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I watched the scene develop from the start. It was a play about desire, about a slut and a hoodlum who find each other by accident, and discover more than the elements of love. Their lust is crazily driven to extremes. She liked their sex intense, entangled and semi-public, in front of windows, in apartment hallways and back alleys. He liked giving her what she asked for. The parallels to KC and me did not go unnoticed; though, I’m not sure how much KC understood that. I wasn’t planning to tell him, but I had the strangest feeling that the forces of nature had set me up to see this snippet of theatre, sitting kitty-corner from the man who might become my serious lover, observing how my proximity to him in this enlivened environment was speaking to us both.
The half-hour rehearsal turned into nearly an hour. I watched KC work mesmerized by his almost exasperating attention to every tiny element of this play. Speech inflections, body language, positions, lights, facial expressions… he could pick the world apart with an eye that beheld every detail under his microscope and pass quick judgment. This was no egalitarian effort. KC ruled as an effortless Napoleon. My body quickened seeing such authority demonstrated, as my mind whirred, my heart beat hot, and my pussy clenched as though it was ready for sex.
I watched him argue with his actress in an exchange as intense as the one inside the play…
“You need to understand giving up, relenting… it’s a softness, Christine. You can’t remain a bitch; you have to expose the difference. That’s what this play is about.”
“Damn right I don’t understand it!” she snarled at him.
“Why don’t you give it a try?” He snapped back condescendingly. “Pretend you’re drunk, totally dependent on someone to take care of you.”
“Ooo, why did you cast me in this!”
“Because you wanted the role and you’re the best to handle it. Makes you pull the feeling from your core. It’s there.”
“Yeah, you should know,” she kept sassing, tossing off her barbs as though the two had an intimate knowledge of each other that transcended this play. Had they been lovers?
Listening to my fears, I was jealous and my body gnawing with need.
KC backed off into the audience, “From Lyle’s entrance,” he announced as he returned to his seat.
The scene repeated. She got it right this time; I knew without seeing KC’s face. I could feel her yielding because it troubled me, having hit the places Rossi colonized and KC now rediscovered.
The rest of the rehearsal passed me by while my tangled mind lost its focus drifting from one scene and feeling in my life to the next.
“Gail.” KC was calling me from my reveries.
“Yes,” I looked up seeing that the company had adjourned for the night.
“How are you?” He had that same questioning expression he’d had the first time I entered the theatre, though he maintained the stern air of authority he’d displayed all evening.
“I’m fine, very fine.” I stood up, having trouble staring up at him. I preferred him eye to eye.
“You look lost.”
“That play was…” what word, it didn’t want to appear, “… intense,” I finally decided.
“For you, I’m sure.”
No, he obviously didn’t miss the parallels.
“You want to speak in private,” he said as fact, not question or suggestion.
I wanted more than that, and he knew exactly what I meant.
“Yes,” I answered flatly. He could feel my fires.
“What’s the reason today?”
“Overwhelming desire,” I answered.
“All right. In the scene shop. Wait for me there.”
There were three people on him asking questions, so I ignored mine and moved through the emptying theatre. A few stray eyes noted me, wonderingly. But I ignored them, and proceeded to the room behind the far back wall where a mass of sets were stored in some complicated order known only to the person who put them there. I peered from one corner to the other, seeing dozens of things that excited my imagination—saw horses, stray slats, leather strapping, rope…
I heard a rustling sound behind me, the door open, and then a click as it closed.
“Stuns the mind, doesn’t it?” KC suggested.
