Chapter 2 Second Act Romance #3
The wardrobe assistants got her out of her vomit-stained costumes and told everyone that came knocking that she wasn’t in there, lying for her.
When she’d heard C. J. at the door, asking if she’d already left, Bex had taken one look at herself in the mirror and begged the wardrobe gal to tell him she’d left.
She’d never heard from C. J. after that. And two months later, he was Colby J. Turner, eternally shirtless doctor at Hart Hospital. (Truly. He’d been shirtless in thirteen out of twenty-two episodes of season one.)
She regretted not contacting him, but as the weeks added up, it became harder and harder to think of reaching out.
Bex sat on the couch with Dana in between her trips to the bathroom and watched the group chat fumble through possibilities.
“This is really not how I imagined I’d be spending Valentine’s Day this year,” Dana said from her blanket cocoon, a mug of ginger tea held tightly between two hands.
“Really? This is exactly how I thought I’d be spending it.”
Dana snorted. “You could have found a date on Bumble, like Rachel and I did.” Bex started to protest. “And don’t use the show as an excuse. We all have the same work schedule.”
Bex couldn’t find the energy to care about getting a date for Valentine’s Day this year. They would leave Denver next week. Anyone she met here would be in the rearview mirror before she could decide on a second date.
Bex sighed. “Tell ya what. If you can rally for tonight’s show, I’ll go watch the asteroids hit Earth with you.”
“They’re comets, not asteroids.” Dana threw a pillow at her. “I don’t know if I can drag myself off the couch, much less to the theater,” she grumbled. “I already canceled with my date for tonight. We were going to drink hot cocoa in the park and watch the comets pass.”
The comets swinging by Earth tonight hadn’t been seen since the eighties, thought to never return again. The articles had started calling them the Star-Crossed Lovers, and Dana was obsessed with them.
Finally, Esther phoned her at three—four and a half hours before their call time. Dana forced Bex to put her on speaker.
“Can you come in at seven?” Esther asked.
“Of course. You have someone for Curly?”
“We have . . . options,” Esther said, rather ominously. “I have to clear it through the union first.”
Bex gave Dana a thumbs-up. “That’s great. Who is it—”
“Thanks, Bex. I gotta talk to wardrobe now.”
Esther hung up.
Dana narrowed her eyes and immediately started texting the group chat.
When Bex arrived at the theater and signed in on the call sheet at 6:52 p.m., she glanced at the scribbled initials above hers. Someone with either an O or a C or an oddly drawn G for a first initial and a T for a last had signed in ten minutes prior.
It should have clicked then. But it didn’t.
She went directly to her dressing room, still littered with Dana’s Valentine’s Day decorations and printed invites to Shrimp Taco Fest 2026. She winced, doing everyone a favor by taking down all references to shrimp tacos. Esther met her on the stairs down from the fourth floor.
“Oh, awesome,” she said and tapped her headset to speak. “I have Bex. Coming down now.” Bex didn’t get a chance to ask a single question as Esther used all four staircases to prep her. “He knows the show. He was in the Broadway cast two years ago.”
That was the second time it should have clicked. It didn’t.
“We’re going to focus on dream ballet and safety call—prop guns, lifts, all that.”
Bex nodded. No matter how often a show was performed, safety call was done daily.
“He’s taller than Charlie and Miles, so he’s wearing a mix of different pieces. I couldn’t get his Broadway costume shipped from New York, but maybe by tomorrow.”
“Are you anticipating he goes on tomorrow?” Bex asked, brows lifting in surprise.
“I’m not putting bets on our tenors having healthy vocal cords after twenty-four hours of vomiting,” Esther said, leading her through the door. Bex agreed, she supposed.
There was a man backstage talking to the prop master about the gun Curly used.
Ten people fluttered around him, some mic’ing him for sound, some slipping a belt into the loops of his costume pants, some kneeling at his feet and helping him slip on five different pairs of cowboy boots to find the best fit.
He was very tall and very shirtless as he slipped off the blue costume shirt and brown vest with the help of a wardrobe assistant.
And maybe seeing his naked chest should have been the dead giveaway.
There were fourteen million people a week who would know Dr. Wes’s chest. Intimately.
But it still took Bex ten more steps and Esther’s unnecessary introduction for Bex’s mind to finally come to terms with the vision of Colby J.
Turner in the middle of an emergency costume fitting, mid–safety check, for the show whose curtain went up in precisely an hour and two minutes.
It felt like slow motion as he turned at Esther’s voice, his eyes sliding past their stage manager to Bex standing there like roadkill.
