He stepped toward her. “Is this just about the work for you?”
She took an uneasy breath. “No,” she said. “No, with you I can actually feel something.”
There were tears in Noah’s eyes as he touched her cheek, then kissed her.
In the end, F managed to divert his funding to their current research. The blackout came just after they began their work on Molten Ice.
It was a sweet set; Noah was pleased. But from the moment they left the stage that night, AJ had the feeling of being caught in someone else’s scene. As they rode the elevator to her apartment, she told herself it wasn’t over yet.
One show left.
Then Noah began kissing her likethat. He was taking her to the bed, andoh God.For the first time in their entire relationship, AJ found herself watching them as though from outside herself. He was having Last-Time Sex with her, and she did not want to be a part of it; and yet, she could not stop herself from completing the rite, from rolling under him, from moaning his name, from coming.
The feeling of being in the wrong scene continued all through the next day. Noah left in the morning to run some errands, and AJ didn’t ask where he was headed—not because she didn’t care, but because she was afraid he would tell her it was none of her business. Because despite her every effort, she had not gotten through to him.
He had gotten through to her.
You can’t always play the hero.
AJ couldn’t fix this.
She had no memory of walking on for their final performance. One moment they were together backstage, and the next she was under the spotlights in black, the crowd’s noise a distant drone.
Across from her, Noah appeared in white, and they began the scripted portion of the show. AJ listened to herself say her lines as if reciting a countdown.
This isn’t real. This can’t be real.
Then Noah initiated his own F and W prequel by divulging a secret.
“I’m an alien,” he confessed. “I was sent to Earth years ago to find a cure for the disease that killed my mother. Unfortunately, I have failed, and soon my own symptoms will begin. The effects are dangerous to humans, and so I am leaving shortly. It’s for your own protection.”
It was a gorgeous set. The flight path was bright tonight, a neon jet stream, the audience’s attention omnipresent as clear, uncharted space. With every move, AJ could feel the Cosmic Consciousness at work. They weren’t playing with each other. It was playing with them.
They began with the arrival of the alien many years before, a curious creature who assumed the form of a human male in high school.
“I fit in well,” Noah reported to his supreme leader. “All high schoolers are like little aliens.”
He fell quickly for a human girl, F. She was auditioning for the school drama, so the alien auditioned, too. When they cut to their performance, Noah jumped down into the orchestra, and now AJ and Noah were back in the first scene they’d ever played.
“I have forgot why I did call thee back,” said AJ, smiling shyly.
Noah stepped forward, eyes ablaze. “Let me stand here till thou remember it.”
For a moment, all AJ could do was look at him.
“I shall forget, to have thee still stand there,” she said. “Remembering how I love thy company.”
Noah swallowed. “And I’ll still stay, to have thee still forget, forgetting any other home but this.”
A red light flashed at the back of the house.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
They were halfway through the set.
This isn’t real,AJ thought as Noah climbed back onstage.
Not when she still had to tell him about the weird odor in her lobby, and Libby’s most recent insane text, and how he’d fucked up her toilet seatagain. That stuff wasn’t just going to disappear in the next twenty-nine minutes.
