternoon.
There were five nights off between the first weekend performance and closing weekend for the Canadian National Ballet’s autumn program. Those days were treated as modified rehearsal days: company class, and for those with solo and principal roles, a run through of our dances. For me, it was just the Peasant pas de deux with Étienne. Auditions for The Nutcracker were all throughout the week. After the closing performance of Giselle, the company’s focus would shift to rehearsing the beloved Christmas ballet for the next six weeks. My audition was slotted for that Wednesday.
On Monday, by the time I’d parted ways with Étienne, I had a text from Kris suggesting that I meet him for a bite on Front Street and that we could carpool home after. Usually the Leafs would only be on the ACC ice during the day for a morning skate before a game, and their game against the Florida Panthers wasn’t until the next day, but Ron Wilson and his coaching staff decided to hold a full practice there that morning. Even though the ACC was only a few blocks away from St. Lawrence Hall (where the Canadian National Ballet was housed) and the Sony Centre—which was right on Front Street—I had yet to see Kris downtown out of the blue. It seemed harmless enough. Besides, I wanted to prove to myself that he could be completely insignificant to me.
But when I found Kris outside the sandwich shop that I suggested, he had a whole new idea. He was looking up at the sky. He wasn’t daydreaming and he wasn’t making animals of the clouds. He was looking up at the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, the CN Tower.
Apparently he never actually ventured downtown beyond the ACC. The CN Tower was right across from Rogers Field, where the Blue Jays played their home games during baseball season. I was pretty sure the tower could be seen from anywhere within several blocks’ radius, including the nearby ACC. But it was there, standing and staring, that he decided he had to do the most tourist thing he possibly could in Toronto and check it out.
“You don’t like heights,” I reminded Kris for the third time, when we were inside the tower’s admission hall at street level. He had already paid for the ascent to the observation deck and we were just waiting for the next elevator up.
“I know what I’m getting into,” Kris retorted, “and I’m not afraid of some nice view once we get up there.”
I smirked. “I seem to recall someone throwing items from his backpack at me from the top of the monkey bars until I went to get an adult.”
“Jeez, Kaylie, that was a million years ago.” Kris clicked his tongue. “I’m a big boy now.”
It felt kind of nice to have something to tease Kris about. I’d spent so much of my time around him praying that I wouldn’t look foolish, feeling pathetic, and trying to get him to see me in a different light. Sometimes I forgot to think about him as just another human, one that I knew details about from childhood. He’d been as much a constant in my life as my brother from seven to fourteen. I didn’t think I’d learned much more about him in the last few months, but I did still know little things about him.
I knew his favourite color and his favourite meal. I knew how much he hated being in the penalty box. I knew what reminded him of home. But I also knew that he wasn’t fond of heights. The anecdote of him, as a 10-year-old boy, climbing to the top of the monkey bars and being too scared to get down on his own once he saw the distance to the ground, was one example. He could deny it and reason that he was an adult, an NHL hockey player who traveled on charter planes all the time, but I knew it was still true. Besides, if he didn’t have a problem with heights, he would have paid for admission that included the SkyPod surcharge, and he didn’t.
But who was I to stop him? We were sharing a theme of the day by facing our fears. I was ten minutes deep into being around him without panicking in my head, and he was taking on the highest observation deck in the western world.
“Why do you want to do this again?” I wondered once we were in the elevator. There was a young family on the ride up with us. The pre-school aged son was excited.
“I keep getting asked about it. Sick of saying I haven’t been,” was Kris’ simple response.
The visitor guide began speaking, smiling about how smooth the ride was and dictating specifics about how high we were going and at what speed. My ears popped. I bit my lip, watching the look on Kris’ face change as he looked out the elevator’s glass panel windows and avoiding looking through the cutout panel in the floor. It was a good thing that our guide didn’t seem to know who he was. Kris might not have even responded if he’d been asked for an autograph; I didn’t think he’d heard any of the information said about the ascent to the lookout level being only 58 seconds long. He looked a little stunned when we were let out of the elevator, hundreds of meters above land, just about a minute after we’d gotten in.
