Always Never Yours(10)

“Megan,” Tyler whispers in a sigh of frustration.

I look at Jody. “It’s a read-through, not a rehearsal. Can’t we just read from our chairs?” I nod pointedly at Tyler’s, which is empty.

“Don’t be difficult,” Jody says, hardly glancing up from her script.

“Fine,” I murmur, even though it’s not. “Um, could you go again?” I ask Tyler.

He takes a deep breath and delivers the line, impeccably concealing his irritation. I close my eyes as he takes my hand, but I know I’m not covering my grimace when I feel his breath on my skin. He’s leaning down. I should bite my tongue, push myself to be Juliet.

But I can’t. I jerk back for the third time, and Tyler’s jaw tightens.

Wait, I realize, this could work.

“Good pilgrim,” I begin, heaping sarcasm on the line before he can restart the scene. Tyler looks startled to hear me actually reading my part, and I hear the room holding its breath. “You do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this”—I transform Juliet’s lines from demure and cautious to combative and superior—“for saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.”

Jody’s gone still, pen pressed to her lips. But Tyler steps into the new dynamic without missing a beat. His delivers his lines flawlessly, making Romeo work twice as hard to impress my unimpressed Juliet.

“Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake,” I say, sneering.

“Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.” Tyler leans forward, lips puckered, and I dramatically turn my head to offer him my cheek.

I hear snickers around me, and Tyler and I banter the next couple lines. When I apply an extra dose of sarcasm to Juliet’s final remark—“You kiss by th’ book”—everyone laughs.

I feel my shoulders straighten. Everyone’s eyes are still on me, but for the first time I don’t feel the need to step out of the spotlight or deflect with a joke. Tyler bounds off to exchange lines with Jenna, the Nurse, and I’m left reflecting. If there was one thing I wasn’t expecting from this rehearsal, it was to not hate every second of it.

The door opens in the middle of the scene, and a stagehand walks in holding a box of props. I’m following along with the dialogue when something tumbles from the box and loudly hits the floor. I glance up at the moment the stagehand bends down, and suddenly it’s not just a stagehand picking up what he dropped.

It’s a veritable hipster Adonis. I recognize his face, I just don’t remember it being this, well—hot. It takes me a second to connect this stunning figure to Billy Caine, the scrawny stage manager I talked to a couple of times when I directed Twelfth Night last year. He’s changed his hair to a slicked-back undercut, and from the way his black V-neck stretches across his chest, he looks like he went to the gym once or twice over the summer.

I realize the room’s gone silent. Owen clears his throat next to me, and I remember—Juliet has more lines. I glance down at the page, but my brain won’t form words out of the letters.

I splutter what I remember of Juliet’s next line, “What is yond gentleman?” What indeed?

“That’s enough,” Jody interrupts, standing up and walking into the middle of the circle.

She’s right. I’ve completely lost our momentum, not to mention how I reinterpreted the character in a huge, spur-of-the-moment decision. Jody pauses, gathering her thoughts, and I prepare for the worst.

“Megan . . . I like what you brought to Juliet’s dialogue with Romeo,” she finally says, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “But,” she continues before I get too relaxed, “you lost focus, and the whole room felt it.”

I hear a couple chuckles. Great. I guess it’s not just my acting I have to worry about. It’s my propensity to get distracted whenever a hot guy enters the room.

“I’m sorry,” I get out.

Jody waves a heavily ringed hand. “Let’s go again.”





FOUR




ROMEO: There is no world without Verona walls





But purgatory, torture, hell itself.


III.iii.18–9


I FIND ANTHONY OUTSIDE THE DRAMA ROOM when rehearsal’s over. I want nothing more than to get out of Juliet’s head, even if I have to eat terrible pizza in a historically inaccurate restaurant. I didn’t embarrass myself further following the Billy Caine incident, but I wasn’t exactly a Juliet to die for.

“You’re walking to Verona for your shift, right?” I elbow Anthony playfully. “I’m totally rehearsed-out.”

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” he says indignantly. “I spent three hours memorizing my Queen Mab monologue, and we didn’t even do my scene today!”

“Um, you didn’t have to suffer the lips of Tyler Dunning,” I reply.

Anthony raises his eyebrow. “I don’t know about suffer . . .” I swat his shoulder. “Yeah, I’m going to Verona,” he says after he’s pinned my hand. “But you sure you don’t want to stick around?” He nods somewhere behind me, and I turn to follow his gaze—to Billy Caine talking intently to Owen.