Chapter Text
“Go on,” Christian urges, giving Santiago’s arm an encouraging and enthused nudge. “She doesn’t bite.”
Santiago’s newly acquired friend stumbles a little due to the copious amounts of alcohol in his system, his sandy hair and cobalt jacket both equally dishevelled. He’s still innocent, Santiago muses: judging by the way he’d been not-so-subtly glancing around the club with crackling starlight in his eyes, this is undoubtedly Christian’s first time at an institution as lively—and hedonistic— as the Moulin Rouge.
“Ah, but she does,” Lautrec interjects, holding out a wobbling finger of caution. “Just look at her, my friend; there is an unmistakable glint of murder in her eyes!”
“Come on, Toulouse,” Christian says almost whiningly, sounding painfully similar to a child still wet behind the ears. He points almost drunkenly at Nini: the strikingly blonde bun perched atop her skull glimmers like a delicately carved sculpture of ice as she twirls underneath the bluish lighting, her head thrown back mid-laugh. “How bad can she be?”
“Very bad, if what I’ve heard and seen is accurate.”
“Will you both stop ?” Santiago admonishes half-heartedly, his gaze still plastered on Nini’s fluid movements; she belongs to the stage, he thinks, what with the way her hips sway to the music as if they have a mind of their own. Some people were just born to entertain, the applause-seeking tendency imbued in their blood. “I should’ve never told you about this.”
“You didn’t need to tell us– well, you didn’t need to tell me, at least,” Toulouse says, rolling his eyes as he picks up his glass. Swallowing a prolonged gulp of his drink, he continues, “You’ve been admiring her since the day you stepped foot through those doors.”
“And you danced with her at the bar,” Christian adds coyly, the perfect picture of innocence. “I saw you both when I was on that diamond with Satine.” He trembles almost reverently after he says her name, and Santiago knows that Christian has fallen head over heels for the headliner here, just as he has for the headliner’s… friendly rival, he should say.
(He’s enamoured with the way that Nini does… everything, really. He loves the biting manner with which she speaks and how her accent is outrageously clipped when she spits out certain words; it’s as though she’s trying to obscure a part of herself, closing it off to the rest of the world. He does not know why he is so drawn to her, but there are many things—both good and bad— in the world that Santiago has long since stopped questioning.
Everything about her is pointed and sharp, from the way her limber legs kick when she’s doing the can-can with the other girls to how she carries herself; there is nothing delicate about her. She seems like the type of person to have a piece of jagged shrapnel for a heart, someone who’s all pointed teeth and rugged edges. He’s heard the whispers; she’s the one that the customers go to when they want someone rough, someone mean .
Once Santiago is in Nini’s presence, however, he finds it impossible to tear his eyes away from her; it’s as if her magnetic field yanks him towards her like some sensuous siren song. Every time he goes in to drink from her tantalising aura, it does nothing to sate his desire for her; it only leaves him thirstier than before.)
“Just go and say hello, Santiago,” Christian eggs. “We don’t have much time.”
“Alright,” Santiago huffs. Christian cheers at the same time that Toulouse boos: choosing to ignore them both, Santiago cautiously approaches the blonde dancer, the palms of his hands clammy.
From his position, it looks like she’s nursing a whiskey of some sort by the endless rows of alcohol lining the walls; her deathly pale fingers wrap around the glass as a python does its unsuspecting prey, and Santiago cannot help but suppress a shiver.
Swallowing his nerves, he clears his throat, drawing Nini’s attention; her head immediately whirls around, her movements so sudden and sharp that Santiago rears back like a spooked horse.
Her face is devoid of any trace of emotion as she looks him up and down like he’s a piece of meat on display in a butcher shop window. Her frosty gaze lingering for a moment too long on Santiago’s very, very bare chest, she asks, “Well? Are you just gonna stand there, or will you buy me a drink?” She sinks against the marble of the bar, the heavy strokes of kohl lining her eyelids making it look as if someone’s socked her in the eye.
“Hi,” blurts Santiago, and he immediately regrets opening his mouth. It is only later that he realises that he hadn’t answered her question.
Nini snorts, the sound guttural and obscene, before a scowl settles on her face. “I thought so,” she says, her lips curling into a threatening sneer. “Too penniless to even empty your pockets for a girl, eh?” She leans in and asks, “Are you another one of Toulouse’s little minions?”
“We are not his minions,” he protests vehemently. “We’re children of the bohemian revolu–”
She exhales slowly. For a second, Santiago’s breath lodges in his throat as he awaits her next move; Nini gives her drink a swirl before emptying it in a single gulp and slamming the empty glass onto the marble counter before her.
“Keep walking,” she drawls, shooing him away as if he’s nothing but a fly on the wall.
He doesn’t need to be told twice; he hightails it out of there and speedwalks back to Toulouse and Christian, who both look like two schoolboys about to burst into a fit of raucous, high-pitched giggles at his misfortune.
“Don’t,” Santiago groans, but they laugh anyway, and he considers getting new friends.
“Discouraged?” Toulouse asks simply, leaning on his cane like someone wise beyond his years, which he is not (well, in Santiago’s humble opinion, anyway).
