14

En route to the Sumner Globe

Instead of parting from the company after breakfast the next morning, I stayed on Wesley’s arm and piled into the vans to head to the lake. I felt like a girl riding the big yellow school bus for the first time—but instead of a lunch pail, I clutched fast to my purse and reminded myself I had my medicine if it became too much to see a theater at work again.

I’d mixed Haas’s powder in with the rest of Dr. French’s, which gave me another week of safety. I was unstoppable.

At the lakeshore, the drivers ferried us to the theater islet on pull-cord metal dinghies. As we carved through the water, I peered down into its murk. It was at least deep enough to get the engine rudders through, but otherwise I couldn’t tell how far it went.

Wesley helped me from the boat onto a rickety dock, and smiled at me when I was on solid footing. “Ready, Jack?”

“Don’t let me fall in,” I said with a breathless huff of laughter. I followed after the company threading through the doors flung open at the rounded edge of the theater’s outer wall.

I stood in the middle of the house and turned in a circle to take it all in, the open eye of the endless blue sky above, the peaked roof over the stage itself, the benches lining the packed dirt here in the middle, and there, the tiered rows of seats stretching up to the heights of the building. It smelled of fresh pine from the bare timbers. I was enchanted.

“Are you alright to explore?” Wesley asked, shedding his jacket.

“Can I?”

He smiled at my eagerness. “Of course. Just don’t get lost.”

“I’ll turn back if I hit water.”

The company settled into the familiar bustle of pre-rehearsal habits. Kline bumbled his way in across the apron, gesturing with a rolled-up folio in his hand at the stage crew and their half-finished set pieces scattered along the boards around a long feast table for the fifth act of Titus.

While they rehearsed, I ambled through the ascending levels of the house and sat periodically to watch the pell-mell practice from various vantage points—they were good, if stretched a little thin. The house was one great ring. All the seats angled forward to look down at the actors like gods watching their mortals at play.

A hard lance of daylight poured in through the open roof to soak the stage. I went from row to row to row in a slow progression, running my hands over the empty seats. I took a narrow staircase back down to the ground floor, steadying myself with a hand along the wall.

I sought the back halls, the true veins of the theater. I crept through the skeletal wood of the trap space, where I found a pit for instrumentalists that didn’t exist. I skirted wide of the direct wings but climbed carefully up a ladder that let me peek into a loft above the main level—made for actors to portray deities, or ghostly visions, or the spirits of the west wind.

The rows of dressing rooms back on the ground floor were little more than broom closets, and in that regard, it was very familiar. Backstage magic, the charged current of it, filled me wholly. God, but I missed it.

There was music in the muffled thump and ramble of footsteps across the boards. If I shut my eyes, I could imagine there was an audience out there. I could imagine I was simply waiting to go on; ready for my cue.

My eyes welled up. “Shit,” I hissed, pawing at my lashes, and hurried to find a bathroom.

A lone toilet, a sink, and a hangdog mirror waited back the way I’d come. At least the door locked. While I sat, I stole down a sniff of powder that helped me believe the watering in my eyes was from the sting rather than frustration.

I washed my hands in sputtering, rusty water and clenched my teeth together until the back of my mind began to fizzle apart. Wagging the dampness from my fingers, I leaned forward to rest my forehead on the mirror.

“Chin up, woman.”

I stepped back and looked up, unmoved, to see the Lady standing behind me in the low, oblong light. I dabbed at the edge of my nose with the back of my hand. “I’m fine.”

I put my compact away and sniffed as I stepped back, regarding her fully. She was giving me a calculating look.

“You are not a delicate liar.”

“Well, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

“Come now.” She appraised me, keen eyes looking for flaws in a skein of weaving. “You spent so much time mired in the bogs of other women’s tragedies, and now the only one you have left is your own. Is there no familiarity to be found?”

I frowned. “I wouldn’t call this a tragedy. It’s life.”

“Are you happy, Margaret?”

I touched up one corner of my lipstick before drawing my shoulders back. “Of course I’m happy,” I said, breezy, and smiled my finest smile. “Are you happy?”

The Lady leaned in to peer at the both of us from over my shoulder. I could swear I felt the brushing of her hair against the side of my face, the layers of her braids below her gold circlet. “Only because I learned of how to snap the chain that held me.”

I flinched away from her, fumbling for the door handle, and sped from the bathroom down a back hallway that was still very much under construction. Long plastic tarps hung down from the ceiling, and I almost turned around again but for the sound of a voice carrying with fulsome intent: “Well, that’s a damn shame, ain’t it? I’d be ever so keen to know why in the hell you figured that would work out in your favor.”

