Rooftop, Interrupted

The coffee shop across from the theater had officially become mine.

Not legally. I hadn't purchased it or threatened the owner into signing over the deed. But I'd been there four mornings in a row, which was more than enough for emotional ownership.

Jay was already sitting at my table when I walked in.

"My table," I said, stopping beside him.

He looked up from his phone, unbothered. "Good morning to you too."

"You're sitting at my table."

"You told me to meet you here."

"Yes. At the coffee shop. I didn't say you could take liberties."

He glanced around the mostly empty room, all four other tables gloriously unoccupied. "Should I move?"

"No. But I want it acknowledged."

"Your table," he said solemnly, like he was signing a treaty.

"Thank you."

I dropped into the chair across from him and pushed my sunglasses up onto my head. Jay's eyes narrowed the second he got a good look at me.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You did a face."

"I didn't do a face."

"You absolutely did a face." He picked his coffee back up, studying me over the rim of it like I was a crime scene. "You seem happy."

"I am generally a happy person."

"You're smug."

That one was harder to argue with. I reached for the iced coffee I'd ordered at the counter and took a long, satisfied drink, mostly to buy myself a few seconds of drama.

I lasted about six of them.

"Danny kissed me."

Jay choked. Not quite the full chicken-and-broccoli spectacle from day two, but respectable: coffee down the wrong pipe, a fist to the chest, the whole production.

"You really need to work on swallowing before I tell you things," I said, delighted.

"Jesus, Tess." He coughed into his napkin. "You can't just say that while I'm drinking."

"I said Danny kissed me. That's not even sexual."

"With you, somehow it is."

"You're learning," I said, beaming.

He wiped his mouth, still catching his breath. "When?"

"Yesterday. After rehearsal."

His eyebrows climbed. "After the director gave an entire speech about nobody dating?"

"Technically, we aren't dating."

Jay just looked at me, the exact flat, patient look of a man who had personally witnessed the creative-definition clause get invented in real time.

"Don't give me that," I said, pointing at him. "You were there. You heard the whole thing."

"That's exactly why I'm giving you this look."

"It was one kiss."

"Okay."

"That maybe lasted a little longer than a kiss."

His mouth twitched, the corner of it fighting a losing battle.

"Don't judge me."

"I'm not judging you."

"You're doing something."

"I'm drinking my coffee."

"Judgmentally."

He laughed and looked down into his cup, and for a second I wondered if telling him had been a bad call, considering he'd tried to kiss me himself two nights ago in that same parking lot. But he didn't look wounded. If anything, he looked amused, in the specific way people get amused when they've decided something isn't going to bother them and are mildly proud of themselves for it.

That was good. I liked Jay. I didn't want weirdness.

"So?" I prompted.

"So what?"

"You're my friend. Friends react to things."

"I reacted. I nearly inhaled my coffee."

"Emotionally."

He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "Congratulations?"

"Thank you."

"Is that what you wanted?"

"Obviously."

"I don't know. Yesterday morning you held a press conference announcing we weren't dating. By that afternoon you were making out with Danny in an empty rehearsal hall. I'm still learning the rules here."

"Different category."

"Clearly."

I kicked his shoe under the table. He kicked mine back, harder than necessary, which I chose to take as a compliment.

"So what happens now?" he asked.

"I don't know." Which was, honestly, half the fun of it.

Danny and I hadn't discussed what the kiss meant, hadn't discussed anything at all, actually. Someone had wandered into the rehearsal room about thirty seconds later and we'd sprung apart like two teenagers caught behind the gym. Then he'd smiled at me over his shoulder and said he'd text me.

He had. At eleven thirty-two that night. Tomorrow. After rehearsal. You free?

Of course I was free. That was what tomorrow was for.

"I think I'm seeing him later," I told Jay.

"Be careful."

I groaned into my coffee. "Don't."

"What?"

"That sounded responsible."

"I am responsible."

"Gross."

"I didn't say don't do it. I said be careful."

I considered that for a second, decided it cleared the bar. "Acceptable."

His smile came back, easy again. "Also, if you get fired, I'm not helping you move."

"You absolutely would."

"Probably."

"Definitely."

"Fine. But I'd complain the entire time."

"That's friendship," I said, and stole a sip of his coffee just to watch him pretend to be annoyed about it.

