“You’re the assistant props master?” Adrian clarified.
Caroline frowned, trying to parse the logic. “I don’t think I have a title. But yes. I must be. The assistant props master.”
“Well done,” Adrian told her as gently as he could manage. He looked at his roommate again. “Tom,” he said in a very different tone, “please come talk to me for a minute.”
The other man wiggled bonelessly off the couch and into Adrian’s bedroom, expression beatific, too high to recognize that he was in trouble. Adrian closed the door, then pushed Tom against it with one firm palm, holding the shorter man against the wall.
“What are you doing?” Adrian growled.
Tom blinked at him in surprise. “Watching my senior performance and eating pizza?”
Adrian’s teeth grated. “With Caroline,” he clarified.
“Hey, I haven’t tried anything,” the other man protested. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Now it was Adrian’s turn to be confused. “What do you mean ‘to me’? You’re doing drugs withher!”
A bouquet of giggles immediately burst through Tom’s throat. “Oh my God. The middle-class respectability police are here to arrest me. ‘Doing drugs’? It’s not even illegal anymore.”
“It technically still is,” Adrian said, beginning to feel a little ridiculous.
“What?”
“You know. At the federal level.”
“Nerd.”
Adrian grunted. “Whatever. But more important, whydid you ask her over here? She’s trying to make friends her own age.”
Tom gave him a skeptical look. “You sure about that? She came over to tell you about the props thing. She stuck around. We ordered pizza. I put on my old stage videos to show her how the set changes work. Then I took an edible because I don’t work tomorrow, and then I shared becauseI’m not a jerk. What’s wrong with that?”
Adrian exhaled through his nose, trying to identify the problems with the scenario. He’d be a real hypocrite if he tried to stop Caroline from enjoying her evening along those lines, and Tom probably had photographs somewhere to prove the point. That didn’t mean Tom and Adrian ought to be involved.
“We are not supposed to becorruptingher,” he muttered. “I promised to show her the Boston arts scene. She didn’t ask to get high with a couple of men in their thirties.”
His roommate groaned, closing his eyes. “What happened to you? We used to have fun. Now it’s like you’re determined that everything in life has to suck just becausesomeof the things in your life suck. Come have some pizza and stop worrying for half a minute. I’m not trying anything with your”—he searched for a word, internally discarding a few—“Caroline. She’s fine. She’s happy. We’ll send her home mildly buzzed and unmolested in a couple of hours.”
Adrian was so hungry he could barely think straight, and some part of him wanted to be angry at Tom but was unable to articulate his reasons for it. If he were still twenty-two, he supposed that eating pizza, taking edibles, and watching old theater videos would sound like a good time. If he could do more of that at thirty-three than panicking that he’d never sell another painting, he’d probably be happier.
He opened the door and leaned out to take a good look at Caroline. She had her long legs propped up on the coffee table and her head tipped back to accommodate the floppy slice of pizza she was lowering into her mouth. She looked like she belonged there.
That was the part that was tightening his throat.
Adrian couldn’t be expected to be the responsible adult all the time. He didn’t have it in him after an entire day of doing just that. He was completely out of willpower to do things he ought to do. So he clenched his jaw and nodded, sweeping past Tom and out the door to the living room. He put a couple of slices of pizza on a paper plate and looked into the fridge on instinct, not really expecting anything beyond condiments and leftovers. Someone (he suspected Caroline) had brought over a large case of flavored coconut water. He took one and looked back to the living room. Caroline caught his eye and scooted to the edge of the sofa, patting a spot in the middle.
If this was what giving up looked like, he wished it didn’t look so inviting.
Adrian sat down between Tom and Caroline, his dinner on his lap.
“My solo is coming up now,” Tom said, pressing a button on the controller to restart the video. “I wasn’t using any props, but I really killed it, so we should watch anyway.”
Caroline nodded enthusiastically, curling her body sideways until her head was nearly resting on Adrian’s shoulder.
“Did you paint anything today?” she asked him.
“No.”
She turned her chin to peer up at him with owlish concern.
