Chapter 30
Three days until Opening Night
The next few days are a blur of costume fittings and running the show with sound and lights.
Our cue-to-cue, where we run the show start to finish, perfecting every light and sound cue, takes eight hours.
It’s a lot of sitting around and waiting, which means a lot of sitting quietly in the back of the theater, covertly staring at Will and chastely holding hands with my whole mysterious future.
Cue-to-cue is the time where the designers get to do their thing, and the actors kind of just move around like props.
It’s the most boring rehearsal, but it does the magical thing of bringing the show to life with all the design elements.
Finally, we meet our enchanted forest: tiny twinkling lights everywhere and gauzy vines and greenery wrapped around every beam, draping down.
The set is simple, a series of platforms plus a balcony where Puck lounges and sprinkles magic down on us, and the background is an intricate collage of marbled, painted trees layered on top of one another, lights filtering between each layer.
A local artist made it. When my dad described it to me, it sounded like a kid’s art project, but onstage, I see how huge it is, the depth it gives the stage, a vast wood you could indeed get lost in.
The fairies match the stage, all in shades of green, long glittering sleeves and lush crowns of ferns and pine cones.
It’s not your usual pastels and gossamer wings.
They almost resemble the witches in Macbeth, their hair gray and wild, but they are the light version.
They almost look like branches of the trees that broke off, and under the lights, the effect is lovely.
These final rehearsals are charged with anticipation, of both our looming opening night and my increasing attraction to Will, which is becoming harder to ignore.
Helena wraps herself around Demetrius, and I feel the broadness of Will’s chest, his heart beating under his shirt.
Demetrius turns on Helena, throws her down, hovering over her, and I watch his eyes flash with a heat I’ve never seen in him.
I feel his weight on me, I feel how right that would be.
Helena grabs his arm, and I feel his forearms flinch.
Helena presses herself against him, and I can smell apples and cedar and sweat.
It’s a cathartic and confusing simulation of love.
I get to touch him and hold him and chase him, and it’s safe, it’s all sanctioned.
It’s just pretend, but I know, we both know, that this is stirring so much beneath the surface.
There is also the question of the kiss at the end: It’s not written in, but it’s implied.
I did it with Nick before we decided to cut it, and no one has mentioned it, but we both know we could.
No one would question it. I get the sense from Will that this ball is in my court, as the codirector of our scenes, as the actor who has been through different versions of it, and as the woman who decided we should just hold hands.
It’s laughably similar to my first kiss, the play with Theo, practicing in the secret garden.
It feels that way too: the butterflies, the wondering, the will we, won’t we.
The worst part is the end. The wedding. Just sitting there together.
I can chase him and grab him and fawn over him, and feel completely in control, even with everything brimming beneath the surface between us.
Acting and all that. But sitting here, like this, just about undoes me.
He is watching the “play” in front of us, my hand in his.
Every so often, we look at each other and smile.
Every now and then, he rubs the side of my hand with his thumb, as if to say, Hey.
I’m here. I am afraid to move. I am onstage, in character; there is a play going on around us, but all I am aware of is him.
I just want him to tuck my hair behind my ear again.
I want him to walk into the room where I’m sleeping and bring me coffee again. And I want to kiss him. So much.
“Are you free after this?” I whisper, even though there is a scene going on around us. “We need to talk.” He looks at me, a question on his face, but reads my eyes. He gets it.
“Come to the cidery?” His smile is hopeful.
“Okay.”
We get through the rehearsal. We get through our fake wedding, holding hands as professionally as possible. Afterward there is an hour of notes. I sit far away from him, my heart racing every time I think about seeing him later. I want him. But what do I want?
We are finally dismissed. I hang up my costume, race home, shower, scrub off all my stage makeup. I put on a simple light-blue linen sundress with a smocked bodice and plain skirt. I don’t put on any makeup. I let my hair air-dry. Somehow, I need to come to him bare.
The cidery is closed; driving in after hours feels illicit somehow. It’s just to talk, I tell myself. We just need to talk.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to go to his house or the taproom. I stand there for a second, looking around. The string lights flicker on, and Will comes around the building, in jeans and a Saves the Day T-shirt. His hair is damp too.
“Hi!”
“Hi.” I’m nervous.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“You want a drink?” he asks, nodding toward the taproom. I stand still where I am.
“No,” I say.
