“The curse,” Blake answered immediately.
Warren clicked his tongue. “You’re always ready to jump straight to the show being cursed,” he said, agitation showing.
“I have good reason to believe that this showiscursed. You know as well as I do nothing has been the same since Cheryl—you know...”
“You really think the show is cursed?” I asked, eager to hear his opinion.
The thought had run through my mind a time or two. There had been muttered suspicions around rehearsals ever since Cheryl’s death. People in theater tended towards being superstitious. Growing up in the Mexican culture had only added to my predilection for it.
He shrugged. “The things that are happening seem a little odd to be a coincidence. Cheryl and the investigation, the gears malfunctioning and Scarlette getting caught in the bubble, missing props,the entire cast being at each other’s throats, and now this?” He ticked off the weird occurrences on his fingers as he named them.
I tried to scrub away the goosebumps popping up on my skin. It could all be nothing. A malfunctioning piece of the set and coworkers not getting along were common enough. But what happened to Cheryl and the ongoing investigation was not.
Derek glossed over the building silence, his eyes shifting nervously. “Maintenance could have tripped something accidentally.”
Michelle glanced out the window. “It looks like their lights are down too,” she said, pointing at the old building across the street. “Maybe the storm caused an outage.”
Ed whistled from the front of the room, silencing the talk and conjectures. “It looks like this entire section of the city has downed power. Could be from the storm or might be something else like a manhole explosion. If we don’t get an estimated time for return of power in the next hour, then I’m cutting rehearsal short. There’s not much we can do here with no lights or music. And hopefully, by that time, this storm will have blown itself out.”
The cast and crew mumbled their agreement, and we settled in to wait out the storm inside the rehearsal studio. We found things to talk about, putting suspicions of a curse to rest for now.
“How did Derek get the black eye?” Scarlette whispered.
“Nick,” I muttered. “I walked in on them arguing this morning before rehearsal.”
“About what?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t hear it all, but Derek punched Nick, and then Nick tackled him. I had to use my pepper spray to get them to stop.”
“Wow,” she murmured, blue eyes wide. “I guess you shouldn’t piss Derek off, huh?”
I snorted. “Yeah, I guess not.”
Ed’s gruff voice echoed through the large room. “They’ve just informed me that there’s a disabled transformer in the substation that caused the blackout. It could take a couple of hours to fix. So, with that said, you all are free to go.”
Cheers erupted at the early dismissal. I waved to Blake and Scarlette as they pushed themselves off the floor to leave. My phone buzzed from my lap, and I smiled at the name that popped up on my screen.
Ben had changed his caller id in my contacts from“Cocky Bastard”to“Best Cock in the City”.
I swiped up on the screen.
“Who is this?” I asked, pretending I had no idea who it could be.
He chuckled on the other end of the line. “The guy who fucked you six ways to Sunday the other night.”
“Hmm..” I murmured as if I couldn’t recall.
“You screamed my name into the pillow and left scratches all down my back.”
“Not ringing any bells,” I said, my cheeks flushing at the memory.
“You’re a shit liar, princess. I’m assuming the fact that you answered my call means you’re not rehearsing. Is there power at the studio?”
“No, it went out about twenty minutes ago. Ed said it’s a disabled transformer that will take hours to fix, so we’re off rehearsal early.”
“Perfect.”
“What? Why?”
