Page 66 of Act Three
And as the theater lights dimmed, the memory of Kyla mouthing off in the car made my dick jolt even harder.
Maybe you should both fuck me right here, and we can live stream it on the internet.
I knew Australians tended to be crass — I’d met enough Aussie backpackers in London to know that they drank hard, partied hard, and spoke like sailors — but since I’d known her, I’d never heard Kyla say anything like that.
It was hot.
My erection pressed against my suit as music started to play and the red velvet curtains covering the stage slid open, revealing the turret of a medieval castle with a woman leaning over its wall.
The woman burst into song and all thoughts of sex disappeared from my mind. She was sad and lonely because she’d grown up in the castle and wasn’t allowed to mingle with the townspeople. Below the turret, a young man sang about his own loneliness, their songs crossing over and harmonizing although they were both unaware the other was there. The final chorus included the townspeople, who emerged from behind set pieces to toil in fields, wash clothes, and make horseshoes.
But after the song reached its climax they disappeared, fading into darkness as they crept back behind wooden trees and huts, and the spotlight shone on the woman who sang the song’s last mournful line.
Kyla leaned forward in her seat, barely blinking, her eyes absorbing everything on the stage as the young man knocked on the castle doors, only to be turned away by the king’s guards.
I knew how she felt. My first time at the theater felt like a transformative life experience, on par with losing my virginity or receiving my first paycheck. I was ten, too young to see the theater as anything other than a boring pastime for dinosaurs like my parents. My dad took me to see a performance ofWicked, and I complained the entire car ride there, staring out the car windows at the movie theaters we passed.
Why did I have to do something boring while all my friends were watching the latest superhero movie?
My lack of interest persisted through perhaps the first ten minutes of the performance. A tall woman with frizzy hair sat in front of me, blocking my view of the stage. When my dad noticed me staring at my hands, he offered to switch seats.
And from that moment, my world was transformed. This was a thousand times better than the movies my friends were seeing — it was immersive andreal, and I swore that the actors looked directly at me more than once. I left the theater humming the songs and when the opportunity arose to audition for myschool’s performance ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream, I jumped at the chance. I was cast in the lead role and my first experience of being on stage was even more addictive than being in the audience.
From that moment onward, I was hooked.
There was nothing else I could have done with my life — I would have died from boredom in an office or on a building site. But when I was on stage, I truly felt alive.
After the couple finally kissed for the first time, Kyla stayed in her seat, watching the closing curtain with confusion.
“What’s happening? That didn’t feel like the end of the story. Shouldn’t they ride off into the sunset?”
“Intermission,” I explained. “Come on, let’s get a drink.”
We all made our way through the crowd that moved up the aisle and into the foyer. I lost track of Wyatt before we’d reached the gold-plated double doors, but Kyla grabbed my hand so she wouldn’t lose me in the sea of people. The line for drinks and snacks was so long that people were queued on the stairs, and while I was inwardly debating whether to use my celebrity status to move to the front of the line, Kyla tugged my hand.
“This way.” She pulled me outside to the street.
“The play hasn’t finished yet,” I said, confused, thinking she didn’t know what “intermission” meant and assumed we were going home. “Intermission is just a fifteen minute break.”
“I know.”
Kyla led me down the sidewalk and down an alleyway where a few people were clustered around a kiosk.
“My mom used to bring me here when I was a kid, and these pies always tasted incredible.”
Pies?
I looked up at the menu and saw that the kiosk stocked every kind of meat pie imaginable. Steak, pepper, mushroom, kidney, curry, chilli, chicken and leek, lamb, butter chicken,lentil, vegetable, mac and cheese… the list was so long it took up the entire board above the cheerful-looking man who pulled a pie from the glass-covered cabinet with a pair of tongs, slipped it into a paper bag, and passed it to a small boy who grabbed it excitedly with both hands.
“What do you want?” Kyla asked. “My shout.”
“A curry pie,” I decided. Kyla ordered and included a chilli pie for her, plus mashed potato, mushy peas, and gravy.
“I have to watch my figure, you know,” I reminded her as she added two sodas to the order.
“Make those diet,” she said, after a quick glance at my chest. Was she checking me out? I didn’t have time to think too hard about it because the man had our order ready and passed several white paper bags across the counter. There was nowhere to sit — the chairs and tables around the pie kiosk were already occupied — so we perched on one of the concrete barriers that kept the cars away from pedestrians.
“What do you think of the performance so far?” I asked, and Kyla crinkled her nose as she squeezed ketchup on the pastry that covered her pie.