“Do you want to sit out here? I could make a fire.” Of course he can just whip up a fire.
“No,” I say, some stronghold in me weakening.
He takes a step closer to me. “Okay,” he says. “Tell me what you want.” He reaches for my hand, but I instinctively step back.
“I—I don’t know. I want you,” I say, and his face breaks open.
“I mean, look, obviously there is something here. And it’s .
. . very difficult, not doing anything about it.
I like you.” His face is soft, unguarded.
“I like you in a way that feels familiar and unfamiliar. Like, really big and incredibly simple.” He nods, listening.
“I feel like I already nearly ruined the play.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he says firmly. “That guy . . .”
“I know,” I say. “But it was my fault, in a way, that I was involved with someone so toxic, someone who was so shitty to me.”
“Mira,” he says, stepping toward me. I stop him.
“Let me try to say this,” I say. He nods. “It’s not about the play. Not really.”
“I know.” He smiles.
“I guess it’s that . . . I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Why would you hurt me?”
“Because I’m a mess! I don’t know who I am or what I want.
I don’t have a plan. I know we already kissed; I know it was me who shut it down .
. . and started it. I know we could have hooked up weeks ago.
We could sleep together now, tonight, and probably have amazing sex.
” His eyes light up just slightly, but he lets me talk.
“And have this messy, chaotic showmance, and then I would leave.”
“And you don’t want that.”
“I don’t know what I want! I feel like that would be a waste.”
“Of what?”
“Of you,” I say. “Of us.” I take a breath. “Of whatever else this could be.” I’ve been avoiding eye contact this whole time, but my eyes finally land on his, and lock in. “And that is so much scarier.” I take a breath. “I don’t live here, Will.”
“You could.”
“I don’t know if that’s actually true.” There is a long beat. I am running out of excuses.
“You don’t want to get hurt either,” he says quietly.
“I haven’t really ever let anyone close enough to really hurt me,” I say.
Not since Theo. Which is to say, not ever.
Sure, Nick pissed me off and bruised my ego.
But it was a surface wound compared to what might be here.
“And I don’t know why, I don’t know what it is, but you .
. .” I sigh. “You scare the living shit out of me.”
“I don’t make you feel safe?” He looks confused.
“No,” I say. I almost can’t get the words out. “You might be the safest place I’ve ever been.”
He steps toward me and wraps his arms around me, solid and sure. I drop my head onto his shoulder. Tears are suddenly spilling out of my eyes onto his shirt. I raise my head to wipe them, but he uses his collar and draws me back in.
“I feel so stupid,” I say when I finally pull away. “I’m acting like this is some big thing, and maybe I’m making it out to be way more than it is, maybe—”
“No,” he says. “You’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“No,” he says, his voice thick.
“I don’t know what to do,” I say. I’ve never felt so vulnerable offstage. “I don’t know how to do this, how to be—”
“Hey.” He stops me, dropping his lips on my temple, as if he’s already done it a thousand times. I pull back again.
“But what if I leave? Or what if it’s great and then you realize I’m an asshole?”
“I already know you’re an asshole.” He smiles.
“But you still like me.”
“I do. So much.” He hooks his finger under the belt of my dress, gently pulling me back in.
“How do we know we won’t obliterate each other?”
He laughs. “Oh, sweetheart.” I like that. “There’s the rub. That’s the thesis of every love story.”
Something sparks in me. Hope. “You think this could be a love story?”
He reaches for me again, and I let him. “I think it already is.” He searches my face, and I’m finally smiling back at him. He pulls me in all the way, carefully takes my face in his hands, and kisses me.
I have kissed an above-average number of people, both on and off set. I have had kisses that were perfectly staged to make audiences swoon. I have kissed movie stars.
Nothing, and no one, has ever felt so much like home.
But this does.
He does.
This kiss holds the whole world. He kisses me like he already knows everything about me. Like he already loves me.
It is late. It was a long day. I let him lead me into the house, up the stairs.
I slip out of my dress and into his bed.
We disappear into each other, a summer’s worth of racing hearts colliding.
Being next to him, wrapped up in him, held by him is somehow more intimate than everything else we do.
Afterward we lie there and we talk, whispering into the dark, laughing, our hands running lightly over all our newfound places, waists and foreheads and napes of necks.
I have wanted to touch him for so long, and now it feels like it’s all I’ve ever done.