“Colby, this is B—”
“Beth.”
Colby J. Turner’s face lit up in recognition, his eyes even bluer than they were on TV, somehow. He smiled at her. Bex’s heart fell out of her ass.
“Oh,” Esther says. “This is Bex, actually.”
Colby J. Turner’s brow furrowed as if she were a puzzle he’d been waiting to press a final piece into.
“I’m—yeah, it’s Bex, but I can . . . I mean,” she stuttered, about to allow Colby J. Turner to call her the wrong name for the second time. She took a deep breath. “Yeah, it’s Bex now. Sorry, I mean, it’s always been Bex.” She stuck out her hand. “Hi, again, C. J.”
His perfectly straight teeth crested over his bottom lip, his eyes never leaving her face as he took her hand.
“Wow. I haven’t been called C. J. in years.”
She paled. “Oh. I’m sorry. I remembered—”
“No, it’s fine,” he hurried to say, not releasing her hand. “It’s easier on set to just go by ‘Colby,’ and that’s not even my name . . .”
He trailed off. They continued to hold hands. There was movement around them as the wardrobe department returned with an act 2 costume for him to try and Esther started talking to the pianist about which numbers they were going to rehearse.
“Bex,” he repeated, testing it in his mouth.
“That’s me,” she said lightly. Suddenly, the stress of the day came back to her. They were under a time crunch, and Bex was standing here unmoving, holding his hand. “So,” she said, turning to Esther and breaking their handshake. “Where are we beginning?”
She felt Colby J. Turner’s gaze linger on her as Esther waved over the three people who’d just arrived.
Richard, who was an incredible Jud Fry even though he was a teddy bear in real life, and Parker and Tiffanie, two of their swings—the latter was also their dance captain, responsible for maintaining the choreographer’s vision through all rehearsals and performances.
Tiffanie was the only one who wasn’t looking a little green.
Hadn’t Richard been in the hospital that morning?
Richard and Parker waved, swaying on their feet a bit, as Tiffanie went to go set up on the stage—always down to business.
“This is Colby. Richard is good to go on for Jud tonight. Parker is swinging up to cover all the male tracks.”
As Richard extended his hand to shake C. J.’s, the green tint left his face and pale white replaced it. “Holy shit, you’re Dr. Wes.”
Parker’s mouth dropped open. “Fuck me.”
C. J. laughed. Bex remembered that laugh. It was nothing like his television laugh, but she’d heard it that day in Sacramento many times.
Bex asked Parker, “How’s Geoff doing?”
He shook his head. “Not good. I told him to stop being such a martyr and just stay in bed.” Bex smiled. That was so Geoff. “I said, ‘If Richard is good to go on, you are staying home.’ And look!”
Parker gestured to Richard right as he took a swig of coconut water, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth in a way that made Bex question exactly how “good to go on” he was.
“Okay,” Esther said, reviewing her notes. “Dream ballet first.”
The dream ballet was a staple in many musicals of the 1940s through the 1960s, an opportunity for dialogue to stop and dance to express the themes and emotions of the characters.
Oklahoma! and West Side Story had two of the most iconic dream ballets, but many times the main characters were played by well-trained dancers in the company in the same costumes, asking the audience to extend their disbelief.
There had been an increase in the past twenty years of the lead actors doing their own strenuous choreography in the dream ballet with the rise of the “triple-threat” actor—someone who sings, acts, and dances with equally high skill levels.
It started to be a badge of honor for productions to use the lead actors in the dream ballet.
Hugh Jackman did the Oklahoma! dream ballet in London in 1998, and the recording of it had reformed Bex’s frontal cortex.
For Curly, the Oklahoma! dream ballet was less pirouettes and piques and more waltzing and lifts.
As she followed Esther from backstage into the stage lights, Bex suddenly stopped. “But he doesn’t know the dream ballet.”
Esther turned to stare at her. She could actually feel Esther counting down the thirty minutes they had on the stage before the audience would be let inside.
Bex swallowed. “Sorry, I just mean, C. J. didn’t do the dream ballet on Broadway.” Right? Surely . . .
She looked back at C. J., who was not following them onto the stage. He was changing into the wedding costume that wardrobe had pulled.
“Parker is going to play Dream Curly,” Esther clarified.
Bex took a deep breath. That made more sense. As a swing, Parker knew the choreography. It would be strange for the audience, maybe, when she played Dream Laurey but another actor came in for Dream Curly, but . . . the show must go on.
“I did do the dream ballet, actually,” a voice called from stage left.