by Alice Ward
She smiled warmly at me. “And you must be Ms. Young. It’s wonderful to meet you.”
I thanked her, and she began to lead us on a tour of the facility. “You really did go all out,” I whispered to him as we walked, peering into rooms where orangutans were in various stages of rehabilitation. “How did you find out about this?”
“Siti Bemoe is the director of the center. She heard your story and thought you might be interested in the tour.”
I searched his face, feeling that there was something he hadn’t told me. “And…?”
“What? That’s it.” He shrugged casually, and then that sexy dimple appeared. “Oh. And Siti was once abducted by Abu Sayyaf and forced into a life of sex slavery. She has a new start here.”
My heart squeezed in my chest as I looked at the small woman in front of us. As tears filled my eyes, Ms. Bemoe stopped and turned to us, a smile practically beaming from her face. As emotional as I felt, I was also in awe that the woman who had been through so much was so… normal. It was inspiring.
“Pardon our dust here,” she said in her lilting voice. “As you know, we’re expanding. I’m happy to show you that your funds are going to good use.”
I looked up at him. “You made a donation?”
“I may have made a little one,” he said innocently, checking behind a plastic tarp.
Ms. Bemoe actually gave me a look that I would have sworn said something along the lines of, he’s crazy, and shook her head. “Mr. Watts, would you like to do the honors here?”
Honors?
Where?
Why?
And did this mean I’d get to have an orangutan on my lap?
Wyatt came up behind me and put his hands over my glasses. I grinned as he blocked my sight. “There’s more?”
“Yep.”
He guided me down a pathway while the sounds of the jungle surrounded us. It could’ve reminded me of a time a year ago, when things were so much more frightening, but it didn’t. Every step I took was sure because he was behind me.
I felt the motion of a door opening, and Wyatt nudged me out into another room. Monkeys howled and chattered all around. Wyatt lowered his hands and whispered, “You can look now.”
I blinked, and the first thing I saw was a sign that said ATLEE YOUNG RESERVE. I stared at it before scanning the jungle around me. It was a dome-covered habitat filled with monkeys. A vet center. It was beautiful. I lifted my hands to my mouth. “Oh, my god. This is… mine?”
He laughed and pulled me against his chest. “It’s actually for the monkeys, but I guess you could live here if you really wanted.”
I punched him, and just as quick as I could, I hugged him. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you did this. Why? How? When did—”
With a finger under my chin, he gently closed my mouth. “So, you like it?”
I nodded, tears in my eyes. I pulled my head back so I could open my mouth again. “So much. I love it. Almost as much as I love you.”
From the corner of my eye, I noticed Ms. Bemoe approach, but this time something small and orange was in her arms. I whirled, and sure enough, it was a baby orangutan cuddled in her arms in a blue blanket. “Would you like to hold our newest addition?”
“Would I?” I breathed, scooping the tiny, adorable creature into my arms. He was such a little nugget, barely the size of a sack of potatoes, and he easily wrapped himself around my body, making himself at home. “Oh! I’m in love!”
Wyatt rubbed the little guy’s head. “What’s his name?”
“Actually,” Ms. Bemoe said with a soft smile. “He was born premature after his mother was injured. We don’t have a name for him just yet. Would you like to name him?”
Wyatt and I looked at each other, and in the same breath said in unison, “Roger.”
We laughed. I honestly couldn’t imagine a more perfect day. The little baby wrapped his tiny hand around my finger, and I pressed my face to his fur. “You’d better not have any more surprises for me. I don’t think I can take it.” I snuggled the baby, wishing I’d never have to let him go. “Will you take our picture? My cam—”
When I looked at Wyatt, he was on one knee, reaching into his pocket. It took me a few seconds for the synapsis in my brain to react and realize what that meant. By the time I understood fully, he’d opened the velvet case and was holding it up to me.
The world tilted then righted itself again. The ring was an embarrassingly large clear teardrop, just like the ones that were forming in my eyes. “You’re not serious,” I breathed, holding Roger tighter.
He smiled. “Hey. Don’t argue with me. I’m going to get this out.”
It wasn’t so much arguing. It was falling apart at the seams from shock and pure happiness. I’d wanted to see him clearly, but my eyes clouded with additional tears, and by the time he started to speak, I was a sobbing mess. The orangutan grabbed onto my hair and pulled. Hard. It was like the little guy was saying, Pay attention!
People had begun to gather around us, and I managed to pull it together enough to say, “I’m sorry,” and wipe my eyes under my glasses with the back of my hand.
His grin grew wider, his eyes even bluer if that was at all possible. “Hey, if you’d let me say what I wanted to say on my first try, you wouldn’t be the woman I love.”
I laughed. I guessed that was true.
He took my hand and laid kiss after kiss on my knuckles, right at the spot where the ring would go. “And I do love you, Atlee. I’ll consider it the best fortune ever if I get to fight with you for the rest of my life. Marry me?”
