Cora finally cracked.
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.
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."
Thankfully, Anais didn't push her. She simply nodded. "If you ever decide that you do, I'm here."
"Thank you."
Anais had costume changes down to a fine science, so it typically only took her a few minutes to get Cora ready between acts. That gave her the remaining ten or so minutes of intermission to do whatever she felt like she needed to do to have a successful remainder of her show, which was usually to touch up her makeup and drink a ton of water. But today, it took significant effort to keep her hand steady as she lightly applied some extra blush onto her cheeks. When she clumsily set the brush down, she nearly jumped at the sound of its plastic handle rattling against the vanity.
Breathe, Cora.
Maybe she would have been better off asking Anais to stay here and calm her down. She was still carrying the thought with her when there was a knock on the door, so she chirped back, "Yeah?"
That was her first mistake in what would pan out to be a sequence of several. It was Rasmus, not Anais, who opened the door and slipped inside before letting it quietly shut behind him.
"Out."
He ignored her demand. "Are you okay?"
Cora had to fight against every cell in her body not to look down at the ground in frustration and embarrassment, but she didn't want to look any weaker than she already did. "Did I stutter? I don't want to talk to you."
"But I think we need to."
"We don't have time for this," she said stiffly, but she knew even as the words came out of her mouth that he wasn't going to accept a flat no as an answer; she was going to have to negotiate with him. "Not right now. If you'll kindly get the hell out of my dressing room, I might—might—consider hearing you out later."
Rasmus crossed his arms, dissatisfied with her offer. Accusingly, he asked, "Are you gonna be fine for Act Two?"
That was the last thing she wanted to hear. She was already boiling, her anger brimming dangerously close to the point of exploding out of her.
"I said get away from me!"
She'd risen to her feet as she said it, but it nearly came out as more of a cry than a shout. She lifted a hand to her mouth, pressing it there to hold back the sob rising in her throat. Just looking at him was making her flush from her cheeks all the way down to her chest with shame—shame for screwing up onstage, shame for kissing him, shame for breaking apart like this while he was clearly perfectly fine.
What he was, however, was what appeared to be genuinely startled by her outburst. Cora didn't know how that could possibly be. All she knew was that her teeth were digging into the inside of her cheek as he came over to her and gently placed his hands on her shoulders as if to comfort her. She miraculously didn't flinch, but she was hyper-aware of each of the ten little spots where his fingertips touched her.
"Is there anything I can do," he asked in a quiet voice. "That will make you feel better instead of worse?"
She could have scoffed—could he not have asked that question ten, twelve years ago?—and yet it was also eerie to hear him say it, like the world as she knew it had been turned on its head. The room felt more still than it had a moment before.
"For starters," she suggested sweetly. "You can get your fucking hands off of me."
"Okay, okay." He lifted them, fingers splayed in a stance of surrender.
But he didn't back away yet. And Cora, too, was unmoving. She just stared at him, wondering if there would ever come a day where she could look at his face and not feel so much. She wasn't asking for a miracle–she wasn't asking to feel nothing—just not to feel like her insides were constantly splintering apart in frustration.
"Why?" she whispered, so feebly that she wasn't even sure he could hear her. "Why did you have to do it?"
His expression became more strained, as if he were in physical pain. "I don't know."
"Dammit, Rasmus."
Enough was enough. He might have insisted on staying here, but that didn't mean she had to put up with him if he wasn't going to give her an answer. Cora turned and made a beeline for her bathroom, intending to shut herself in there for the few minutes that remained before she'd transform back into his wife. But he saw what she was doing and somehow beat her there, sliding his body between her and the door and pressing his back against it so that she couldn't pull on the knob without getting through him first.
"Cora, you're gonna have to face me eventually." Even as a small, victorious smile pulled at his lips, his voice was melancholy, as if he wished there was a chance it wasn't true.
In spite of how he tried to hide it behind that smirk, his expression was as grim as a thundercloud. But Cora—she was burning, every inch of her body smoldering. In an outburst of resentment, she slammed her fist against the door by his ear.
For a fraction of a second, they were both silent. Cora's fingers were digging into her palm, her chest rising and falling as her breath stuttered in and out of her lungs. Rasmus had stiffened when she pounded her hand against the wood, but he didn't break his eyes off of her. His were completely and utterly unreadable.
