A WEEK LATER, my teary little breakdown seemed like ancient history as I made a face at myself in the Landmark’s bathroom mirror. I knew I was making more out of the night’s dinner date with Drew than I should be. We were just going out for burgers. It was no big deal.
Nevertheless, I’d dashed out to Macy’s during our lunch break, finally splurging on the cashmere sweater I’d wanted for years. It was a deep hunter green, a color so rich that I expected it to smell like pine every time I brushed my fingers against its softness. The sweetheart neckline was delicate without being dainty. I’d coveted it forever; I’d hinted heavily to TEWSBU that it would be a perfect birthday gift, and then I’d been too heartsick to buy it for myself after he left me.
But I had bought it that very afternoon. To wear with Drew. For Drew. For myself.
Truth be told, I’d bought it as a sort of magic talisman. Now that Teel was gone, I needed to grant my own wishes. And ever since that night a week ago, the night that Drew and I had spent apart, my boyfriend had been grating on me just a little.
I told myself that was normal. I told myself that every couple went through a few weeks of absolute bliss before settling into the ordinary annoyances of daily life in the real world. I told myself that I was personally responsible for some of the things that bothered me the most—Drew was clingy because I had wished him to be that way. He touched me constantly because I had made Teel magically bind him to do so.
I glanced at my fingertips. If I held them at just the right angle, the flame tattoos were still visible, a reminder of everything I’d asked from my genie. I wondered if I’d be stuck with them for life, secret marks that would always remind me of the crazy time when I’d had magic at my beck and call.
Or maybe they would fade after I put Teel’s lamp back in circulation. With the crush of the play, I still hadn’t found time—made time—to leave it somewhere. I knew it wasn’t fair for me to keep putting off the transition. Teel needed to find two more people, grant six more wishes so that he could enter the Garden.
I closed my eyes, trying to re-create the feeling of nothingness that had surrounded me when Teel had taken me to that timeless, spaceless place. What did the iron gate really look like? How had the flowers perfumed the air?
I sighed. I’d never know. For just a heartbeat, though, I wished that I wanted something—anything—as much as Teel had obviously wanted to enter the Garden.
I ran my fingers through my unruly hair one last time, then stooped to pick up my backpack. My stage-manager clothes were shoved in with utter disregard for the possibility of wrinkles. I dug beneath them to extract a little clutch purse, and then I was ready to go.
Drew and John were the only people left by the time I walked into the lobby; the rest of the cast and crew had scattered as soon as rehearsal ended. John was explaining, “There’ll be posts every six feet. The fencing will be sturdy enough, even if you walk right into it.” He paused and ran a hand over his mustache. “When you walk into it. There probably won’t be enough light to see it once we paint the fencing black. But don’t worry. It won’t fall down.”
Just that morning, Bill had delivered his latest bombshell: we’d perform the play in the dark. No theatrical lighting at all; nothing that David Barstow had created was dim enough, grim enough to capture Bill’s somber vision of Verona. Instead, each audience member would be given a flashlight, a high-power beam to illuminate whatever he or she wanted to see on stage. Some would naturally focus on the actors, others on the set. A few would probably be jackasses and aim their lights at each other, but that was the price we had to pay for full audience immersion in our theatrical world.
At least the supertitles would cast a little bit of light onto the set.
I would have to order dozens of flashlights and scores of rechargeable batteries. We’d need a crew member to swap out old batteries for new after every performance. It would take a couple of hours to unscrew each flashlight, drop in fresh cells, screw the things back together, test, and plug the dead batteries in for recharge. Overtime at union wages, countless batteries, the flashlights themselves… More fodder for the “it’s only money” campaign.
Of course, all afternoon the actors had been worried about little things (Read: Their safety, life, and limb). They were afraid of slipping on the slimy plastic set and braining themselves on wrought-iron frames while their wet suit costumes split open to reveal their sweat-slicked bodies and the supertitles raced on overhead, getting ahead of whatever lines other characters were actually emoting on stage.
I had to admit, they had a point.
Drew looked up as I approached. “Dude, this isn’t going to work. Tell him, Kira.” He settled his arm around my waist as I stepped up to the table, and I squelched a tiny flame of annoyance. John’s glance flickered toward Drew’s hand, and he nodded slowly, as if I’d confirmed some close-held suspicion. I stepped away, pretending that I needed to move so that I could make out the latest version of John’s plans.
