Eternal Spring YA short story collection

Barre Hopping At Midnight

Barre Hopping at Midnight

By

Amanda Brice

Life sucks when your boyfriend is a vampire.

Fine, he’s not really a vampire. And if we want to get 100% technical, he’s not really my boyfriend, either. Sorta kinda maybe. But not really.

I don’t know.

It’s complicated.

Jackson leaned in closer, mere millimeters away, two-hundred-year-old ebony eyes locked on Robyn’s green ones with such intensity she found it uncomfortable not to look away. Yet she couldn’t. “I will love you until the day you die.”

Robyn shivered at his touch, despite heat from the nearness. She felt like a scorpion’s prey – paralyzed, standing as still as a statue, almost in a trance. “But…what would Eric say?” she finally whispered.

His gaze clouded over as suddenly as the vast desert sky before a midsummer monsoon. “I don’t give a damn what that animal would say.”

“But--”

His lips grazed hers in the lightest of kisses, sending a thousand watts of energy racing down her spine and cutting off any stray thoughts she might have had about his rival. “Hope springs eternal. Just like my love for you. Robyn Bell, do not deny your destiny. You are mine. Today, tomorrow, forever.”

Le sigh. Was there anything more romantic?

“Are you reading that stupid book again, Dani?” Analisa San Miguel’s voice snapped me out of my reverie. Why doesn’t she just splash a glassful of cold water in my face while she’s at it? That might actually be less jarring. “We’ve been backstage for what, two minutes at most, and you’re already at it?”

“Take that back!” I said, playfully batting her in the arm with the hard box of my toe shoe as she leaned over her outstretched leg to work out the kinks after our dress rehearsal. “I can’t believe you called it stupid. Bethany Beyer is a literary genius.”

Okay, perhaps a bit of hyperbole. But, cynic though she was, even Analisa couldn’t deny that the Midnight saga was an international sensation. Originally aimed at the teen market, the little-known indie e-book catapulted into the public eye when one of the ladies on The View mentioned she’d read it while post-op from giving Mother Nature a little help during her latest ride on the nip-tuck-go-round, claiming she’d discovered the fountain of youth in a self-published Young Adult paranormal romance novel. Suddenly Midnight was on everyone’s TBR list – daughters, moms, and grandmas alike. In fact, the average reader’s age was more than double that of the main characters.

Well, the human characters, at least.

Almost overnight Bethany had landed an agent, a seven-figure advance, and a movie deal, and was being called “one to watch” in both the indie community and New York publishing circles alike. Because she was a recent graduate of Mountain Shadows Academy of the Arts, all my friends back home in Sparta thought it was “OMG, so cool!” that I went to the same high school as her. Of course, I’m just a freshman, so I’ve never met her because she’d graduated last June before I got here (plus the dancers and writers only have academic classes together – nothing in their majors), but my upperclassmen friends had.

Her prose was more than a little melodramatic and could probably benefit from a nice long waltz with a red pen, but a million readers can’t be wrong. It had that certain je ne sais quoi and tapped into our fears and dreams on a purely visceral level, with raw, emotional angst.