Chapter 9: The Alley

Forty phones turned from Lenore to me.

I could feel them. Little black eyes, all of them recording.

The girl from Baltimore had stopped signing. The pen was still in her hand.

Lenore lifted her chin. She'd done her lipstick for this.

I thought about all the things I could say.

I thought about the wig room, and the girl on the floor with her knees up, and the screaming that followed.

"Lenore," I said. "I'm not sleeping with anybody. You're the one who did that on my wedding day, in a live mic."

Somebody in the crowd said, "Ohhh."

Somebody else laughed out loud.

Lenore's face went red under the streetlight.

I turned away from her. I didn't want to look at her anymore.

I turned to Ward.

He was standing on the stage-door step behind me in his overcoat, his hands in his pockets, very still.

Every phone in the alley followed my eyes to him.

"Mr. Stanton," somebody shouted. "Is it true? Are you sleeping with her?"

"Isn't there a rule?" somebody else shouted. "Isn't there a rule in your contracts?"

Ward came down the step.

"There is," he said. "I wrote it nineteen years ago. Everybody in my company knows it."

He stopped in front of me.

"The producer never touches anyone in his company," he said. "It's my rule."

He looked down at me. His eyes were very dark.

"So it's mine to break."

"Ward," I said. "There are forty phones."

"I can count."

"We're outside the theater."

"That's why I waited till we got out here."

He took my face in his hands.

He kissed me in the stage-door alley of the Stanton, in front of everyone.

It wasn't polite. It wasn't a kiss for the cameras.

He kissed me, like he'd decided and there was no going back from it.

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