by Anne Tenino
Levi laughed and slapped Nate’s back. “No worries there. I doubt Iris Bedrosian knows me from the third spear-carrier on the right. Sit with us during the show?”
“Sure.”
Nate left Levi to confer with his staff, and after checking to make sure Jack didn’t need him for anything, Nate wandered back into the lobby while he waited for curtain time.
If he wanted to be honest with himself (although why start now?), he’d missed live theater. The pace, the vibe, the immediacy—so different from TV. Still its own brand of crazy, of course, but one with completely different stakes.
If an effect didn’t go off perfectly on performance night, there was no safety net—no chance for a dozen retakes to get it right. He still shuddered at the memory of a long-ago performance of The Philanthropist, when the gunshot effect in the shocking opening scene had failed. The poor actor had sat with a gun in his mouth—and nothing happening—for nearly a minute, which felt like fucking forever under lights with several hundred people staring at you.
But watching an effect go off perfectly, and hearing the audience oooh or ahhh or shriek in response? It was an adrenaline rush like no other.
Maybe he could talk to Levi about getting involved in future productions from the beginning. If he kept his involvement low-key—and under his mother’s radar—he could feed that still-active theater jones without compromising his own principles.
Nate entered the auditorium and joined Levi and Darla in the back row. Levi had a legal pad on his knee, and he clicked his pen, in-out, in-out, until Nate gave him a pointed look.
“Sorry.” He tucked the pen in the pocket of his shirt.
“Nervous?”
“Always. Not for me. For the cast and crew. There’s nothing I can do to help them now.”
“Don’t worry.” Nate nodded at Darla, then jerked his head at the stage where the actors were no doubt taking their places. “Your team is great. The audience’ll love it.”
Levi shook his head as the lights dimmed. “If they don’t either laugh everyone off the stage or suffer simultaneous heart failure.”
But he needn’t have worried. The audience gasped and jumped and screamed at all the right places. While the performance didn’t go off without a few snafus—one costume malfunction and a couple of missed sound cues—it was a solid show. As soon as the house lights came up after the final curtain, Levi excused himself and dashed backstage.
Nate moved over one seat to sit next to Darla. “I think we need to fix the light levels in the laboratory scene, for the Creature-disappears-off-the-table effect. As it stands, I could see the table flip.”
Darla tapped her lips with a pencil. “What if we stagger the lightning effects? Victor is already heading downstage. If he moves farther stage left to draw the audience’s attention, and we hit them with a double lightning bolt, Jack can time the flip between the flashes, when everyone’s eyes will still be adjusting.”
“Perfect. Then the crew will have time to unstrap Ty so he can hit his mark in the corner before Victor lights the desk lamp.”
Nate surreptitiously checked his phone again as the audience was filing out. Still nothing from Seth. He’s not obligated to talk to you. He’s probably busy. Or at work.
Darla spoke into the headset for a moment, then turned to Nate. “Levi’s giving notes after the cast gets out of costume. He wants to know if you can hang around for it.”
“Sure.” Not like he had anything else to do, with Seth maintaining radio silence and Tarkus being spoiled rotten by Morgan for the evening—she was taking him to Bluewater Bark in the morning too.
The cast began straggling out from backstage. Shannon, since her character had gotten offed (for the second time) shortly after intermission, was one of the first. Nate ambled down the aisle and sat next to her in the front row.
“Hey. Great performance. You expired beautifully. Twice.”
She grinned. “Thanks.”
“I wanted to tell you—the story was awesome. You should have seen the reaction from my friend at work. She was ready to march to the mayor’s office and demand everything from a public apology to an official Adeline Appreciation Day.”
“Oh.” Shannon’s brow puckered, and she bit her lip.
“What’s wrong? That’s exactly the reaction we were hoping for.”
“I know, but—” She glanced behind her, at the other actors chatting amongst themselves. “I think it kind of backfired on Seth. His mom and uncle showed up at the restaurant and—” she lowered her voice “—there was a scene.”
