The dress didn’t smell, so she supposed it would pass Tom’s judgment. Heels were retrieved from the passenger seat. She returned to the apartment and changed in the bathroom, leaving her old clothes folded on top of the towel rack.
It was a good dress, a yellow-and-white ribbed knit with ruffles where it hit her mid-thigh. She couldn’t wear the black bra she’d come in because the top had spaghetti straps, but the fabric was thick enough that she didn’t think anyone would notice.
Caroline came out of the bathroom and nearly ran into Adrian, who had that now familiarWe are late, but I’m not going to say anything even if it kills meexpression on his face. His gaze dipped down to her chest, hanging long enough for her to decide that her braless state might be a little more evident than she’d assumed. His eyes bounced back up, met her own, and then moved to focus very intently on a featureless spot ninety degrees to her left. Caroline suppressed a smirk. Itwasa good dress.
“Are you going to be cold? Do you want to borrow a sweater?” Adrian asked with studied casualness.
Caroline looked down at her cleavage. “Do you want me to cover up?” Maybe it wastoomuch boob for the art scene.
“I don’t think there’s a good way I can answer that question,” Adrian said, shifting uncomfortably. Caroline tipped her head back to laugh at him, and he stalked off to his room.
“Well, I think you look perfect,” said Tom from the couch. “Are you going to wear makeup?”
Crap, she’d forgotten. She’d meant to put some on after rehearsal. She opened her purse and peered within.
“I think I have some lip gloss in here,” Caroline muttered, bringing it up to her face.
Tom clicked off the TV and got to his feet.
“I can do it,” he said confidently. “Come on.” He headed to his room, which Caroline had never been in.
Adrian peered out of his own room long enough to frown at them.
“You don’t have to change anything,” Adrian told Caroline. “We could go now and be on time.”
“I went to every single one of your openings, remember? You can be late,” Tom retorted. “At least let the girl get some war paint on before you subject her to all your ex’s friends.”
Caroline shot Adrian a look of alarm, because that prospect had not occurred to her. His guilty expression confirmed Tom’s statement.
“Yeah, let’s put on some eyeliner, if you have it,” Caroline said to Tom. She tried to think of what she’d say if she did run into Adrian’s ex, the flower bush murderer and fine art defacer. She wasn’t sure makeup was going to be enough armor for that situation, but it couldn’t hurt.
Tom turned on the overhead lights in his bedroom and closed the door behind her. His room was messy and redolent of wet towels and unwashed clothes, in contrast to the rest of the apartment, which was cleaner than her own. Caroline squinted suspiciously at the unmade bed before unearthing a chair beneath a pile of clean laundry and claiming it as her seat. Tom rooted under his bed until he found a large plastic makeup caddy and plopped it on the duvet.
“I haven’t noticed you wearing any makeup,” Caroline noted as he rummaged in the messy, foundation-splattered interior of the case.
“You should have seen my emo phase. But no, most of this stuff is for the stage. The theaters in Bostongenerally can’t afford a makeup artist, so I do my own these days.”
He held up a few different eyeshadow palettes and pencils next to her wrist and set them aside. Then he began hunting for a blush.
“Why do you live in Boston? Is your family here?” she asked curiously.
“No, I came up for school,” Tom replied. He sharpened a black pencil and tugged her closer to the bed so that he could begin outlining her upper eyelid. “I worked in New York for a little while after graduation, but then I moved back here.”
“Isn’t New York a better city for theater than Boston though?” Caroline asked before realizing it might be a sensitive question.
Tom snorted. “It is. But my ex got all our money and most of our friends in the divorce, so I had to live on Adrian’s couch for a year while I dug my way out of debt. And then it seemed too hard to just start over, so I stayed.”
“I’m sorry,” Caroline said automatically.
“Don’t be. I made some bad choices.”
“I’m sure you didn’t deserve to get chased out of an entire city.”
“I sort of did. Rosie was working twelve-hour days crunching numbers, and when she got home, I was never there because I would be off watching experimental burlesque in Queens or something.”
“That sounds fun though.”
“It was. It’s much more fun to do Molly at a warehouse performance ofA Midsummer Night’s Dreamthan to eat microwave dinners on the couch with your exhausted wife, but if you pick one over the other too many times, it turns out that it’s impossible to stay married to that wife, so...”