The drawings were as masterful as ever, every line clear and dramatic. Bill had recently decided to go without any of the painted backdrops John had already created. Despite their grays and blacks, their subdued metallic malevolence, they were now deemed too soft for our hard-edged Verona. Too conventional. Besides, the flashlights weren’t going to have enough power to reach that far upstage.
Instead, Bill had mandated hand-forged wrought-iron fencing, huge panels of it, making a jagged barrier across the back of the set. John had shouted him down, citing the weight and the time it would take to complete the welding. They’d finally compromised on lengths of standard hurricane fencing, painted black. John had reluctantly conceded the need for iron support posts instead of aluminum—only iron would have the right tone as the actors clanged against it with their pipe swords.
Drew pointed to a particularly narrow passage that now existed upstage. “We’ll never find that in the dark. Right, Kira?”
Despite my initial annoyance at his physicality, I smiled at Drew, touched that he thought I could solve all of his problems. “What do you think, John? Can we add more glow-tape?”
“We might as well paint the whole damn thing fluorescent orange,” John snarled. Drew leaped back like a kicked puppy.
I hurried to smooth ruffled feathers, “Come on now, it could be worse. We could have the producers breathing down our necks.
In a stroke of genius, Bill had convinced all of the show’s producers, all of the dreaded money men, to stay away from our rehearsals. He’d argued that they’d hired him to blow their minds with a radical new production. If they watched it change incrementally, from day to day, they’d never experience the full body blow of everything that Bill envisioned. Okay, I’d been a little surprised that they’d actually bought the argument, but I was relieved to have one less pressure as we raced toward our opening.
I continued to placate both men beside me. “Shows always feel like this a few weeks out. It’s totally normal to worry about pulling everything together.” John tapped his drawings into a neat cylinder, and I smiled at him. “Bill being Bill, remember?”
John darted a glance at me. “Franklin, you and I both know it’s way too late to make changes this drastic. Bill’s never been like this before. Not with his wildest concepts.”
It felt odd to have him talking to me this way, so directly, so personally. It was like we were continuing the phone conversation that had started a week before, even though Drew was now standing right there. Of course, Drew was more interested in twisting a lock of my hair around his finger than he was in the latest tangle of aluminum and iron Maginot Lines that Bill was demanding upstage.
“It’s going to be fine, John,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. Drew nodded his passionate agreement.
John barely spared our leading man a frown as he said, “My name is going on that design, Franklin. My name is associated with this production.”
“So is mine,” I said, and I sighed. “It’s the Landmark, John. We’re supposed to—”
“—Supposed to take the lead in contemporary American theater.” He rubbed his face, as if he were waking up from a bad dream.
“Kira’s right,” Drew said. “She’s totally…” He trailed off, as if he were trying to string together words in a foreign language.
His loyalty was touching, but I came close to wincing as he struggled to shore up his statement with facts. He was supportive, always, almost to a fault. That was one of the things I loved about him, one of the things that made me most grateful to Teel. I just wished that sometimes Drew would think things through before he spoke, that just once, he would demonstrate that there were brains inside that gorgeous head.
John waited politely for Drew to finish making his point, but accepted that no other argument was forthcoming when Drew bent to nuzzle my neck. I edged away, thoroughly embarrassed. I was grateful when John changed the topic of conversation. “Where are y’all going?”
Surprisingly, I had trouble meeting his eyes when I said, “Mephisto’s. Just to grab a burger.”
“Did Mike change the dress code?”
I forced myself to shrug, to act like our destination was no place special. “I’ve been living in my theater clothes. I wanted a change.”
“Oh, you have a change, all right.” Once again, I had that eerie feeling that he and I were back to the previous week’s phone conversation, that we were having a private dialogue, with half our lines unspoken. My fingers prickled as I brushed my hair back from my suddenly flushed cheeks.
“Come on, Kira,” Drew said. “I’m hungry.” He offset his whine with a goofy grin, reminding me once again that I actually was enjoying his attention. I loved my dating life as belle of the ball. I had never been happier.
Drew picked up my coat and shook it out, holding it behind me. I swallowed a flash of annoyance and caught my sweater sleeves with my fingertips, sparing them from riding up to my elbows as I fumbled to find the coat sleeves. What would I have to do to break the New and Improved Drew of that little etiquette tradition?
Fishing my hair out from the coat’s collar, I asked John, “Coming with?” It would have been rude to just walk out on him.
“I’m going to wrap up a couple of things here,” he said. “I’ll see you later. If you’re still there.”