“Of course I will,” I breathed, extending my finger so he could slip the ring on. “I want to fight forever with you too.”
It might have been the first thing we ever really, truly agreed upon. We actually didn’t have to argue about that at all.
He kissed me, the heat of his lips warming me to my toes. “I love you,” I murmured, the baby orangutan wiggling between us.
Wyatt smiled, causing me to melt. “I completely agree.”
I sighed, leaning my head on his chest, the monkey under my chin.
If our time together had proven anything, it was that nothing was impossible.
THE END
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Alice Ward
A Sneak Peek
THE INTERVIEW
CHAPTER ONE
Sadie
I’d been in this position before.
Legs crossed. Pad of paper balancing on my knee. Pen poised in hand. Eyes forward.
Dim light curled around the corners of my vision, and the grenadine velvet of the seat clung to the loose skirt tucked beneath my thighs. The backrest behi
nd me forced perfect spinal alignment, but my shoulders turned inward to shield my thinly bloused torso from the cool draft drifting down from the soaring ceiling above.
A dull hum lit on my ears as the bodies seated shoulder to shoulder around me turned to one another and discussed post-show dinner plans in the patented Broadway murmur. This was a world I knew well, one I visited weekly in both the revered theaters of New York City and the lesser-known playhouses of hopeful up-and-comers, but I felt like a virgin in a sea of hookers tonight.
Tate McGrath was headlining the Imperial’s newest production, Concrete, and I was terrified.
For years, I’d been following McGrath’s career, even before I landed the critic’s column at The Apple. He’d started by playing supporting roles on dingy stages across Staten Island and Brooklyn before being recognized as a true talent by producer Jack Jacobsen, who promptly plunked him into an off-Broadway show as the lead, and Tate’s road to theater stardom was paved with sequins from there.
While live performers hardly gained the notoriety of the actors and actresses on the silver screen, he became somewhat of a legend in the industry, lionized for his powerful method acting and raw realism, and I became an avid fan. Then, practically overnight, he became a national sensation when he was scooped up by Hollywood to star in a psychological drama film that shattered box office records and led to a sequel of similar success.
He’d done the interviews and talk shows and public Q&A panels typical of A-list celebrities, and he’d now returned to his home on the stage, but while it seemed everyone was eager to see Concrete merely for the sake of watching Tate McGrath live, I was almost fearful.
More than once, I’d reviewed plays featuring movie stars of note, and the delicate art form that made Broadway and its less luminous counterparts such an exquisite experience was simply absent. There were no camera angles and close-ups and gripping graphics to pull the audience into the soul of the plot, only people reaching out with the very deepest parts of themselves to a room of eyes and ears. If Tate had lost his gift of honest expression in the fabricated studios of the West Coast, I was going to be crushed.
I was the only one, apparently.
“Did you read that interview he did in the Times?” a woman wearing green from head to toe whisper-screamed to her companion. She sat a couple seats away from me, but I could hear every word. “He sounds like he’s turned into just another California hippie. Avocado on toast for breakfast? You’d think he’d never heard of New York, much less gotten his start here. Anyway, I wouldn’t have even come to see this show, but I’ll bet it’s his last run before his career falls apart, and I’d hate to miss that.”
The man directly in front of me — donned in a full tuxedo, complete with a modern top hat — was having a similar conversation with his wife. “I heard the boy refused to do the play unless they doubled the salary he got for those movies. Greedy, if you ask me. And ungrateful. It would serve him right if this thing’s a flop.”
Six girls barely of drinking age in knockoff designer dresses filed into the row behind me, jarring my seat as they tittered amongst themselves.
“I can’t wait to see him in person. He’s so hot.”
“He should keep doing movies though. Plays are so boring.”
“I bet he’s not as good live. No retakes, you know?”
“Who cares? He’s so hot!”
Putting pen tip to paper, I scribbled several fragments, including a mention of avocado toast, a query about salary, and a note about giddy fangirls. I wasn’t just a critic tonight. After the show, I was going backstage for an exclusive interview with Tate McGrath, which was another reason for the bowling ball in my belly.
It was an honor to have been given the piece by my editor, as I’d never strayed from standard reviews during my employment with The Apple, but it was especially exciting because the small-circulation paper had never had an exclusive with anyone of such status. The closest we’d come was reprinting from other sources.
I was going to be the first person in my paper’s history to have my name printed alongside a self-conducted interview with a high-profile star, and I was determined to make it the best damn interview of Tate McGrath to date. If that meant digging into the mundane details of breakfast choices and contractual negotiations to find the juice, so be it.
The lights mounted on the walls ebbed to a muted glow, and a moment later, the sounds of brass and stringed instruments suffering various degrees of sharpness or flatness rose throughout the theater as the orchestra tuned their instruments.