A moment lapsed and we were just standing in the vicinity of the elevators, in front of the signs that pointed to different directions of where to go. Behind the signs, after a small hallway, were the tower windows of the lookout, offering a panoramic view of a sunny downtown Toronto.
“Uh, Kris, are you feeling alright?” I asked. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m fine,” he rolled his eyes. “I’m not gonna puke all over your shoes if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well that’s good.” I looked down at my high-top Converse and quipped, “These are my favorite pair of shoes.”
With narrowed eyes, he shoved my shoulder playfully and I laughed. “Come on,” he said, “I want to take a few pictures on my phone.”
“You know,” I returned, taking a step in the direction of the stairway that led to the base of the main pod, “the pictures will look cooler if you take them on the glass floor level.”
“You know I don’t like heights, therefore you tell me to go hang out on a see-through floor where I’ll probably get vertigo?” he wrinkled his nose. “What kind of friend are you!”
“Oh, so now you admit it?” My laughter bubbled over.
When I mentioned the glass floor, I was serious but I was also challenging him. I wanted to see how far he would go to keep up the charade that he was totally cool being in a confined stationary space in the sky, where, unlike a plane, he couldn’t just shut the window shade. Kris wasn’t acrophobic per se. For God’s sake, he lived on the 17th floor of a high-rise condominium. Like the story of the monkey bars, he was just not a fan of seeing how far down the earth was, directly below his feet, when he was up high. Neither a plane nor his place of residence showed the drop-off right under him.
“Come on,” he muttered, taking me by the elbow. “Let’s get this over with.”
I’d been to the CN Tower only once before, as a field trip when I was still in high school at the National’s ballet school, but it hadn’t changed much. Heights didn’t faze me. I felt dizzy when I was drunk, but never from seeing how far away the ground was. There were far scarier scenarios I’d willingly put myself in for ballet. If I really thought about it, partnered ballet dance was, to a certain extent, madness. I put my complete trust in my partner to lift me by the palm of his hands—sometimes with just one hand—and maneuver my body all in time to music.
The distance from the stairs to the actual glass floor was reasonable, I thought. It wasn’t a sudden, overwhelming change that went from solid vinyl stairs to transparent floor. The glass floor was paneled around the inner edge of the 360-degree panoramic window view. There was carpet from the stairs for several strides before getting to the glass. Young children were stomping on the panels and even lying down on their stomachs, watching the downtown world below.
Kris let go of my elbow on the way down. We walked side by side toward the glass. Once we reached the end of the carpet, we came to a dead stop. He titled his chin downward and leaned forward, peeking into the floor for just a second before making a face. “Gross.”
In front of us, a little girl with her chestnut hair in pigtails did jumping jacks, her feet making a tapping sound with each landing. I smiled and spoke to Kris, “You don’t have to look down. We can just go to the window.”
He took one step onto the glass floor, still looking through it and to the buildings and streets below. He wasn’t a big boy when he did that. When he grimaced, he was still that kid stuck on the monkey bars. Without warning, he grabbed my hand and pulled me towards himself so we were both on the glass.
My heart stopped. And then it raced. Maybe it just made him feel better, having a hand to hold when he was afraid to look down. All I could think was that Kris was holding my hand. And we weren’t at some low key night club, buzzed and bumping to a beat. He was holding my hand in public, at the most popular tourist destination in the city. There were other people holding hands in the tower. They were couples and they were doing it affectionately.
The grip of Kris’ palm was tight against mine as we took the few steps to the window directly in front of us. All around the glass floor level, the windows were angled at a perfect diagonal for optimal viewing of the city. From where we stood, shoulder to shoulder, there was a spectacular view of Queens Quay and the Toronto Islands, then the depths of Lake Ontario, sparkly under the sunshine, until it faded into the horizon.
