The next day at rehearsal, Zara touches everything. She walks through the house, skimming her fingers along the backs of the seats, row after row, red so deep and soft that it makes her blush. The stage manager tells her to sit down, which makes her feel like a scolded child. Zara settles into the second row, perched at the edge of the aisle. She looks over her script for act 4, scene 2, but she can’t focus. Her skin is shimmering with everything it felt last night. Her lips are fully awake.
Her body is a walking memory.
When she climbs onstage, what happened is right beneath her feet. Down there in the dark. Eli is up in the lighting booth running through the show with her new board op, and Zara is onstage, about to rehearse yet another love scene with Adrian Ward. The lantern-lit kiss has become one of the stories of the Aurelia, built up like the layers of paint and dust.
She wonders how many love stories are buried in this theater. How many secrets.
“Where are you?” Leopold asks from his spot in the front row.
Zara’s head snaps up. She didn’t even realize she was staring at her shoes.
“I’m ready,” she says.
“Oh good,” Leopold says in a voice ballooning with pretend delight. “Did you hear that, everyone? Zara Evans is ready. In that case, we can begin.”
Adrian tries to sneak her a smile. He’s always doing that — being nice to her when Leopold is at his worst. But Zara gets the feeling that Adrian will never know how bad Leopold can truly be. He gets the stage-ready version that the rest of the world sees. Zara is learning — from Toby and from Meg and from Enna, from Leopold himself — who the director is behind the curtain.
She trusted Leopold Henneman so easily a few months ago. She can’t decide who she hates more — that old version of herself who wanted to stay up late into the night, impressing him? Or Leopold, staring at her now with a flinch of pain as she says her lines, letting her know that she’ll never be good enough?
“Once I had everything, and it felt like nothing,” Zara says. “Now I have nothing, and I am filled.”
“Lovely,” Leopold says.
She can see it, how he flicks from bored to furious, how he calls her brilliant and then breaks her down. He keeps changing the story so she won’t know what to believe — except for him. The sick part is, his compliment still made her glow for a second.
But not half as brightly as she burned last night.
Zara thought it would be easy, once she and Eli kissed. That they would slide into being together. That’s how it worked for Echo and Ariston. They met, they kissed, they became inseparable.
When Eli and Zara left the theater at two in the morning, Zara kept a safe distance between them. No twined hands, no sides pressed together. What if someone was working late and saw them? What if one of the crew members told Leopold, not knowing what he might do?
Adrian finishes a monologue and Leopold twitches his hands, signaling Zara and Adrian to move closer together. They both jump to match his urgency, and she wonders if she’s the only one who feels like a puppet. “Our play has the potential to be immortal or forgettable,” Leopold says, getting up, mounting the rehearsal stairs, moving in close. “In the end, whether the audience believes in this love story lies with you.” He circles Zara like he is a red pen and she is a word out of place. “You have shown us that you are capable of emotion. Feeling, however, is not enough. We need explosive potential behind each moment, danger in each breath.”
Danger? Zara feels it every time she thinks about what happened to Roscoe and Enna. And a different kind, every time she stands too close to Eli.
Leopold slips behind Zara, his hand spanning the distance between her shoulder blades. He pushes her toward Adrian, until every part of her is crowded against him. Adrian’s whole body feels like an apology. She can’t tell if he’s sorry that Leopold is pushing her into him, or sorry for liking it.
Leopold’s voice is a thick whisper. “This is what we need, in the moments you are standing together.”
“Kiss/kill,” Meg adds from down in the orchestra pit.
“What’s kiss/kill?” Adrian asks. He sounds eager to learn, and again Zara remembers her old, innocent self.
Leopold chuckles. “We use such different words in the theater, I know. Kiss/kill is the distance we use to show intensity.” Leopold prods Zara in the back again, forcing her even closer to Adrian. “So close, the characters seem to have only two courses of action. They might kiss, or they might kill each other.”
Leopold pushes Zara farther; every contour of Adrian’s body is obvious now. Standing this close to him is part of the blocking, has always been part of the blocking, but the way that Leopold pushes her makes anger slide through Zara, burning at the back of her throat.
She doesn’t step away. If two deaths aren’t enough to make her walk away from this role, and being kept away from Eli isn’t enough, being shoved up against Adrian Ward is definitely not enough.
“Still wrong,” Leopold says, studying their bodies like he’s hanging a picture frame and it’s just a fraction off. He adjusts her — a flurry of small touches — and she goes sickly hot everywhere his hand meets her skin.
“Come to my office tonight, before the gala,” Leopold whispers to both of them, as if he doesn’t want the rest of the company to know how much they’re embarrassing themselves.
“Okay,” Adrian says. “No problem. Right, Z?”
He tries to smile at her again.
Zara can’t smile in return — not even a quick, pretend tug of the muscles. She can’t say no problem back to Adrian. Leopold is the biggest problem she can imagine right now.