“I called your parents,” the nurse says. “They’ll be here shortly to pick you up.”
“Wait, no,” Amber says, pushing herself into a sitting position. “I’m fine. I have rehearsal soon.”
The nurse presses on Amber’s shoulder, insisting until she lies back down. “No. You need to rest, and nothing else matters. Rehearsals can wait.”
The nurse turns her back to reach for something, and if looks could kill, she would be dead from Amber’s glare of pure fucking fire. She’s about to say something, and I catch her eye and shake my head. We could sneak her back into rehearsal later and the nurse will never know, but I can’t say anything until she’s out of the room.
We wait in unbearable awkward silence for ten minutes until I hear footsteps in the hall outside.
“Amber?” It’s her mother’s voice, and she pokes her head into the room. “There you are. You okay?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” she mumbles.
“Good,” she says. “Let’s go. You too, Peter.”
We both follow her into the hall, and I sneak my hand into Amber’s and squeeze. She squeezes back. Once we’re in the hall she turns. “What happened?”
“I think I just got lightheaded. I fainted and Peter brought me here. But I’m fine, and I am going to rehearsal.” The tone in her voice surprises me. Amber has a great relationship with her parents, and I’ve never heard her speak like that to them.
Her mom raises her eyebrows. “Do you have anything important tomorrow? Tests? Homework?”
Amber shakes her head. “No.”
“Okay. I’ll let you go to rehearsal, but you’re staying home from school tomorrow so you can rest before tomorrow night.” I can tell Amber’s about to argue, but her mom shuts it down. “That’s the end of it, Amber. Either that or you skip tonight’s rehearsal. If you’re so exhausted that you’re fainting, then something’s gotta give. You choose.”
She sighs. “Fine, I’ll stay home tomorrow.”
“And if you feel faint tonight, don’t try to tough it out, you call me or have someone bring you home. You’re at rehearsal too Peter?”
“Sure,” I say. I’m not in this play, but no way in hell am I letting Amber out of my sight for the next couple of hours. “I’ll be there.”
Her mom nods. “Good. I’ll send a note to the office about tomorrow. I’ll see you at home.” She pulls Amber into a hug before heading off down the hallway. That’s the way both her parents are. They’re blunt and to the point—no doubt where Amber gets it from—and they love her, but they don’t hover. They only intervene if they have to.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Amber says even though she sounds tired. “Tonight’s important, and we’re doing a lot of my scenes. If I skip tonight, we’ll have to rearrange the whole schedule and that’s a stupid thing to do just cause I need some extra sleep. Why did you lie?”
I tell the truth now. “Because this scared me and I don’t want to go home and wonder whether or not you’re feeling okay. And I don’t think Mr. Davidson will care if I sit and do homework in the audience.”
She gives me a wary look. “You don’t need to babysit me.”
“I’m not,” I say, and her expression makes me laugh. “I don’t think I could even if I tried. You’re too damn stubborn to be babied Amber Dwyer.”
“Damn straight.” She pauses, then laughs. “I can’t believe the nurse didn’t notice you were barefoot the whole time.”
I look down, and my toes are poking out from the bottom of my jeans. “To be honest, I didn’t even know.”
“We should go get our stuff before someone wonders why there are pillows and blankets and random shoes everywhere in the prop room.”
I imagine someone like the janitor wandering in and wondering whether there’d been an orgy or a séance and burst out laughing. “Yeah, I suppose we should.”
15
Peter
Present
Michael is looking at his phone again, and he trailed off in the middle of a sentence. I stare at him in the make-up mirror, hoping he’ll somehow get a clue.
He doesn’t.
I sigh. I’m happy that Michael is a damn good agent, because if he weren’t, he’d drive me up a fucking wall. I would have fired him a dozen times over already if he weren’t so good at his job. I would still be the cliché actor waiting tables and tending bar if it weren’t him.
I clear my throat. “You were saying?”
“Right,” he says, snapping his eyes to me. “Things are looking good. The higher-ups are really happy, and there’s talk of getting a second season green-lit before the premiere of the pilot next month.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Congrats, man. You’re putting in the work and it’s paying off. There would have to be a monumental fuck-up at this point for things to go wrong, so please, don’t fuck it up.”
That’s amazing news. Not just for me, but for Amber. I can survive a show going down, because it’s rare for an actor to get blamed for that. But a director? She was right the other night, she needs this to be a hit, and it seems to be headed in that direction. I’m relieved. I want her to succeed almost more than I want it for myself.
I want her to succeed so much that I’ll back off, because it’s possible that the way I want to be involved with her—in the most unprofessional way possible, with her gasping underneath me for hours while I fuck her, and then hold her until we’re both ready for more—is exactly the kind of giant fuck-up that Michael is talking about.
I can see her across the room. Her ankle is better, and she’s only using one crutch now. She’s making notes on a copy of the script, her forehead scrunching in a way that’s adorable and makes me want to run over and smooth it, to see if I can make whatever she’s thinking about easier.
Since the nightmare scene, she’s looked at me differently, and now I’ve caught her eyes following me when they wouldn’t before. What changed for her? I would love to be in her head, just for a second, so that I can understand. That’s what I always did when we were younger, take the time to understand her. Her mind, her body, her dreams. It’s frustrating not to have that anymore. Now it feels like there’s a wall between us so high and so thick that we’ll never get past it.
Unless the scene from the other day changed that. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a little crack in that wall now. I just need to figure out what’s going to be the stick of dynamite that breaks it all the way open. Unfortunately, I don’t think that my stick is going to be that dynamite even if I want it to be. That nightmare scene has had me thinking about other things we did back then. Like what we were doing right before she fainted the first time.
We were each other’s firsts. You can’t really break a bond like that. No matter what happens, we’ll always share that experience. I haven’t been a saint in the last ten years, and there’s plenty of sex that I’ll never remember, but I will always remember that first night. We were both nervous and vulnerable, and because of that, it was amazing. I’ll never regret it. I hope she doesn’t.