Rêveries

Chapter 33.

We said goodbye to my parents and flew home to Monaco. Pierre came with us to be close to Evie if she needed him. Her parents had left and she felt like she needed to talk to Max. She had basically run out on him and just left to go to Sweden. He had accepted she needed time and she'd come back when she was ready to deal with what went down.

When we got home, I became oddly aware of the fact that they'd be home for at least two months. I don't know when they start pre-season testing, but it won't be for about two months. What the hell am I going to do with them in the house for two months?

For the first week, Pierre was there and kept Charles busy. They tried to get me to do all these activities with them, but I kept declining. Evie was over a lot too to spend time with Pierre without Max gagging in their direction every time he entered a room. If it wasn't because Evie and Pierre were hanging out, I promised myself to not hang out with Charles as much.

When Pierre went home to France for a while he asked Evie to come along, but she was too anxious to meet his parents so she stayed. I cursed her out for it. I'm sure they'd love her, because how could they not? His parents are lovely and his brothers may love to tease him, but they're really nice too. They'd tease Pierre but they'd praise her. I know them enough to know that.

I started dancing again. I signed up for some ballroom classes, kept scheduling practices with my dance coach and I got the practice down. I hadn't danced ballroom in forever, because it's difficult to call the dancing with Charles anything close to ballroom dancing. I had to rely on some muscle memory to begin with. I started dancing lyrical with my private coach three days a week and I started dancing street with her four days a week. But she told me it was important to keep one whole day off so I decided to make Saturdays my day off every week. On Saturdays I taught a class or two to cover in for a teacher. I woke up early to go on a walk before the boys woke up and offered to go with me. They usually woke up around the time I walked out of the kitchen with my breakfast smoothie. I focused on my diet and I made sure to exercise more, since I needed to get back into shape to compete. But that meant that I barely spent any time at home.

Lucie and I only crossed paths in the kitchen, in the hallway or in the door. We didn't have to speak more than a few sentences to each other and I didn't have to see Charles kiss her even once. But one day she stopped me and told me that Alice had been talking about me. She had said something about Cece and dancing. My heart nearly melted and I told her to bring her around soon. She did bring her around and I got to play with her a bit before one of my shifts at the studio and I offered to babysit whenever her sister needed it. So that resulted in me actually having to babysit a few times and I got to spend even more time with Alice.

Charles and Arthur took turns driving me to the dance studio, I told them I could walk or something but they never let me. Charles asked me questions regarding the dancing while Arthur tried to grill me on the reason I picked up so much dancing all of a sudden. I tried to convince him it was because I missed it, which was true, but he knew as well as I did that it wasn't the whole truth. I simply needed reasons to not be home and to not be at Charles' races. So I made sure to get busy. I didn't tell Arthur that though, but he knew there were other reasons for my absence at home when they were finally there.

My parents helped me pay for my classes, but I could pay for most of the expenses myself due to my job and due to actually starting to use my social media. Mia helped me get started and told me it would be great for my image to start getting on different kinds of platforms but she also warned me about how ruthless people could be. I posted a few brands and with the money I got I could pay for most of my own expenses.

I got myself a mediocre choreographer to not spend too much money on it when I don't know if I'm good enough to win competitions. My coach signed me up for my first competition in Montpellier. I didn't want to go too far for my first competition back. I didn't want to put all of my money on this thing I didn't know would work. I hadn't competed in almost five years, I wasn't sure I still had it. I worked my ass off to get ready but I was worried it wouldn't be enough.