The World is a Stage (5 page)

“Have you two ladies met?” Michael interposed smoothly. He might not know exactly what kind of sticks were up the asses of all these theater women, but he could at least put a stop to things before they pulled them out and started beating one another. “This is Rachel Hewitt, and I don’t believe—”

“Don’t be a moron,” the redhead said, crossing her arms over her chest and glowering. “Of course we know each other. You’re the one crashing our cast party, unwanted and uninvited. Not Jillian. She’s been working the lights for years.”

Michael’s head spun a little, but it didn’t have a chance to do more than one or two whirls before the redhead—Rachel? Not Rachel?—let out a low laugh and turned her mercenary stare on the brunette—Jillian? Not Jillian?

Not good.
That’s what this was.

“Don’t be too flattered, Jillian. He tried that same smile-and-charm routine with me back at the Odyssey. I guess when I turned him down, he moved on to the next warm body.”

Correction. Bad.
This was very, very bad.

“Ladies, please.” Michael put his hands up in full surrender and plastered a smile on his face. “There’s more than enough of me to go around. I’m a very substantial man.”

Both of them turned on him, scowls on their once so promising faces. Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said that bit about a woman scorned?

“I’m also a very good sharer,” he added.

“Larson!” Rachel’s shout was loud and final, piercing his heart but not the stirring underneath his kilt. That woman had volume. Michael had always admired a strong pair of…lungs.

“Larson, get this brute out of the party. He’s preying on the female staff.”

For the second time in one evening, Michael found himself confronting the hundred-pound usher, his cummerbund replaced with a Mario T-shirt that looked much closer to his actual size. The look of stark fear on his face was the same, though, terror in the white skin with illuminated bursts of teenage acne smattered across his forehead.
 

Unable to help himself, Michael widened his stance and crossed his arms. It was his menacing look. He liked it.

“Um, Miss Hewitt? Can’t you just get one of the other guys to kick him out?”

“For crying out loud. This is what you do for a living—just get him out of my sight and make sure he doesn’t try to sneak back in. Do you want to be the one responsible for all the roofies he’s probably slipping into the punch?”

Great.
In addition to a mule and a pig, he was now a rapist. What kind of brownies had Peterson been eating, begging him to take on this woman? He liked a challenge, but this Rachel character was a hell of a lot more than that. She was a lunatic.
 

“Actually, Ms. Hewitt, I mostly help people find their seats,” the usher squeaked. “I’m not qualified for this.”

“Get him out of here, or you won’t be qualified to do anything remotely connected with the theater ever again.”

Larson’s lower lip quivered.

“For fuck’s sake. I’ll go. Don’t break the poor kid into tiny usher pieces.”

Michael turned to Jillian and smiled. “It really was nice to meet you. I’m sorry to run off before I could give you those goat-wrangling pointers, but all you really need to remember is to go for the eyes.”

Jillian smiled directly at Rachel and gave her shoulders a little shake, obviously feeling the triumph of his kindness and eager to flaunt it.
 

No judgment.
If ever a woman needed to be put in her place—a tight, cramped, uncomfortable hole where she’d be forced to smell her own shit—it was Rachel Hewitt.

“It’s okay. Give me a call sometime,” Jillian added.

“Hey, Larson—you want to walk me out? Make it official?”

“Sure. Thanks, man. I’m sorry about before.”

“You’re just doing your job.”

Larson stood up a little straighter.
Atta boy.
A good three-fourths of confidence was just letting yourself feel it. For the rest, the kid would have to do a few thousand bench presses.

“This satisfy you, Your Highness?” Michael smirked, turning back to Rachel. “Or would you prefer to get the cops involved? Maybe just the handcuffs? Some whips and chains?”

He had the pleasure of seeing her turn on her heel and storm away, that ass making yet another grand departure to feast his eyes on. A righteous ass, that’s what it was, all mad and stomping and full of motion. He wondered if she did it on purpose.

Still.
Score
. Michael O’Leary: One. Rachel Hewitt: Zero.

He cracked his knuckles and allowed Larson to lead the way out the back door. He’d tell Peterson and Molly that he tried, but even Michael O’Leary had to know when to bow out of a fight.
 

It wasn’t fear, of course.

Michael just wasn’t keen on losing his balls.

Chapter Four

Cradle Will Rock

In Rachel’s experience, early morning visitors to Evergreen Cemetery took the shape of one of two things.

The first were one-half of elderly couples divided by fate. They were the little old men who’d lost their wives to breast cancer, the little old ladies mourning husbands taken by heart disease—coming almost every day, like clockwork, walking slowly and resting along the garden paths. It was as though a lifetime of saying “good morning” to the same person was an impossible habit to break, and there was no way for them to start their day without it.

It wasn’t sweet, and Rachel wasn’t about to start cooing and clucking over their devotion the way Molly did. She didn’t approve of any kind of addiction that dictated a person’s actions so heavily. Caffeine. Alcohol. Drugs. Love.

Especially love.

The second types of visitors were runners, herself included. The gym was too confining, and Rachel much preferred the rustle of the barren tree branches and the crunch of her shoes on brown grass grown stiff and iridescent with cold. She wasn’t the only one. Nodding politely to a woman in a tracksuit, Rachel felt the rush that came when she finally hit her stride.

Determination urged her to keep going, past the rows of somber headstones and sad elderly people until fatigue made it difficult to focus on anything but the movement of each leg. Forward, forward, always moving ahead.

But she didn’t. She slowed to a walk and wrapped her arms over her stomach. It was fairly chilly out, the morning March air showing little puffs of her breath as she ran. Her body was an odd mixture of hot and cold, simultaneously covered with sweat and goose bumps. If she wanted to keep the adrenaline going, she needed to turn and run the rest of the way home.

