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...
All this time, she'd managed to keep her cool onstage no matter how horrendous she felt when she was off of it. Through every little interaction with Rasmus, through every argument—nothing had stopped her from doing her job and doing it well.
But now that Sunday had happened, she was losing it. She was nervous. Nervous about holding him, kissing him, letting him undo her dress even though they'd choreographed it so precisely and performed it so many times by now that it was practically robotic.
She felt a bead of sweat trickle down the back of her neck and disappear into the ocean of fabric that was her gown. Rasmus was close enough to her that she could hear the faint sound of his breathing, and it was somehow the only noise that touched her ears even though there were a thousand other people out there in the shadows in the room. His eyes, partially concealed by long lashes, were watching her lips.
Her hands trembled slightly as she placed them on his shoulders. She opened her mouth to speak.
And the words that had been at the tip of her tongue suddenly died on her lips. Nothing came out.
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Cora ran offstage the second the curtain had fallen for intermission, silently cursing at herself all the way back to her dressing room for fumbling her line. How had she just forgotten it? This damn script was drilled so deep into her head that she could have recited it in her dreams.
Even the very first time she had to kiss him in rehearsals—long, long before she was used to having to get up close and personal with him—she hadn't messed up her lines before or after the fact. She'd been panicking on the inside, of course, but on the outside, she was made of steel. Her last line of defense had been to not let anyone else see the effect he had on her.
Why did she have to bend under the pressure now, when their audiences were more packed than they'd ever been because of their Tonys win? They were probably out there murmuring amongst themselves about her at this very moment, breezily gossipping about her performance as if she were only a spectacle and not a human being.
She should have just brushed it off, moved on. People messed up all the time. But her whole body still felt shaky as she entered her dressing room and the thought of going out there and doing another whole act with him made her want to cry.
Anais was already waiting there to help her get freshened up for Act Two. Cora started the act in the same gown that she'd been wearing for the first, but her undergarments and sweat pads always got swapped out during intermission so that she didn't have to stand there bathing in her own sweat for two hours straight. She was quiet while getting laced back into her dress.
"Are you alright?" Anais asked as she tied off the ribbons.
"Yeah," Cora lied. "I'm fine."
When she saw her dresser's small frown at that lackluster response, she added, "I don't really want to talk about it."