Kris stroked the back of my palm with his thumb once before letting go of my hand. But I never got the chance to be disappointed that the contact was over. Instead, he brought me closer to his body and draped an arm around my shoulders.
“This ain’t so bad, eh?” The pained expression from his face was gone and replaced with a playful grin.
Oh, but it was bad. My stomach was doing cartwheels. He hadn’t even looked at the view out the window. His neck was craned to the side, in my direction, and he was only looking at me.
The glass beneath me might as well have cracked, and then the ground could’ve opened up to swallow me whole. I was wrong. I couldn’t get over my crush on Kris in one afternoon. In fact, while telling myself that I was done with everything, it was the most comfortable I’d been around him in years. It was the best time I’d had with him in years—being able to tease him but also being his hand-holding hero.
There was no pressure and it was easy. I actually had the ability to communicate with Kris and it was fun. It felt better than any first date I’d ever been on. It felt like something I should be doing all the time.
I really wanted to call Luke and tell him the news, to say that I’d changed my mind. I couldn’t just give up on the game. The six nights between the party and the tower were just a needed break, and the two months of rolling the dice weren’t a waste. I didn’t just have a huge crush anymore. The way that I’d hurt when I was drunk, it wasn’t just because I was drunk. It was real. There were actual feelings. I was in too deep. I was all in.
I was pinned to the bed under his weight, but if ballet had made me anything, it was strong. Holding his shoulder for leverage, I un-trapped one of my legs from under his and bent it so my foot was planted firmly against the mattress. He groaned into my mouth as the movement caused every part of him beneath his shorts to be pressed up against me. Behind closed eyes, I smirked.
My hands roamed beneath his shirt. I could feel the muscle definition in his back as he supported himself on top of me. He was ripped all the way up, from his ribs to his shoulders. I really did wonder when he shed his potato chip baby weight and got so lean. But instead of giggling about it again, I went for his shirt, tugging it upwards. His hand left my hip and his lips left mine momentarily as he shrugged the garment off. I watched him and took in the scenery of his chest. I’d seen it before, but not with the new soft focus that my heavy eyelids granted me.
Once we were attached at the mouth again, I went for his chest instead of his back. My fingers grazed over his abs southward, softly and slowly, and Luke pulled away as his breath hitched for a second. He placed a kiss on my throat and nipped at my neck. I pawed at his cheek selfishly until I found his chin and got what I wanted. I wanted his lips touching my lips. I wanted his tongue on my tongue. He was too good of a kisser to waste it on sensation at my neck.
He slid his arm under the small of my back. I tried to hook my bent leg against his thigh and draw him closer but instead he outmuscled me, rolling us so that we were both on our sides. He ran his hand down over my ass and leg and kissed me hard before he stopped to speak.
“We can’t do this, Kaylie,” his voice was a combination of heavy breathing and a whisper.
I ran my hand over his sternum possessively and answered without opening my eyes, “Why?”
“This isn’t you,” he told me. “You’re drunk.”
My eyes flew open with a groan. “Ugh. Why would you wait until you’re half naked and we’re both horny to stop?”
Luke let go of me completely and created some space between us in the bed. I was suddenly furious. Drunken intimacy didn’t rattle me. The interruption of it did. Damn him for not getting wasted with me. Damn his conscience for kicking in. Luke was a certified heartthrob. I was pretty sure there wasn’t anyone else I’d rather give in to temptation with.
“I’m not the one you want,” Luke spoke gently. “Kris is.”
And just like that his words broke me. I remembered how amazing my night had been going until the party. I remembered hearing about Kris breaking a girl’s heart and then sweet talking another girl right in front of me, all in the same day. I remembered why I had gotten drunk off my ass. My heart jumped up to my throat as I remembered everything. Everything over my brother’s best friend.
