The rehearsals were exciting. For a nobody, like Loretta could only call herself in her head now, for otherwise Oliver would vehemently object, it was a dream come true to be included in this production – with all its ups and downs. Among the ups were definitely, finally, her upcoming Broadway debut and getting to know her son, who had turned out to be such a sweet boy that Loretta had once found herself musing over the fact that she had probably picked the best possible parents for him – the rest of the family, well, that had not been up to her. The other surprising and heavenly side to the play was Oliver with his wonder-filled eyes and sometimes unintelligible quips, with his flatteries and encouragements and, most importantly, his faith – in the play and in her. No one had ever believed in her quite like he did – so honestly and so fully. For this opportunity Loretta thought she could face just about anything.
At their core, the rehearsals would always follow the same pattern. Oliver would be all over the place, KT would be loud, Dickie would be meek, Howard would be all important, Jonathan would be patient, Kimber would be attentive and Ben would be a pain in the ass.
Their leading man, who always managed to convey just how bored and unimpressed he was with everyone else's performance, liked tinkering with anything he could get his hands on during rehearsals. The various pens and markers lying around the studio didn't entertain him for long, unlike making paper planes our of loose pages of script to throw at fellow cast members, like he had been doing for the better part of the morning, or Loretta's reading glasses.
"Wow, these are shit! How can you see anything with them?" he commented once he had snatched them from her table. He was holding her glasses up to his eyes and peering at the room through them.
This extent of audacity was made possible by a phone call about the materials for set designs, which Oliver couldn't postpone and which took him out of the rehearsal room, leaving only Dickie and Loretta there to finish reading her scene with Ben before lunch break.
"I am a caretaker of children…" Loretta continued with their scene, conveniently from the lines she had memorized long before table reads and rehearsals began. She was standing in the middle of the circle of tables around the rehearsal studio, clutching her script to her chest. She was confident that Ben wouldn't actually break her glasses, in spite of how much he seemed to enjoy making a pain out of himself, and was just having another episode of his need to play the childish bully.
Naturally, Loretta was not the only one in the cast and crew that Ben picked on, but she had a feeling that he had picked her out for special treatment – perhaps because she was the easiest one to bully. Loretta had no serious theatre career to fall back on or to show for herself, she was a no-name and a soft touch to boot. Her steadfast way of believing in the good in people had worked in her favour exactly once – with Oliver. She supposed all that was really keeping her tied to the production was Oliver's favour and a contract any half-decent lawyer could pick apart blindfolded.
"This is the dumbest shit," Ben muttered to himself while Loretta was talking about children in the nanny's care not being born of her own flesh. Ben was not observant enough to catch the timid intensity with which Loretta was staring at Dickie as she said her lines.
"Would I kill for the children in my care…" Loretta's voice trembled when she saw Ben carelessly spinning her glasses in the air by their temple.
When it was his turn, Ben nearly spat his lines at her, unintentionally making his performance the tiniest bit convincing through his irritation with his co-star.
There was a looming, uncomfortable pause before his arm twitched towards Loretta. "It's your line," Ben informed her in a tone of superiority. "What, you need Oliver to tell you your cues, too? Huh?" The aggressive urgency in his voice made her jump.
Loretta resisted rolling her eyes and with a decidedly straight face explained to him, "I can't see my lines without my glasses."
Ben huffed. "Don't you think you should have memorised them by now?"
Choosing to ignore the obvious stab at her incompetence, Loretta patiently opened up her palm, inviting Ben to return the glasses to her.
Her calmness must have annoyed Ben even further. His lips twitched haughtily and puckered with ire. His pointed eyes flicked between Loretta's open hand and her quietly demanding face and with a swift step he approached her. The glasses were shoved unceremoniously into her hand, but before Loretta could secretly rejoice at her small victory, something happened that she had not been expecting. As he retreated from her, Ben placed a heavy hand on her upper arm and gave a decidedly rough shove.