The sound of a dull thwack and a barely muffled wheeze of pain shuddered up from farther down the hall. I froze. The voice came again.

“You’ll probably wanna start talking, or maybe I’ll consider you a lost cause. Huh?”

Curiosity snared me the same way it used to when I peeked in on the meetings Mr. Matthews held in my mother’s sitting room with strange, well-dressed men. Up on my toes to keep my shoe heels from clicking, I moved silently to a hole in the wall scaffolding where yellow light leaked from a small alcove. It shivered with passing shadows—pacing boots moved slowly along the floorboards, circling.

I put my eye up to the wall and looked in on the moment: Two of the drivers stood back with their corded arms crossed, flanking a man tied to a chair with a dirty gag in his mouth. He looked panicked, peering up at the pacing passage of someone else I couldn’t see properly.

“I’ll ask one more time,” came the same voice as before. It was sweet as pie, smooth with unhurried purpose. “Are you gonna talk, or will we have to find a nice deep hole outside of Mosquero with your name on it?”

The man tied to the chair breathed hard through his bleeding nose but stayed quiet. He fixed his stare forward, glaring at nothing, and finally the speaker came into view: the mustachioed cowboy with the orange Corvette who had greeted Kline when we first arrived. I hadn’t seen a wink of him since, but now here he was in the belly of the theater doing ugly work. His hat was off, his silver hair slicked back. He wore fine boots on his feet and had an easy lope to his long legs.

He sauntered up behind the man in the chair and rested a tender touch on the crown of his sweating, stringy-haired head. “You know,” the cowboy said gently, peering down at the trembling man with what looked like true concern, “I have to respect your conviction. I really do. You’ve got integrity, and I gotta think there’s something worth keeping in there.”

The cowboy reached into his pocket, and the light winked gently from the red enamel of a folded knife handle. “But maybe,” he cooed, leaning down to hover at the man’s shoulder, “maybe not your tongue. What do you think?”

The cowboy looked up, the sharp flick of his eyes cutting straight through the gap and meeting mine in an instant—his gaze flashed, invigorated. “What do you think about that?” he repeated with a grin and flicked the blade out with a twitch of his wrist.

I hurried backward as the man shouted against the gag and began to buck—the heavy thumping of the chair legs rattled against the floor, and then the sound of him choked off.

I turned and sped back down the hallway, careful to stay silent even in my hurry.

He saw me.

What did that mean for me? What was this place, really?

That was a knife with a mean-looking blade.

I leaned against the wall and shut my eyes, catching my breath back. I sagged and focused on the steady centering exercises Dr. French had taught me: In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through th—

“Margaret?”

I jumped, my eyes flying open, and found Haas standing in the mouth of his workshop. A half-manic chuckle chuffed from my chest. “Oh, God. Hello. You scared me.”

“Are you alright?” Haas glanced with steely eyes over my shoulder, down the hallway I’d just come out of.

“Yes. I’m fine, I’m—I just got lost. I was exploring, completely turned around back there. All that construction…it’s silly. I panicked over nothing. I’m fine.”

I gave him the winningest grin I could manage. Haas came over and put his arm around my shoulders.

“If you intend to wander in this place,” he said easily, steering us back toward the winding hall that fed into the house, “tread lightly.”

“Why’s that?” I fussed at the edges of my hair for something to do with the last of my nervous energy. “Loose timbers?”

“Unpredictable men.”

The simple clarity of the warning jammed me into silence for a moment. I cleared my throat and lifted my chin slightly. “What do you mean?”

“Some men are like land mines,” Haas said, half-wearily, as though having to impart a lesson to a younger student. “Tread on the wrong part of his pride, and it all goes up in smoke.”

Haas gave me a dry, perfunctory smile and gestured ahead of us, After you.

Onstage, it seemed the entire cast had been doused in sugar blood—the scene was a mess of dramatic slaughter, the climax of the tragedy at its fever pitch. Haas put one hand on his hip as he pawed the other down across his mouth. He growled a low oath to himself in German, and then flashed me a wry look. “I’m going to be scouring those godforsaken doublets until my fingers fall off.”

“Do you want help?” I asked.

“That’s kind of you. I wouldn’t want you to ruin your manicure.”

I snorted, held out my cracked cuticles, and looked up to find Haas smiling at me—truly smiling, and I glowed with the sense I’d caught him in unexpected pleasure.