Like the snapping of fingers, in an instant I went from being the drunk girl trying to have sex with Luke to the drunk girl ugly crying in his bed. I covered my eyes with my fingers as the first tears fell, but soon my shoulders were shaking and I was biting back sobs. I added more space between Luke and me, scooting as close to the side of the bed, away from him, as I could without my vision. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had a new problem to deal with.
“I—what—Kaylie—” he stammered. “Are you crying? Why are you crying?”
My intoxication had my emotions in complete disarray at the mention of Kris. The realization that his earlier actions had made me miserable was jarring. I was jealous and hurt and angry at myself all rolled into one.
“I’m just like her,” I sobbed, then clarified, “like that Rissa girl.”
“Uh…a crier?”
I almost wanted to laugh but the tears kept falling. Luke was right. Earlier I hadn’t had any sympathy for her, and I ended up crying, probably worse than she had. But that wasn’t what I meant about being like her. Not even close.
When I sighed it sounded like I was wheezing. “I just want him to pick me.”
It wasn’t just Rissa. The ‘other’ kind of girls that Kris hung out with, the ones who didn’t want to just sleep with him, the ones with feelings, who got their hopes up—they were just like me. Or I was just like them. There were a lot of girls like me in Kris’ world, and there were a lot of them who got closer to my goal than I ever did, because they didn’t wait years to act on it. I had my hopes up for him. I wanted my chance with him. I wanted to be the girl for him.
All of his supposed jealously had done me no good. At least those girls he shot down had a fighting chance when he kissed them and held their hands and took them home. Nearly two months’ worth of scheming and I hadn’t even gotten anywhere close to that.
“He’s never gonna pick me,” I spoke again, sorrowfully, burying my face in the pillow.
I’d gotten Kris to notice me. I’d gotten his attention. So why did I feel worse off than when I was just in the background?
“Kaylie, baby,” Luke touched my back, “look at me.”
“Don’t call me baby!” my voice was muffled by the pillow but I was sure there was enough anger in my voice for him to hear me clearly.
It was a far cry from the way I reacted earlier in the night. I’d practically purred when he attached ‘babe’ to my name while we’d been getting ready for bed. But I didn’t feel floaty anymore.
“Look at me,” he repeated, void of any terms of endearment.
Begrudgingly, I whimpered and turned my cheeks from their cushion. I felt more exposed than I ever had in front of him—and I’d already flashed him. Luke looked at me and moved my hair off my face. “If you weren’t so into him, you could have any guy you want. You know that, right?”
With a scoff, I shook my head against the pillow. “You just turned me down for sex like five minutes ago.”
“That’s not because I don’t think you’re beautiful or clever or hilarious. You are all of those things,” he said. “That’s why I know five minutes ago…that’s so beneath you.”
I began to argue, “It’s—”
Luke pressed a finger to my lips, stopping me, and then brushed a fat tear away from under my eye. “Crying over some guy who probably wants you to pick him, that’s beneath you, too.”
My bottom lip quivered but I tried to smile. I wiped at my eyes and tried to swallow my heart back down to my chest. I must have been a mess and Luke was still his supportive, reliable self.
“Sorry if I ruined your night,” I sniffed. My voice sounded whiny from all the crying.
“Don’t worry about it.” Luke extended his arms out in the air to me as best that he could. “C’mere.”
He drew me into his arms once I scooted my way back to him. I settled in against his chest and took one long shaky breath. I was done crying but I needed some time to settle down. My hysterics were all over the place and Luke had talked me down from the ledge again. Kris had been the reason I felt insecure and desperate again.
I was thinking about how crazy Kris made me as my shallow breaths subsided into hiccups. Luke didn’t hold me tightly but instead stroked my back. I was sure that what was left of my party makeup had transferred to at least one of the pillow cases and the sheets but he didn’t complain. He just comforted me. Unlike Kris, he knew how to deal with the crying.
“I hate him,” I hiccupped.
