Lahat ng Kabanata ng Beyond the Spotlight : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

Zaire's alarm never actually got the chance to go off. His body woke him at seven sharp anyway, the way it had for years, a habit left over from a decade of early call times that had stuck around long after most of those calls stopped being early. He lay on his back for a minute, staring at the water stain shaped vaguely like Florida on his ceiling, the one he kept meaning to mention to his landlord but somehow never did, and ran through the day before his feet touched the floor.Nine a.m., rehearsal with the girls doing the halftime routine for the basketball team. Oh how much he loved easy money. Forty minutes of choreo he'd thrown together in an afternoon and could probably run in his sleep at this point. Noon, a call with a brand that wanted him to "consult" on a dance challenge for a protein bar, which really just meant they wanted his name stapled to sixteen seconds of footage some twenty two year old intern would shoot on an iPhone propped against a stack of books. Two p.m., th

The rehearsal space took up the entire fourth floor of a building in the arts district, mirrors running the length of three walls, a sound system that had cost more than most people's cars, and the particular echoing hush of a room built for two hundred people that currently held about fifteen. Kairo had been standing near the water table for minutes now, holding a bottle he had no intention of drinking from, at least not yet. Doing the thing where he pretended to check his phone while actually watching the door.He'd imagined this moment more times than he was willing to admit to a single other person alive. In most versions of it, he'd been composed, easy, warm, the version of himself that interviewers described as "disarmingly normal for someone so famous." In none of the versions he'd built in his head had his stomach actually felt like this, a low, persistent drop that stretched out over an entire morning with no lights coming up to end it.The door opened at about 9:58, two or m

Sienna’s house sat up in the hills, all glass and pale stone, tucked away from the noise of the city. Kairo had a key, so he let himself in through the front door without bothering to knock. He’d been doing it for years. With how close they were, it had never felt strange or needed explaining.She was on the back terrace when he found her, her laptop open on the table and a glass of wine sitting untouched beside it. She didn’t look up when he stepped outside. She already knew it was him.“You look terrible,” she said.“Jeez, thanks. I didn’t know you cared that much,” he said, the sarcasm obvious in his voice.“I mean it kindly. You look exhausted.” She closed the laptop and leaned back in her chair. “I guess two weeks of rehearsals will do that to a person.”She gestured to the chair across from her.“Sit. Tell me about rehearsals.”He sat down. The city stretched out below them, blurred by the evening light.For a while, neither of them said anything. He liked that about her. They’d

The tour bus was not due for another two months, but the label had already started shuttling the core group between rehearsal spaces and press previews in a van that smelled permanently of coffee and someone’s aggressive cologne. Kairo ended up in the middle row next to Zaire more often than not, usually because of the seating arrangement, though he had stopped pretending it was always an accident. He had started noticing which door Zaire climbed in through and timing his own entrance a beat behind him, telling himself it meant nothing even as some quiet slightly embarrassing part of him kept track. They were forty minutes into the ride back from a photo preview, most of the van either dozing or scrolling in silence, when Zaire pulled out his phone and started deleting notifications with visible irritation. “You good?” Kairo asked. “Yeah I’m good. I just have like four hundred unread messages, and my thumb is tired of deleting them already.” Zaire kept swiping, barely looking up. “

Friday morning Kairo walked into rehearsal having slept maybe three hours, the skin under his eyes doing nothing to hide it. He spent the first twenty minutes of warm up relearning how to exist in a room with Zaire without his voice doing anything strange.It was not that anything had changed on Zaire’s end. Zaire said good morning exactly the way he always did, tossed him a water bottle without looking, asked if he had eaten anything before call time, same as any other day. It was Kairo who felt like a different more fragile version of himself had shown up that morning, one still carrying the specific rawness of a Thursday night he had not told a single living soul about except Sienna, in fragments, over the phone.He got through it. That was the only victory available to him, getting through an entire day of close contact choreography, of Zaire’s hands at his waist on the count, of easy conversation at the water table, without once letting any of what he had cried out in the back of