by Tanya Chris
I nodded. It was a conversation we’d all had before. Shakespeare equaled small houses, big casts equaled big houses, opening night was opening night. I looked at Joshua and found him looking back. “Break a leg?”
“You too,” he said politely. Then he reached out his hand, also politely, and I took it, and something warm flickered between us until he pulled his back.
“Holding for five,” Rebekah announced, not surprisingly. We never started on time opening night. The cast was eager but the crowd was hard to corral. “Go sit down,” she said to me, coming over to push me away from the stage door. “You’re in the way.”
I wasn’t really, but backstage had a flow to it and I didn’t belong at the door just then. I wandered back to the makeup area and checked myself over for the third or fourth time, admiring the breadth of my shoulders and the taper of my torso in the strictly structured tunic. Maybe it was a fashion that should come back into style. I didn’t mind if women wanted to ogle my legs.
I stayed in the makeup room until I heard Pete’s voice and Joshua’s response float over the loudspeaker. One more entrance and finally it was my turn to stand by the door with Rebekah, to feel that buzz that took away Nate and left Othello, to make my quiet way out the door and through the narrow, dimly-lit passages behind the stage.
Joshua exited the stage through one of the fake stone arches and joined me in the drapery behind the set. We waited in stillness and silence while the actors on stage finished the scene, the calm that came to me on stage beginning to fill me. We entered together, Joshua’s voice breaking clearly across the stage, and Othello responded: “Tis better as it is.”
Chapter 21
Relief, rapture, the dizzy high born of mental exhilaration and physical exhaustion. I smiled down at my family, both grateful for their support and eager for them to leave. I wanted to be with the people who shared my buzz, to take off my costume and makeup and grab a beer and a seat and for the first time this week not have tomorrow hanging over my head like a to do list.
The auditorium was cluttered with groups like ours—friends and family congratulating their particular actor. Hugs were exchanged, bouquets handed over, photos taken. People who hadn’t heard Shakespeare’s name since high school offered their opinions on Central Playhouse’s interpretation of Othello.
Along the back wall, Joshua and Sherry stood together with a couple of our other cast mates. Sherry, draped over Joshua’s arm, raised up on her toes now and then to kiss him. I hadn’t spoken to her yet. It was one of the reasons I was antsy for my mother to leave. At any moment, Sherry would be over to congratulate me, likely in a manner similar to how she was congratulating Joshua. And that would require an explanation.
Lissie swooped in to say hello to Bella, which triggered introductions. I’d avoided this meeting while we’d been dating, but as one of Bella’s clients and safely in the friend zone, Lissie was now eligible for a hasty exchange of names. She wasn’t likely to start grabbing at me. Unlike Sherry.
I risked a glance in her direction, knowing that catching her eye would only precipitate her arrival, and saw Joshua introduce her to Repeat and Mikaela. Repeat looked less incomplete than he usually did without Pete next to him.
Figuring that Repeat, even without Pete, ought to keep Sherry busy for a while, I turned my attention back to my own group. Lissie and Bella were talking about her lights, a conversation that clearly bored my mother and Desi.
“Not many women in the cast,” Ma observed.
“Shakespeare,” I answered.
“That girl who plays your wife seems nice. Is she single?”
“The girl I strangled?” I put my hands around Desi’s throat in a manner more like Frankenstein’s monster than Othello.
She batted me away, squeaking ‘stop it’ from beneath my hands.
“I have to,” I insisted. “It’s right in the script: Strangles Desdemona.”
“Don’t joke about strangling people, Nathaniel,” Ma said.
I dropped my hands, having succeeded in diverting the conversation away from Deb. “I really appreciate you guys coming. You’re my biggest fans.”
“Only fans,” Desi snorted.
“Probably true,” I admitted, which made my mother give Desi a stern glance.
“You’ll come for dinner tomorrow?”
“Maybe. I need to catch up on my sleep.”
“All day you’re going to sleep?”
