Chapter 3: Get Me Zaire

The label's LA office occupied the top three floors of a glass building that had been designed, as far as Kairo could tell, entirely to make the people inside it feel important and the people looking up at it feel small. He'd been coming here for six years and still hadn't gotten used to the elevator ride, the particular hush of it, the way the doors opened onto a floor that smelled faintly of money and eucalyptus, as if someone had decided ambition needed a scent.

Priya was already in the conference room when he arrived, three tablets and a laptop arranged in front of her like she was preparing for a small war, which, knowing Priya, she probably was. She'd managed him since he was nineteen, had watched him go from a kid with a guitar and a SoundCloud following to whatever he was now, and she'd earned, in all that time, the right to speak to him with a bluntness almost no one else in his life was allowed.

"Sit," she said, not looking up. "We have four dancers to talk about and a flight to Atlanta for Gideon in three hours, so let's start."

He sat. A screen on the far wall lit up with a name and a reel, a woman named Talia, résumé a mile long, backup for two of the biggest names in the industry over the last five years, technically flawless in the thirty second clip Priya played.

"She's clean, experienced, and she's worked with your choreographer before, so there's no ramp up time," Priya said. "I like her for lead."

"Next."

Priya's eyebrows went up a fraction, but she moved on. Second dancer, third, fourth, each one competent, each one exactly the kind of safe, professional choice a tour of this size was supposed to run on. Kairo watched all four reels with the specific attention of someone trying very hard to look like he was actually considering them.

"None of them," he said, when the fourth clip ended.

"None of them what?"

"None of them are what I want."

Priya set down the tablet she was holding, slowly, which was, for Priya, the equivalent of another person standing up and walking out of the room. "Kairo. These are four of the best working dancers in the country. My team built this list over three weeks."

"I know. They're good, I don't doubt that. I just said none of them are what I want. I didn't say they weren't good."

"Then what exactly do you want?"

He'd known this question was coming since he walked in, and he still didn't have a clean answer for it, which was its own kind of problem. "I want Zaire Lennox."

The name landed in the room after a beat of silence before anyone reacts to it. Priya's expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind her eyes recalculated fast.

"The T****k kid again."

"For heaven’s sakes he's not a T****k kid. He's a choreographer who happens to also post videos. There's a difference." Kairo heard the edge in his own voice and tried to sand it down. "He's the best mover I've seen in years. You've seen his work, everyone's seen his work, that's the whole point, it's not some secret."

"I've seen his work. It's good. It's also completely different from anything you've built your show around, and he's never led a tour before." Priya leaned back, studying him the way she did when she suspected she wasn't getting the whole story, which in this case she wasn't. "His schedule is famously impossible. He turns down five figure single day bookings because he doesn't feel like it, according to his own manager. What makes you think he says yes to thirteen months of someone else's schedule?"

"Offer him enough that saying no doesn't make sense."

"What is wrong with you? That's not a strategy, that's just dishing out a blank check."

"I don't care. Give it to him if that's what it takes. Whatever he wants, let him have it." Kairo heard how it sounded, imperious, a little unhinged, the exact tone he'd hated in artists he'd met over the years, the ones who forgot that other people's time wasn't infinitely purchasable just because their own bank account was. He tried again, softer. "I'm not saying this because I want to be difficult. I've watched his stuff for..." He stopped himself before the number came out sounding as strange as it actually was. "For a while. He builds routines like he's solving something, even when to everyone else it already looks perfect. That's rare. You know it's rare. I want that on this tour."

Priya studied him for a long moment, tapping one manicured nail against the edge of her tablet, and Kairo made himself hold still under it, made himself not fidget, because Priya had known him long enough to read fidgeting as a tell even when she couldn't have said what exactly it would be telling her.

"You've watched a lot of his stuff," she said, finally, carefully neutral.

"He's good. I pay attention to good work." It came out faster than he meant it to.

