“Why, does it feel sexual to you?” he all but purred.
Rose was running out of pillows, but she hurled another just to make her point.
Tom finally turned to get in the shower, which shifted him out of her direct line of sight but instead gave her a view of all the muscles down his back, as well as the round ass that—
She still had one pillow left. Maybe she could smother herself with it. Or at least starve the horniest of her brain cells of oxygen.
“Do you remember when I was inEquus, our senior year?” Tom shouted up at her.
Of course she did. He’d been so good in it—he’d played the main character, Alan Strang. She’d cried at every single performance. But that probably wasn’t what he was referring to—he was reminding her that most of Boston had seen his kit when he’d appeared naked onstage. That hadactuallybeen nonsexual nudity.
“Oh my God. Yes. I can’t believe Adrian didn’t tell his girlfriend you’d be naked in that play,” Rose said, speaking toward the ceiling. Served Adrian right for dating a snotty French literature major who’d offered Rose highly unnecessary diet tips. Tom and Rose had made Adrian dump her soon afterward.
“She never looked me in the eye again. Every time she came over, it was like I had a bull’s-eye painted on my crotch.”
Rose could perfectly visualize the scene at the big house in Somerville they’d rented that year. Adrian’s love life had been a chief medium of entertainment: all his girlfriends had been terrible. Tom and Rose had been the smug, judgmental couple lifting scoreboards over breakfast when he brought someone new home.
It was nice. They’d been happy. It was the closest Tom and Rose had ever gotten to domestic, even with three other roommates and their hookups and random houseguests cluttering the space. No, actually, Rose had been thrilled to make like a 1950s housewife between interviews and her scanty senior schedule, baking custard pies and elaborate casseroles for ten people.
When she looked back on it now, it was with a faintly embarrassed lens on the memories. She’d thought the rest of her life would be like that, when it was obvious in retrospect that she, like everyone else in the world, had just had a good time in college, and she ought to have savored the experience as a temporary joy.
“What was her name?” Rose asked. “Ellen? Elena? She tried to say it was Hélène for a while, but nobody bought it.”
She heard the water turn on.
“It was Helen! And God save you if you called her Ellie,” Tom called from the bathroom. The shower door clanged shut.
Tom would be in there until the hot water ran out, so Rose could go to sleep now. She used to tease him about his long showers.
It only takes like five minutes to jack off. What are you even doing in there?
Thirty minutes of aftercare, Rosie, because I’m treating myself right.
But really he just liked to sing and practice his lines and let the water run over his back and wrinkle his toes. Rose could hear him singing now: a little scatting as he worked his way up to the falsetto chorus in “Smooth Criminal.”
She sighed and put her last pillow over her head. It wasn’t a terrible pillow, but it was ineffective at blocking her awareness of Tom in the shower. Wet. Naked. Lonely? No, Jesus Christ, Rose Kelly, keep it together. He’s fine taking a shower alone, and you haven’t cleared anything with his boyfriend.
Thoughts of little drops of water sliding down Tom’s hip bones were easier to focus on than Tom’s singing. She’d missed his singing. He had a wonderful, rich baritone, and several of his professors had tried to push him toward music instead of theater, since he played the piano as well as he sang. But Tom didn’t have the patience to compose, and he only practiced if he had an appreciative audience for his Broadway standards and Beyoncé medleys.
Tom’s music was supposed to have been the soundtrack to her life.
As Rose breathed into the mattress, Tom followed “Smooth Criminal” with “The Weight” and then “Tomorrow.” Rose laughed when she got it, even if it was pained.
“Three songs about girls named Annie,” she called.
“You’re so good at this!” Tom called back.
That had been an easy one, but Rose finally rolled onto her back and looked up at the close, floral-stenciled wood ceiling. She was very awake.
Since Tom was giving out free tickets to the show, Rose propped her head on her arm and watched as he got out of the shower and toweled off with slightly more modesty than he’d shown during his entrance.
He did a little shrug when saw her looking—not in a vain way, instead almost apologetic.
“Just so you know, this is for the play,” he said, apropos of nothing, with a wave at the defined plane of his midsection. “You might want to take some photos. I probably can’t keep this up after the Broadway run wraps.”
“Too time-consuming?”
Tom would go to three dance classes in a row if he had the time and money, but as far as Rose knew he’d never set foot in a weight room.