I wasn’t sure why he thought that I’d be gone—if he was alluding to my fleeing from TEWSBU, or if he thought that Drew and I would be…otherwise engaged. Neither possibility left me with an easy answer, so I just shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about the show. It’s all coming together. The play will be fine.”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Drew cocked his head to one side, his eyes creasing into an adorable—if maddening—squint. “What’s that from? Peanuts?”
Peanuts? He thought the line was from a comic strip? “Hemingway,” John and I said at the same time. I hurried toward the door before Drew could ask which play.
It was bitterly cold outside, but no snow was falling. We’d driven to rehearsal together; Drew’s Mazda was parked three blocks away, halfway to Mephisto’s. As we started walking, he reached for my hand, lacing his fingers between my own.
“Hey, Drew,” I said.
“Hmm?” Again with the goofy grin.
“I thought we had an agreement.”
“I’ll agree to anything you want, Kira. You know that.”
Yeah. I did. He’d agree to anything, say any words I wanted, just to keep me happy. And he honestly meant it, too. At least until he forgot, five minutes later.
A sudden realization smacked me between the eyes, and I stumbled to a stop.
I was dating a golden retriever puppy. A really beautiful, totally loyal, wonderfully intentioned, incredibly dumb golden retriever puppy.
Drew turned to look at me, concern creasing his forehead. He leaned in and planted a quick kiss on my lips, the sort of casual affection that was guaranteed to make my belly swoop, even in the face of other, less positive, realizations. “What, Kira? What’s wrong?”
He wanted to please me. He wanted so badly to please me.
“Nothing,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s just that you promised. You promised that you wouldn’t touch me in front of the cast or crew, and back there, in front of John…”
Drew pulled his hand away from mine, as if my fingers had burned him. “I’m sorry! I thought that you liked me to touch you!”
“No!” I said, feeling like an idiot. “I mean, I do! I love it! It’s just that when we’re in the theater, when we’re surrounded by all of our coworkers, I don’t think it’s appropriate.”
“We weren’t surrounded by coworkers. That was just John.”
I pictured the set designer’s slow appraisal, his gaze flicking over Drew’s hands, his laconic nod as he accepted the public display of affection. My cheeks burned. “John counts,” I said to Drew.
“It’s not like he’s the director, or anything. He’s not in the cast. He’s just the set designer.”
My throat worked; I wasn’t even sure how to respond to that. Too many actors looked at their technical crew as “just” those people. Some actors truly believed that they could do the show on their own, that they could perform without the bother of a lighting designer, a costume designer, a set designer. A stage manager.
When my silence became uncomfortable, even for happy-go-lucky Drew, he said, “Okay, Kira. I get it.” But he really didn’t. He said, “I don’t want to make anything more difficult for you.”
I shivered and took the easy route. “I know you don’t,” I said. I pulled my coat closer around me. “Come on. It’s freezing out here.”
It was plenty warm at Mephisto’s. Mike was standing behind the bar, setting a Jack and Coke onto an already-laden tray. The tables in the front room were filled with customers; the restaurant was steeped in a healthy weekend buzz. Nevertheless, Mike looked up automatically as we walked in. He nodded, then did a classic double take as he recognized me. I could only flash a smile as Drew reached for my collar, eager to take my coat. I picked a path through the tables, navigating so that Drew and I ended up beside the bar just as a harried waitress swooped in for the tray of drinks.
Mike took advantage of the temporary lull in hostilities to give me an appraising look. “Kira,” he said. And then he seemed to notice the man standing beside me. “Drew! I haven’t seen you here in a while.”
Drew smiled, his best, happy grin. “I’ve been too busy, dude. This Kira, she’s a slave driver.”
Mike looked at me, with an expression that was at least halfway down the road to disbelief. He recovered quickly, though. “Well, you know you two are always welcome. The Landmark group is back in the Shakespeare Room.”
“Fitting,” I said. And then I concentrated on making a question sound offhand. “Is, um, Stephanie there?”
“No,” Mike said, shaking his head as he finished shoving limes onto the rim of my glass of tonic water. “They’re not back there.”
Drew didn’t catch the plural pronoun as he accepted his Sam Adams. I, though, flashed a grateful smile at Mike. “Thanks,” I said.
“Just part of the service at Mike’s Bar and Grill.” He gave me a mock leer, looking exactly like the debauched devil that had earned the place its nickname. Before I could express my appreciation, Mike got pulled away to mix a half-dozen cocktails.
