Now the blaze was embarrassment. She pulled away from Damon and that won her his voice. He said, “Intermission,” all husky and shot through with a rumble of grit.
Intermission was over, it was time for the third act, but he cleared his throat and kept hold of her hand. It was a declaration they weren’t.
She grabbed for the headsets and they put them on. Damon went into his narration and she forgot to feed him the change. One change in one line, did it really matter they’d messed it up? One kiss had messed her up. Left her knowing she’d do anything for more.
She tried to focus on the printed script, but Damon’s hand on the back of her neck, the brush of his fingers behind her ear made it hard to keep her place, impossible to talk herself out of having more of his attention; hands to heat her from the inside out, voice to sink her into bliss and tether her to her body, to his.
He wasn’t Hamish. He didn’t blame her. He hadn’t isolated himself from friends and family. He didn’t need her except in superficial ways and there were other people in his life who stood by him. He sang like he didn’t care that his sound was mastery and it did things to her, reminded her of who she’d once hoped to be.
But she wasn’t prepared for Damon, the force of him, the energy of him. She’d never had a one-night stand and knew she wasn’t made of the stuff you needed for that, detachment, fearlessness, a healthy self-image. It was no good pretending she could love Damon and leave him. He already loomed too large in her thoughts to be so easily discarded. And yet she couldn’t hold him either, she was too little, too small in her understanding of life, and he was too grand. He’d be bored with her when he realised how ordinary her outlook was, and she wasn’t strong enough to have her heart broken by that truth.
As if he could read her thoughts or smell her indecision, he turned her face and kissed her and nothing about it was idle. She tasted unexpected things on his lips: curiosity, attention, determination, and it made her shiver.
She fed him lines and he repeated them. She led him from A to B and back again in a rhythm of grazing bodies, an odd dance of practicality and stumbling purpose that made them both stifle laughter, snatch kisses.
Not once did she feel like she was responsible for him, that she was the reason he could do what he needed to do. That made no sense. He couldn’t work the script changes without her and despite Ed’s cues, he wouldn’t be able to see the actors to time the lines with specific movements. So he needed help, but this needing felt nothing like being claimed by Hamish. Being needed by Damon didn’t make her feel heavy limbed and headachy, crushed with expectation. It was stunningly different. It was enlivening.
It was fun.
The baby didn’t
do it, but was the leading clue. The murder victim was the baby’s daddy. Damon knew, but he’d laughed at her surprise, taken obvious pleasure from knowing the performance engaged and amused her.
While the audience cheered, they kissed again like it was a new fashion and might be done with before the night was. Damon’s fingers explored her face over the sound of whistling, stomping and rousing applause, and she forgot to be nervous about being caught out by Jace again. Jace had caught on anyway. He didn’t return.
Damon was still voiceless though, relying on touch to bind her close, wind her up and spool her out like so much insubstantial floss. Her body was his to stage direct. His hands made her pulse thump, her skin bead with sweat, her buttons magically part to expose her to his tongue and teeth. He counted her ribs with tiny nips, he skimmed her waist with the flat of his thumb and traced the edge of her bra with his knuckles. She lost her breath again and again and he lent her his. She lost her balance and he held her up, but inside, where her hopes and fears flourished, she tipped over anyway and sprawled on the floor at the feet of such unexpected delight.
But it wasn’t meant to last, the suddenness, the fever of it. It was random like the movements of the audience, impromptu like lines in the play, and just as mysterious and thrilling in its conclusion.
It was also one night only. Had to be, the circumstances were unlikely to be repeated.
When Damon did speak, it was in that crushed glass voice that growled in his throat, and knowing it was time to move on she tried to kiss him silent to take one more minute, one more grab at the illusion before it was gone.
His breath across her cheek. “I have to see Dalia.”
She eased back. “Of course.”
He drew her close again, brushing her hands away from her shirt, doing her buttons. She might have fumbled them, with fingers thick and dumb from too much hot blood freewheeling through her system. He was steady and sure, but then maybe backstage trysts were not uncommon for him, a night of sport. The thought made her teeth clamp together, made it hard to swallow. She was a fool to think this was more than a performance to him, when it was a front row seat at an exclusive event to her. And he’d lied to get her here.
“I messed up your hair.”
All the pins were gone, but she spied the sparkly star on the floor and used it to fashion a tidier do.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Back to the light. Back to the real world where someone like Damon and someone like Georgia didn’t have an insane make-out session for no good reason.
He stepped out in front of her and that was confusing. “Should I go first?”
“No need.”
He started down the walkway to the stairs, the fingers of one hand skating over the surface of the wall. He’d feel the banister and the change in flooring from wood to metal before the first step. She was so easily redundant and instead of feeling relieved, she was bereft.
Cracked and dusty memories of the one time she’d played around and been dumped sat in her chest like yellow curled newsprint used to line old cupboards. She’d kissed Lenny Tims behind the toilet block, let him touch her breasts over her school uniform on a humid Friday afternoon.
Lenny had blanked her on the Monday as if she was brickwork, nothing more than any dumb surface to play handball on, and asked Michelle Payne to the end of year formal. She’d cried herself sick at seventeen, and Damon’s sure-footed progress on the stairs brought it all back.
She needed to wake up to herself, but her soul was stroked raw by the revelation of him and it was too soon to be rational.