Chapter 2 Second Act Romance #7
Bex spun, smiling for the audience.
If nothing happened, Bex could improvise. Twenty-four years of dance classes could get her pretty darn far tonight.
She glanced back at stage right. Parker was still on the ground. The conversation backstage was buzzing.
Bex twirled like a carefree young girl.
There were barely fifteen seconds left of her solo.
Maybe Esther would cut to the dream wedding. That’s what Bex would do.
Maybe Tiffanie would come on as Dream Curly.
Bex moved downstage center, ready to twirl over and over, moving in a large circle to land at the position where Dream Curly would meet her onstage.
She began her piqués. One, two, three—
There was movement backstage. Hurried conversation. She could hear the electronic click of conversation over the headsets of the backstage crew.
Four, five, six—
Bex would simply waltz with herself. She would act as if Curly were there.
Seven, eight, nine—
Someone was moving onstage. Parker was up? Parker could do it?
Ten, eleven, and twelve—coming to a stop as Laurey almost ran into Curly, the way he’d come into her life and interrupted her course.
Bex fell out of her spinning, a broad chest in front of her face.
Perhaps the most famous chest on television, when bared.
Her eyes traveled up, up, letting Laurey’s shock at seeing Curly mix with her own at seeing C. J. in front of her.
Colby J. Turner.
“I did do the dream ballet, actually,” he’d said.
Bex’s chest released tension like an air pressure valve.
They stared at each other, anxious and unsure, just as Laurey and Curly did.
When the music shifted to the romance theme, and C. J.’s hand came up, offering to take hers for a waltz, Bex’s arms floated upward as if tugged on strings.
He was so much taller than the usual Curly or Charlie, the understudy. Suddenly it was hilarious to her to think that Parker could have passed for Dream Curly this evening. Parker was barely taller than she was.
But as C. J. placed a hand on her waist and pulled her softly to him, Bex’s anxiety hit her like a truck.
There were seven lifts in this dance between Curly and Laurey. Seven times that she would be taken off her feet. Seven moments that were required by union law to practice at the half-hour call time for every performance as a safety check.
And Bex didn’t give a shit about union law at this moment, but she sure as hell cared about being lifted over someone’s head with no practice, with no test of center of gravity, with four extra inches of height than she was used to.
Just before C. J. stepped forward, beginning the waltz steps that would take Curly and Laurey across the stage and into the first set of lifts, he nodded to her, eyes never looking away from hers.
“I got you,” he whispered.
He stepped forward, and she followed. He turned her, and she found him again. He dipped her, and her body extended low to the ground.
Bex’s eyes never left his, only to turn, only to throw her head back. Her pounding heart was calmed with the sight of his intense focus on not letting her float off alone.
The first lift came. And because they didn’t need their microphones to be turned on during the dance number, C.
J. took the opportunity to quietly count them into the lift, knowing the exact one-two-down-up that the choreography demanded—because he knew this choreography.
It had been two years since he’d been in the role on Broadway, but he knew it still.
His hands were large and strong on her waist as she sailed upward, her smile of satisfaction matching Laurey’s as he twirled them. On the ground again, they waltzed into another series of lifts, each of them easier than the last as Bex’s tension left her and C. J.’s confidence grew.
C. J.’s added height made her feel like she was flying.
All too soon, the Curly and Laurey section of the dream ballet was over. Geoff was waiting for her as Jud to dance their section, and then the finale.
Laurey awoke from the dream to find Curly on one side of the stage, Jud on the other. She walked toward Jud, choosing him, as the curtain came down. The audience’s energy was through the roof, leaping to their feet before the orchestra was done.
Bex felt like applauding too. The second the curtain met the stage floor, Bex spun and ran back toward C. J., laughing.
C. J. met her center stage, picking her up and twirling her.
“I can’t believe we just—”
“You’re incredible, Bex. Truly incredible.”
“Me? You! You had every step!”
“That was insane—”
“I was dying inside when I saw Parker faint,” Bex said. She was still gripping his shirt, holding tight to him.
“I saw it from the other side of the stage and ran.” C. J. wiped the sweat off his brow. “I was like, ‘Move! Move! I know it!’” He grinned.
“I was ready to improvise for eighteen minutes,” she said, a laugh bursting out of her at how ridiculous that would have been.
“Okay, but I would have paid money to see that version.” C. J. grinned down at her.
She got lost in his smile, his blue eyes never leaving her face.