Drew and I made our way back to the Shakespeare Room. I nodded to the assembled cast members, slipping into a seat on the far side of the table. Drew immediately joined me, resting a casual hand across the back of my chair. As his fingers traveled to the back of my neck, I was irritated by the physical attention, particularly since we’d just discussed it five minutes before. I offered him one pointed look, but I decided not to build mountains out of molehills. When the waitress came in, we both ordered burgers and fries. I was really hungry—I went with the black and blue, and I asked her to add bacon.
I resisted the urge to whip out my food diary then and there. Even if I left half the food on my plate, the fat and cholesterol should go a long way toward satisfying my overconcerned housemates and father.
I still hadn’t reconciled myself to their stupid food diary. I found myself thinking about it at odd times, obsessing over whether I had recorded something, whether I had accurately estimated the weight of a chicken breast cut up on a salad, whether I had been fair when I said that I ate half a cup of mashed potatoes. The diary was almost having the opposite of my loved ones’ desired effect—it was so damn hard to write down everything that I ate, that I was tempted to just eat nothing.
But that would only bring about more problems. It was easier to give in now. Easier to prove that they were all wrong, with their overprotective stance. Easier to manage the situation than to let it continue deteriorating.
“Kira?” I looked up to see Jennifer Galland at the far end of the table. She had her fingers wrapped around a stein of some light beer, and even at this distance, I could make out a couple of nasty bruises on her forearm. Rehearsals had not been kind to our gentle Romeo. Her iron pipe sword had tripped her up just yesterday. She likely would have kept herself from falling, if her wet-suit-clad feet hadn’t slipped on the slimy plastic sheeting.
Bill had been impressed with the string of profanity that Jennifer had let loose. He’d decided that Romeo would be thinking in just those terms as he contemplated fighting the hated Capulet crowd. It had only taken me three phone calls to determine that we could, in fact, change the supertitles, to make the language more foul, even though they’d all supposedly been finalized the week before. There would be a charge, of course, a substantial one, but Bill insisted it was all worthwhile.
I’d needed to deliver the new supertitles over the phone to jump-start the modification. I wondered what my father would have thought if he’d seen me standing in the Landmark lobby, seeking out the best pocket of cell phone reception so that I could enunciate words that would have guaranteed my mouth being washed out with soap when I was a kid. I had to spell some of them, too. All those years of playing Scrabble with Maddy and Jules came in handy. Sort of.
“Kira,” Jennifer said again, when she had my attention. “Can’t you talk to Bill? Ask him if we could carry flashlights, too?”
I shook my head. “I already tried that. He wouldn’t go for the idea. I think he’s afraid it’ll look silly, like kids around a campfire.” I mimed holding a flashlight under my chin. “You know, ‘There was a hook, caught in the car door.’”
They all laughed, and Drew leaned over to kiss my cheek, as if he were rewarding me for a great witticism. I would have pushed him away, but our waitress chose that moment to come in with our food. The aroma of the burger made my mouth water; I was hungrier than I thought. I closed my eyes and took a bite, actually moaning a little as the bacon crunched between my teeth, as the Cajun spice danced at the tip of my tongue, and the creamy melted blue cheese flooded my mouth with flavor.
Heaven. Sheer culinary heaven.
Even if I did need to grab for my napkin to wipe juices from my chin.
“You’ll need this for your fries, Franklin.” I looked up to see John laughing at me from the doorway, holding out the bottle of ketchup that the waitress had just passed into our crowded room.
“Hi!” I said, surprised. “I didn’t think you’d make it.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I wasn’t sure what his tone meant. It was steady and calm, merely stating a fact. He’d clearly made a conscious decision to set aside his frustration over Bill, over the ever-changing set design. I felt guilty, though, that I hadn’t insisted that he join us, back at the theater. “If I’d known y’all would be telling campfire stories, I’d’ve brought along some s’mores.”
I laughed. Before I could think of something else to say, though, two more people ducked through the curtain.
Stephanie Michaelson. And TEWSBU.
The bite of burger in my belly turned cold. Stephanie and my ex were laughing too loudly, holding each other up as they stumbled into the room. “Sorry we’re late,” Stephanie brayed. “We stopped off at Orlando’s for a drink after rehearsal.”
More like for a bottle, I thought. They were both drunk. Not a pleasantly giddy, Friday night flush after a week of hard-won rehearsals. No, Stephanie actually swayed as she stepped into the room. TEWSBU didn’t help her; he was peering around the room, his head held a little too far forward on his neck, his gaze a little too uneven to be sober.
I realized that neither of them had drinks in their hands. I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected that Mike had taken one look at their condition and declined to serve them further. I gritted my teeth. I had a problem with TEWSBU under the best of circumstances, but I remembered all too well that he could be a heartless drunk.
