AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 9
Troy couldn’t tear his eyes away as Alison popped a seared scallop into her mouth and closed her eyes to savor it. She let out a low moan as she did, so quiet he had to strain to hear it, and his cock strained a little against his slacks.
Damn, she was sexy as hell. And what made her even sexier was that it wasn’t calculated. She wasn’t employing eyelash fluttering and coy touching and punctuating every other sentence with a hair toss like most of the women he knew did. When they used those tactics, it made him feel like the flirting was less about him and more about wanting attention.
With Alison, it was different. She was completely natural. Every move she made, every word she spoke, every facial expression and touch—they were all completely authentic and organic and, holy fuck, it couldn’t have been hotter if she’d been trying.
“Excuse me.”
He turned at the sound of the small, tentative voice over his shoulder. He assumed whoever had come up to their table was talking to him. After all, Alison had been here, what? All of two days? Who could she possibly have met during that time?
However, when he saw the young woman who’d spoken, her eyes were fixed squarely on Alison. She looked past him as if he didn’t even exist. In fact, to her, it seemed that he didn’t.
He looked back at Alison, brows drawn together. “Friend of yours?”
“No, probably a fan,” she whispered, and then turned her face to the young woman and said amiably, “Hi. I’m Alison.”
The girl giggled a little bit, shy and embarrassed, but stepped up closer to the table. “I know who you are. I loved you on Broadway Baby. Do you think we could, um, take a selfie together?”
Alison scooted to the edge of her chair and held her arm out to the girl. “Absolutely! Get in here!”
The girl knelt down next to Alison. She was absolutely vibrating with nervous energy. Troy could feel it from all the way across the table. Her hands shook as she held the phone up. “Oh my God, thank you so much. I’m Jenny by the way. This is, like, the best day ever.”
She and Alison smiled up at the phone. The camera clicked, they looked at the screen and both agreed that it was “totally adorbs,” and then she was on her way, waving and giggling as she walked back across the restaurant.
The whole encounter had taken less than thirty seconds, but it was going to take Troy a little bit longer to process what he’d just seen.
“It’s just now occurring to me that I never asked what you do for a living,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. He figured a joke would be the best way to handle it. Less awkward, less pressure.
It worked. She slapped her palm lightly on the table and laughed. Wow, he’d never get enough of making her laugh. It was such a high.
“Well, my secret’s out. Although, as you can see, it wasn’t much of a secret. For people who are into a certain kind of television show, at any rate.”
“Oh, are you an actress?”
She nodded. “Theater. So, until recently, I never really got recognized outside of New York and other small theater-loving enclaves—and, yes, I am talking about liberal arts colleges.”
She looked at him as if she were waiting for something, and he sat in silence, giving her space to continue with her story. After a moment, she shook her head. “Okay. Theater joke. It didn’t fly. Got it. Anyway, about a year ago, I agreed to be a judge on a competition show called Broadway Baby. It was your standard kind of format. You know, like The Voice, or American Idol, or America’s Got Talent. That kind of thing.
“Except it wasn’t just a singing competition. The idea was to discover Broadway’s next big star. So it was multifaceted. Singing, acting, and dancing… and the competitors were expected to come into it with some training.”
He nodded. “You know, the more you describe it, the more it sounds a little familiar. My kid sister Mila is into all that drama stuff. I feel like she talked to me about this show while it was on. Maybe.”
Alison smiled dryly. “And I can tell you hung on every word.”
He chuckled. “Well, she thought I did. That’s the main thing. Anyway, go on.”
“At the time, I viewed it as a way to give back to the theater community and to expose all of the things I love about theater to the wider world. I mean, people think that all it takes is talent, that we just step out on stage on opening night and dazzle the audience, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s blood, sweat, and tears.
“It’s hours of rehearsal every day. It’s sores on your feet so raw you can barely walk, but you still dance three hours a night, and twice on Sunday. It’s ripping out your heart and leaving it on the stage, then standing there calmly as the director critiques you, and then starting from the beginning and doing it again. It’s all of that.”
“God, that sounds brutal. Why would you even do it?”
She smiled, and he was reminded of the moment when he’d looked at her and seen an angel. That angelic light was all over her again, but this time it wasn’t coming from the lightbulb above her front door. It was coming from within her.
“Simple. Because after all those hours, and all those months, and all those years of torturing yourself to get ready—there is that moment. That magic moment when you do step out on stage on opening night, and you do dazzle the audience. And that moment is worth it all.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I get that. Before I came back to Valentine Bay, I played baseball for the Long Beach Waves. There’s a hell of a lot of training that goes on behind the scenes before we ever set out to play a game. And now that I think about it, a lot of that is pretty brutal. But, man, when you hear the crack of that bat that lets you know you just hit a homer and you take off running while the crowd roars in the background? Damn, that moment is the highest you can experience without chemical intervention.”