Alarm chased a lightning path down Nate’s spine. “Is he okay? Did they do anything to him?” God, was this why Seth hadn’t responded to his texts? If Nate had been a party to Seth being ostracized from his family . . . He had more than enough experience to know how much that sucked.
“I don’t know. He looked kind of agitated, but I had to leave before we could talk much about it, for you know—” she gestured to the stage “—this.”
Nate checked his watch. It was late, but he’d still have time to get to Ma Cougar’s before they closed and make sure Seth was okay, as long as notes didn’t take too long.
But when notes went on and on and on—and then Jack needed to consult on the table-flip mechanism—closing time disappeared into the rearview. How could I have forgotten the miserable time suck of tech/dress rehearsals?
As soon as he was released though, he raced to his car. Seth said he was usually at the bar, closing up, until at least one, and it was barely past that now. Was it too late to stop by? It wasn’t as though he didn’t know where Seth lived, and Seth had seemed like a total night owl in their evenings together—not that there had been many of them.
“Screw it.” He shoved the Jeep into gear and tore off at decidedly illegal speeds for Sentinel House.
Seth was exhausted but wired when he finally left work that night. Well, morning, actually. He’d worked what was becoming his regular closing shift, which meant not getting out of Ma Cougar’s until at least one.
Thank God he had the next two days off. Maybe he could decide how to answer Nate’s text sometime in the next forty-eight hours.
Risking water damage to his phone, he pulled it out of his pocket just before turning into the driveway of Sentinel House to read it again. Nate had it right—tempers were running high because of the Beacon story—but Seth was having a hard time calling it a success. He stared at the glowing screen long enough that the words were nearly obscured by drops of drizzle.
“Excellent,” he muttered to himself, then wiped the phone off on the leg of his jeans and put it away before climbing the stairs to his place.
Once he was dry and in pajama pants, he threw himself onto his bed, snatching the remote out of the air when his body landed on the mattress and launched it high. Heh. He could unwind with an episode of his current British crime drama and maybe forget the scene at work with his family, and all of Shannon’s worried questions after. He’d told her next to nothing, mostly because he was just so fucking tired. Exhausted by his mother and uncle and their ongoing battle to make the whole world see things their twisted way.
God, and Kirk had said they’d discuss it more later. If only his fucking father would grow a pair and speak up. Assuming whatever the guy had to say would be supportive of Seth and Grandma’s position, and not Kirk and Debra’s. The jury was still out on that, and nothing that had happened this afternoon had given Seth any more of a clue.
Except he was almost certain his dad had been appalled by the idea that Fennimore had raped his maid. He had to realize that the master-servant relationship wasn’t okay even if Adeline had agreed to it.
Or maybe Seth wanted a reasonable parent so much he was hallucinating.
Give yourself a break. Thinking these things wouldn’t help him relax. He’d worry about future arguments with his family and how to answer that text in the morning.
Five minutes past the opening credits of Foyle’s War, he heard someone on
his stairs. Not Grandma—her light had been off when he’d come home, plus the creaks and groans that warned him he was about to have a visitor were too loud. Whoever it was, their footsteps were too heavy to be his grandmother’s.
Good lord, was this what his uncle had meant by “discuss this later”?
Not wanting to answer the door in nothing but pajama pants, he’d managed to pull a sweatshirt on by the time whoever it was knocked, hesitantly. Definitely not Kirk.
Nate? The guy knew where he lived, after all . . . but wasn’t he at that final rehearsal Shannon had been going on about? She’d given him the impression it might run all night.
Only way to find out was to answer the knock. He swung the door wide, and there stood the man himself, dripping a little in the rain and looking apprehensive, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets.
“Hi. I know it’s late, but, well, are you okay? After our conversation the other day, and then not hearing from you . . . and when Shannon said your family gave you shit today, I was worried.”
Any irritation he’d felt over Nate’s text melted away. If it had ever even been there. “C’mon in, you’re getting wetter by the second.”
