Chapter 7 – Graham
Chapter Seven
Graham
Graham sat in the lead’s dressing room with Pride and Prejudice open across his knee, the spine cracked to the same well-worn place he always returned to when his thoughts got too loud.
A few minutes before places. Just enough time to settle.
The corridor outside hummed with the pre-show scramble: footsteps, laughter, someone calling for bobby pins like it was a medical emergency. A muffled burst of music leaked through a wall and died again. The building had that particular, expectant energy it always got before places was called.
He read the same paragraph three times without absorbing it.
The words were familiar, reliable in the way he preferred most things to be. And still, his attention kept slipping sideways, as if his mind had developed a draft.
He checked the time. He had a few minutes before he needed to swing by the wig closet for the pre-show hair check.
He tried to focus on the page. And yet, his attention slid away from the book again, uninvited, to the memory of Elise’s voice from the day before.
It’s perfect.
Not a compliment dressed up as teasing. Not a line delivered for effect. Just… matter-of-fact, as if she’d reached out, touched something, and named it true.
He’d been told he had good hair before. Enough times that it had become background noise, filed away with other facts about himself that didn’t require consideration. It was like being told the sky was blue. Fine. Noted.
But Elise saying it had landed differently. It had slipped past the usual armor, warm and irritating and absurdly persistent.
He stared at the line of text without seeing it, the corner of his mouth threatening an expression he didn’t have a name for.
Ridiculous, he told himself.
And yet the warmth of it lingered—because it wasn’t that his hair was perfect. It was that she had thought so.
Graham turned the page with careful precision, as if he could flatten the thought into the paper.
It didn’t work.
He stared at the page like it had personally betrayed him, then let his gaze slide off it, unfocused. The warmth from yesterday’s comment was still there—unhelpful, persistent—like a stage light you couldn’t quite escape once it found you.
And then came the other memory. The one that made his stomach tighten.
Emily.
He could still hear Lark saying it—casual, assured, as if she were handing him a harmless fact. Her name’s Emily. And he’d repeated it, because he’d been tired and distracted and because Lark spoke with the kind of certainty people mistook for truth.
He’d watched Elise’s expression flicker when he’d said it.
The brief confusion. The quick recovery.
The polite correction. He’d felt the embarrassment flare hot and immediate, and ever since, his brain had been insistent about the conclusion: he’d blown whatever small chance he might’ve had of being anything other than the aloof leading man who couldn’t be bothered to learn a name.
Which was… not inaccurate, if you wanted to be cruel about it.
His jaw worked once, as if he could grind the moment down small enough to swallow. He couldn’t.
Lark, of course, had been perfectly unbothered.
Lark was always perfectly unbothered. And she’d been…
pointed about it—no apology, no correction, not even a flicker of concern that she’d set him up to look like an idiot.
It wasn’t only that she’d told him the wrong name.
It was the ease with which she’d done it, the casual certainty.
The way she’d watched the result afterward like she was measuring distance between pieces on a board.
Lark seemed to think she had some sort of claim on Elise.
Not in any way she’d say plainly, because Lark rarely said anything plainly when she could imply it instead.
But he’d seen it—the way she positioned herself, the way she steered conversations, the way she looked at Elise like Elise’s existence in the room was a decision Lark had made.
And that was what bothered him most.
Not jealousy. Not interest. Not… anything like that.
Just… a familiar, unpleasant recognition of the pattern.
He’d watched Lark break hearts before. Quietly, efficiently.
Sometimes with a smile. Sometimes without one.
Cast members, crew members—people who were otherwise sensible, stable, grown adults—somehow ended up orbiting her until they burned out, then disappeared from the company with strained goodbyes and careful non-explanations.
Graham had learned to keep out of her way. To stay on her good side the way you stayed on the good side of a temperamental director: polite, neutral, useful. Sterile coworkers.
It had worked. Mostly.
But Elise didn’t know the rules yet.
There were rumors about Lark. Things people said half as jokes and half as warnings.
That she was a witch. Or a practitioner.
Or… something. Graham had never known the right term, and he wasn’t sure he believed in any of it.
Not really. Not in the sense of candles and spells and forces you could shape with intention.
Still. Lark had an uncanny ability to bend people and situations to her will, and whether that was magic or charisma barely mattered in the end.
And she was predictable. She had a type.
Attractive women who reminded her of herself.
Graham had noticed how similar Ellen and Lark were—of course he had. They were cast in the same role, two versions of the same face. And then Elise had arrived, fitting the same mold in a different key: a different kind of beauty, but still unmistakably the kind Lark collected.
The thought made him uneasy in a way he didn’t want to examine too closely.
He wasn’t even sure Elise had clocked Lark’s attraction, much less returned it. Elise seemed… warm. Easy with people. The sort of person who could be kind without it meaning anything more than kindness. It was possible Lark was reading too much into it. It was possible Elise was.
And none of it was his business.
He told himself that firmly, like a line he’d practiced.
Probably for the best. He’d gotten used to staying removed from the company. Safer on the edges. Predictable. Controlled. He missed connection sometimes—he wasn’t made of stone—but connection was complicated. Connection asked things of you. It made you visible.
Graham exhaled once, slow, and looked back down at the book as if it could rescue him.
A knock landed against the doorframe—light, but confident.
His reflex was immediate. He slid Pride and Prejudice off his knee and tucked it beneath a folded hoodie on the chair beside him, as if the book had never been there.
The dressing room door was rarely closed—just an open threshold and the shared understanding that most people didn’t wander in unless they had a reason.
Apparently, Nick had found one.
Nick leaned into the doorway a beat later, bright and easy. “Hey,” he said. “You in here brooding, or just rehearsing your mysterious leading-man aura?”
Graham straightened, willing his expression into something unreadable.
