Chapter 1: The Boy on His Screen

The lights went down a few seconds before Kairo walked onstage. He knew because that has been his life for years now. The house lights dimming, the crowd noise swelling into that specific pitch of anticipation, and then the four count of darkness where nothing existed except his own heartbeat and the muffled thump of the opening track building through the floor.

Then the lights came up, and sixty thousand people screamed his name like it was their lifeline.

Kairo gave it back to them the way he always did. Wide arms, easy grin, the practiced tilt of his head that photographed well from any angle. Two hours of choreography he could run in his sleep, a costume change he'd rehearsed until it took lesser time than it’s supposed to, and a closing ballad that made half the arena cry, including reliably the seventeen-year-old girl in the front row every single city, like they were bused in.

He loved it. That was the strange, uncomfortable truth he rarely said out loud, he loved the noise, the heat of the lights and the way sixty thousand voices could make him feel, for two hours, like he wasn't alone in his own life.

Now that the two hours were successfully over, surviving the other twenty two hours was the problem.

……

Sienna was waiting in the car when he came off stage, scrolling through something on her phone with the particular stillness of someone who'd learned to look busy in front of security cameras. She glanced up when he slid in beside her, sweat damp and buzzing.

"Good crowd?"

"Good crowd." He reached over and laced his fingers through hers, out of habit more than performance, though the driver would mention it to someone eventually. And someone would post about it, and by morning there'd be a blurry photo captioned “KAIRO + SIENNA, STILL GOING STRONG” or something along that line. That was fine though because that was the arrangement.

"You looked tired in the bridge of 'Fall Line,'" she said. "Second verse. Your smile did the thing it always did."

"O…..k What thing are we talking about?."

"The thing where it's a smile but your eyes clock out early."

He huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t know what that is, but I’m fine. All I know is it was a good performance, the people loved it. That’s all that matters.”

"I didn't say you weren't fine. I said your eyes clocked out." She squeezed his hand once, then let go to check her phone again. It wasn't an accusation. It never was, with Sienna. Three years of this thing they’re doing. The arrangement, the photos, the careful choreography of a relationship that was real in every way except the one the tabloids assumed and she'd never once made him feel like a liar for it. She noticed things the way a girlfriend, a best friend, a sister, a wife and a mother all in one would. It was, he sometimes thought, the closest he came to being truly seen which should have meant something, and instead just felt like his life.

…………..

The hotel suite was enormous and empty in the way that all of them were a hush of expensive fabric and someone else's idea of what luxury should feel like. Kairo showered off the show, ordered food he was sure he wouldn't finish, and sat on the edge of the bed in a T-shirt with his hair still wet, phone in hand, doing the thing he did most nights but told no one about.

He opened T****k.

He didn't search anymore. He didn't need to at this point seeing that the algorithm had long since learned exactly what he wanted, which meant his For You page was, embarrassingly, about sixty percent Zaire Lennox.

He noticed excitedly a new one tonight. Zaire in a black tank top in what looked like a converted garage studio, running through a sixteen count to a song Kairo didn't recognize, stopping twice to redo a turn he clearly wasn't happy with even though it looked, to Kairo, completely clean both times. The video was ninety seconds long but Kairo embarrassingly watched it four times.

He knew things about Zaire Lennox that he had no business knowing. That he'd started dancing at eight because his older sister did it first and he refused to be left out of anything. That he'd walked out of two auditions for major label backup dancer positions because the choreographers wouldn't let him add his own transitions.

That he ran his own rehearsals barefoot because he said shoes told you lies about your balance. That he had, according to a caption from eleven months ago, choreographed his entire studio setup himself because he didn't trust anyone else's eye for camera angles. Yes he was that good, amazing good for that matter.

None of this was secret information, per se. It was all sitting in plain sight across a few hundred public videos, freely offered by a twenty-four-year-old who had no idea one of the most famous singers alive had memorized the shape of his gestures the way other people memorized scripture.

That was the part Kairo tried not to think about too hard. It wasn’t that he was hiding something shameful, exactly. It was that he was hiding how obsessed he had become with the dancer.

He'd sent messages over the past year. Not thirsty ones or he told himself they weren't, but it didn’t matter at this point. A comment on a video praising the transition work. A DM after Zaire choreographed a routine for another artist's awards show performance, something short and amazing. “that eight count in the bridge was insane, who taught you to move like that” was one of the messages. Months later, another “hope the tour with Jace Monroe is treating you well”. Message he’d sent and obviously received no replies.

Not even a read receipt he could torture himself with. Zaire's DMs weren't set up to show those, which meant Kairo had spent the better part of a year not knowing if his words had ever been seen at all, or if they'd simply vanished into an inbox with thousands of others just like his, sent by people who wanted a stranger's attention.

He told himself it didn't matter. He had an arena of people who screamed his name hours ago. He had Sienna in the room down the hall, who understood him better than almost anyone alive. He had everything a person was supposed to want, arranged around him like a stage set, beautiful and lit from every angle and entirely managed.

And still he sat on the edge of a hotel bed at one in the morning, watching a stranger redo a turn he was clearly annoyed about, because it was the only thing in his day that hadn't been curated for him. Zaire seemingly wasn't performing for cameras. Zaire was just annoyed about a turn judging from what is being shown through his screen and sincerely to Kairo It was the most honest thing.

“I’m in love with someone who doesn’t even know I exist,” he thought, and sighed the way you might sigh when you realize you’re out of milk. “That’s actually where I am right now.”

He put the phone face down on the nightstand. Something he always told himself he'd start doing earlier, but never does no matter for obvious reasons.

……..

In the morning there would be a flight, and a rehearsal right after for the outfit change nobody had gotten right yet, and after that a dinner with Sienna would follow. Three photographers had already been tipped off to attend.

There would be interviews where he’d be asked, again, like he was every year, what it felt like to have “everything.” And he would give the same kind of answer, something warm, grateful and true in its own limited way, no matter how tired he’d grown of the question.

Truthfully he was grateful, he did have everything, that was somehow both the honest answer and sometimes the whole problem.

But first, lying in the dark with the city glittering through the window. He let himself think just for a moment, because no one was watching about what Zaire Lennox's voice actually sounded like when he wasn't performing for a camera or on stage. He'd never heard it directed at him before. He wondered, not for the first time obviously, if he ever would. But having to hear it would be a dream come true.

Then he made himself stop, because it was one in the morning and he had a twelve hour day ahead of him, a life that ran on schedules and people telling him what and what not to do. There was no line anywhere on any of his schedules for “wanting things he wasn't allowed to have”, example Zaire Lennox. He closed his eyes.

Somewhere in a garage three thousand miles away, a boy who didn’t know his name was probably still awake, running the same eight count over and over until he’d lost count. Annoyed at himself for a turn that would have looked perfect to anyone else.