“Maybe.” I refused to tie myself down to anything, wanting to stay and drink and dance if someone put some music on, and go home with Sherry if she and Joshua would let me, and then sleep and sleep and sleep. I kissed my mother’s cheek, then hugged both my sisters.
“Not to rush us out,” Bella said, teasing me because she knew about the women Ma didn’t.
“Thanks for coming,” I said with a little shove against her back. I watched until they were safely through the door. Sherry and Joshua were now talking to Deb, but since she’d been friendly earlier, I thought it might be safe to join them.
Sherry squealed and threw her arms around me. We hugged hard, kissed harder, then hugged again. Despite having had most of my family around me earlier, this was the acknowledgement I’d been waiting for.
“Oh my God, you were amazing. Everything Joshua said about you is true.”
My eyes flicked over her head to find Joshua’s. We hadn’t spoken to each other directly since the curtain had come down. We’d bowed side-by-side, our hands joined for the full-cast bow at the end as per custom, parting with a final, slow-to-release squeeze when everyone else had dropped hands, but we hadn’t spoken.
I let go of Sherry to hold my hand out to him. I moved forward, intending to transition from handshake to hug, but he moved almost imperceptibly backwards at the same time and so I left it at a handshake.
“You were great.” I turned to Deb. She didn’t look like she wanted a hug either so I went with a nod. “You too.”
“We knocked it out of the park,” Joshua agreed.
“And now we’re ready to party,” Sherry said. “Right? There’s a party?”
“Well, this is the party, but yeah.”
The room was already emptying, the strangers having left long ago and family members and non-significant-other type friends starting to filter out. Curtain call lighting shone down on us, disruptively bright. Sometimes opening night parties weren’t much more than this—tired people drinking beer in companionable pockets.
“We can make it a party.” Sherry pulled a bottle of tequila out of her suitcase-sized handbag and upended it into her mouth, then held it over me. I tilted my head back and allowed her to pour a good-sized shot directly into my mouth. Two shots, at least. I shivered as it slid straight into my bloodstream.
“Want some?” Sherry asked Deb.
Deb’s face reflected a mixture of longing and fear. I tensed, watching eagle-eyed until she shook her head. When I sucked in an audible breath of relief, she shifted her eyes from the bottle to me, glared at me, and stalked off without a word.
“Let her police herself,” Joshua warned.
He’d already changed, looking sleek and handsome in a snug pair of jeans and a light knit shirt that clung to his chest. I was still dressed like a sixteenth-century Moor and covered in more makeup than Mikaela had worn as the clown. I gave Sherry’s tequila-tinged mouth a deep kiss, feeling the intoxication of both the liquor and her, then headed backstage to leave Othello on the dressing room floor for the night.
Deb was back there, in her street clothes with her bag over her shoulder.
“You’re not leaving, are you? It’s opening night.”
“Why would I want to stay? So I can watch you make out with Joshua’s wife? Or so you can keep an eye on me to make sure I’m not drinking? Sounds like a blast either way.”
“You don’t have to hang out with me. I’m not the only one here.”
“Wow, I’m surprised you know that. I thought it was the all-Nate show. You don’t give a fuck how
anyone else is feeling as long as Nate is getting what he needs. You want to fuck your co-star’s wife, you just go right ahead.”
“Joshua—” I started, then stopped. Not her business. “Whatever, Deb.”
“Debra.”
“Deb,” I repeated, suddenly angry. I wasn’t a fucking criminal for shortening her name down to one syllable, for fuck’s sake. Or for not wanting to sleep with her, or for sleeping with Sherry either.
Deb brushed past me towards the exit and I let her go. Fuck her.
Mikaela and the kid who’d run the light board ran past me up the staircase into the booth. As I changed, I heard music over the speakers, something loud and pounding and imminently danceable. When I got back to the auditorium, I saw they’d rigged up the light board to make the lights flash randomly in a decent simulation of a night club, although the overhead lighting kept the room department-store bright.