Nate walked through the door, but stayed right there next to him while Seth shut it. Before he could let go of the knob, Nate’s fingers were gripping his wrist. “Tell me.” His lips—his very sculpted lips—were only inches from Seth’s. So close and so beautiful that Seth almost couldn’t pay attention to Nate’s next words. “Was it bad?”
“Well . . .” He blinked, trying to remember. Oh, nice. That was the first time he’d managed to forget all day. “Yeah. I mean, they came to the bar and we had it out, sort of.”
Nate nodded, his mouth firming, then he dropped his hand from Seth’s arm.
Damn it.
“We knew there’d be blowback, but you shouldn’t have had to deal with it alone.” Nate took a couple of steps into the room and then turned. “I’m really sorry.”
Seth had no response, even though Nate stood there like he expected one. So he shrugged and led the way to the settee in the middle of his living area. “You want something to drink?” He had beer, but that was really about it. Maybe some milk . . . but it could be pretty old. He mostly ate up at the house with Grandma.
The cushions sighed as Nate sat down next to him, stretching one arm along the back of the couch and still peering at Seth with that concerned look in his eyes. “I’m fine. No need to be the good host for jokers who show up unannounced in the middle of the night. But will you tell me what happened?”
“Pretty much what you’d expect. Total denial. Noisy denial.” Forced to shrug again, Seth started to remember that Nate’s text had seemed pretty uncaring today. Except . . . “Did you think they wouldn’t get their knickers in a twist?”
“I have to admit, I wasn’t thinking about them at all—I was only thinking about you and how much you wanted to make things right. If anything, I guess I assumed they’d appreciate your concern and sense of justice—because they damn well ought to.” A smile flitted across Nate’s face before being replaced again by that concerned expression. That look went a long way toward convincing Seth that the guy really had had no idea. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
God, this shrugging thing was getting old. He needed some new moves. “I thought you’d know. I’ve told you how they impose their will on me and Grandma all the time, and taking me for granted is an honored family tradition.” He’d never say it aloud, but even his grandmother did, on rare occasions.
“Yeah, well, in my family, denial takes an icy, passive-aggressive form—avoidance and noncommunication, that’s our playbook.” Nate let his head flop back to lie on the top of the settee, facing the ceiling. “I should have realized the story would be incendiary for you personally, not just for the Cult of Fennimore in general. If I’d have just thought about it, we could have asked Shannon to soft-pedal the piece. Publish just enough to help your grandmother, but not enough to—”
“Shut up. No.” For a second he covered those perfect lips of Nate’s with his fingers, but then yanked his hand away when his skin started to tingle. “I mean, I wanted it out there. Something has to change around here, and that’s as good a push as any. And after what Grandma told me . . .”
“Did that come up too? Shit,” Nate whispered, still staring at the ceiling. He didn’t seem to have noticed Seth’s fingers on his mouth at all. “I’m guessing they weren’t exactly excited to find out you knew about the birth record.”
“Well,” he stalled. “It’s like you said, tempers were running high.”
Nate winced and jerked his head up to look at Seth. “Uh-oh. I take it from your tone of voice that you weren’t thrilled with that text.”
“It’s no big deal.” And it wasn’t. He’d been under stress and overly sensitive. The way people reacted had been a good thing, viewed objectively. Ish. “A bunch of customers mentioned it to me at work today. Coworkers too. Everything from, like, horrified interest to outrage about the maid. It had the desired effect.” On most of the public.
“But not with your family.”
“That was inevitable.” He waved it off. “I knew it was coming, so I was prepared.” As much as possible. “Honestly, though, I’m kinda done thinking about it. Tell me how your day was. How’d Frankenstein turn out?”
A grin transformed Nate’s face, and that mischief sparked in his eye. “Terrifying. Jumpstarted a few pacemakers in our septuagenarian test audience.”
“So, that’s a good thing?” Seth teased. “What was it you did for them again?”