Danny's version of somewhere private turned out to be the rooftop patio of his building, four blocks from the theater. Of course it was. Everything in this town was six blocks from everything else, like the whole place had been built to a scale model of my life.

It was technically private in the sense that no one else was up there. It was technically not private in the sense that roughly forty apartments had windows facing directly onto it.

I mentioned this.

Danny just laughed and handed me a beer. "Relax. Half the building's still at work."

"Comforting. Only twenty potential witnesses instead of forty."

The roof itself was nicer than I expected: good outdoor furniture, string lights looped overhead, a couple of enormous planters someone was clearly paid to keep alive. I settled into the chair beside him, and for a while it was easy: the sun still high, the beer cold, Danny stretched out with his legs crossed at the ankle like he owned the whole skyline.

"How long have you been working here?" I asked.

"Third season."

"Look at you. Local celebrity."

"Basically." He smiled, and I laughed, and it should have stayed that easy.

"I almost didn't come back this year," he said.

"Why not?"

"I've been getting better offers." No hesitation on the word. Not different. Better.

"What'd you do last year?"

"Three contracts. Spring regional, here, then a tour."

"Okay, fancy."

"Tour paid like shit."

"Less fancy."

"Still brought home sixty-eight last year."

It took me a beat to catch up. "Sixty-eight thousand?"

"Yeah." His smile widened, pleased with the reaction. "I'll beat it this year. Already got another contract lined up after this one, and my agent's talking to me about a winter gig. If that comes through, I'm clearing seventy-five, maybe eighty."

"Jesus."

There was something magnetic about the certainty in it. Danny wasn't wondering whether his career would work out. He was just narrating the schedule of it happening. I took a sip of my beer and tried to look impressed instead of faintly winded.

"You have to keep moving up," he said. "Sideways gets people stuck. You take whatever sounds fun and suddenly you're thirty-five doing ensemble at some dinner theater in Ohio."

"There are worse things than dinner theater."

"Not many."

I laughed again, a half-beat slower than the first time, and he kept going: his agent, a director he'd worked with who was probably headed to Broadway, a callback he'd made it down to the final three for, how much one theater had paid for housing, how important it was to cultivate the right relationships with the right artistic directors.

I listened, mostly. Some of it was genuinely interesting. And he was, annoyingly, still very good to look at, which covered a multitude of monologues.

But twenty minutes in, I realized I hadn't said a full sentence since the sixty-eight thousand dollars.

Then Danny leaned in, close enough that I caught the shift in his attention like a change in weather. "You know what I like about you?"

Finally. "What?"

"You're ambitious. You walked in and took a role Claire thought was hers, and you don't apologize for being good at it. I like that."

Okay. That one landed. Maybe he was allowed twenty minutes of self-narration if this was where it ended up.

"Careful," I said. "Compliment me like that and I'll start thinking you're trying to seduce me."

His eyes dropped to my mouth. "I thought we'd established that."

He kissed me, and Danny kissed exactly the way he did everything else: confidently, like a man who already knew the reviews would be good. His hand found my waist and pulled me in; I set the beer down somewhere behind me before I could spill it and slid my fingers into his hair.

This was what I'd wanted. Danny. My ridiculously attractive, wildly overconfident leading man, kissing me on a rooftop in the middle of a summer contract I'd remember long after the paychecks cleared.

His phone buzzed.

He pulled back. "Sorry." Checked it. Typed something back, thumb moving fast, jaw tight with concentration.

I waited, looking out past the string lights at the rest of the skyline. The sun was still high, hours of daylight left, the lake somewhere out past the buildings, probably a dozen places in this town I still hadn't seen.

"Agent?" I guessed.

"Yeah. One second."

He finished typing, slid the phone into his pocket, and leaned back in like nothing had happened. "Sorry."

"Important?"

"Potentially."

He kissed me again. I smiled and met him halfway, because Danny was hot, and Danny wanted me, and Danny had apparently made sixty-eight thousand dollars last year, which was, on paper, an extremely impressive collection of facts.

But when his phone buzzed a second time and his hand drifted toward his pocket before he'd even finished breaking the kiss, one completely unrelated, entirely unhelpful thought floated through my head.

I wondered what Jay was doing tonight.