All By Design: A Nikolai Lantsov Series

Just a Short Time Chapter Six: i miss who i used to be

this time: Genya Safin's life is a web of intersecting connections. She meets David Kostyk through Aleksander, but she also meets someone much, much worse.

this chapter's song: would've, could've, should've

Genya Safin is handmade by the heavens themselves. Her eyes are brighter than stars, her skin smoother and more refined than the very silks she models. People would travel miles and miles to see her walk any runway, and they do, camping out around fashion week to watch her, small armies descending on any available event hall. Genya is highly coveted, desperately needed, and above all–

Saints, she is exhausted. If it weren't already enough to be thrown from one corner of the world to the next for each new show, Genya can't afford to merely live for herself. No matter where she goes, people are clamoring for her help with something else. She does the makeup of at least half a dozen other models and celebrities what feels like every day, always at someone else's beck and call. Newspapers claim that simply being in her presence is enough to make you look your best, like Genya herself is so gorgeous that existing in her bubble makes you at least a hundred times prettier, but Genya can promise it doesn't feel that easy. Not to her.

Still, she's trying to make her way through it all. By hook or by crook, Genya will live season by season, trading in spring/summer floral angst for fall/winter jewel toned stress. It feels like work only kicks up again every time she tries to kick up her heels and relax, but that's just what she gets for trying to pick a career that was even halfway difficult.

As if Genya ever had a choice in all this, though. As if she wasn't assigned to this sort of life as a child, handed over to the highest bidder the second someone looked at a preteen girl and decided she was pretty. The only option Genya has ever had is to move forward, and so she has. It doesn't matter how much the wheel of career success and failure bleeds her dry, only that she keeps it turning.

At some point, Genya is certain that she will fall behind, that even her best efforts at keeping up with everything will come to nothing and the whole damned system will spit her out. The worst part is that Genya isn't even sure that would be such a terrible thing. Wouldn't it be wonderful to live life on her own terms, to not have to answer to anyone ever again?

A bleak voice in her head reminds her that Genya could never survive that way for long. She has grown desperate to please, hinging her entire life on a single compliment printed in crisp black letters in any fashion magazine worth its salt. Genya can think of no other life but this one. The dream of running away is just that, a dream, and one that every single one of them has entertained at one point then brushed aside under an equally hapless clutter of false aspirations and hopeless visions of perfect happiness.

So Genya has learned to stay for the little things. The thrill of a beautiful dress that will never be hers to keep, only to drape across her mannequin-like limbs. Getting coffee with her so-called model friends who demean Genya behind her back, but at least their jokes are funny half the time.

And most of all, the singular person with the capability of turning Genya's entire outlook around with a single awkward glance her way: why, none other than one David Kostyk, of course. Zoya Nazyalensky teases her mercilessly about it as only true friends can. Of all the people Genya has met, gorgeous models and rich actors, why is it that some pitifully shy computational whiz whose best friend is a graphing calculator would have this much sway over her?

He technically shouldn't be in her sphere of existence at all, as he doesn't even work in the modeling industry. David is an accountant for a music label run by a man named Aleksander. That leach Aleksander is so exorbitantly wealthy that he pretty much owns all of Ravka by himself, maintaining a careful spider's web of industry and talent, music and art and politics. David should technically be on Aleksander's side of the street, but instead, he's lingering on hers. This minor act of rebellion should probably convince Genya to keep her distance, but instead it just makes her like him even more.