Taken by surprise, Loretta gave a weak yelp of alarm as she stumbled against the tables and was dragged to the floor. A sudden unmistakable pain in the side of her face told her she had hit her head on the corner of one of the tables. She pressed a hand to her mouth to suppress a disheartened whimper of defeat.
If Ben was taken aback by the chaos he had caused, he hid it well behind a grunting, "God, what a fucking amateur!" as he shuffled hurriedly out of the room.
Loretta reached jerkily for the, luckily, unmarred pair of glasses next to her on the floor. This was an unsettling development. Although they had not been working together long enough for Loretta to know if she should be afraid of him or not, she had learned early on to keep out of Ben's way when he was feeling mean. However, she had not thought it possible that Ben could become physically violent, in spite of his evident anger issues. A gut-wrenching panicky thought flickered through her mind – had Ben ever been violent towards his brother?
Speak of the devil – or rather, her angelic boy – Dickie was already crouching next to her. She could feel his hand on her back, steadying her. "I'm so sorry, Loretta," he said quietly. "Are you okay?"
Loretta shook the stunned daze out of her mind and turned to look at him, supporting herself with her arms. "I'm all right." She failed to disguise her miserable sniffling, but looked at Dickie with a grateful, admiring glint in her eyes. "And you didn't do anything."
"That's exactly right," admitted Dickie heavily.
Immediately sitting up straighter, Loretta's tone quickly changed to concern for her sensitive, kind boy. "No! Dickie, you can't blame yourself for him being… well, an asshole."
The sad smile didn't really reach Dickie's eyes, but he agreed, "You said it."
He offered her his hand and used his other to support her around her back to help her up from the floor. With a warm fluttering sensation Loretta realized that this was the first time Dickie had touched her, and she gently squeezed his hand with ardent appreciation.
She was still pretty much shaken up when Dickie helpfully returned her script to her hands. "Oh! Right," Loretta thanked him with a faltering smile and fumbled for her bag. "Sorry. I've gotta-"
There was innocent, sincere worry glistening in Dickie's eyes, but Loretta couldn't stay to soothe it. Pressing her possessions against her chest, she escaped before she could burst into tears of bitter embarrassment.
Oliver noticed many things about her when she entered the rehearsal studio that morning – her almost confident gait, the quick glances she sent towards each and every person in the room, her glasses dangling loosely between her fingers, the tail of her shawl trailing teasingly close to the floor behind her – and her smell. He noticed that today more specifically than he ever had before. Probably because that lovely spring-reminiscent scent had been following him around everywhere he went for the past 24 hours.
As a rule, people weren't supposed to be able to smell something any more after they'd done so for a considerable period of time, but Oliver Putnam was breaking rules today. He had found Loretta's scarf at the rehearsal studio the day before, after she had left in a hurry, and worried that the cleaning people could come and take it away and that he would never see that bewitching tone of violet on her again, and not at all because he had noticed right as he picked it up that the scarf carried its owner's singular scent, he had taken it home with him for safekeeping and brought it to work today.
Loretta was politely early, as usual. Oliver had discovered this trait of hers one morning when Charles had gotten the rehearsal times mixed up and dragged him there a half an hour too early, accidentally gifting Oliver the opportunity to survey the arrival habits of his cast. Loretta was always early, and although Oliver had gone through most of his life fighting through ridiculous side quests that always made him just the teensiest bit late, he had set his mind to always being at least a few minutes early to rehearsal this time around on the off chance he could exchange a few words with his leading lady before work.
Making immediate use of his excellent excuse to slide over to where Loretta was unpacking her script, Oliver carefully held out the precious scarf. "Here," he said gently in lieu of a greeting. "You left it here yesterday."
Loretta's pensive face immediately lit up and she accepted the scarf eagerly. "Oh! Thank you!" Hugging it to herself, she looked up at Oliver, familiar happy wrinkles appearing at the corners of her eyes. "You know, I missed this. I was looking for it all night."
Without the privilege of knowing what kind of a home Loretta lived in, Oliver's quick mind immediately painted an adorably chaotic picture of Loretta rummaging through his own colourful wardrobe.