Santiago wavers for a moment before shaking his head no. “Never,” Santiago replies, and he strides off in the direction of the Elephant; they’ve got a show to pitch, after all. Later that night, however, he thinks of how she’d looked at him when he’d walked by; her eyes had lit up for a real moment, and that’s enough for Santiago to believe that there is a bit of flesh and feasibility and feeling hidden within her stone-cold excuse of a heart.
***
He finds her standing by one of the windows in the rehearsal room on a lazy afternoon at the Rouge, a cigarette dangling between her fingers like a smoking pendulum. He moves to stand next to her; she doesn’t acknowledge him.
(They’ve gotten friendlier with each other since that first disaster of a meeting: she still scorns him and scowls in his direction when she catches him staring, but he’s been able to buy her a couple of drinks.
“You found work?” she’d asked one evening, just as the clock was about to strike midnight.
“Hmm?”
“How else were you able to afford this?” She held up the glass of murky liquid in her hand. “Surely you’ve found work or something of that kind.”
And Santiago had winked as he took a drag of the pipe in his mouth. “Zidler won’t notice the absence of a few shots, will he? What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Nini had said with a slight shake of the head. Her lips had quirked into a smile for a moment, though, and that is more than enough to sustain his endeavours.)
A breeze slips through the open window and worms its way between the two of them before scattering through the studio like a broken absinthe bottle, its glass shards splintering across the floor. It’s chilly days like these that make Santiago long for the blistering summers of Argentina and the feeling of sweat pearling at his back, soaking through his shirt as he stomps his way through a dance. He misses Argentina sometimes; Paris is a jungle of debauchery and unmitigated chaos, but Santiago reckons he’s happier here with his friends.
Out of the corner of Santiago’s eye, Nini shivers slightly. Patches of gooseflesh line her slender arms, and she wraps those arms around herself, a butterfly retreating into its cocoon. Wordlessly, he shucks his shirt and makes to drape it over her shoulders, but she shakes her head once, and he puts it back on again.
“Are you cold?” he asks, after a moment. When she doesn’t reply, he continues, “There is a dance that we used to do in the brothels of Buenos Aires. They called it…” Santiago tries to reword it into French, but no translation will ever do it justice, so he simply says, “The tango.”
The tango, Santiago thinks, provides him with a sense of rejuvenation and revitalisation that nothing else in the world can. It invokes passion in him, but not in the way that the Green Fairy does: no, this is something different altogether. You see, the alcohol blinds him; the tango chooses to ground him, instead.
“What does that have anything to do with bein’ cold?” she drawls, turning to look at him with an inquisitive glance.
“Might warm you up,” Santiago offers. Distantly, he remembers shivering and reeling from a deep-seated iciness within him as he walked up to a dance partner and panting like a dog after a few lively songs back home. He remembers how his soul had felt alive.
She seems to contemplate this for a moment, eyebrows knitted together as if deep in thought before she extends her hand to him. “Show me,” she demands, and before he knows it, they’re both strutting onto the dance floor, her palm lounging lightly against his.
His blood starts to pump the moment the pianist begins pounding out a familiar tune, one that agitates unwarranted memories from the depths of his soul. When the melody begins to pick up and bleed from the ivory keys, Santiago does not hesitate to move: what surprises him is that Nini doesn’t miss a beat, either, and he starts to wonder if she’s done this before.
Every idiosyncrasy and movement of hers is typically choreographed and rehearsed, but as he watches her dance with him now, there is a fire that surges within her, melting her icy facade. He decides that he likes seeing her like this: Nini looks like she wants to take on the world, and Santiago? He won’t mind if she wants him to come with her.
“That was…” she starts, before trailing off as if she’s taking her words back in a way. Instead of attributing a word to how she feels, Nini simply shrugs instead. It’s a nonchalant shrug, but it seems like a happy shrug, too, and Santiago smiles.
“You’ve done this before,” he says: he does not pose it as a question, because there is no room for uncertainty. “The way you moved…”
“I’m glad you think so,” she replies, rolling her shoulders and wincing when she hears her joints slide into place. The rehearsal space is almost full of dancers, now, and she retracts her hand from his as if she’s nothing but a child caught with a fist in a jarful of sweets. She turns on her heel– in search of her grey towel, Santiago believes, to wipe away the sweat lining her back–, and brushes past his shoulder with a whispered “Thank you”, too quiet to carry across the room but loud enough for its intended recipient to hear.
***
One chill-warding dance turns into two, and two dances turn into a heated tango session every day after everyone else has left the rehearsal space. Before Santiago knows it, Nini is accepting his invitations to coffee (paid for with coins salvaged under cushions and bills pinched from Toulouse’s wallet, of course) at the nearby café and humouring his attempts at striking up conversation.
Sometimes, it feels as if they’re moving faster than Christian and Satine, the two lovebirds who swoop behind costume racks for fragmented moments of joy and hole up in their garret of a nest for hours on end. Santiago knows that they’re not, though, for there are still days when Nini goes painfully quiet when he cracks a joke that she’d usually laugh at, dismisses his kisses with an acerbic scowl, and storms off in a flurry of lace and kohl.
