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“Will you still wait in the lobby for me?” he asks.
“No,” I say, and his face falls, confusion knitting over his expression. “I’m going to come sit with you in the stage manager’s booth.”
He smiles, delighted he isn’t being rejected and maybe remembering the last time we were in the stage manager’s booth together.
“You know there are other people in there tonight. You have to behave yourself,” he says, his voice low.
“Damn. And after rehearsal? Do I have to behave myself then?”
“Nope. Not even a little bit.”
JADE
6 MONTHS LATER…
“. . . my heart unto yours is knit . . .”Act II, Scene II
“Trash it.”
“What? No! I had this all four years of college,” Ian says, arms crossed.
“Put it in a storage unit then. We’re not using your ancient, grubby futon as our couch.” I swipe the sweat from my hairline and my top lip with the back of my hand and wipe it on my jean shorts. June in Texas is no joke, and our air-conditioning doesn’t seem to have caught up to us yet.
“Okay, I’ll save it for the next place we move in together,” Ian says with a smirk. He knows he’s lost this battle, and now he’s just taunting me.
“You’re lucky I agreed to move in with you this time,” I say, poking his sternum. He grabs my finger and drags me to him, wrapping his arms around me and kissing me on the nose.
I scrunch my nose at him, and he does it again.
“It was more economical this way,” he says, reiterating the point he made to get us here in the first place.
After reconciling six months ago, Ian and I started talking about summer plans pretty quickly. My instincts to escape and avoid kept kicking in, but Ian was steady and consistent, never pushing me too far and approaching all our conversations about the future with a gentleness that would soften a boulder.
Which is how we landed at a regional theater in Austin, Texas, for a summer production ofCats, Ian as a light tech and apprentice to the designer, me as the costume and makeup designer. There’s potential for some fall shows here too, and we like the idea of staying longer than three months, but not for too long.
When it came time to decide where we would live, Ian floated the idea of us living together. I was hesitant. I’ve never lived with anyone besides my mom and Jessie and Mac—certainly never anyone I’ve been in a relationship with.
“We’d be spending half the amount on rent every month. And we’d be sharing a bed all summer anyway. Might as well do it in the same house. And think of the convenience! We’d have such easy access to each other,” he’d said one night while we ate dinner at the caf before heading to a tech crew meeting for the spring show at MPC.
Which is how I came to be sweating my ass off in a two-bedroom apartment, trying to convince my boyfriend that his grubby futon is killing the vibe.
“Hey, you agreed I could make all the decorating decisions,” I say, poking his chest again.
“What will we use for a couch then?” he asks as if he can out-logic me.
“An actual couch. Or at least an IKEA couch. Something we pick out together.”
“All right, but I get to pick the color.” He scowls at me, and I plant a kiss on his puckered-up lips.
“Nope,” I say.
“All right, you can pick the color.” He says it like he came up with the idea.
“We knew it would end like this. Your efforts were valiant. Now take that cushion to the curb. Better yet, burn it.”
He groans but leaves to haul the futon cushion down to the curb, or maybe to donate it to the dumpster. When he comes back, we order dinner to be delivered to us and get back to work. Ian tackles setting up the bed, and I start in on the boxes.
I start with the kitchen—where Jessie and I always started when we lived together—and the first box is a hard slap of nostalgia. Mac had a ton of kitchen stuff, so when he moved in with me and Jessie, we used his stuff. All of my and Jessie’s stuff was in my mom’s attic, and Jessie said I could take it for me and Ian. But opening this box now, looking at the bright teal utensils that Jessie and I shared for years, a wave of emotion brings tears to my eyes.
