Wish Upon a Star (27 page)

I gritted my teeth. “She doesn’t even know that I
am
her understudy.”

“That’s her problem. Not yours. Seriously. I’ve watched enough of those rehearsals to know. Everyone says the same thing, whenever you run through a scene. You’re better than Martina, and it’s a crime that you weren’t cast in the role.”

It felt wonderful to hear someone else say that. Wonderful to know that it wasn’t just my spite, my selfish anger with Martina, coloring my perspective. “Thank you,” I said.

“There’s no reason to thank me,” he said, his voice filled with a new determination. “It’s the truth.” He pushed himself back from the center island and began stacking Amy’s recommendations into one neat, orderly pile. “Shouldn’t you be getting over there?”

I glanced at my watch. “Yeah. I guess. Are you joining us today?”

Timothy shook his head. “Ken said not to bother. He figured everyone would rather work straight through and get out early enough to see fireworks.”

“Great,” I said. No one had asked me. I’d rather get free food than see fireworks, any day of the week. Get free food, and visit with Timothy, that was.

He laughed. “Don’t sound so excited.”

“I can’t imagine how Martina is going to react.”

He rolled his eyes as he led me back through the shadowed dining room. “Think good thoughts,” he said as he unlocked the door to let me leave. “Martina just might surprise you, after all.”

* * *

Martina surprised me, all right.

She surprised me by coming up with entirely new ways to drive me insane. It started while we were collecting our bags, giving up on rehearsal after six hours. Six hours, and we only got through two scenes. At one point, Ken sent all the lead actors backstage, told them to look over their lines while we understudies took a pass at the action. Thinking about what Timothy had told me that morning, I let myself believe that Ken was running us understudies so that he could get a break, get some perspective on what the play was
supposed
to look like.

Of course, my time onstage was miniscule, compared to the main cast’s. By the end of the day, my mind was muddled by a combination of starvation and disgust. I couldn’t believe that Martina had presented so many questions about staging, so many arguments about blocking, so many ideas about how Laura’s character should evolve. We’d been through all of this a thousand times before. Didn’t she realize that we were rapidly running out of time? We had one month until opening night, one month left to pull together our entire masterpiece—costumes, full orchestra and every single scene in the entire musical.

The final straw was Martina announcing to Ken that she’d like to receive her Lucky Red Dragon early.

“Lucky Red Dragon?” Ken had asked.

“It’s in my—”

“Contract,” Shawn had completed in a drawn-out whisper, digging his elbow into my side.

Somehow, Ken managed to keep a civil tongue in his head, questioning Martina with an appropriate level of concern to determine that Lucky Red Dragon was a brand of Chinese soda, flavored with ginseng and a dozen other herbs and secret spices. Ken was contractually bound to provide a case of Lucky Red Dragon by opening night, and an additional case every week for as long as the play ran with Martina in the lead. Our fearless diva insisted that the carbonated beverage was the only thing that gave her the power to appear onstage, to sing her heart out for the masses.

“If it’s so important to her,” Shawn groused as we collected our belongings at the back of the theater, “you’d think that she’d keep her own stock permanently on hand.”

“And give up a chance to send us all scurrying around on her behalf?” I asked. I would have said more, but Ken was walking down the aisle. I didn’t want him to overhear and think that I was bitter or anything. I pasted on a smile and asked Shawn, “Are you going to see fireworks tonight?”

He made a face. “What? Try to find a spot on the river? Patrick and I are making our
own
fireworks, sweetie!” He growled playfully and air-kissed my cheek before hurrying out the theater’s double doors.

Before I could follow him, I heard Ken exclaim, “Timothy! Am I glad to see you!”

I looked up to see Timothy standing in the back row of the theater. I couldn’t be certain how long he’d been there; his black clothes made him disappear in the shadows. I ran a quick mental movie of how I’d acted during the last endless hours of rehearsal. If he’d been sitting behind me, then he’d had ample time to observe Shawn’s snide comments, to monitor my laughing attempts to shush my partner in understudy-crime.

