Micah had the good graces to look sheepish at the reminder. "Yeah, guess I'd better lay low for awhile, huh? No sense rocking the boat. But I'm not the sort who gives up easily, as you know. So, one of these days, Goddess Sasha, you'll give into me. I had a sixth sense about you from the very first time we met, and those vibes have only gotten stronger over time. It's fate, sweet Sasha, that we'll be together one day."
Sasha resisted the urge to roll her green-gold eyes. It had been very obvious to her from the first time she'd met Micah that he was something of a poser - a spiritual wannabe, in so many words. He'd only been practicing yoga about six years, and while he more or less had the physical aspect of the practice down, he had a long way to go before he fully understood all of the other facets. But he liked to put on certain airs, was wont to talk in New-Age terms, and acted like some sort of modern-day guru at times. To someone like Sasha, who'd not only studied many of those other facets in depth for more than a decade but had lived them as well, Micah's put-on airs were both comical and mildly insulting.
"Well," she told him with a mischievous grin, "my sixth sense is telling me that you might have gone a wee bit overboard on the garlic supplements this morning. You might want to abstain for twenty four hours before you teach a class from now on. See you later, Micah."
As she passed by the front desk, Sasha caught Callista's eye, knowing that the receptionist would have just overheard the conversation with Micah, and the two women exchanged a knowing grin. As she waited for the bus that would bring her home a few minutes later, Sasha was still chuckling under her breath at the shocked expression in Micah's light blue eyes at her admonition.
'That was just a tiny bit evil, you know,' she scolded herself. 'And not very kind. But, boy, did he ever deserve it! Maybe now he'll stop asking you out every time you cross paths.'
But Sasha doubted this would be the end of Micah's attempts to ask her out on a date, given his massive ego and not especially bright intellect. However, he certainly wasn't anything she couldn't handle easily, and she dismissed the incident from her thoughts during the bus ride home.
A couple of blocks from home, the cell phone that she rarely used pinged, signaling a voice mail. Sasha sighed, knowing before she looked at the screen that the call would have been from her mother. These Sunday calls were pretty much a regular thing, unless of course Katya was preoccupied with something related to business, or had to head in for a last minute rehearsal or costume fitting.
Katya Veselov was one of the professional ballroom dancers on the long running TV show Beyond Ballroom. The immensely popular reality show paired professional dancers with celebrity partners, most of whom had little to no dance training, and who were quite often something of a train wreck to actually watch. Sasha's mother had been with the show nearly from its beginning a decade earlier, and was now quite the celebrity herself. Katya was close to fifty years old now, though she was as toned and fit and stunning as she'd been as a young ballroom protégé in communist Russia. Still, the show's producers had begun assigning her partners who were closer to her own age as of late, something that Katya frequently raged about. Not, thought Sasha wryly, that her fiery-tempered mother ever lacked something or other to get into a rage about.
During Sasha's bohemian, nomadic-like childhood and adolescence, the most frequent subject of Katya's rages had been Enzo - her on-again, off-again lover, and the father of her child. Enzo was every bit as fiery and passionate as Katya, and during the times they'd been together it had always been unclear what was more fervent - their epic screaming matches or their wild bouts of lovemaking. Sasha had often thought that her parents went together like fire and ice, and that the day they had first met must have triggered either an earthquake, a hurricane, or a tsunami somewhere in the world.
They had met in Paris, the city where Katya had defected from her home country. She'd been near desperate to escape not just the oppressive communist regime that had governed Russia at the time, but also her abusive, domineering mother who had pushed Katya into the world of competitive ballroom dance at a very young age. And while she had grown to love dance and competitions and performances, she hated the restrictions placed on her by both the government and her overbearing mother.
The dance troupe that she belonged to was rarely allowed to travel outside of Russia, so when Katya learned about the trip to a competition in Paris she knew this could be her one and only chance to escape. Fortunately, her older sister had herself defected to Paris several years ago and Katya had been able to hide out with Polina until the troupe returned to Russia without her. Katya had been barely twenty years old at the time, but still possessed of a steely determination to make a better life for herself, a life where she and no one else could make her decisions.