To Wish or Not to Wish

by Mindy Klasky

  “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have pushed.”

  “No—”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to compete against the guy, though. I lied.”

  “What?” I had heard all the words, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant.

  “I said I wasn’t going to compete. But then I thought about him keeping you company tonight. I thought about him telling you that everything was going to be all right. I thought about him being the one to hold you, to help you. And I knew that I wasn’t going to let him do that without a fight.”

  He pinned me with the hypnotic gaze of a cat tracking prey. The muscles in my legs went slack; I honestly thought that I would fall, if I didn’t reach out for the back of the sofa.

  “So,” Timothy said. “Is he here?”

  I shook my head. Timothy looked past me, into the kitchen. He glanced to his left, toward the shadowed bedroom.

  “He was,” I said, my voice so soft that I wondered if Timothy could hear me. “He was, but we fought.”

  Timothy had heard me. He’d stiffened at my first words. I almost didn’t recognize him when he asked, “About what?”

  “You,” I whispered. “And Justin. And how Teel thought he could control me.”

  “Thought?” Timothy moved closer, barely breathing the word.

  I nodded. “It’s over.” I chose my words carefully, plucking each one from the silence between us. “I know you won’t believe me. I can’t really explain, but the thing I had with Teel was never real. It was never…true. It was a stupid game that I played because I could.” I shrugged. Without being able to divulge Teel’s actual identity, that was the best that I could do. “It’s over,” I repeated.

  Timothy closed the distance between us. His hands framed my face, and heat radiated from his fingers into my flesh. His lips on mine were hot, hard, but they gentled as I responded. His arms shifted, folding around me, pulling me close, and I let myself melt into the iron support of his body.

  This wasn’t the pure, electric bliss of kissing a genie. It wasn’t an ecstatic impossible union with magic. Instead, it was the earthy support of a true, human man, the constancy and certainty of a man who knew what he wanted, who was willing to fight for what he got.

  I wanted to lace my fingers between his. I wanted to guide him to my bedroom. I wanted to collapse onto my bed with him, to finish the conversation that we’d begun months before, in the courtyard outside his restaurant.

  But I couldn’t. I still had lines to learn. I still had a show to prepare for, a cast that was counting on me, against all odds.

  “I can’t,” I whispered against the raspy growth of his beard. “I have to go through the script again.”

  He sighed, and his arms loosened just a fraction. “How is it going?”

  Hating the answer I had to give, I clutched him closer, stealing back the space he’d made between us. “I can’t get through the scenes. I can’t hold on to the lines. I know that I know them, but I just can’t keep them straight.”

  Impossibly, he laughed. When I pulled away in indignation, he settled his arms around my waist, keeping me close. “What did you eat for dinner?”

  What did I eat for dinner? What sort of question was that? I hadn’t had time to eat dinner! I had lines to memorize. I had blocking to review. I had an emergency to survive.

  He stepped away from me and nodded. “That’s what I thought.” He glided past me, into the kitchen.

  I stared as he pulled open the refrigerator door. A bottle of water glinted on the top shelf. An apple rolled around in one of the bins. A bottle of ketchup leaned against a jar of mayonnaise in the door. “You’re kidding,” he asked. “Right?”

  “I don’t eat at home a lot,” I said, blushing as he slid over to the pantry. Even I was a little embarrassed by the confession there: an empty box of granola bars and the soy sauce packets from some long-ago Chinese takeout. At least there were a dozen cans of cat food. Tabitha didn’t go hungry, even if I couldn’t put together a meal fit for an anorexic supermodel.

  “No wonder all of you actors attack the catering table,” he said. “This is crazy.”

  “There hasn’t been time,” I said. “With the show opening…” I trailed off, afraid to say the word tomorrow.

  He shook his head. “This is like a bad TV competition. Even I can’t put anything together with this.” He glanced at the glass-clad cabinets, at the full complement of dishes and bowls and glasses that had been left behind by Becca. He took a quick look at the clock on the stove, and he said, “Wait here.”

