Chapter Six #2
It was different, I thought as I unwrapped my sandwich, from things here in Willow Creek.
Here, Simon grew out his beard once a summer because he spent four weekends a year as a pirate.
And as much as Mitch loved running around shirtless in a kilt, he didn’t do it all year round.
They kept those parts of themselves separate from their day-to-day lives.
And now I was thinking about Alex, and when I’d watched them rehearse in the backyard this morning.
The guy sitting in the grass, fiddling with his necklace, seemed younger.
Less sure of himself. But when he and Simon ran through the fight itself, he changed.
He looked at home with a sword in his hand, and even though he was in that cutoff shirt and shorts, it was easy to imagine him in period dress.
It was in the way he carried himself, with easy confidence.
A confidence he didn’t always carry when he wasn’t performing.
“How’s Mitch doing?” Stacey turned wide, concerned eyes to me. “I heard he broke his ankle?”
I shook my head while I chewed. “Sprained,” I finally said. “He’s in a walking boot for a few weeks.”
Stacey winced in sympathy as I took another bite. “What are they doing about the chess match?” She addressed the question to both me and Emily; apparently whichever of us finished chewing first could answer.
Emily won the race. “They’re reworking it right now.” She examined her Reuben, determining how to take the next bite. It was a messy sandwich. “It looks like Alex may be stepping in.”
“Really?” Stacey’s surprised, interested tone all but covered my growl as I wrestled with the potato chip bag.
“Yep.” I popped the p before crunching into a potato chip.
I’d made peace with it. Okay, maybe at the beginning of the week, I’d hoped that he’d help them reblock the fight and then go back to his show on his stage, where I could easily avoid him.
But by now I’d faced reality; Alex was here to stay, and I’d be seeing him twice a day, every weekend, for the rest of the season.
It would be so much easier if he would just take his sexy little crop top and go away.
But Emily caught none of my inner turmoil.
“That’s what I’m hearing.” She shrugged and took another bite from her sandwich.
“And if that’s the case, we need to rethink the schedule.
Alex’s second show overlaps with the afternoon chess match, so if he steps in, we’ll have to move around the acts on the Chaucer Stage. ”
“Oof.” Stacey winced. “Talk about a domino effect.” She turned her focus to me again. “How about you? You doing okay?”
“Sure,” I said way too flippantly, fooling nobody. “Love having him around. He’s a real trouper.”
Emily snorted from across the table, but Stacey’s smile was kind. “Good to know, but I meant settling in at home. Being back in Willow Creek? All that.”
“Oh.” I took a sip of water. “It’s only temporary.
Until I get another job lined up.” It sounded so easy when I put it like that.
Like all I had to do was reach out my hand and the perfect position would fall into my palm.
When of course it didn’t work that way at all.
I mentally kicked myself for wasting so much time watching fight practice this morning.
What if the perfect position had been posted while I was out there, and I hadn’t seen it yet?
What if someone else had already jumped on it?
The thought made my fingers itch, made me want to reach for my laptop.
“What is it you do again?” A small crease appeared between Stacey’s eyebrows as she tilted her head. “Marketing or something?”
“IT,” I replied. “It was with a marketing firm, though, so you were close.”
Emily shook her head. “I never would have thought it,” she said, almost wistfully. “When you were in high school you were a Shakespeare nerd like me.”
“Still am,” I said. And I wasn’t really lying. I still had my copy of The Riverside Shakespeare, and a handful of books on the sonnets and various literary criticism. Once the Bard’s language gets under your skin it doesn’t go away that easily.
But for years now, Shakespeare meant the ren faire, and the ren faire meant Alex.
When I’d changed my major, I’d blocked off that part of my life, like blocking an ex in my phone.
That Riverside Shakespeare and related books gathered dust on my shelves in my old apartment, and now in a box under my bed.
While I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them, I hadn’t read them in years.
Doing so would bring up memories I would rather stay forgotten.
“But to go from that to computers…” Emily shook her head. “I can’t even imagine. That’s a big switch.”
“I like it,” I said. “It’s a lot of problem-solving.
” I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t tell her why I felt more comfortable behind a keyboard these days than in the pages of that Riverside Shakespeare.
Computers didn’t lie to you. Computers didn’t make you dream.