Luke didn’t need to ask me to clarify. He didn’t believe me either. “You don’t mean that. I wish you were sober right now so it would make sense to you if I explained how letting him get to you like this is letting him have the upper hand in the game.”
“Well that’s just it,” I whispered, “I don’t think I want to play anymore.”
I had meant what I said.
I didn’t want to play the game anymore. I was over it. As I’d learned from my night of drunkenness, winning and losing didn’t feel very different. If Kris wasn’t into me, then he could kiss my ass and go to hell. Or heaven—it didn’t matter which one. I was lucky enough to have a demi soloist role in the National Ballet’s first cast for Giselle and lucky to have a friend like Luke who didn’t want my lows to be too low.
The morning after my attempt to sleep with my friend and my ugly crying, I was completely hung over. Luke had been to practice and back by the time I woke up. He’d had to refresh my memory on the past night’s events; I was hazy on some of the details. I was embarrassed that I’d basically stripped him down to his underwear. He shrugged it off easily but I got plenty of time to be mortified over the fact for the remainder of the week.
Truly, I was blessed to be in the first cast on opening night. There were eight performances of Giselle in twelve nights. The show distribution was different for principals, but being part of the first cast as demi soloists meant that Étienne and I got to do our pas de deux together for five of the performances: opening night and all of the weekend shows. The bright spot for the second cast soloists was dancing in the only Friday show, but their other nights were both in the middle of the week. It meant that my drunkenness had no repercussions on my professional life. I didn’t have a class, a rehearsal, or a performance the day that I woke up with a hangover. I just got to think about the stupid game I was playing with two of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
I thought about it a lot, even into the weekend performances. I decided that Luke was right. Of course he was. He always was. Letting Kris make me feel like shit, that was beneath me. He was a cute guy from my hometown but he wasn’t worth pining over. It was just a crush that had gotten out of control. I was awesome and I could find someone else awesome, too. A dancer or a lawyer or a musician. Maybe even a different hockey player.
So I was over and done with the game. I was sure of it.
Well, until I ended up hanging out with Kris on a Monday afternoon.
There were five nights off between the first weekend performance and closing weekend for the Canadian National Ballet’s autumn program. Those days were treated as modified rehearsal days: company class, and for those with solo and principal roles, a run through of our dances. For me, it was just the Peasant pas de deux with Étienne. Auditions for The Nutcracker were all throughout the week. After the closing performance of Giselle, the company’s focus would shift to rehearsing the beloved Christmas ballet for the next six weeks. My audition was slotted for that Wednesday.
On Monday, by the time I’d parted ways with Étienne, I had a text from Kris suggesting that I meet him for a bite on Front Street and that we could carpool home after. Usually the Leafs would only be on the ACC ice during the day for a morning skate before a game, and their game against the Florida Panthers wasn’t until the next day, but Ron Wilson and his coaching staff decided to hold a full practice there that morning. Even though the ACC was only a few blocks away from St. Lawrence Hall (where the Canadian National Ballet was housed) and the Sony Centre—which was right on Front Street—I had yet to see Kris downtown out of the blue. It seemed harmless enough. Besides, I wanted to prove to myself that he could be completely insignificant to me.
But when I found Kris outside the sandwich shop that I suggested, he had a whole new idea. He was looking up at the sky. He wasn’t daydreaming and he wasn’t making animals of the clouds. He was looking up at the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, the CN Tower.
Apparently he never actually ventured downtown beyond the ACC. The CN Tower was right across from Rogers Field, where the Blue Jays played their home games during baseball season. I was pretty sure the tower could be seen from anywhere within several blocks’ radius, including the nearby ACC. But it was there, standing and staring, that he decided he had to do the most tourist thing he possibly could in Toronto and check it out.
“You don’t like heights,” I reminded Kris for the third time, when we were inside the tower’s admission hall at street level. He had already paid for the ascent to the observation deck and we were just waiting for the next elevator up.
“I know what I’m getting into,” Kris retorted, “and I’m not afraid of some nice view once we get up there.”