  Before I could protest, he let himself out the front door. The nearest grocery was the bodega over on Eighth. It would take him at least twenty minutes to get there and back. That would give me a chance to run through the first scene again.

  Only five minutes passed, though, before there was another knock at the door.

  “Where—” I started to ask as Timothy edged past me. He had a carton of eggs under one arm and a brick of cheddar cheese in the other. A cloth grocery bag was slung over his arm, and I could just make out fronds of fresh herbs at the top.

  “Dani,” he said.

  “You woke her?”

  He grinned. “Wednesday nights are the regular Guerilla Gathering. I was going to take a chance that she’d still be awake, but I could hear them all talking before I knocked. They’re planning their autumn attacks, and things are getting a little heated.”

  I followed Timothy into the kitchen. Tabitha deigned to take an interest in our late-night activity; she started butting her head against Timothy’s leg, weaving between his feet in an effort to get him to drop some cheese onto the floor. He made a cooing noise in the back of his throat, but he didn’t waste any time setting to work. As if by magic, he extracted a frying pan from a drawer. The smell of melting butter soon had my mouth watering.

  “Towson, Maryland,” he said, as he rotated the cookware, coating the surface evenly. “What?”

  “That’s where I grew up. Wasn’t that the question you asked me on Sunday?”

  I winced, thinking of that abortive conversation. “I shouldn’t have come over there. I had no right to interfere in your home like that.”

  He caught my gaze and held it steadily. “I’m glad you did. Even if I didn’t do a great job of telling you so.”

  “No, I mean, I should have figured out some other way of talking to you. I should have figured out a way to explain during those three weeks. To tell you about the Plan.”

  “The Plan?” He glanced at the frying pan. The butter was dark, nearly brown. He moved it off the burner and turned off the flame. “What Plan?”

  “It was a stupid idea that Amy had. To help me get over Sam.”

  “Sam?” Timothy looked totally lost.

  “Brooks Brother lawyer? Joined me for dinner at Garden Variety one night?”

  Timothy nodded. “And didn’t like ordering without a menu. Hated the idea that I had a table for my private guests.”

  “That’s the one.” I shook my head. It seemed like Sam and I had broken up a century ago.

  “So? What’s the Plan?”

  “Amy says I rush into things. She says I need to prove that I’m responsible. She’s my older sister, and she’s always been more organized than I am. She’s always been right, so I went ahead and agreed. I promised.”

  Timothy leaned back against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. The action showed off the muscles in his arms, and I had to swallow hard. “I’m not going to like this very much, am I?”

  I took a deep breath. “I have to keep a plant alive for a month. And then I can get a fish. When I keep the fish alive for three months, I can get a cat. After a year with the cat, I can date a man.”

  Timothy laughed.

  “I’m serious,” I shouted.

  “And that’s supposed to be your plant.” He gestured to the corner of the counter. The dead peace lily looked even worse, now that it was coated with dust. I nodded. “And your fish.” He
pointed at the empty bowl. “And you got yourself a cat.”

  Tabitha obliged by jumping onto the counter. I picked her up and returned her to the floor. “She was in heat,” I confessed. “I let her get pregnant.”

  “So that night that we came back here…”

  I had to look away. It all sounded so stupid, now that we were talking in the kitchen. But then, when we were face-to-face, on my couch… “I felt like I was lying to Amy. Lying to myself. I mean, I’d made a promise!” I sighed. “But it’s more than that. It’s more than a stupid game. I feel like I ruin everything I touch. I’ve never succeeded on my own. I’ve never shown that I can make it here in New York, make it onstage. Before Menagerie! I had more catering gigs than I did actual acting jobs. I needed the Plan, to prove that I could stick with something. Anything.”

  I sensed him move, more than I saw him. His thumb and forefinger were gentle on my chin as he made me look at him. “‘Needed’, you said. And now?” he asked.

  He was standing too close to me. He was looking at me too steadily. My heart was thundering in my throat. I wanted to step away; I wanted to step toward him. “I’m not much good at working the Plan,” I whispered.

