“Mm-hmm.”
“I miss being onstage, but it would kill part of my soul to do it as my job. That’s why I love the community theater so much. It’s bonus goodness in my life.”
I slide a look at her.
Her cheeks are going pink. “And I wrote the play,” she whispers.
“Send me dates. I’ll come see it.”
“It’s probably—”
“Fucking amazing,” I interrupt. “Something you should celebrate. Be proud of.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Would you believe me if I said I was going to say that it’s probably when you’re on vacation?”
“Were you?”
The guilty look answers for her.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“It’s just—I wasn’t in New York more than six months before I figured out that acting as a career wasn’t going to do it for me. But every time I leave my apartment, I see something new and fascinating andinspiring, so I wrote the play as an ode to my neighborhood. To celebrate what they’d done for me. And then I showed it to Yazmin, and she was like,get out of my head, and I realized we all love our community, we all love the city, and we all love different things about it, but it unites us. So it’s ... in a lot of ways, it’s bigger than me. It’s my thank-you to everyone who’s become my family away from Tinsel.”
“Think you’ll write more plays?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Good.”
Her fingers drift up my neck. “You ever want to be on a stage?”
“I’d rather run naked through a town hall meeting with both of our families sitting together.”
She laughs a little, then sighs.
She’s about to say the thing I don’t want her to say.We need to talk about how we’re breaking up tomorrow.
Nope.
Don’t want to.
I shift so I can kiss her knee again.
She runs her fingers through my hair.
I loop my hand around her calf and kiss her knee once more. Her breath hitches, and her fingers tighten in my hair.
And someone knocks on the door.
The sun’s up. Clear blue skies are showing off outside the bedroom window, and before I shut it to keep more cold air from sneaking in, we could hear the birds chirping.
But it’s still not even seven in the morning.
They knock again.
Both of us sigh in unison.
“Probably my grandmother.” Amanda shifts like she’s getting out of bed, but I move faster.