It was just my luck that the only empty chairs were on my side of the table. Drew was already scrambling to his feet, pushing in his own seat and edging toward the wall to make it easier for the newcomers to get by. I thought about scooting up as close as I could to the table, but it was easier to follow Drew’s lead, to stand against the wall and let them go by.
Stephanie edged past first. The smell of alcohol was so strong that I wondered if she’d spilled at least one drink down her front. She giggled as she walked by, clutching the back of my chair to keep her balance.
And that’s when I saw it—an engagement ring with a diamond as large as an egg. All of the oxygen was sucked out of my lungs, making it impossible for me to swear, to shout out a string of epithets that could have inspired yet another remake of the supertitle slides. Instead, my gasp was loud enough to draw Stephanie’s attention.
“My ring?” she said, following my gaze. “Don’t you like it?”
I knew that I was supposed to say something civil. I knew that I was supposed to give her my best wishes. I was supposed to turn to TEWSBU, to congratulate him, to follow through on all the social niceties that had been drummed into me since I was a child.
But the cold glints from that gigantic diamond froze the words at the back of my throat.
TEWSBU had never given me an engagement ring. He didn’t believe in them, he’d pontificated. They were a primitive gesture of ownership. I’d gone along with whatever he’d said, of course. I hadn’t needed a ring. I’d known that he loved me, and no silly block of compressed carbon was going to prove anything more.
At least my lack of an engagement ring had made things simple in the end. I hadn’t needed to consult with Miss Manners about broken-engagement etiquette rules. I hadn’t needed to return anything to my lost love.
It had all worked out for the best.
Stephanie apparently forgot that she was waiting for my response. She staggered past me and collapsed into a chair. And then I was face-to-face with TEWSBU.
He might be drunk, but he was still handsome. Not in the conventional way, not like Drew. TEWSBU was too tall to be traditionally good-looking; I had to crane my neck a little just to look him in the face. He was too skinny. His face was carved into planes, and his nose was a little too long. His cheekbones jutted out a little too hard, leaving behind hollows that whispered about the emptiness in his heart. When he became an old man, he’d look like Ichabod Crane.
But he was brilliant, in the theater. He read plays and truly understood them, carried those meanings to the public with an ease and a confidence that was the envy of every director I’d ever known (Bill Pomeroy likely excepted). He elicited emotions from his actors, pulling truth from them and displaying it onstage. He was excellent at his job—that was what had first attracted me to him, and that was what I’d most often mooned about during those long nights spent mourning what might have been.
He stumbled as he stepped past me, falling against me with his full weight. My arms automatically reached out to steady him, and he clutched the back of my chair, keeping himself from going down to the floor. He ended up, though, with his nose planted at the center of my sweetheart neckline, as if he were trying to breathe in the cool pine scent that I had idiotically imagined emanating from my treasured cashmere sweater.
Then he pulled himself up to his full height. He twisted his neck from side to side, like a pianist trying to work out the kinks before mastering a concerto. He took a deep breath, a sobering breath, and he exhaled fumes strong enough that I worried I might have an allergic reaction then and there.
Everyone in the room was staring at us. They all knew our history. Every single person was waiting to see what he would say, what I would say, how we would spin out our own sorry drama for their personal pleasure and enjoyment.
And TEWSBU gave them what they wanted. “Those,” he enunciated carefully, “are extraordinary tits. Where did you get them?”
A flood of adrenaline actually kept me from hearing the crowd’s reaction, but I could see the discomfort on every face in the room. I heard Stephanie screech something wordless. I felt Drew step up behind me, lay a protective hand on my arm.
And even as I cringed at TEWSBU’s crude words, I was grateful for Drew’s presence. I was grateful that somebody was going to defend me, that someone, that a man was going to tell TEWSBU that he had stepped out of line, that he had been utterly inappropriate, that he was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Drew said, “Hey, dude. They are pretty great! Come on, now. Sit down.”
I whirled on my supposed boyfriend. “I can’t believe you just said that!” I was so astonished that my voice broke.
“What?” he said. “He’s drunk. Never argue with a drunk, dude.” My dim-witted puppy leaned in close, whispering in a voce that wasn’t sotto enough, “Besides, he’s right. You’ve totally got a great rack! And they’re real, so what’s the problem?”
I needed to escape. I needed to get away from all of them. I needed to get away from my burger and fries, which had turned into a cold, plastic representation of food, nauseating in frozen grease.