  “I think I’m glad about that,” he said.

  He brushed another kiss across my lips with matter-of-fact certainty—no fireworks, no impossible flare of unimaginable pleasure. Just reality. Long, lasting reality.

  He turned around and replaced the frying pan on the burner. “One brother,” he said, as he cracked eggs into a bowl, talking as if we hadn’t taken a break to discuss my crazy, mixed-up Plan. “No sisters. Mom and Dad still live in Towson—it’s a house in the suburbs near Baltimore, just like every other house in the suburbs. Public school, ran cross-country. I had a dog.”

  “A dog?” I asked, as he whipped half a dozen eggs into a saffron-colored froth.

  “I grew up with a Lab mix. Fred. Mom and Dad have a corgi now.” He shook his head slightly. “And what was your other question? Favorite color? Blue. Dark blue, though. Not anything pastel.”

  I leaned back against the counter. “Like the lines in a blueprint?”

  He glanced at me quickly. “I went to University of Maryland. I was going to be an architect—I took five years of classes for it. But somewhere along the way, I realized that it took too long.”

  “The classes?”

  He flexed his fingers before he found my saltshaker. “The job. Projects stretch out, year after year. I could spend three and a half years creating the perfect stairway banister, and I’d never get any closer to really helping people. Really having an effect on their lives.”

  “So you became a chef.”

  He shrugged and ground some fresh pepper into the bowl. “Everybody eats. Every day. It seemed like a more direct way to do things.”

  As I absorbed that, he quirked a questioning eyebrow. “Plates?” he asked, as if that were the most natural next thing to talk about.

  I took them out of the cabinet. Trying to hold up my end of the bargain, I also collected silverware from a drawer. I poured tall glasses of water for both of us. Timothy worked some magic with the skillet and a spatula, and he carried both plates out to the dining room table, avoiding the slinky land mine that was Tabitha.

  I took my first bite, and all thoughts melted from my head. “This is amazing,” I said.

  He grinned, like a cat lapping up cream. “So? Are we going to run lines from the show?”

  “Run lines?”

  “Isn’t that what you were doing when I got here?” He nodded toward my script, toward the scrunched pages where I’d dropped them on the couch. “Go on,” he said. “Tom’s first line is, ‘Laura, you don’t know how difficult it is out there.’”

  I stared at him. “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve spent enough time over at rehearsal, haven’t I?” And then he repeated, “‘Laura, you don’t know how difficult it is out there.’”

  He was quoting from my first scene, the most difficult, because it wove together new lines and old like a patched Depression-era quilt. “‘Tom,’” I said, dredging up the response. “‘Was work hard today?’”

  “‘Hard,’” Timothy recited, spearing another bite of eggs. “‘They don’t understand what a man can do.’”

  The next line rose without my thinking about it, and the one after that. I recited the text as easily as if I were reading it in front of me. Timothy grinned and crossed the room to retrieve my script. There was a limit to what he could memorize, after all. He was a chef, not an actor. He settled the pages on the table between us, flipping to the right place with a minimum of effort.

  And so we fed each other, tossing lines back and forth over the omelet. When our plates were empty, Timothy returned to the kitchen. He produced a peach from the bottom of the bag, and a melon that was not much larger than his fist. I watched in amazement as he reduced them to a summer fruit salad, adding slivers of fresh basil and a splash of something that turned out to be white balsamic vinegar.

  We moved on to the second act, not pausing as Timothy found my teakettle, as he dug out a spray of mint leaves that rapidly became an aromatic tisane. We plowed through the play’s climax, the shattering of the glass animals that gave the show its name, the final scenes of pure, high emotion that wove together new lines and old, the staid and the experimental.

  “And that leads into the reprise of ‘My World, My Dream,’” I said, after reciting my last line.

  “Perfect.” Timothy leaned back in his chair. Tabitha had climbed onto his lap sometime during our recitation. Her shed white hairs stood out against his black T-shirt, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “I can’t believe that you knew those opening lines.”