I smirked. “I seem to recall someone throwing items from his backpack at me from the top of the monkey bars until I went to get an adult.”
“Jeez, Kaylie, that was a million years ago.” Kris clicked his tongue. “I’m a big boy now.”
It felt kind of nice to have something to tease Kris about. I’d spent so much of my time around him praying that I wouldn’t look foolish, feeling pathetic, and trying to get him to see me in a different light. Sometimes I forgot to think about him as just another human, one that I knew details about from childhood. He’d been as much a constant in my life as my brother from seven to fourteen. I didn’t think I’d learned much more about him in the last few months, but I did still know little things about him.
I knew his favourite color and his favourite meal. I knew how much he hated being in the penalty box. I knew what reminded him of home. But I also knew that he wasn’t fond of heights. The anecdote of him, as a 10-year-old boy, climbing to the top of the monkey bars and being too scared to get down on his own once he saw the distance to the ground, was one example. He could deny it and reason that he was an adult, an NHL hockey player who traveled on charter planes all the time, but I knew it was still true. Besides, if he didn’t have a problem with heights, he would have paid for admission that included the SkyPod surcharge, and he didn’t.
But who was I to stop him? We were sharing a theme of the day by facing our fears. I was ten minutes deep into being around him without panicking in my head, and he was taking on the highest observation deck in the western world.
“Why do you want to do this again?” I wondered once we were in the elevator. There was a young family on the ride up with us. The pre-school aged son was excited.
“I keep getting asked about it. Sick of saying I haven’t been,” was Kris’ simple response.
The visitor guide began speaking, smiling about how smooth the ride was and dictating specifics about how high we were going and at what speed. My ears popped. I bit my lip, watching the look on Kris’ face change as he looked out the elevator’s glass panel windows and avoiding looking through the cutout panel in the floor. It was a good thing that our guide didn’t seem to know who he was. Kris might not have even responded if he’d been asked for an autograph; I didn’t think he’d heard any of the information said about the ascent to the lookout level being only 58 seconds long. He looked a little stunned when we were let out of the elevator, hundreds of meters above land, just about a minute after we’d gotten in.
A moment lapsed and we were just standing in the vicinity of the elevators, in front of the signs that pointed to different directions of where to go. Behind the signs, after a small hallway, were the tower windows of the lookout, offering a panoramic view of a sunny downtown Toronto.
“Uh, Kris, are you feeling alright?” I asked. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m fine,” he rolled his eyes. “I’m not gonna puke all over your shoes if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well that’s good.” I looked down at my high-top Converse and quipped, “These are my favorite pair of shoes.”
With narrowed eyes, he shoved my shoulder playfully and I laughed. “Come on,” he said, “I want to take a few pictures on my phone.”
“You know,” I returned, taking a step in the direction of the stairway that led to the base of the main pod, “the pictures will look cooler if you take them on the glass floor level.”
“You know I don’t like heights, therefore you tell me to go hang out on a see-through floor where I’ll probably get vertigo?” he wrinkled his nose. “What kind of friend are you!”
“Oh, so now you admit it?” My laughter bubbled over.
When I mentioned the glass floor, I was serious but I was also challenging him. I wanted to see how far he would go to keep up the charade that he was totally cool being in a confined stationary space in the sky, where, unlike a plane, he couldn’t just shut the window shade. Kris wasn’t acrophobic per se. For God’s sake, he lived on the 17th floor of a high-rise condominium. Like the story of the monkey bars, he was just not a fan of seeing how far down the earth was, directly below his feet, when he was up high. Neither a plane nor his place of residence showed the drop-off right under him.
“Come on,” he muttered, taking me by the elbow. “Let’s get this over with.”
