He shook his head. “Before that.”
I gave a skepticalhumph. It landed somewhere between his shoulder blades. Maybe his memory extended as far as the first day of school, but I doubted it. Before he could speak again, I stepped back to call a number to Anton.
“What if the other leg is longer?” Alex asked, when I moved to one side of him to measure the distance from his waist to the floor.
“Then you have bigger problems than your costume,” I answered shortly. We had reached the most intimate stage of the process, and my mind was scrambling for a way to avoid what came next. “Do you happen to know your inseam—like in pants?”
Alex crossed his arms, tapping his bottom lip with one finger. “Thirty-two? No, maybe it’s thirty-four.”
I frowned at him. “You’re not that tall.”
“You give me life, Mary!” Anton called. “So much sass behind that sweet face.”
Alex glanced from Anton to me, and I felt heat suffuse my cheeks.
“There you are,” said a sultry voice.
I took a quick step back. Although the person who’d spoken sounded like a nightclub singer, she had the cascading ringlets of a pre-Raphaelite painting, and the body-conscious clothing of a yoga instructor. She sidled up to Alex, her delicate shoulder giving him a playful nudge. “I thought you came to hang out with me.”
My mind skittered from one revelation to the next: He’s here withher—a College Student. Which means he didn’t come to woo Terry. Unless he’s really, really debauched.
“There was a door propped open, so I walked in and these two grabbed me.” Alex made it sound as though Anton and I had wrestled him to the ground like a pair of thugs, when all that really happened was that—I squeezed my eyes shut, striving in vain to suppress the memory of draping a tape measure around every section of his body.
“I figured they were going to shake me down for my lunch money,” Alex added.
Anton ignored this exchange, tipping his sunglasses up to stare at the new arrival. “Do you model?”
She flashed a coquettish grin, all lowered chin and fluttering lashes. “A little.”
“Let’s see the walk.” Anton all but rubbed his hands together in anticipation, headache temporarily forgotten.
The girl—or rather, woman—threw her shoulders back and shook out her hair. She stomped a straight line from where she was standing to Anton’s chair.
“So you’re not auditioning?” I hissed at Alex while his special friend spun around to begin high-stepping back our way.
“I never said I was.”
I ground my teeth, annoyance twisting the knife of my embarrassment. His significant other rejoined us.
“Hold this, will you?” She handed her bag to Alex, then used both hands to coil her long hair into a magazine-worthy bun. Not even with a wall of mirrors, oceans of hairspray, and battalion of bobby pins could I hope to replicate such a feat.
Pressing both hands to her abdomen, she inhaled deeply through her nose, lips puckering on the long, slow exhale. “Are you going to watch?” she asked Alex, before commencing the next round of exaggerated breaths.
“I’ll be in the front row,” he assured her, laying on the supportive boyfriend act with a shovel.
“Then you’ll be staring at her feet.” I hadn’t intended the words to carry, but Anton licked his finger and made a sizzling sound.
Alex favored me with a slow grin. It seemed highly inappropriate for him to look at anyone that way with his girlfriend standing right there. “Where are you sitting?”
“I’m not. I’ll be running around. Doing things.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Anton quipped.
Belatedly I realized that if I set Alex loose in the auditorium, he would almost certainly run into Terry. “You can watch from the wings.” Feeling the need to sell the idea, I added, “It’s a really cool view.”
“So cool,” said Anton. “The coolest.” For someone who claimed to be on the brink of death, he was remarkably quick with the commentary.
“Which way?” Alex asked me.
