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“I kiss you every night,” he said with a raised eyebrow. The corner of his mouth quirked up in a teasing grin. “You can tell a lot about a man from his kiss.”
It was true, but I wasn’t about to let him win this little bullshit battle.
“What do I do before the show every night?” I asked.
“Avoid everyone,” he said.
I nodded. “And why do you think that is?”
“We’re beneath you.”
I threw up my hands. “When have I ever said that? No. It’s because I get crippling stage fright. I find a quiet corner and go through guided meditation so I don’t faint or puke.”
Jem’s eyes widened comically. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Wow. I… had no idea. How is it possible to get so nervous when you have as much experience as you do?”
I blew out a breath. “Because I had a horrible experience in my high school drama program and live in fear of it happening again. Every time I go onstage, I imagine doing something or saying something humiliating.”
I could tell he was taken aback by this information. Good. He needed to learn that he’d misjudged me as some elitist asshole who thought his shit didn’t stink. In fact, I was a scaredy-cat afraid of making a fool of myself all the damned time.
“So how do you get past it?” he asked. “Besides the meditation.”
“One of the things that helps is exactly what I told you a minute ago. It doesn’t really matter as much that you follow the script or answer the actual question asked. As long as you entertain them, they’ll be happy.”
Jem looked unsure, but I could see the cogs turning in his head, so I continued. “When we were first given direction for that kiss, do you remember what it was?”
He shrugged. “It was just to kiss, right? I mean, there’s a mark where we’re supposed to stand, but other than that…”
I nodded. “Why is the mark so far over on stage left?”
He bit his bottom lip and glanced at me through his lashes. I wanted to nibble on that lip so badly it hurt.
“Because we want the audience to watch us on stage left instead of the stagehands swapping out the set piece on stage right.”
“Exactly. As long as the audience is being entertained by something else, they aren’t looking at the boring stuff in the background. It’s the same thing with interviews. If the interviewer and the audience are being entertained, they won’t notice or care if you’re nervous, if you say the wrong thing, if you forget to tell them when and where to see the show.”
Jem let out a nervous huff of laughter. “Show management might notice.”
“Maybe. And then they can call and ask the radio station to announce it again. That’s their problem. Our job is to be entertaining. If we act like we’re having fun, people will want to come see what the show is all about even if our fun isn’t related at all to what we were supposed to talk about.”
He looked at me skeptically. “And you think the two of us can fake having fun?”
I tapped my chin. “If only we had acting experience, this whole thing might go more smoothly…”
Jem shoved my shoulder. “Be serious. We barely get along in real life.”
“Yeah, why is that?” I asked, seizing my chance.
He laughed again. “Because you think I’m a shit actor who doesn’t deserve to be in the show.”
My stomach dropped. Was he joking? Where did that thought even come from? “What the hell are you talking about?”
He waved a hand in the air and stood up to stretch. His lithe body always attracted my eyes, but right now, I was too upset to focus on it. “It’s fine. I’m over it. We don’t have to talk about it.”
I reached for his wrist and pulled him back down next to me. “It’s not fine. Explain why you think that.”
“I heard you telling someone early on how disgusted you were with them casting me. You made your opinions very clear about untrained actors landing roles trained actors should have gotten.”
I stared at him in shock. “And you thought I was talking about you?”
“You were. It was clear you were.” Jem’s eyes pinned me with a challenge. I dare you to disagree with me.
“No I wasn’t,” I said fervently. “I was talking about my friend Marley’s mother, who landed a role in a show because the director overheard her being rude to a server in a restaurant. He thought it was the perfect affect for the role, not realizing or caring that it was simply the woman’s real personality. She couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. She was an entitled society matron whose only job up to that point had been working as a flight attendant for six months in 1969.”
