Love, Lust, and Jealousy.
It's a story Cora knows all too well - not because it's her own, but that of her character in Illicit Affairs, the murderous romance that's about to take Broadway by storm. It's her crowning achievement, her pride and joy...
Cora was wrong. Rasmus hadn't been mean for his entire life, just most of it.
Which, of course, directly corresponded to the first time his dad hit him.
Had that moment come when he was older, everything might have played out a lot differently. But he was just six at the time, much too young to understand any of it.
It started with a mistake. He didn't mean to do it; he was just playing with his action figures. He was running around with his Buzz Lightyear after dinner, pretending that he was flying alongside him, when he cut a corner too close and bumped into his mom's credenza. Her favorite flower vase went toppling to the floor and shattered.
It didn't take his dad storming into the room, red-faced with anger, for Rasmus to know that he was in trouble—he'd figured that out from the moment he saw the mess of broken glass on their hardwood floor. But he didn't know what that stuff Dad had been drinking was or that sometimes it made people behave differently than they would otherwise.
And afterward, as he ran and shut himself in his bedroom, he still didn't grasp that what just happened wasn't normal, that it wasn't something all parents did to punish their kids. That part wouldn't dawn on him until much later, and by that point, he had a much bigger problem: he wouldn't be the only child Dad could take his anger out on anymore.
He crawled under his blankets that night with a face covered in sticky tears and a stinging, ugly red mark on his cheek. Mom never came to check on him.
It was the first time he ever went to bed without one of his parents tucking him in.
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Rasmus had planned to sleep in on their day off, the day before they started previews, but his phone started ringing at 8:30. And it was Ava. Sitting up, he rubbed his sleepy eyes with one hand and answered the phone with the other.
"I'm sorry," she immediately said once he picked up. "I know it's early."
He had to cover his mouth to conceal a yawn. "It's okay. What's up?"
"Do you, um..." his sister was quiet for a second. "Do you know how to make an omelet?"
He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. His brain tried to piece together what was going on. "Is Mom not home?"
"No, she went to breakfast with her friends. You know how she is."
Rasmus did, in fact, know how she was. Lorraine was a housewife and a socialite who had nothing better to do than go drink mimosas and gossip on a Monday morning.
But they technically had two parents, though he'd stopped thinking of them as such a while ago. They'd started feeling less like parents and more like two adults that he just happened to live with. He treaded forward carefully, trying to get to the bottom of why neither of them felt like taking care of his sister today.
"...And Dad didn't make anything before he went to work?"
He heard her quiet sigh from the other end of the line. "No, I think he's probably a little hungover. He made some bacon and scarfed it all down in thirty seconds without talking to me."