The company broke for the afternoon, the bloodied ones among them wagging strings of thick, syrupy crimson from their limbs. Haas held up a hand to hail Wesley. He bounded from the stage to the floor with his buttons open to his undershirt, blood-soaked with a syrupy smell hanging heavy in the air about him. Wesley grinned, a hearty flush under his cheeks.

“I haven’t fenced like that since university,” he said, panting. He kissed me on the forehead, smearing a small track of red at my ear, and cast a private look at Haas.

“What say you get cleaned up,” Haas offered, nodding his chin at Wesley, “I lend you some fresh weeds, and we three find some lunch?” He drew a set of van keys from his pocket and nodded over his shoulder. “There’s a place further west down the highway that knows how to salt their food.”

Wesley beamed. I couldn’t help but mimic him, despite the brackish churn in my gut from what I’d seen backstage—What do you think about that?

Haas caught my eye. He quirked another brief, knowing smile, and led us out to the lakeshore together.

---

◆ ◆ ◆

Wesley wore Haas’s clothes well. Where Wesley’s palette was full of slates and blues, cooler colors against his complexion, the warmer-toned finer fabric of Haas’s wardrobe lent a summery flair that brought him a certain radiance—or perhaps that was just him being near Haas, the juvenile flush of adoration mixing well with liquor.

We were forty minutes outside of town at a cramped cantina where nobody spoke English, but we’d been able to pantomime enough of what we wanted that we found ourselves pleasantly tipsy and filled with food as the sun hung swollen and high in the sky.

I had never before tasted spices with these sharp, earthy flavors. Haas ordered a tequila for himself after we finished our food, and it arrived plainly poured on an earthenware dish with two small piles of salt and cinnamon on the edge. I couldn’t help but watch each sip he took—casual as anything he would lick the pad of his thumb, press it into the salt and cinnamon, stripe that off on the tip of his tongue, and then finally take a sip from the tiny cup; savoring the flavor, dragging his lips across his teeth. Haas caught me looking more than once. I was intimately aware of my own tongue darting out against the rim of my glass to catch the salt stuck there.

As the men collected their hats after paying the bill, Haas looked pointedly at me. “Margaret,” he offered, “would you care to join us for an aperitif in my room?”

Wesley looked amused. “Aren’t those for before the meal?”

Haas’s eyes crawled briefly, hungrily over me, as though the empty plates on the table meant nothing. “Precisely.”

I glanced between the both of them. Wesley pulled an expression of neutrality, Your choice, Jack, and fit his hat down over his brow.

Looking pointedly at Haas, I made the same gesture at the front door of the restaurant he’d made in the theater house earlier—After you.

We crossed the wide gravel lot back to the van. “Don’t you have another rehearsal?” I asked.

Haas hefted open the door to the van and tossed the keys to Wesley, who caught them easily in one hand. “Not until evening,” Haas insisted. “Plenty of time.” He held out a hand to help me into the seat.

Wesley rounded the flat nose of the van to get to the driver’s seat, and Haas climbed into the back after me. He hauled the door shut, tucked his glasses neatly into his breast pocket, and rounded on me with a starved kiss as the engine growled to life.

I hardly had time to react but for a sharp inhale—my body surged immediately with the instinct to turn toward desire. I crushed Haas’s lapels in two messy fists as Wesley backed out onto the main road, tires jostling, and Haas arranged me easily along the seat. He kissed his way down the open expanse of my neckline and painted his hands up the curve of my waist. Sitting back on his heels, both of us flushed, Haas hunted in his inside breast pocket. He proffered a neat envelope of paper, which was filled with white powder when he tipped open the edge with one finger.

“Did you enjoy the sample?” he asked, brisk with appetite.

“I was going to ask for more after you drove us back,” I admitted, giddy and addled by the foreign rush of being touched so ravenously. I leaned up and took my usual measure of Dr. French’s powder without thinking to pare it down for the strength of Haas’s product. He took a sniff and offered it to the front seat without looking away from me, his expression terribly pleased.

“None for me, thanks,” Wesley said, glancing up at us in the rearview. Unbothered, Haas finished off the rest of it. He pinched shortly at his nose and blinked several times, before licking his thumb and swiping it over the dust left on the paper to streak his gums.

He offered his thumb to me. I took it into my mouth, holding the sear of his eye contact as I sucked, and tasted the lingering salt and cinnamon still left behind in his fingerprint. I tugged him back down by the end of his tie.

The overwhelming presence of everything took on a plush, soft volume behind my eyes—a thick droplet of blood, breaking into meandering threads in water. The rush was exactly as I remembered and more.

