Calore Dance Academy// Red Queen AU

Chapter 64

Well. Hello there. Welcome to Nat's 6000-word brunch chapter. Do enjoy, and leave some comments and likes too. Follow my profile @Natthefantastic for important updates on CDA!

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There's something terribly empowering about walking around a one-hundred-and-fifty-million dollar penthouse in my socks.

I ascend another glass staircase with Cal and his grandmother. The uppermost story of the penthouse is taller than the others, as though there's no standard definition of how tall a room should be. It stretches up and up, its perfect creamy ceiling situated as high as the Academy's stage rafters.

The stairs lead to a small library of no more than five hulking bookshelves, their expensive wood stretching up fifteen feet. The books, looking like boring business texts to me, are accompanied by a rolling library ladder. A little area composed of leather green ottomans and chaises waits alongside the shelves. We weave between two, and past the alcove and around a corner, I find a scene that Mom would faint. The penthouse is far too high in the air to have a balcony, but it possesses no shortage of windows.

The grand piano, sleek and black and lovely, stands past the bookshelves. It's the simplest part of the Calores' formal living room, stretching some seventy feet. A massive grey area rug frames a sitting area with twin pristine white couches facing one another. Royal blue wingback chairs, silver lamps, and two narrow coffee tables dance around the space. The artwork upon the walls, abstract and muted upon gargantuan canvases, lines the cream wall that parallels the windows.

The heaping white curtains probably cost more than my entire apartment building in East Harlem.

Taking up two massive window panels of its own, a dining room consisting of a glassy table and eight pale chairs waits before the living room.

There's little else to it. It's minimalist, I suppose.

Magnetized, I step towards the dining table, where Mister Calore and Elara already sit at either of its ends. Maven and Cal's dad wears a pair of reading glasses along with a henley, newspaper in his hands. He looks too domesticated. Maven and Shade sit opposite one another on the side closest to Elara. Lucas, content to watch chaos unfold in silence, sits next to Maven, grinning ear-to-ear.

" . . . I'll say it again, Calores," Shade says, glancing between Elara and Tiberias. "I thought that I was just coming here for brunch. I thought that I'd get to insult my sister a little and try to convince you guys to cut her pay. No way is she worth three-hundred Gs per year, okay? I didn't realize that this was a meet-the-parents brunch. And now I have to deal with this. With him." Shade points an accusing finger towards Maven.

I ignore them for a moment.

The windows stretch from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, their great panes framed in narrow strips of bronze. Two blocks away from the southern border of Central Park, the views from the Calores' living room are stunning.

I see Central Park from start to finish. Its dying grass and gorgeous autumn trees stretch three miles north, but I see far past that, to where Manhattan bleeds into the Bronx before giving way to the blue horizon. The Lake, its blue waters embedded deep into Central Park, glistens in the morning, and the stretch of grass where Maven and I went on our first date gleams proudly under the sun. Walking paths and bike lanes cut through the park like arteries.

The modest yet beautiful buildings of the Upper West Side link the greenery to the Hudson. The Upper East Side, no longer so impressive, and East Harlem, never impressive with its stocky red-bricked buildings, link the other side of Central Park to the East River.