  “So do you,” he pointed out. “And the entire rest of the script. And you can do the song and dance numbers, as well.”

  I grinned, but the action turned to a yawn. “Excuse me,” I said, embarrassed. I looked at the teacups on the table between us. “Thank you,” I said, and I caught the next yawn in my throat. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to go through all of that again, and I don’t want to bore you to tears.”

  “You could never bore me to tears,” he said. And suddenly, we weren’t talking about the play. We weren’t talking about the rescue package of a late-night dinner, of a dessert, of completely unexpected companionship on the night that I truly had believed my entire professional life was falling apart.

  We were talking about that kiss that we had shared. We were talking about the potential that had hummed on our lips.

  His eyes looked black in the dim light. His gaze was so intense that I wanted to look away, wanted to bury my face in my hands, wanted to do something—anything—to escape the ferocity of that expression.

  “Timothy—” I said, but I had no idea how I was going to finish that sentence.

  “Go lie down.” He nodded toward the bedroom. My eyes widened, but he shook his head. A smile chased his lips. “You’re exhausted. Rest for a few minutes while I clean up out here, and then we’ll run the lines again.”

  My intended protest was foiled by another yawn. “Just run water in them,” I said. “I’ll clean up later.”

  “Fine,” he said, but I could tell that he was lying; he was going to wash all the dishes.

  Tabitha padded after me as I crossed to the bedroom. I kicked off my shoes and lay down on top of my comforter. I heard the water running in the kitchen, soft and soothing. I closed my eyes. Tabitha jumped onto the bed and stretched out along my side. Her purring was loud, so loud that I could barely make out the sound of Timothy in the kitchen. I took a deep breath, exhaling as I heard Timothy’s amused voice reciting Tom’s first line.

  I was asleep before I could deliver Laura’s reply.

  CHAPTER 15

  SUNSHINE WAS STREAMING THROUGH MY BEDROOM windows when I woke up.

  That wasn’t the light of dawn, creeping around my shades. It wasn’t the tentative light of early morning, luring me
back to wakefulness. No, I was facing the full blast of summer, the sun high in the sky.

  I started swearing even before I looked at my clock.

  11:55.

  I had slept away half the day. Half the day, when I should have been reading through my script, when I should have been practicing my lines, my dance moves, my solo songs.

  And Timothy had let me do it. More than that, I realized, Timothy had helped me to do it. He’d come in sometime during the night, settling a fleece throw over my shoulders. He must have removed my shoes from their haphazard scramble at the foot of the bed also—they were lined up neatly by my closet door, presumably so that I wouldn’t break my neck when I got out of bed.

  I hadn’t heard him at all, hadn’t been aware that he’d been anywhere near me. I guess I’d been more exhausted than I’d thought. A lot more exhausted.

  “Hello?” I called as I scrambled to my feet. “Timothy?”

  Silence.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, rejecting the idea of taking a shower. The guy had seen me at my strung-out worst the night before; he could hardly be put off by bed-head. On second thought, I did run a quick toothbrush around my mouth, splashed water on my face, scrubbed my cheeks to pink brightness with a towel. Some sights were just too terrifying to contemplate, for anyone.

  “Timothy?” I called again, as I ventured out of my bedroom.

  But Timothy was nowhere to be seen. I realized that I’d been expecting to find him stretched out on the couch, his black jeans contrasting with the light upholstery. I’d expected to see him waiting for me with a lazy smile, with an apology for letting me sleep, for letting me waste the last day before my Broadway debut.

  Instead, all I found was Tabitha, stretched out in the longest square of sunlight she could find. She twisted lazily as I entered the room, putting her ears back and yawning as if she were possessed. When I failed to be impressed by her curled tongue and her mighty incisors, she devoted her attention to grooming her side.

  So, one spoiled house cat, holding place of pride in the living room sunlight. No restaurateur anywhere in sight.

  If I had to be honest with myself, I’d admit that I was disappointed.