“Nice try, but you’re getting nothing out of me.” Nate waggled a finger at him. “No spoilers, or it’ll ruin the effect when you see it.”
“Am I going to see it?” Speaking of pacemakers, his heartbeat faltered.
“We talked about it the other day. Guess I shouldn’t have assumed your acceptance.” Nate cocked his head. “But you are coming to the opening with me tomorrow, right?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“Which approach will get you there?”
“Either. I’m easy.” Especially if Nate was involved.
Uncle Kirk’s “later” discussion happened the next afternoon before the Frankenstein opening. Yet again, Dad would be no help—Mom and Kirk hadn’t even brought him this time. Mom dragged Seth out of his place up to the house, where Kirk insisted they “meet” in the formal sitting room. Seth sat next to Grandma on the damask couch as a show of solidarity, but it ended up working to his uncle’s advantage—instead of a united front, they were more like a couple of naughty children.
Kirk paced back and forth in front of them, his hands clasped behind his back, lecturing. He reinforced the impression that they were misbehaving kids by chalking up the article to them “acting out,” refusing to see the validity of their points, and actually chuckling—chuckling!—at the suggestion that he let Grandma move.
“Don’t say any more,” Grandma murmured to him when Kirk was at the far end of the oriental rug, about to turn around and come back past them. “Let him have his damned say and let’s get this over with.”
It was infuriating. Seth did his best to look bored. Grandma successfully ignored her son, but at the expense of being so angry by the time he was done that Seth was sure she could chew up nails and spit out bullet casings. Once Kirk had left, she was nearly incoherent with anger for a good five minutes.
Once she’d calmed enough, they discussed whether they could stomach giving Shannon the birth certificate. “We don’t know if that baby had descendants,” she insisted. “We don’t know what making this public might do to that family. I’d rather not screw up someone else’s as well.”
“You can’t blame yourself for how Uncle Kirk turned out.” Seth’s money was on Grandpa messing him up.
Apparently, Grandma agreed. “When he was a boy, he’d do whatever he wanted knowing his father would always take his side.” She scooted to the edge of the cus
hion and pushed herself up from the couch, wobbling a little. Seth gripped her elbow to steady her, and she smiled at him for a second. It didn’t last, though. She was back to sighing and shaking her head before he dropped his hand. “It’s high time someone put my self-righteous son in his place, but talking to him is like beating my head against a pompous brick wall. I swear, that boy . . . he makes me want to do things.”
She left the room before Seth could ask her what things, but he thought he understood anyway. Crazy things, that was what she meant. Again, it was time to up their game.
The night of the Frankenstein opening, Nate had planned to meet Seth for dinner beforehand, but the Wolf’s Landing crew had gotten a last-minute shooting schedule change, and he’d had to scramble to prep the set pieces for the new scenes. He practically ran from his car to the sidewalk in front of the Playhouse with minutes to spare before curtain time.
Seth was standing at the foot of the stairs leading to the big double doors, hands in the pockets of his jacket. His eyebrows were drawn together and his gaze was fixed on the ground at his feet. He didn’t notice Nate huffing down the street, until Nate touched his elbow.
He looked up, blinking as if he was having trouble placing Nate. “Oh hey. You’re here.”
“I’m so, so sorry. I’d never—”
“Hey, no worries. I haven’t been waiting that long anyway.” Seth sighed, glancing up at the marquee, although his gaze seemed unfocused.
“You okay? You seem a little preoccupied.”
Seth appeared to give himself a shake, like Tarkus emerging from the bushes, and that killer smile lit his face. “Nah. I’m good. Looking forward to the shock and awe.”
Nate grinned. “Outstanding. Shall we?”
They walked into the lobby as the lights flashed, joining the last stragglers making their way into the auditorium. Levi had made sure they had great seats, smack in the center of the house, and apparently they weren’t the only ones—Ginsberg was in the row behind them, snuggled into Derrick’s side, the big man’s arm draped across his shoulders, and Carter grinned at them from the seat next to their empty ones—the only free seats in the aisle.