But she couldn’t.

One hundred and seventeen rows back from the entrance. Eight places in from the path. The grave to the right of it had a little cherub sculpture that always seemed to Rachel to be too sickly sweet for the rest of the simple rectangle plaques.
Someone showing off.
Cemeteries were the worst for that.

A huge spray of pink carnations, still fresh and wrapped in green tissue paper, were placed on the headstone, and the grass clippings and debris had been wiped clear of the markings.

Baby Hewitt

March 22

Rachel reached down and placed her hand on the chilly headstone, holding it there until she could no longer feel her fingers.
 

And that was it. That was all she had to offer. One whole year had gone by, and she still couldn’t find any words to describe the way this cold slab of marble made her feel.

“I didn’t think you’d remember.”

Rachel wrinkled her nose and blinked a few times before turning to answer her sister. “Well, you were wrong.”

Molly blew her nose into an already decrepit-looking tissue and came in for a hug.

Rachel winced. “I’m super sweaty.”

“Geez, Rach. Like I care.”

Part of the reason she’d come so early this morning was to keep things simple. Get in, get out. Avoid messy displays of emotion. But Molly must have been walking on the far side of the cemetery—she did that sometimes. Usually Rachel remembered to keep an eye out for her.

Her sister’s arms tightened, and Rachel relaxed a little, letting Molly add to the dampness on her shoulder with a sudden rush of tears. She ran her hands over her sister’s hair, up and down, tugging through the curls as she went. It felt awkward at first, almost like petting a dog, but she soon gave in to the rightness of it.

No matter what else happened, they still had each other.
 

Rachel wished she didn’t have to make a conscious effort to remind herself of that simple truth, but she did. Every day was an affirmation. Every day was her proof that the sacrifice was worth it.

“She’d be one today,” Molly eventually said, her voice thick. “A whole year.”

“No. She wouldn’t.”

The words were automatic, a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that was well outside Rachel’s comfort zone. She was no good at this kind of thing—the laying bare of emotions. The finding a way to talk about what happened.
 

Molly was good at that. Their mother, once upon a time, had been good at that.

Molly jerked back as if Rachel had punched her, so she tried again, feebly. “I just meant that she wouldn’t have been born in March. You know. If Justin hadn’t… If you hadn’t…”

“Don’t, Rachel. Please stop.”

Rachel tried reaching for her sister to resume their hug, but Molly shook her off, stepping back and crushing a few of the carnations under her heel. “You don’t really get it, do you?”

“I’m trying, Molly. I really am.” And she was. She’d never tried so hard at anything in her whole life. “I know I don’t always have the right thing to say, but—”

“That’s just it,” Molly said between sniffles, looking down at the grave with a kind of tenderness that made Rachel shift uncomfortably. “It’s not about you.”

“I know it’s not—”
 

Molly held up her hand. “See?
You
know.
You
try.”

Rachel stood there, her mouth wide open, her mind at a complete blank. Why couldn’t she think of a single sentence that didn’t start with “I”?

“For once, it would be nice if we could keep you entirely out of the conversation. Today. Just for today—that’s all I’m asking. Yep. Molly is weak and useless and has bad judgment in men. Yep. Molly killed her own baby.” Her eyes filled again. “Can you just allow me the luxury of not feeling guilty for twenty-four hours so I can be
sad
?”

“I didn’t mean to say it like that.”

Molly let out a scream, one so loud the groundskeeper walking by asked if she needed some help. With gritted teeth, she offered the man a light pleasantry, wishing him a good day and even calling him by name.
 

Rachel wasn’t fooled. There was nothing light or pleasant about her sister in that moment. But she knew better than to try again. Clamping her lips shut, she did her best to stand there, silent and strong or whatever it was Molly wanted her to be.

“Please go away. I know I owe you a lot, but I can’t really look at you right now. I just want to be alone.”

Gone.
Molly wanted her gone.

“Sure thing.” It was shameful and weak, but she wanted herself to be out of there almost as much as her sister did. It was too hard, seeing the baby and Molly like this—the only way they could ever be together. “Will I see you? I mean, will you be home later today? Before work?”

“No. Eric invited me over for this afternoon.” She said it as a challenge. A dare.

Rachel clamped her mouth shut again and flipped the volume on her iPod—the Bitchin’ Workout Mix—as high as it could go.

Running and loud music were all that was left to her. She wasn’t allowed to scream her frustration into the air like Molly, and her own inadequacies as a human being meant she could never find a way to give voice to all the things she felt.
 

Don’t go
, she wanted to plead.
Don’t let that man do what the others have done. Use your brain for once. Use it for the four-months-too-early child frozen in the ground.

Her sister’s judgment in men was awful. Not just break-her-heart awful, but break-her-bones awful. Break-her-body-and-her-spirit-and-the-tiny-little-soul-growing-inside-her awful.

Rachel couldn’t understand why Molly kept turning to the same type of guys, why she kept turning into the same type of girl with them. She was irrevocably drawn to bad boys, and no amount of begging and pleading on Rachel’s part could change her mind or give her the backbone she needed to stand up to them. And the worst part was, she expected Rachel to do nothing more than stand by and watch her make the same mistakes again.

Didn’t her sister have any idea what that did to a person?

This new guy, Eric, was the poster boy for everything that wasn’t good for Molly: big and mean and much too old for her. And his giant Nordic demon of a friend wasn’t helping matters any. Brainless brutes, the pair of them, targeting Molly because she was sweet and trusting and completely clueless when it came to guys like them.