Page 37 of Specters & Spotlights

He’d gone cold so fast he’d felt it in his teeth. Mortified, not just because she’d said it, but because he had no idea how she’d arrived there. For days afterward he’d replayed every interaction, every polite conversation, every thank-you and nod and careful smile, searching for the moment he’d accidentally offered more than courtesy. He never found it.

Which meant either he was oblivious, or people heard what they wanted to hear.

Neither option was comforting.

“I’m not sure it’s wise,” Graham said finally, because it was the closest he could get to honesty without sounding like a man afraid of a party. “Given… last time.”

Nick’s expression softened, just a notch, like he understood more than he was going to say. “Fair,” he said. Then, with renewed brightness, went on: “But tonight is different. New city. New show. New—” he waggled his eyebrows, as if that completed the thought.

Graham gave him a flat look.

Nick grinned, unrepentant. “Also,” he added, “it’s Elise’s first cast party.”

Graham’s face remained carefully blank. Somewhere behind his ribs, something small and irritating shifted.

Nick watched him for half a beat too long, like he was waiting for a tell.

Graham gave him none.

“I’m going to try to convince her to do a duet,” Nick said breezily, already turning toward the door. “Because I am a benevolent force for chaos.”

He paused in the doorway, and his eyes sparkled in that knowing, theatrical way Nick had when he thought he was very clever. “Don’t be weird about it,” he said, and then—before Graham could respond—he was gone, leaving the doorframe empty and Graham staring at the space like it had insulted him.

He’d forgotten about the cast party.

His instinct was still to skip it—clean, simple, predictable. But Nick’s pointed reminder had lodged where it didn’t belong: Elise’s first cast party.

Graham told himself that was not a reason.

And yet, the idea of Elise in a crowded bar—noise, bodies, attention coming at her from all directions—pulled at his mind with an odd insistence. Not because he expected drama. If anything, he expected the opposite. Elise didn’t strike him as someone who enjoyed big, loud parties. She could do people, clearly. She could talk to anyone, pivot between humor and professionalism like it was second nature.

But there was a difference between being capable and being comfortable.

Graham knew that difference intimately.

In a social setting, he preferred to watch. To absorb. To let the room move around him without demanding anything back. It was easier that way—less performance, less risk of saying the wrong thing and spending the next week replaying it like a botched cue.

Elise, he’d noticed, did something similar. She stood a half-step apart from the center of things, eyes tracking, taking inventory. Only with her there was an edge to it—a wariness that sharpened in crowds. Not fear, exactly. Vigilance. The kind that stayed tucked behind a smile.

He’d also noticed that it wasn’t always there.

There were moments—small ones, unguarded—when she didn’t know anyone was watching.

Once, from the hallway, he’d seen her in the wings during a run-through, her hands full, her attention split between a wig and the stage. And still, her mouth had moved along with the lines, silent and precise, as if the words lived in her muscle memory. Another time, she’d done it again—mouthing along, smiling faintly to herself, completely oblivious.

Adorable, his mind supplied before he could stop it.

He exhaled through his nose, annoyed at the word and at himself for thinking it. Elise smiling to no one, Elise caught up in the show in a way that looked like devotion instead of labor, was not his concern.

And yet it had become, inconveniently, something he looked for.

There was a moment earlier that day, brief, easy to miss, when he’d passed the wig room and heard Elise muttering.

Not mouthing along with the script. Not quietly tracking the scene.

Muttering like she was carrying on an argument under her breath, half to herself and half to the wig stand in front of her. As if the hair had opinions and she was negotiating terms.

He’d paused without meaning to. Simply long enough to catch a few clipped, earnest phrases—nothing he could repeat, nothing that made any sense out of context. Then Elise had made a small, triumphant sound, like she’d won, and the whole thing had struck him as—there was no dignified word for it⁠—