I’d been to the CN Tower only once before, as a field trip when I was still in high school at the National’s ballet school, but it hadn’t changed much. Heights didn’t faze me. I felt dizzy when I was drunk, but never from seeing how far away the ground was. There were far scarier scenarios I’d willingly put myself in for ballet. If I really thought about it, partnered ballet dance was, to a certain extent, madness. I put my complete trust in my partner to lift me by the palm of his hands—sometimes with just one hand—and maneuver my body all in time to music.
The distance from the stairs to the actual glass floor was reasonable, I thought. It wasn’t a sudden, overwhelming change that went from solid vinyl stairs to transparent floor. The glass floor was paneled around the inner edge of the 360-degree panoramic window view. There was carpet from the stairs for several strides before getting to the glass. Young children were stomping on the panels and even lying down on their stomachs, watching the downtown world below.
Kris let go of my elbow on the way down. We walked side by side toward the glass. Once we reached the end of the carpet, we came to a dead stop. He titled his chin downward and leaned forward, peeking into the floor for just a second before making a face. “Gross.”
In front of us, a little girl with her chestnut hair in pigtails did jumping jacks, her feet making a tapping sound with each landing. I smiled and spoke to Kris, “You don’t have to look down. We can just go to the window.”
He took one step onto the glass floor, still looking through it and to the buildings and streets below. He wasn’t a big boy when he did that. When he grimaced, he was still that kid stuck on the monkey bars. Without warning, he grabbed my hand and pulled me towards himself so we were both on the glass.
My heart stopped. And then it raced. Maybe it just made him feel better, having a hand to hold when he was afraid to look down. All I could think was that Kris was holding my hand. And we weren’t at some low key night club, buzzed and bumping to a beat. He was holding my hand in public, at the most popular tourist destination in the city. There were other people holding hands in the tower. They were couples and they were doing it affectionately.
The grip of Kris’ palm was tight against mine as we took the few steps to the window directly in front of us. All around the glass floor level, the windows were angled at a perfect diagonal for optimal viewing of the city. From where we stood, shoulder to shoulder, there was a spectacular view of Queens Quay and the Toronto Islands, then the depths of Lake Ontario, sparkly under the sunshine, until it faded into the horizon.
Kris stroked the back of my palm with his thumb once before letting go of my hand. But I never got the chance to be disappointed that the contact was over. Instead, he brought me closer to his body and draped an arm around my shoulders.
“This ain’t so bad, eh?” The pained expression from his face was gone and replaced with a playful grin.
Oh, but it was bad. My stomach was doing cartwheels. He hadn’t even looked at the view out the window. His neck was craned to the side, in my direction, and he was only looking at me.
The glass beneath me might as well have cracked, and then the ground could’ve opened up to swallow me whole. I was wrong. I couldn’t get over my crush on Kris in one afternoon. In fact, while telling myself that I was done with everything, it was the most comfortable I’d been around him in years. It was the best time I’d had with him in years—being able to tease him but also being his hand-holding hero.
There was no pressure and it was easy. I actually had the ability to communicate with Kris and it was fun. It felt better than any first date I’d ever been on. It felt like something I should be doing all the time.
I really wanted to call Luke and tell him the news, to say that I’d changed my mind. I couldn’t just give up on the game. The six nights between the party and the tower were just a needed break, and the two months of rolling the dice weren’t a waste. I didn’t just have a huge crush anymore. The way that I’d hurt when I was drunk, it wasn’t just because I was drunk. It was real. There were actual feelings. I was in too deep. I was all in.
Notes
I know, I know. The end of the previous chapter was a tease. Luke basically cockblocked himself. Kaylie did the opposite of forget about Kris. You might be a little confused. I'm sure at least a few of you are even annoyed. I promise that I'm going somewhere with this, and there's a reason for all of it. All in good time.Thank you for the comments! I really appreciate you reading my story. Prepare to have your mind blown with the next chapter. Or maybe you've pieced it all together already! Part of the fun for me, writing this, is that it's a guessing game for Kaylie as much as it is a guessing game for the readers.
Extended Chapter Notes
Omg, its sooo good.
3/15/14