Timothy shook Ken’s hand. “What’s the problem?”

“Have you ever heard of Lucky Red Dragon? It’s a soda or something. Chinese.”

“Sorry,” Timothy said, shaking his head.

“Could you try to track some down? Martina needs it.”

Timothy’s face tightened visibly, but he kept his voice neutral as he asked, “A bottle?”

“A case. Each week.”

Timothy shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Ken barely managed to mutter a few pleasantries before he stumbled out the door. I was left alone in the theater with Timothy. “I thought you weren’t coming over here today. Did you leave something backstage?”

He shook his head. “I came to see you.”

Wow. So much for hoping he hadn’t noticed me, hadn’t been paying attention. Timothy was direct. Not witty and flirty and beating around the bush. He just made a straightforward statement of what he wanted. Just like I’d told him to do that very morning—to Amy, to his landlord.

I hadn’t planned on his applying that technique to me, though.

As I tried to remember enough words in the English language to reply, he asked, “What are
your
plans to see the fireworks?”

I wrinkled my nose. “I love watching them, but I hate fighting the crowds. I’ll probably just go home and turn on the TV.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said.

“Serving up dinner at the restaurant?” I wondered if he could possibly be taking me up on my long-ago request for work.

He shook his head. “I closed the restaurant tonight. One of the perks of owning the place.” I looked a question toward him, utterly mystified about what he might have planned. He said, “Trust me.”

And I did. I trusted him. I’d trusted him every time I’d set foot inside Garden Variety. I’d trusted him when I’d seen him in the hallway of my apartment building. I’d trusted him whenever I’d taken a break from the play that Martina was ruining, whenever I let some delectable catered treat bring me back from the edge of insanity.

We left the theater and made our way through the hot city streets. Heat shimmered off the asphalt, radiating off the sea of pedestrians that flooded the sidewalks. Sometimes, the summer turned city crowds crazy. Tonight, though, there was just a jangling hum of expectation, of excitement. Everyone was flowing toward the river, toward the traditional Macy’s display of fireworks.

But Timothy led us upstream. He seemed to have some special skill for finding paths through the crowd. He eased between people like a shadow flickering beneath a jungle canopy. I stumbled once, missing a gap that he had found effortlessly, and he reached back for my hand, folding his fingers around mine as if he’d intended to touch me the entire time.

Before I could question where we were going, before I could ask what Timothy had planned, we were entering one of the huge hotels near Times Square. Timothy guided me across the cool lobby, slipping across the marble floor like a predator heading into its lair. He led us to a hidden hallway, to a service corridor that looked like a hundred other service corridors I had haunted during my catering days. A staff elevator waited there, its doors opening as soon as Timothy pressed the call button.

“Where—” I started to ask, but the amused twist of his lips silenced me. He pressed the button labeled R.

R. For Rooftop.

The elevator opened onto a tiny lobby, a grimy greenhouse that crouched on the roof. The flyspecked glass would have made the room unbearably hot, but someone had blocked the door open. A sultry breeze wafted through.

As we stepped onto the building’s roof, a dozen white-aproned maids looked up from their gossiping clusters of three and four. A couple of bellhops stood apart, talking to each other with the slouched shoulders and easy camaraderie of hard-working men on a break. A clutch of uniformed busboys broke off their conversation in Spanish, calling out greetings to Timothy. He answered them with an easy wave and a smile.

“Who are these people?” I asked.

“They work here,” he said quite reasonably. He still held my hand, and he was drawing me away from the others, toward the far edge of the roof.

“But what are
we
doing here?”

“Getting the best view of the fireworks in all of Manhattan.” He gave in to my confusion. “I know the head chef of the restaurant. Jean-Louis and I go way back.”

I could have asked a dozen more questions, but there wasn’t really any need. Timothy knew people. In the same way that he knew the homeless people who ate in his restaurant, in the way he’d come to know our cast and crew. It was easy,
effortless,
for Timothy to slide between worlds. And tonight, he’d brought me with him.