Nick’s eyes flicked toward where the book had disappeared under the hoodie on the chair, and then back to Graham without comment.
If he noticed, he didn’t dignify it with teasing.
Nick had always had that peculiar persistence: he reached for friendship the way he reached for a harmony line—confident it existed, even if the other person wasn’t giving it to him yet.
Graham respected him for it. Quietly. From a safe distance.
Nick stepped fully into the room, hands in his pockets, taking in Graham’s jacket, his posture, the careful neutrality. “Just doing my rounds,” he said. “Making sure you’re not planning to vanish the second the curtain goes down tonight.”
Graham’s mouth tightened a fraction. “I wasn’t planning to vanish.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s… a long day,” Graham said.
Nick made a humming sound, the universal language of I’m not buying it, but I’ll let you pretend. “It’s the cast party,” he said, like he was reminding Graham of a scheduled dentist appointment. “You know. The thing where we pretend we’re normal humans who can socialize without stage directions.”
Graham’s stomach gave a small, ill-timed drop.
The memory came again, uninvited: the last cast party. The sticky heat of a crowded bar. Someone’s hand on his arm. The previous wig mistress—what was her name again? Laughing too loudly, too close—then suddenly earnest, eyes shining with something Graham hadn’t known what to do with.
“I’m in love with you,” she’d said. Into the mic. In front of everyone.
He’d gone cold so fast he’d felt it in his teeth.
Mortified, not just because she’d said it, but because he had no idea how she’d arrived there.
For days afterward he’d replayed every interaction, every polite conversation, every thank-you and nod and careful smile, searching for the moment he’d accidentally offered more than courtesy. He never found it.
Which meant either he was oblivious, or people heard what they wanted to hear.
Neither option was comforting.
“I’m not sure it’s wise,” Graham said finally, because it was the closest he could get to honesty without sounding like a man afraid of a party. “Given… last time.”
Nick’s expression softened, just a notch, like he understood more than he was going to say. “Fair,” he said. Then, with renewed brightness, went on: “But tonight is different. New city. New show. New—” he waggled his eyebrows, as if that completed the thought.
Graham gave him a flat look.
Nick grinned, unrepentant. “Also,” he added, “it’s Elise’s first cast party.”
Graham’s face remained carefully blank. Somewhere behind his ribs, something small and irritating shifted.
Nick watched him for half a beat too long, like he was waiting for a tell.
Graham gave him none.
“I’m going to try to convince her to do a duet,” Nick said breezily, already turning toward the door. “Because I am a benevolent force for chaos.”
He paused in the doorway, and his eyes sparkled in that knowing, theatrical way Nick had when he thought he was very clever. “Don’t be weird about it,” he said, and then—before Graham could respond—he was gone, leaving the doorframe empty and Graham staring at the space like it had insulted him.
He’d forgotten about the cast party.
His instinct was still to skip it—clean, simple, predictable. But Nick’s pointed reminder had lodged where it didn’t belong: Elise’s first cast party.
Graham told himself that was not a reason.
And yet, the idea of Elise in a crowded bar—noise, bodies, attention coming at her from all directions—pulled at his mind with an odd insistence.
Not because he expected drama. If anything, he expected the opposite.
Elise didn’t strike him as someone who enjoyed big, loud parties.
She could do people, clearly. She could talk to anyone, pivot between humor and professionalism like it was second nature.
But there was a difference between being capable and being comfortable.
Graham knew that difference intimately.
In a social setting, he preferred to watch. To absorb. To let the room move around him without demanding anything back. It was easier that way—less performance, less risk of saying the wrong thing and spending the next week replaying it like a botched cue.
Elise, he’d noticed, did something similar. She stood a half-step apart from the center of things, eyes tracking, taking inventory. Only with her there was an edge to it—a wariness that sharpened in crowds. Not fear, exactly. Vigilance. The kind that stayed tucked behind a smile.
He’d also noticed that it wasn’t always there.
There were moments—small ones, unguarded—when she didn’t know anyone was watching.
Once, from the hallway, he’d seen her in the wings during a run-through, her hands full, her attention split between a wig and the stage.
And still, her mouth had moved along with the lines, silent and precise, as if the words lived in her muscle memory.
Another time, she’d done it again—mouthing along, smiling faintly to herself, completely oblivious.
Adorable, his mind supplied before he could stop it.
He exhaled through his nose, annoyed at the word and at himself for thinking it. Elise smiling to no one, Elise caught up in the show in a way that looked like devotion instead of labor, was not his concern.
And yet it had become, inconveniently, something he looked for.
There was a moment earlier that day, brief, easy to miss, when he’d passed the wig room and heard Elise muttering.
Not mouthing along with the script. Not quietly tracking the scene.
Muttering like she was carrying on an argument under her breath, half to herself and half to the wig stand in front of her. As if the hair had opinions and she was negotiating terms.
He’d paused without meaning to. Simply long enough to catch a few clipped, earnest phrases—nothing he could repeat, nothing that made any sense out of context. Then Elise had made a small, triumphant sound, like she’d won, and the whole thing had struck him as—there was no dignified word for it—
Endearing.
Graham blinked, irritated with himself as the thought landed. He was doing it again. Slipping back into thoughts of her, like his mind had developed a habit.
He stared at the book wedged under the hoodie for half a beat, then made the decision with the same quiet finality he brought to everything else.
Fine. He’d go.
Not because he needed to. Not because Nick would be insufferable if he didn’t. Because he’d like to see her there, once, and then he could stop thinking about it.
He checked the clock on his phone, then slid it into his bag. It was time to go. Time to do the routine thing. The normal thing.
He headed for the wig closet to ask Elise for a hair check, and tried, unsuccessfully, to calm the butterflies that had nothing to do with the show.