Freakshow

Chapter Three

"Leave your purse in your locker and pick one of the red jackets that will fit you," Joanna told me and pointed to a closet of identical red suit jackets with long tails, Ringmaster style but sequined along the lapels.

Joanna was babysitting me, showing me the ropes until I could handle taking cash and selling tickets at the front.

Joanna was in her mid-twenties, give or take a couple years, had thick blonde hair and brilliant blue eyes. She also happened to have a very curly, well-groomed beard.

I had tried to avoid looking at it when we'd first met, but Joanna had immediately addressed it, gotten it off the table.

"I have a beard, get over it," Joanna had said, "look now, touch it, ask questions, but then let it go, okay?"

"Okay," I'd said, touched it lightly and decided to stop thinking about it. This proved more difficult than one might assume, but I was doing a fairly good job at hiding it.

"Should I try one on now?" I asked and stepped towards the closet.

"It doesn't matter to me, there are always a bunch of jackets, there will always be something for you to wear."

I decided to forgo dressing up and followed Joanna to the staff concession.

"Your meal voucher is on file, just swipe the employee card the guys in security will give you. If you don't use up your ten dollars each day, you can roll it over to the next day. If you don't use it by the end of the month, you lose it. Understand?"

I tried not to stare at all the employees milling about, getting food, eating it, chit chatting like there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. I realized several of them were staring at me as well, grouped together and whispering.

"Understood," I said, and forced myself to make eye contact and smile at a young man with a gigantic forehead. I assumed he had a form of Macrocephaly. I'd met a girl with it back in the day when my entire life was a revolving door of children's hospitals and charity fundraising drives.

"Listen," Joanna hissed, "you'll eventually get used to us Freaks, but until then, just keep your eyes to yourself, okay? We are the bread and butter of the entire show, without us you wouldn't have a job. So nothing but absolute respect, one hundred percent of the time."

"Understood," I repeated and looked over Joanna's shoulder to find something, anything, to lock my gaze on.

Out of the corner of my eye I spotted what might be the most incredible looking man I'd ever seen. I snuck a direct gaze and wasn't disappointed. He was tall, leanly muscled with a confident ease about his posture that immediately drew me to him. I loved asshole men, and he looked like the supreme, with the cocky tilt to his head, and his easy, arrogant smile as he flirted with the girl behind the counter. He turned to me, as if feeling the weight of my gaze, and smiled.

I was lost for a brief moment, unsettled by the strange attraction I felt. His eyes were dark and endless, his thick, black hair pulled back in a knot on the top of his head, and his arms were covered in intricate, colourful tattoos. He had a hungry, wolfish look to him.

He also had a smirk on his face, as though he knew my secret thoughts and could feel the lustful heat radiating from my body. I glanced back to Joanna and winced at the other girl's look of disgust.

"Seriously? I tell you not to look at the Freaks, and you pick the boss's son?"

"Who is he?" I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

"Cairo," Joanna said, "Orion's only son. Cirque royalty." Her tone suggested I was an idiot, an outsider who would never be privy to the inner workings of life in the show. She was right; I didn't care who he was, or who his father was, or anything about him. I just knew he was the hottest man I'd ever seen, and he'd smiled at me.