She forgot for a moment how many ensemble men they were missing, how the adrenaline had pushed her through it all, and how absolutely mad this day had been.
Staring up at him in his costume with his dark hair curled loosely, Bex felt like she’d finally slipped back into a dream she’d been trying to remember for years.
“Bex! Colby!”
They turned to find Esther waving them over offstage. She must have run from the tech booth.
Reluctantly, Bex’s fingers detached from his shirt, and she stepped away from him. They jogged to Esther.
“You good? I know that wasn’t ideal,” Esther said.
Bex almost laughed. It was more than ideal. “No, I feel great about that.”
Esther turned to C. J. “Anything you need for act two? If not, I need to work out the holes in the ensemble.”
“Is Parker okay?” Bex asked.
“He’s awake, but not going on.” Esther looked at her phone. “Assad and Dana are coming in.”
Bex blinked. “They’re okay to go on?”
Esther shrugged and reached for a cigarette that wasn’t there, like a phantom limb. “No one is okay to go on. What can you do? Also, I think Dana wanted to meet Dr. Wes.”
Bex snorted. That sounded like Dana.
Esther left them, and C. J. and Bex started back toward the stairs to the dressing rooms.
“So, how did you even get called for this?” Bex said. “I didn’t have time to ask.”
“I was here skiing with my family in Aspen,” C. J. said with a laugh. “They sent a helicopter for me. Can you believe it?”
Bex’s chest tightened, but she kept her smile pasted on. Had she been falling in love with him again while his wife waited for him back at a ski lodge?
“You have kids?” she asked lightly as they started to climb the stairs.
“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “My parents. My mom loves to ski.”
She glanced back at him on the landing and decided to just go for it. “That’s sweet. You took your parents skiing on Valentine’s Day . . . with your wife?”
He blinked at her before a slow smile curled his lips. “No. No wife.”
She nodded, pressing her lips together to keep from smiling back at him as a coil loosened in her chest. “And Hart Hospital? Are you done filming season eight?”
“Yeah, my scenes are done,” he said. There was a tightness in his voice.
“Your scenes . . .” She paused, letting a few people pass them on the stairs. “Does that mean the season’s not done filming?”
He smiled thinly. “My NDA requires that I not answer that question.”
Her eyes danced. “Are you getting killed off?”
“My NDA requires that I not answer that question.”
Her jaw dropped, and he laughed.
“Well, no matter what’s happening on Hart Hospital,” she said, “I’m glad you’re back onstage. And if you have more time to be onstage in the near future, that’s television’s loss and our gain.”
There was a soft expression on his face. An echo of what she’d just spent the entirety of act 1 looking at—Curly’s adoration for Laurey.
She stood two stairs above him, her face level with his. Bex shifted, leaning against the wall of the staircase, forgetting entirely that they had dressing rooms to head to.
“So, wait. You got a call about your whereabouts and literally left the mountains for the theater?”
“I Left the Mountains for the Theater, a memoir.”
Bex laughed. “I’d read it.”
“And you?” he asked. “How long have you been on the tour?”
“Almost a year.”
“Do you like it?”
She shrugged, pressing herself to the wall as people passed them on the stairs.
“Yeah. It’s hard,” she said. “But it’s worth it for days like this.”
They stared at each other for a few moments. Bex was about to give him the opportunity to escape to his dressing room, worried she was keeping him, when he spoke again.
“I was so confused when there was no Beth in the company of Sweeney Todd,” he said.
“I thought for sure that was the cast you were in.” Her heart thundered in her chest. “I sent an email to the Oklahoma! stage manager, asking about you, but I made the mistake of asking for your number or email. He said he couldn’t give out ‘private information.’ Made me feel like a creep, actually.
” He laughed lightly. “And then I remembered that you left immediately after the show, which”—he raised a placating hand—“now I know you were sick, but it made me wonder if I actually was a creep—”
“No, not at all!” she said.
“But yeah. That’s why you never heard from me.” His eyes flickered back and forth between hers.
Bex frowned, irritation building at the stage manager from eight years ago. “That guy was a lot. He was probably embarrassed that he didn’t know my name when he introduced me.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Bex. Beth.” She shrugged. “When you’re twenty-one and beyond grateful for an opportunity, what difference would a proper credit make?”
His eyes were intense yet soft as he whispered, “Maybe a big difference, actually.”
She thought she would never tire of looking at his face. She cleared her throat before she did something silly.