“Can someone turn off the fluorescents?” Mikaela shouted down from the light booth.
Rebekah heaved a mighty sigh, then went over and turned off the overhead lights, plunging the room into a moody, flickering darkness.
The two young people brushed back past me to the middle of the room and started dancing, going straight for an intimate grind. Then Hannah dragged Pete out into the middle of the stage to join them and a few other couples joined in. The heavy lean towards men in the cast skewed the crowd toward self-conscious bystanding, but I was eager to join in. I found Carol in the audience seating, a glass of wine in her hand and a flush on her cheeks, and escorted her onto the makeshift dance floor.
“You done good,” I said directly into her ear so she could hear me over the driving beat. She smiled wider and raised her arms—wine glass still in hand—over her head and let her body brush against mine as we danced, enjoying her moment. When the song ended she laughed breathlessly and gave me a hug before returning to her spot in the audience, waving at me to go on without her.
“I think I found your weak spot,” Sherry said when I merged into the sexy tangle of her and Joshua. “We’re going to have to work on your dancing before you get to New York. How can someone who’s so fluid in bed be so stiff on the dance floor?”
She handed her bottle to Joshua and put her hands on my hips, guiding me into the rhythm I could only half-feel from the music. We danced and kissed until the kissing became dancing and the dancing became kissing. Sherry laughed and pulled back a little.
“Better,” she said. She held her hand out to Joshua and he put the tequila bottle into it. She drank, offered it to me, then took a second swig and handed the bottle back to him when I shook my head.
Noticing that Joshua was outside the circle Sherry and I made, I tried to open towards him, but she grabbed me and pulled me into her. Her mouth, freshly tequila-flavored, enveloped mine. I moaned into her, grinding my hips against hers, lifting her onto her toes to bring her pussy up where I could feel it against my hardening dick. The lights swirled across the backs of my closed eyes and the music beat through me in a way I’d never felt it before.
And Joshua ... I picked my head up and looked to my left, to where Joshua stood, no longer dancing or even swaying with the music. He met my eyes angrily, turned sharply, and stalked away from us like he’d been waiting for my acknowledgement before he could leave.
“Should you ... ?” I asked Sherry.
She shook her head. “I think you’d better.”
I crossed to where Joshua had disappeared through the door to the lobby. On the other side of the door, he stood with his back to me, his head tilted down so that he appeared to be looking at the bottle in his hand.
“What’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice low. Joshua spun at the sound of it.
“It’s jealousy. Rip-me-up-from-the-inside-out jealousy. Not something I’ve ever felt before.” He put his free hand on his temple and squeezed, like he was trying to contain his brain within his skull. “It’s like there’s fire ants crawling beneath my skin. I just can’t anymore, OK? I just can’t.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll give you guys some space. I thought you were OK with me and Sherry.”
“I’m not jealous for Sherry. I’m jealous of Sherry. Jesus fucking Christ, Nate. How do you not get this by now?
Ah, but that was fixable. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Come dance with us then. I wasn’t meaning to keep you out. I want you there too.”
“It’s not enough anymore. It’s worse than nothing. It’s not helping.”
“What—”
“You know what would help?” Joshua interrupted. “You could get Sherry home.” He handed me the bottle of tequila. “This is for her, not you. You can leave her car here. We’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“Of course, but why? Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“Out to get laid. I’m done fucking around with not fucking around with you.”
“Joshua—”
“Are you going to try to tell me who I can and can’t have sex with?”
“Of course not, but—”
“Right.” He brushed past me, back through the door into the auditorium. I followed, but before I’d made it halfway across the floor, he’d already disappeared through the stage door.
So now I’d chased two people I cared about away from their opening night celebration. Excellent. I plastered a smile of festive triumph onto my face and returned to Sherry.