Hot anticipation burbled in my gut.
I hadn’t been so wired for a performance since my first review outing almost five years before, when I was a young Connecticut girl fresh out of college with nothing but a trial piece between me and my journalistic dreams. As a critic, of course, it was my obligation to write an unbiased analysis of the performance I was about to see, but I was rooting for excellence nonetheless for reasons that were very much born of bias.
When the play began, the entirety of the Imperial auditorium was swathed in a sheen of gloomy blue as a young child in tatters emerged to walk the curb of the set’s faux street. I recognized him at once as one of the Dresden twins cast to portray Xander, Tate’s character in his youth. His dark head was arced down, shoulders hunched, in a show of weighty misery, and he trudged the length of the curb and back before settling to sit with his elbows on his knees. He ground a toe into the rain soaked pavement and kicked aside a stray piece of litter. Then a soft, mournful lament rippled from his cherub lips, accompanied only by a simulated rainfall.
The scene was very Dickens-esque, and I was captivated right away. Without tearing my eyes from the stage, I scrawled a comment on my pad and listened with bated breath as the child’s voice swelled and hung on one trembling, sorrowful note. His angst rattled in the deepest parts of my bones, drawing a lone tear from the corner of my eye just before the poignant fade to black.
And there he was.
In a blaze of gold like the Second Coming, a man swaggered to the center of the same street, which now glistened as if bathed in sunshine. He was nearly as tall as the doors boasting quirky shop names on either side of him, and he was shirtless. Taut chest muscles and lean arms of bronze claimed my attention to distract me from the sinfully low-hung jeans cradling narrow hips. Not a single hair on his perfect head was out of place, but the scruff on his stern chin and the guarded brace of his posture revealed a torn and incomplete soul hiding behind midnight blue eyes. I stared unblinking at the Adonis, my chest failing to rise and fall normally.
“It wasn’t the first time I thought about murder.”
Forlorn, bitter, and steely, the words curdled in my ears and kickstarted my breathing again. With the unforgiving immediacy of a whip, I knew my fears had been for naught. Tate McGrath was back.
***
I had risen from the trenches, scarred and rejuvenated all at once. The emotional rollercoaster that was Concrete had prodded guffaws loose, yanked tears free, and drawn both hope and hatred from the darkest chasms of my being. I battled the desire to sleep off the hangover of overstimulation and the need to hop in a cab and go directly to the nearest skydiving facility to exorcise my body of coursing adrenaline.
How I was going to present myself professionally when I was reeling from the conflict, heartache, and retribution I’d just witnessed, I didn’t know. But I needed to figure it out quickly because I was standing in Tate’s empty dressing room with the promise he would be with me shortly.
Having been so enraptured in the play, I’d failed to take as many notes as I would’ve liked, so I sat down at the stark white vanity and used the moment of solitude to scribble as much on my nearly naked pad as I could.
Writing reviews was a harder task than it sounded like because I was forced to toe the line between providing ample detail and spoiling the plot’s highlights. Or lowlights, in some cases. This one, in particular, was going to be more of a challenge than usual.
Concrete was perhaps my new favorite work, certainly my favorite production featuring Tate McGrath, and I found myself filling out an entire summary on one lemony sheet after another rather than bulleting neat, concise points to touch upon.
“Am I disturbing you?”
I whirled around so quickly that the chair rocked back onto two legs, and I nearly toppled over. I’d been so focused on my recollection of the performance that I hadn’t even heard the door open or the footsteps approaching, and my heart was thrumming furiously against my breast.
A dark brow lifted in a smooth arc over a piercing eye that, with its partner, stripped away my physical existence to peer into the ether of my thoughts — which were little more than snapping static in my startled state.
“No.” My voice was far away, muffled by walls that didn’t exist. “Sorry.”
“Are you sure? I can give you a few minutes.”
He was pulsing, emanating a palpable intensity that stroked my hair and slapped my cheeks. In the hundreds of photographs I’d seen and the scads of plays I’d enjoyed, I’d memorized this man’s striking features, but I never could have imagined how imposing his presence actually was.
His shoulders, broader up close, claimed the space around him with stunning conviction, and his stare seemed to see straight through me. Straight to the truth of me. His gaze was so penetrating I couldn’t move. As I faced him, I suddenly felt a wave of unprovoked defiance crash over me, as if he’d verbally threatened to make this meeting as difficult as possible and ensure my everlasting failure as that one theater critic from The Apple who botched the interview with the famous Tate McGrath.
“No,” I repeated, my tone noticeably more stable. At least I hoped so. “I just needed to write down a few extra thoughts about the show.”
I snatched my pad from the vanity and got to my feet, my skirt swishing around my knees. Tate didn’t move, but his gaze wandered up and down the length of my form, and I silently congratulated myself for having chosen the smart yet fitted blouse as my top for the evening.