She Hadn’t Been on a Stage in Four Years

The dressing room smelled like gardenias and old wood. Someone had left flowers, white ones with no card. They were competing with the ancient radiator and the ghost of every perfume that had ever been sprayed in this room before a curtain call.

I sat in front of the mirror and didn’t recognise myself for a second. Not because of the makeup or the costume. Because the woman looking back at me was about to walk onto a stage in front of fourteen hundred people. That four years ago, she’d sworn she never would again.

Four years. That’s how long I’d been gone. Long enough for the industry to half forget me, and for me to convince myself I preferred it that way. I’d left after a run that nearly broke me. Not so much the performance, the everything else. The director who thought cruelty was a method. The reviews that took pieces of me, I didn’t know how to get back. The night I stood in the wings and couldn’t make my legs move.

Then Marcus Ashworth called.

I knew who he was before I knew his voice. Everyone in this world knew Marcus. He’d produced four of the biggest shows in the West End in the last decade, and had a reputation for two things. Impeccable taste and absolute calm. When he asked me to read for the lead in his new production, I laughed. When he told me he’d written the part with me in mind, I went quiet. When he said “I saw you in *Closer* in 2021 and I’ve never forgotten it.” I said yes, before I could talk myself out of it.

Rehearsals were professional. He sat in the back of the theater during runs. Never interrupting, and taking notes in a leather bound book he carried everywhere. He’d give them to the director afterward, and I’d watch them talk in low voices. Marcus’ hand would occasionally gesture toward the stage, like he was conducting something only he could hear.

He spoke to me exactly the way he spoke to everyone else. Warm, measured, specific. And yet. There was something in the pauses. The half-second too long he’d hold eye contact, after giving a note. The way he said my name, like it had more syllables than it did. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself that for six weeks.

Opening night. Sold out. I could hear the audience through the walls. That low and anticipatory murmur, that sounds like the ocean if you let it. My dresser finished the last button on my costume, and left me alone with fifteen minutes before places were called.

That’s when he knocked.

He leaned in the doorframe in a dark suit, no tie, top button undone. He looked like he’d been running his hands through his hair, which was the only sign I’d ever seen that Marcus Ashworth got nervous.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Terrified,” I said. Cause I’d stopped lying about it, somewhere during week three of rehearsals.

He stepped inside and closed the door. Not all the way, just enough that the corridor noise dropped to a murmur. “I need to tell you something before you go out there.”

“If it’s a note, I swear, Marcus…”

“It’s not a note.” He crossed the room and stood behind me. I could see both of us in the mirror. Me in full costume and stage makeup. Him in his suit, with his hands in his pockets. As if he didn’t trust what they’d do otherwise.

“I’ve wanted to say this for weeks,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in the reflection. “But it never felt appropriate. And it probably still isn’t.”

“Say it.”

“You’re the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever watched work. And I don’t mean on stage.”

The room got very small. The gardenias were suddenly overpowering. I could hear my own pulse in my ears and, distantly, the stage manager’s voice calling the fifteen minute warning.

I stood up and turned to face him. In the heels from wardrobe, I was almost his height. Close enough to see the faint lines around his eyes, the way his jaw tightened when he was holding something back.

“You have terrible timing,” I said.

“I know.”

“I go on in fifteen minutes.”

“I know that too.”

I kissed him. Not gently. I grabbed the collar of his suit, and pulled him into me, like I’d been rehearsing it for six weeks. Which, honestly, I had. He made a sound against my mouth. Neither of us saw it coming, and neither of us tried to stop it. Even though the timing couldn’t have been worse. His hands finally came out of his pockets and found my waist and my ribs. Even the bare skin at the back of my neck, where the costume left me exposed.

He pushed me against the dressing table. The mirror rattled. A makeup brush rolled off the edge, and hit the floor. Neither of us cared. His mouth moved to my throat, then lower. Sucking at the spot just above my collarbone, hard enough that I had to bite my lip. I could feel him already hard against my hip.

His hands slid beneath the hem of my costume, up my thighs, over the tops of my stockings. I gasped when his fingers found me bare. No underwear, was a wardrobe’s choice, and already wet. He groaned into my neck as he stroked through it, two fingers sliding inside me with no preamble.

“We don’t have time,” I whispered, even as I rocked onto his hand.

“We have twelve minutes,” he said against my skin.

“That’s not enough.”

“Then I’ll be quick and you’ll hate me.”

“I could never hate you,” I said, and the way his expression changed when I said it. Something cracking open behind his eyes. Told me this wasn’t just backstage adrenaline for him either.

He lifted me onto the edge of the dressing table. Something snapped under my weight. Might have been a makeup container. The flowers wobbled in their vase. I undid his belt, and shoved his trousers and boxers down just far enough. He was thick, flushed, already slick at the tip. I wrapped my hand around him and stroked once, watching his jaw go tight.

He pushed my costume up around my hips. Lined himself up, and thrust into me in one deep and continuous motion, until he was buried all the way inside me. I bit down on his shoulder to keep from making a sound that would carry through the walls. He held still for a moment, with forehead against mine, breathing hard, stretching me open. Then he started to fuck me.

Not gentle. Not careful. The table knocked against the wall with each thrust. I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him deeper, heels digging into his back, fingers twisted in his hair. The lights around the mirror were hot against my spine. Every time he was deep inside me, I made a muffled sound into his suit jacket.

“Five minutes to places,” came the stage manager’s voice over the tannoy, and we both laughed. Breathless, reckless and without stopping.

He reached between us and rubbed my clit in tight, precise circles while he kept driving into me. I came hard, hand clamped over my own mouth, shaking. My vagina clenching around him in waves I couldn’t control. He followed seconds later. Burying himself as deep as he could, and coming with a low groan against my neck, that I felt more than heard. I felt him pulse inside me, hot and thick. While the building hummed with fourteen hundred people waiting for me.

We stayed there for a moment. Still joined. His hands in my hair. My heartbeat everywhere. When he pulled out, I felt the slick heat of him between my thighs and didn’t wipe it away.

“Places, please. This is your places call.”

“Go,” he said softly, voice wrecked. “Go be extraordinary.”

I slid off the table. Fixed my costume. Checked my makeup in the mirror. Flushed, bright eyed and lips swollen. Alive in a way I hadn’t looked in four years. He picked the makeup brush off the floor, and set it back on the table. Straightened his suit. His hands were shaking.

“Marcus.”

He looked at me from the doorway.

“Stay where I can see you. Wings. Stage left.”

He nodded once. Then he was gone.

I walked to the wings on legs that felt brand new, still wet, still aching in the best possible way. The stage was lit, the audience was hushed, and somewhere in the darkness to my left. A man in a crumpled suit was watching me, with the same expression he’d had the first time he saw me perform, five years ago. Like he was seeing something he’d been looking for, without knowing it.

The lights hit me and I stepped forward.

I gave the performance of my life.

—

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