It was better than any feeling I’d ever believed could find quarter in this body.

Wesley parked in the spot outside room number five. Clamoring out of the van, my skirt rumpled and my stockings in disarray, the men steadied me between both of them. We stumbled to Haas’s room, and I glanced at Wesley—he was making his smug I told you so face, the one that made me break during rehearsals when one of us forgot or flubbed a line, so of course I lost the battle against the giggle that broke hard from the edges of my teeth.

By the time we made it over the threshold, I was guffawing into Wesley’s neck as he caught me with barely enough time to keep me from going sprawling. I stumbled inside as Haas crowded in neatly after me.

Haas shut the door behind him and wasted no time catching Wesley in a kiss that firmed him back up against it, fumbling to slide the safety chain into its latch without looking.

I sat at the foot of the bed and pried off my shoes. My head had flown far away from me. Every sensation puffing and wisping through the air was concentrating itself in my chest, my throat, my pounding skull, and all of it trickled steadily down to pool around my hips.

Haas pulled back just enough to shuck and toss his jacket over the edge of a desk chair, switch on the lamp, and tug his tie knot apart to slip it off over his head. Wesley kept himself busy with his mouth along the cords of Haas’s neck.

“Come here,” Haas rasped, looking right down to the very heart of me.

I laughed again and sprawled backward on the bed, laying my arms out long above me just to feel the stretch, and lolled my head sideways to look at them both urgent and half-bare. “You come here,” I sang.

“Felix,” Wesley hummed against the ridge of Haas’s jaw. He was fumbling with both of their belts. “Be sweet.”

“You want sweet?”

Wesley grinned through another kiss. “Sure. Why not.”

Haas nodded his chin at the bed. “Then go sit and watch.”

Wesley came to sit on the bed with me, briefs and sock garters still on. Haas took his time stepping out of his own fine clothes—cuff links unclipped, shoes toed off, laces neatened, trousers into a crisp fold, shirt stays unclipped, shirt shrugged off and smoothed over the jacket across the chair. With his undershirt tugged off from the back of his neck before folding it with automated precision, Haas brought himself elegantly bare, down to nothing but undershorts.

“Dress off, Margaret,” he said, kneeling before me and running his hands along my calves.

I spread my knees. “Why don’t y—”

“Dress,” Haas cut in smoothly, his grip tightening gently into the give of my flesh. “Off. Margaret.”

That soft heat coiling in my belly tightened like the jolt of acceleration out of a starting gate. I sat up as Wesley worked down the zipper. It hissed from my shoulders to the lower curve of my back, where he and Haas slid it off me.

“Is this alright?” Wesley murmured at my ear. I was several light-years away, merely observing the unfolding like a diorama as my pulse ran, ran, ran—I nodded and hummed.

Wesley reached down and unclipped my stockings. Haas rolled them away and tucked them neatly into the toes of my shoes.

With two fingers hooked around the elastic, Haas slid my shorts down to my ankles as I did away with the clasp of my brassiere. He put a hand to my flank and kissed me high on my hip, and when I laid back down again peeled to nakedness, I rested my head companionably on Wesley’s thigh.

I looked upside down at Wesley and smiled dreamily at the blush staining his face. “I think I might like it here, this way,” I told him.

“I figured you would,” he whispered. I shut my eyes and laughed again with a freedom I hadn’t believed for years could be mine.

The wet heat of Haas’s tongue pressed into me without warning.

I choked on a sharp, ecstatic gasp. My hands, flailing softly, flew down to knit themselves in his hair.

“Oh, shit,” I breathed up at the ceiling. Wesley skated his own fingers up the back curve of my head, combing softly down to my scalp.

I squeezed my eyes shut and gasped at the concentrated feeling—more intimate than a kiss.

Breathless laughter hitched low along my ribs and pulled, punching itself up with a throaty leap as Haas’s mouth worked against me. I flexed my fists against his roots and drew an attendant groan from him, the hot burst of air from his nose fluttering against me.

What was this? This—the feeling was foreign, almost violent with insistent pleasure. Profane. Glorious.

Haas ministered until I was nothing but a melted wash of sensation. The building of my limit was sharp, harrowing, more sudden and far denser than I’d ever been able to cause on my own.

When I pitched over its edge, my body jumped and seized with live-wire tremors as I tried not to make too much noise. Wesley whispered encouragement into my temples, my hairline, the corners of my eyes, where thrilled tears had built. I was endless, one with everything for just a moment.