~~~
Lying next to Sherry in the darkness of her bedroom, I heard the kitchen door shut and the whisper of male voices in the hallway. Someone outside our room closed the door we’d left open and the voices moved farther down the hall. The door to the back bedroom clicked and then nothing. My ears strained to eavesdrop, now and then picking out a muffled thud or an echoing moan. It was hot and it was horrible.
I was worried—worried about the mindset Joshua had been in when he left the theater, worried about the condition he might be in now. He’d gone out to pick someone up. Where would he go to pick someone up? To a bar.
What if ...
I couldn’t fall back asleep. I hadn’t really been sleeping anyway, only drifting and waiting and worrying. Sherry obviously had more faith in Joshua’s sobriety. She slept soundly beside me, curled on her side with one hand wrapped around my bicep. My dick was hard because Joshua was naked with some man down the hall and I could wake Sherry up and get relief, but it wouldn’t relieve anything.
The alarm clock on Joshua’s side of the bed glowed red, the numbers ticking over as the occasional sounds of sex drifted from their room to ours. Finally, there came a lasting silence. I wondered if the man would sleep over, if there’d be four of us for breakfast, but then I heard the bathroom being used and voices fading towards the kitchen. The kitchen door clicked shut.
I shot up from the bed. I grabbed my boxers from the floor, hopping into them as I moved towards the hallway, needing to see Joshua before he returned to that separate bedroom. I flung open the door and nearly collided with him.
We looked at each other in the light that spilled from the bathroom, illuminating us from boxers down. We were very close to each other, close enough that I could smell him—Joshua plus sex plus something foreign, but not alcohol.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.
“I was awake. I was worried.”
“About what? I know how to get laid.”
“Not about that.” I couldn’t bring myself to say it, not now that I saw it wasn’t true.
“That I’d been drinking? Don’t flatter yourself, Nate. You’re not worth drinking over.”
I winced. That wasn’t how I’d meant it. Joshua sighed and ran a hand over his hair. I knew what that hair felt like now. I looked away, my eyes on the floor.
“I needed a man, not a drink. I hadn’t had sex with a guy since I met you, so tonight I picked up some guy—who looked a lot like you, but who wasn’t you—and I fucked him. I fucked him while he begged me to do it.�
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“And now you feel better?”
“No.”
“Can I—”
“It’s not your problem, Nate. I have my own Higher Power, remember?”
I dropped my eyes again. Nothing I said was right.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I should be able to own this better, but I can’t.” He turned his back on me and leaned against the hallway wall with his forehead resting on his arm. I wanted to touch his back, to stroke my hand over the muscles bunching there.
“Maybe Sherry should go to your place from now on,” he said, his back still to me. “We said we wouldn’t let whatever happened between you and Sherry come between you and me, but I guess it’s the other way around now. I’m not going to get in the way of you and Sherry, but I could use some space.”
“Joshua, please.”
He turned around. “Please what, Nate?”
“I don’t know.” Paralysis. At the last second, always paralysis.
“If you don’t know, then I can’t help you.” He shook his head. “I need to take a shower. I smell like some guy who’s not you.”
When the bathroom door closed behind him, I went back into the bedroom and got dressed. I shook Sherry lightly and kissed her when she half-opened her eyes.
“I have to go,” I told her. I left before she could wake up enough to ask why.
Chapter 22
If I hadn’t been so completely miserable, I’d have picked up on the general air of anxiety surrounding me a lot earlier. As it was, I drifted through the routine steps of prop check and makeup Saturday night without noticing the rising buzz of hysteria.
Joshua hadn’t met my eyes once since he’d arrived, had merely grunted when I said hello. I knew I needed to get him alone and explain, if explanations would still be allowed, that as hard as I’d screwed up Thursday I hadn’t meant for it to be the final word between us. I was still trying to adjust, but I hadn’t given up on adjusting. I wanted him with, like, ninety percent certainty, and I wouldn’t let the ten percent coward in me keep me from him.
After the show, I promised myself. Tonight.
The situation with Deb—