A black railing marked the edge of the roof. Timothy staked out a place for us on the very corner, far from the laughing hotel staff. I caught my breath as I looked out. We could see all the way across to the river; not a building hampered the view.

Something about that open expanse made me reluctant to edge all the way up to the rail. I knew that it would protect me. It would keep me safe. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think about how many hundreds of feet I could fall. I wanted to invent an invisible safety net, a massive, unseen hook that I could fasten to my sundress, to keep me safe and secure.

As if he sensed my fear, Timothy moved to stand behind me. His chest was warm against my back, solid. Comforting. I edged a little closer to the corner. A warm breeze billowed up below us, startling me, and I jumped away from the edge. Timothy laughed, a chortle that sounded almost like a growl. He stepped even closer, settling his arms on either side of me, catching me in the corner between his body and the railing.

With anyone else, I might have felt restricted. I might have felt confined. With Timothy, though, it seemed like I was supported, protected. Even though I knew the hotel staff was talking behind us, even though I knew we were two people surrounded by millions of other New Yorkers, I felt as if we were miles away from anyone else.

I let myself lean back against his chest. I gave myself permission to melt into the solid heat of his body.

When the first burst of fireworks went off, his arms tightened around me, holding me close when I jumped with the inevitable surprise.

I had always thought that fireworks were beautiful—full of mystery, full of light. The dull concussion as the shells launched, the sharp crack of the explosion. The flaming stars, the weeping cascade of sparks. Pure white, red, green, the occasional shock of other colors, painting the clouding canvas of the night sky.

I had always thought that fireworks were beautiful, but I had never seen them like I did that night. They seemed close enough that I could lean out over the abyss, that I could soar between them, lost forever in their stars. The explosions were so loud that they made me catch my breath. I had to laugh when multiple stages caught, popped, burst into colored flame. I had never known that I could watch, forever, feeling my heartbeat slow to match another person’s, feeling my breathing synchronize until the full power and glory of the finale could blind me and deafen me and make me eternally grateful for the cage of flesh and bone that kept me safe.

I don’t know how long we stood there, after the fireworks were over. I closed my eyes, resting my head on Timothy’s collarbone, thinking nothing, saying nothing. A lifetime passed and then I felt his broad hands on my waist, holding me safe and secure. Turning me to face him.

“That was amazing,” I said.

“It was.”

There were entire conversations buried in those five words. I knew that he was telling me stories, about his life, about all the things he knew and thought and believed. I knew that he was asking me questions. And I understood all the answers that I wanted to give him. I understood that I wanted to lead him to the ghostly staff elevator at this magical hotel. I wanted to guide him back to the Bentley, to my apartment, to the king-size bed where we could watch my bedroom grow rosy with the light of dawn.

The streets were surprisingly empty by the time we left the rooftop. Timothy and I walked, hand in hand, as if we were the only two people on the sidewalks, the only two people in all of New York City.

He nodded to the doorman when we got to the Bentley. He stood close to me in the elevator. He radiated heat against my back as I opened the three locks that led into my apartment. He closed the door behind us, taking care to see that it latched.

It was the most natural thing in the world to sit next to him on the couch. Every moment that we’d known each other had siphoned into this funnel. He was supposed to cup a hand behind my head. I was destined to pull him close, to hook my fingers under his black leather belt. We were meant to fall back onto the wintergreen throw pillows, to laugh against each other’s lips, to lose ourselves in a tangle of hands and hair and twisted, crumpled clothing.

I barely felt the impact as Tabitha jumped onto the arm of the couch. I might not have realized she was there at all, if Timothy hadn’t looked up, hadn’t grinned at her and lightly eased her back to the floor.

But that interruption was enough. Tabitha’s intrusion was like a lightning message from my superego, a reminder transmitted in thousand-point type.

I had the Master Plan.

I couldn’t let myself be distracted by Timothy’s touch. I had promised myself, promised Amy. I’d never made anything stick, never kept a single vow I’d ever made before, not where men were concerned. I had never chosen to place
my
feelings,
my
needs above those of some broken relationship with a guy, some desperate thing that I thought was a panacea.