(She’ll come back, though, when he’s sitting on a chaise lounge somewhere in the Rouge, and settle down beside him, the springs squealing as they scramble to support her, too. He never asks questions and she never says a word, but they manage to come to an understanding anyway.
She’ll twist her fingers between his and squeeze his hand hard: that’s the closest thing Santiago’s ever gotten to an apology from her, but he understands it. Words always die on their tongues when they try to express them, for they have never learned to communicate that way; it has always been movement for them, leaps and pas de deux and gentle touches on the shoulder.
Perhaps that is why they never put what they are into words.)
“They’re being stupid,” Nini says to him one morning when the sun is still hiding behind a veil of mist. She’s just woken up from a midnight nap and lounges on the bed like a cat, her limbs contorted in some strange stretch that she insists is loosening her hamstrings.
Santiago puts out his cigarette against his trousers and turns from his window-side post, from where he’d been gazing at the sunrise. “Who?”
“Satine and her poet, you idiot.”
“Oh.”
“I caught them snogging behind– you know those prop trolleys? The ones that– Yeah? I caught them there yesterday.” She snorts, rolls over, and buries her head into a pillow. Voice muffled, she continues, “They’re clearly taking this ‘secret affair’ thing very seriously; kudos must go to his youthful lust and her lust for his youth.”
“They’re safe so long as the Duke doesn’t find out,” he offers, crossing the room and sinking into the mattress. The springs beneath the seat of his trousers have become familiar over the past month or so: Nini’s started pulling him into her apartment, and that’s where they’ll both stay until the sun’s past its peak in the sky, nursing hangovers and reading newspapers and putting a pot of soup on the stove to boil and pretending to be anyone but a courtesan and a gigolo.
“But he can’t possibly be that stupid,” Nini insists, sitting upright and leaning against the headboard. Her blonde locks, matted from sleep and pomade, hang like a lion’s mane around her tired eyes. “They’re not even trying to be subtle anymore.” She sighs once, and sagely mutters, “Love, am I right?”
“Drives you mad,” Santiago hums.
“What, like how you’ve made me flub a step every night of the week because you won’t stop causing a ruckus by the bar?” she asks, but her words are mellow and almost light. “That’s been driving me up a wall.” She tilts her head and locks eyes with him, a ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of her lipstick-stained mouth.
Santiago wants a lot of things. He wants to run a hand through Nini’s hair, press a soft kiss to her temple, and pretend for a moment that, despite the stench of Parisian nightsoil wafting through the windows, they are nestled deep within the countryside. The one thing that supersedes it all is the desire to ask her if she loves him: not how Satine does Christian, of course, but in their own special way.
He thinks he’d fare better if he heard a concrete answer from her: such a query, however, is out of the question, and he knows that. This– coffee dates, occasional moments of intimacy, staying the night, and kissing the same cupid’s bow without feeling repulsed– is not second nature to either of them. They’ve had to learn to express the passion that runs maroon in their veins, and Santiago knows for a fact that Nini will never let those three pesky syllables slip from her lips.
He finds himself chuckling in response. “I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known how distracting I was being. I’ll find some other time to get us some drinks, mi amor.”
The two of them stay curled up under the covers until Nini starts clamouring for strong coffee and a croissant: as they get dressed, she suddenly asks, “What’s that mean?”
“What’s what mean?”
“What you called me earlier. Mi amor .”
Her Spanish is unsure and almost disgustingly French, but Santiago smiles anyway, for it’s been too long since he’s last heard those words– however butchered– blossom from someone else’s tongue. “My love,” he says simply. “It means ‘my love’.”
She doesn’t say a word after that, but she lets him kiss her on the cheek.
***
It takes them three months and twenty-eight days to work out that they will never last. It’s impossible for people like them to offer affection for free when they could be scalping coins off someone else. Santiago concludes that there’s something wrong with both of them: they love each other vehemently, but it feels like Nini’s stuck on an inaccessible island more often than not, aloof and impossible to reach. He knows that he gets like that too, sometimes. That, he thinks, is where the irony lies.
The breakup– can they even break up when they were never officially together, two halves never sewn together with russet thread?– is nothing short of a mess, a rollicking storm of red and smudged eyeliner and screaming and slamming doors and shaking shoulders.
He is the one to call it off, first. He gets tired of watching her flirt with the aristocrats and finds himself repulsed by the fact that her lips will never truly be his. She’d been mere moments away from locking him out of her life, anyway, so he resolves that the past four months had been nothing but a competition to see who’d break first.
“I wish I could,” he says, when she holds on so tight to his arm that he is convinced for a moment to roll right back into the momentum of whatever they had.
“Stay, then,” Nini challenges, her voice breaking as she sits up on the bed, her eyes hollow.
He doesn’t, despite the fire burning in his soul, yawning and yearning to be fed. He doesn’t, even though this is the first time she’s ever said anything bordering on those three syllables: it’s too little too late, he decides. He keeps walking.