Computers didn’t hook up with one of the tavern wenches at the renaissance faire, the summer after he’d looked at you with stars in his eyes.
Okay, maybe I was projecting a little.
“You feeling any better about Alex?”
I stopped chewing. How had Stacey read my mind? The woman was scary sometimes. I swallowed carefully before answering. “What do you mean?” I kept my voice as casual as I could.
“You sure you’re okay with him being around? I know that you and he…” She glanced cautiously between me and Emily, like she was revealing a secret.
Emily looked dismayed. “Was I the only one who didn’t know about you and Alex?” She heaved a sigh. “If I had, all that drama on opening day could have been avoided.” She pointed at me with the last bite of her sandwich. “That’s what you get for keeping secrets from me.”
“You’re right.” I nodded solemnly. “I promise I’ll never keep secrets about my first love from you ever again.”
“Ohhhhh.” Stacey’s sigh bordered on dreamy as she rested her chin on her hand. “First love, huh? I didn’t know it was that deep.”
“How did you know about it at all?” We hadn’t been obvious, back when Alex and I were…Alex and I. At least, I didn’t think we were. I’d felt very covert, back in the day.
“Oh, please,” Stacey said. “It was obvious.” She looked to Emily for confirmation. “Wasn’t it obvious?”
Emily shook her head, wide-eyed. “Not to me. When was this again?”
“When was it?” Stacey thought. “What, five years ago? Six?”
“Seven,” I said flatly.
“Seven,” Emily repeated thoughtfully, tapping her bottom lip with her fingernail. “That would be the year after Simon and I got married, so you were…eighteen?”
Close enough. I nodded, shoving the rest of my sandwich in my mouth. This conversation had gotten way too personal. Way too much about opening up old wounds that I wanted to stay closed.
But that was too bad, because the gossip session was underway. “I always thought Alex was a little old for you.” Stacey shook her head in mock censure. “I mean, a twenty-year-old going after a high school girl?”
“Hey!” My protest was muffled through that last, too-large bite of sandwich. “I wasn’t in high school.”
“Barely,” Emily said. “You’d graduated what, a month before Faire started? And you didn’t think he was a little too old for you?”
“Well, I didn’t back then.” I remembered the girl I’d been in those days. So thrilled to have someone older interested in me. I had no idea, back then, how much a heart could break. But that year, between Alex and my dad, my heart had gained a lot of scar tissue. It was tougher nowadays.
“I don’t blame you,” Stacey chimed in. “If a hot guy in tight pants with a sword had looked at me the way he looked at you…” She fanned herself dramatically with a paper napkin. “I would have given it up too. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“I didn’t,” I said quickly. “Give it up. I didn’t…
We didn’t…” What was the saying? If you couldn’t talk about sex, you shouldn’t be doing it?
I’d done it plenty since those days, with various relationships that had never lasted.
But I was still having trouble talking about it.
Especially in front of my aunts—well, one real aunt and one honorary one—who had watched me grow up.
I had to defend Alex on this, though. Honor demanded it.
I took a fortifying sip of water. “We never took things that far,” I finally said.
He may have broken my heart, but he hadn’t been that much of a snake.
He’d been gentle. And patient. So, so patient, always stopping when I felt out of my depth, and never making me feel like I was doing something wrong by saying no. By saying wait.
“Hmm.” Emily crumpled up her sandwich paper, stowing it in the takeout bag. “Okay, I respect him a little more.”
I helped clean up after lunch, but my mind was elsewhere.
Elsewhen. I was back in the past in my yellow Gilded Lilies costume, lingering near the stage where the Sword Bros had their set.
Like it was yesterday, I remembered the way Alex shook his sweat-damp hair off his forehead.
The way his eyes lit up when he saw me. The way his hand felt sliding around my waist, warm against the brocade and boning of my bodice.
He’d been magnetic. Like the sun, and I found myself bending toward him.
I remembered watching him onstage, the easy way he’d banter with his castmates and the audience, thinking, He smiles at me like that.
Those hands have played with my hair. That mouth kissed me behind the ticket booth when no one was around.
But outside of the Faire, when it had just been him and me, he’d been…different. Less brash and bold. That easy smile had gentled. A different man offstage than on. Like this morning, when the Alex sitting in the grass had been different than the Alex with a sword in his hand.