I shoved an elbow into TEWSBU’s side when he didn’t move quickly enough, pushed Drew away so that I could reach the curtained doorway. I marched across the dining room, absurdly grateful that Mike was too busy to look up. I grabbed my coat from its hanger by the door, blindly shoving my arms into the sleeves.
On the sidewalk, I realized that I was in trouble. I didn’t have my car; Drew had driven us to rehearsal. I would have to phone Maddy, see if I could reach her, see if I could beg her to leave Herr Wunderbar, to come rescue me. I started to dig for my cell phone, fighting back tears that I had been so stupid, that I had let myself believe in Drew, that for one blinding moment I had actually thought he would make things better in front of TEWSBU. TEWSBU, who had proved once again that he was a coldhearted bastard, theatrical genius be forever damned. I caught a sob in the back of my throat.
“Need a ride?”
I recognized the voice before I turned around. The Texas twang was easy, comfortable. The sentence was truly an offer, an option, a choice that was open to me, something I could take or leave with no consequences, no penalties. I turned to find John framed against the light of Mephisto’s plate-glass window.
“Yeah,” I said.
We walked to his truck in absolute silence. He opened my door in absolute silence. He walked around to the driver’s side, put the key into the ignition, fired up the engine, pulled out of the parking space, all in absolute silence.
“You okay?” He finally asked, keeping his eyes on the road. Leaving me room to answer.
I shook my head, then said, “I will be.”
“They’re all jackasses. Everyone back there.”
“Some more than others.”
“You can say that again.” We drove another couple of blocks. “Want to tell me where we’re going?”
We were going to be the gossip of the entire cast and crew of Romeo and Juliet. We were going to be the laughingstock of every theater professional in the Twin Cities, once our play opened. We were going to be changing careers—at least I was—as soon as my public ridicule was complete.
I shrugged.
He pulled up to a red light and said, “You didn’t get a chance to eat much of your dinner.”
“I’m not hungry now.”
“Well, I am,” he said. “Keep me company while I get something.”
I shrugged again. He nodded as the light changed, as he worked the truck through its gears in the comforting predictability of first to second to third to fourth.
In the end, he took me to a restaurant I’d never seen before. It was some sort of dive-y diner, the perfect place to order a large bowl of chicken noodle soup. The waitress brought us hot bread and butter that was creamy and soft. John told me they served a chocolate silk pie to die for. He remembered that I didn’t like to share. He ordered his own apple pie à la mode, and we matched each other, bite for bite.
We talked about everything other than the disaster of my personal life. I told him about growing up in the Twin Cities, about the Winter Carnival, about walking out on the ice of Lake Calhoun in the middle of the winter.
He told me about summer dust storms where half of East Texas blew into his Dallas backyard. He talked about growing up one of seven kids.
When the waitress brought the check, I glanced at my watch, realized with astonishment that it was past eleven o’clock. “Can I drive you home?” John asked, as he slipped a couple of bills out of his wallet, waving off my offer to pay for my food.
“Thanks.”
I gave him directions in a hushed voice. It was late enough that there wasn’t a lot of traffic. He drew up in front of my house, hovering beside the parked cars and putting the truck into Neutral, pulling the parking brake. The porch light was on, but none of the others. The Swensons were asleep. My housemates were in their rooms, or gone for the night.
I stared at my hands in my lap. I didn’t know what I wanted to say, wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. It seemed rude to just say good-night, presumptuous to say anything else.
Before I could figure out some way to express my confusion, John’s tanned fingers closed over mine. He left his hand there for just a moment, just long enough for me to register the warmth, the weight. And then he leaned over and set his lips against mine. One chaste kiss—a little salty, a little sweet, like the echo of our night at the diner.
He squeezed my hands again. “Go on, Franklin. Head on in. I’ll wait till you’re safe inside.”
For once, my key slipped easily into the front door, and I turned to wave. He acknowledged me with one brief toss of his own hand, and then he put his truck in gear, drove off into the night.
I was still awake as the sun came up, wondering what I was going to do to fix the tangled mess of my life. I needed to give Drew his walking papers—genie’s spell or not, absolute faith in me or not, there was no way that I could condone his gleeful objectification of my body. Especially not when he’d been speaking to TEWSBU He had to know what TEWSBU had done to me, how he’d left me stranded. Everyone in the theater world did. Drew knew, but he didn’t care, and that’s what made his offhand crudity the worst insult of all.
Somehow, I feared that even my double-strength coffee wasn’t going to make my day any easier.