"Don't you get it?" she cried. "All I've been able to think about is you."
She pressed her mouth against his, dying to get the taste of him on her lips and the sight of him out of her mind. A small noise hummed from the back of his throat as he kissed her back and drew her body flush against his, filling her with equal parts pleasure and annoyance. She had believed she was giving herself the final word by doing this, but she no longer felt in control of her own body as her lips came back to his again and again with increasing urgency. His fingers somehow crawled into the tiny gaps between the ribbons that Anais had just tied up so neatly, sending a shockwave of goosebumps rolling down her spine. He was gripping at her corset, one layer closer to her bare back than he'd been a moment before.
Shit, she thought. In that microscopic moment between when she'd decided to kiss him and when she did it, she'd prayed that doing this while in costume might make it feel more like she was just kissing his character again. But this was all Cora and Rasmus, their stage personas stripped away as easily as a discarded article of clothing. Isla and Theo already knew their way around each other; they didn't hold on to one another with this wild, unfamiliar desperation.
"Actors, this is your five-minute call," their stage manager's voice suddenly sounded over the intercom system. "Actors, this is your five-minute call."
She yanked back from Rasmus. His expression had morphed back into a sharp mask, any trace of concern for her that he might have been hiding inside of him now wiped from his eyes. And she felt it inside her, too—the coldness. Physical desire was never going to change what they were:
Too far gone to ever be saved.
Another step back. "Just practicing for Act Two?" she asked.
In what felt like a split second, he was already halfway to the door. "Just practicing for Act Two."
Anais didn't know what had thrown Cora's mood off so much today, but it didn't sit quite right with her to just leave her there feeling so glum. So when she brought the bag of garments upstairs to the costume shop to be washed and saw that someone had left out a pot of coffee for anyone who wanted some, she decided to bring a small cup of it to Cora in case she could use something to lift her spirits. A puff of steam rose from the styrofoam cup as Anais filled it halfway.
Knowing that they were on a time crunch, she scurried back down to the dressing room as quickly as she was capable of without sloshing hot coffee onto her hand. With her free hand, she started to crack the door—
And nearly dropped the cup. Cora wasn't alone. Rasmus was with her, pinned between her body and the door to the bathroom as if they'd been in the midst of a heated argument and she'd trapped him there to force him to look at her. But they definitely weren't looking at each other—they were kissing each other. Feverishly.
Anais shut the door as quietly yet quickly as possible, her feet immediately carrying her away from the scene of the crime and back in the direction she came. Oh my God.
Okay, yes—there had always been glaring sexual tension between those two that only they seemed not to notice, but with how clear they made it to her from day one that they vehemently hated each other, she'd never expected that they would act on it. And definitely not at work.
She realized only right then that Cora had never texted her to tell her all about the Tonys, which begged the question: What the hell had gone down on Sunday night?
It put an uncomfortable feeling in Anais' stomach. She adored Cora, so the last thing she wanted to see was her getting hurt. And Anais herself had learned the hard way that you had to be very careful with who you allowed yourself to fall for.
Her last love was a co-worker, one of the higher-ups in the wardrobe department at the last Broadway show she worked on. But when things went downhill in their relationship, he found a way to get her pushed out of the show. The official reason for her termination had been listed as "failure to cooperate and collaborate with her fellow crew members," but she knew way better than to believe for a second that anyone besides him had ever submitted a complaint about her.
Job openings on Broadway were so few and far between—especially when someone had you on their no hire list—that she'd spent the past three years since then moving all over the Northeast for work. She'd barely gotten to see any of her family, her friends. She'd been on the brink of giving up this career for good when she was finally offered the job at Illicit Affairs, so when the cast showed up for their first day of tech rehearsals and the girl she was dressing loathed her male co-star, Anais had instantly been concerned. Much more concerned than she ever let on.
It was also why she hated herself for this stupid little crush on Gideon. She was not letting herself walk right back into the situation she'd just spent years digging herself out of. It hardly made a difference that he wasn't her superior this time because she'd already made her choice. A choice to live by the code that there were only two categories of relationships that your co-workers were allowed to fall under: acquaintance or friend. Not lover, not enemy.
The thought that Cora might be starting to slide down the slippery slope of letting Rasmus North be both of those to her was nearly enough to make Anais run back there and yell at that boy to stay far, far away from her.