Haas sat back in a kneel with a victorious look in his eye, wiping at the corners of his mouth with the edges of one hand. The sight of him beholding me with my taste on him lit a primal hunger of my own in my gut.

He crawled onto the bed and let Wesley do away with the maroon satin of his shorts. His body was lithe, wiry with control and fine training. He was hard and brazen in the half-light. Floating in my afterglow, I watched him sprawl out long.

Leaning down smoothly, as Haas combed a guiding hand into the sweat-damp waves beginning to coil at the back of his head, Wesley took Haas easily into his mouth. “Go on,” Haas said, feather-light and yet brooking no argument, and groaned his low approval as Wesley reached down past his own waistband and obeyed.

The immovable cleaving of Haas’s eyes latched into mine as Wesley worked intently on him. His pupils were huge and dark, swallowing me whole, and I watched with my restive heart in my mouth to fear losing even a moment of the sight by blinking.

They were wondrous, the communion of them, in that same urgent and fundamental way Haas’s tongue on me had been.

I was looking out over the precipice of my own belonging, fearless of the plunge, and could not look away.

Haas losing his composure was quick and subtle—he made a hurried fist in Wesley’s hair, pulling an encouraging grunt from him as his own pace picked up, and those long, pale lashes fluttered once against Haas’s cheeks. His mouth fell open with a soundless gasp, and he looked away from me to the soft edge of where the light fell to shadow against the carpet.

In the collapse of his expression came to me a knowledge I hadn’t thought to seek: Men, just as weak to the pull of the self; that same obligatory need which pressed us hard against the line of madness.

Hysteria.

Haas caught his breath. Wesley had pulled off, panting against Haas’s hip as he rose toward his own point of no return. He let out a hitched, damp gasp when Haas’s hold in his hair tugged again.

“On Margaret,” Haas said, and looked directly at me as he reached to light a cigarette from Wesley’s case on the nightstand.

Wesley went up to his knees with his eyelids heavy and low, unfocused. His frame trembled with the tensile stress of need. I reached out and cradled him where the back of his thigh turned into the curve of one buttock, staring unblinking at Haas.

Wesley made a bruised cry as he broke like a stone from a sling across my stomach.

The three of us returned to ourselves in the long stillness of frayed endings. Haas gave Wesley a sip of the cigarette, who passed it to me, and I sat up carefully to take a short draw before handing it back to Haas. He was staring with a bone-deep satisfaction at the sight of us before him, absolutely sated.

Wesley was the first to stand. He laved a spent kiss to Haas’s shoulder and staggered to the bathroom to fetch a washcloth.

We tidied one another, pastoral and careful. The bed was hardly habitable with three of us, but for the moment it would hold—I shimmied up between the two of them and shut my eyes when they each slung an arm around my waist.

Tucked there, my heart beat over-present with such richness I feared it might swell out from under my skin and run away. I stroked my hands over each body flanking me: the sturdy trunk of Wesley’s leg, the dark fur of him curling softly on the ridge of his knee, and the mussed slouch of Haas’s once-orderly hair so fine I could barely feel it sliding through my fingers.

“Alright, Felix,” I murmured, “I think I qualify now: Who’s pulling your strings?”

Haas sniffed an amused chuckle and leaned into my touch. “Fine. Are you good at keeping secrets?”

“Masterful.”

“Kline and I have a side project,” Haas said. “We sell product for a volatile sort, but we skim and cut a portion of it with my own home brew that nets pure profit. You’re feeling it right now, you tell me. It’s good, isn’t it?”

I thought only fleetingly of the cowboy backstage before the drug snatched away my concern, tossing the idea to the wind of aimless pleasure. I groaned happily, stretching long through my back to arch sweetly along his side. “Better than what the doctor ordered.”

“I’m being kept on a very tight leash,” Haas whispered at my neck, kissing me slowly, “for having such thrilling ingenuity.”

“Poor you,” I breathed.

“Not to interrupt,” Wesley said lightly, reaching over me to set a gentle hand on the bend of Haas’s hip, “but we have another call in an hour.”

“I’ll drive us,” Haas said against my throat. “Don’t worry. Lie here for a while, won’t you?”

I reveled in the aftermath of us. The promise of sex was alluring, but so was the fevered fascination of men keeping secrets; a temptation toward which I had been conditioned, touching it but briefly as I came to understand the man who refused to call himself my father but still insisted I behave like a daughter—or the man who cleaved me to his ego, and only bound me more tightly once he realized I had no intention of making that easy.

This was the closest I’d ever come to holding agency in my own hands.

Here, I was a solid thing, thick and vital with purpose.