"Mm." She let it go, which he was grateful for, and, in some small buried way, disappointed by, as if some part of him had wanted her to push, had wanted someone to make him say the actual shape of the thing out loud, if only so he'd stop having to carry it alone. "Fine. I'll have someone reach out. For the record, I think this is a risk. An untested lead on a thirteen month tour is a bigger swing than the board is going to love. But it's your show, and you've earned the right to make a swing like this if you want it badly enough."

"I want it."

"Clearly." Priya was already tapping something into her phone, already three steps ahead into logistics, which was the thing Kairo loved about her even when she scared him a little. "I'll tell them it's non-negotiable and the number's flexible. If he says no, I don't want to hear about it for a month, because you're going to sulk, and I don't have time to manage that on top of everything else this tour requires."

"Thank you so much. Hold on a minute, I do not sulk."

"You, pretty boy, are a very spoilt brat. You sulked for two weeks when the Milan show got rescheduled." She stood, gathering the tablets, the meeting apparently over in the abrupt, efficient way all of Priya's meetings ended. At the door she paused, looking back at him with an expression he couldn't quite name, not suspicion exactly, something closer to the careful curiosity.

"Kairo. This isn't about the dancing, is it?"

He didn't answer right away, and the silence did more talking than he wanted it to.

"It's about the dancing," he said.

"Sure. I just hope you know what you're doing." Priya left him alone in the conference room with four rejected reels still glowing faintly on the screen, and the specific, hollow feeling of having asked for something he had no idea how to actually receive if it came.

……….

The call came a few days later. Kairo was in the middle of a costume fitting, standing on a small platform in his underwear while a woman named Delphine pinned fabric around his hips and made small disapproving noises about a supplier's fabric weight, when his phone buzzed against the mirror ledge and Priya's name lit up the screen.

"Can you take that," Delphine asked, not really asking, mouth full of pins.

"Yeah. Give me a second." He picked it up, angling away from the mirror as much as the pins in his waistband would allow. "Tell me."

"He finally signed." Priya's voice had the particular brisk satisfaction of someone who'd closed a deal she hadn't fully believed would close. "Contract came back an hour ago. Rehearsals start in six weeks, he's in as lead as agreed but credited as assistant choreographer per his own ask, which, for the record, is a smart ask. Means he's not just there to hit marks."

Kairo stood very still on the platform, fabric pinned halfway around him, a strange lightness moving through his chest that he recognized, with some embarrassment, as something close to relief.

"He signed," he repeated.

"That's what I said. You can stop holding your breath, whatever that was about." A pause, the sound of Priya's heels clicking against a hard floor somewhere on the other end. "First rehearsal's the fourteenth. You'll meet him then. Try to act like a professional and not like whatever this was in my office, you’re not a puppy."

She hung up before he could answer, which was probably for the best, because Kairo wasn't sure what he would have said. Delphine resumed her pinning, muttering about hip measurements, entirely uninterested in whatever had just visibly moved across her client's face.

Six weeks. Kairo did the math without meaning to, forty-two days, which was nothing, and which was also, somehow, an enormous stretch of time to spend knowing that on the other side of it, a door he'd been quietly and uselessly knocking on for the better part of a year was finally, actually, going to open.

He didn't know, standing on that platform with pins digging into his waist, that Zaire had signed the contract that morning without a second thought about the man who'd requested him, thinking mostly of his own studio, his sister's voice on the phone, and a career he was finally, deliberately building past its ceiling.

He didn't know that his name, when it came up at all in Zaire's life over the following six weeks, would arrive mostly as a logistical detail, a rehearsal schedule, a wardrobe fitting, a producer's email about media training, rather than anything resembling the weight it carried on his own end.

He only knew that in six weeks he was going to be standing in a room with Zaire Lennox, and he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with his own face when that happened.

"Hold still," Delphine said. "You're vibrating."

"Sorry," Kairo said, and tried, and mostly failed, to hold still.