Yes, he was braking rules today, for he was content with letting his eyes linger on Loretta's lovely features, which had only ever inspired warm, positive sensations in him. Today, however, he felt a cold pang of dread as his concerned gaze was instantly drawn to her right cheek, the telltale carefully fixed layer of concealer and powder upon it and the secret haunting shadow of a bruise she had evidently tried meticulously to cover up.
"What happened to you?"
"What?" Loretta's face fell just as quickly as it had lit up. "Did I do something wrong?"
Gathering that his leading lady had misunderstood his question as an accusation of losing her unique grasp of her character, Oliver reassured her distractedly, though sincerely, "No-no! You're perfect. I just mean." He nodded, glancing pointedly at what he was by now certain was a bruise and not a cruel trick of the light. "That looks fresh. And I say that both as a professional at recognizing layers upon layers of stage make-up and as someone who saw you only yesterday."
Loretta's brow puckered slightly with confusion but her honest eyes brimmed with guilty comprehension. "I don't understand what you m-"
"Who did this to you?" Oliver demanded gently, and brought up his hand to hover over her cheek, his fingertips almost brushing her cheekbone.
Oliver found it incredibly suggestive how Loretta sometimes forgot her mouth open in surprise. "I thought I covered it up," she gasped, absently lifting her hand to the spot. She hadn't registered that her director had also reached out to her, and as a result gently, momentarily pressed his hand against her cheek.
They jumped apart almost instantly, both with pain – on Loretta's part it must have been physical, and on Oliver's it was the ache of guilt. Quietly and with a serious glimmer of sympathy in his eyes, Oliver replied, "Not quite."
After allowing Loretta a moment to compose herself, he laid his hands softly on her arms in a supportive gesture and asked, "Now, Loretta, I need to know. Are you in some kind of trouble?"
In point of fact, Oliver didn't know all that much about Loretta outside of how talented she was – outside of how ardently he adored her talent. For all he knew she could easily have belonged to a criminal organization or something of the kind, although, if she had, she would certainly have been there against her tenderly well-meaning will. Oliver decided he was getting too fixated on crime for his own good.
"What? Oh, no," Loretta wiped out all of his ideas of gangsters' vendettas, run-ins with loan sharks and even domestic violence with a dismissive, cheerless chuckle. "It's just… It's so embarrassing. I-I was just- I was mugged yesterday."
Oliver's hands fell away just as his mouth fell open.
"It's nothing serious, they didn't get much," Loretta was quick to reassure him, lowering her voice. "And I just… Well, I bruise easily."
He should have known that. She was the most delicate creature he had ever known. At times, when she was caught frozen in a touching moment and her eyes were glossy with tears, she looked like a delicate, frail flower, taken hostage by an unexpected frost and liable to break into thousands of tiny smithereens at the slightest gust of wind. It made perfect sense that she would have to be handled with care.
"I'm so sorry," Oliver muttered, feeling equally miserable and uncomfortable about digging up such an unpleasant memory for Loretta. His eyes anxiously scanned what he could see of her skin for any more marks. "Are you okay to participate today?"
"Oh, of course," Loretta brushed off his worry. "I'm just fine, don't worry about me." She appeared both forlorn and undeniably alive – flickering between the two, she remained a persistent mystery to him.
"You'd tell me if there was something wrong, right?" Oliver prodded carefully, locking his gaze with Loretta's.
The earnest glimmer in her pale eyes faltered and she averted her gaze. She saw the Glenroys entering. "Yeah. Of course," she said distractedly, and frankly, unconvincingly.
But Oliver was not given the opportunity to elaborate on the idea because their young producer had skipped over to them and assumed a familiar position next to them, with his one arm around either of their shoulders.
"Hello, you fabulous people!"
"Cliff! What?" Oliver acknowledged the boy and scanned the room quickly. Surprisingly, Donna was nowhere to be seen. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh, I know I have absolutely nothing to do here, but I couldn't stay away. I wanna see the action!" Cliff giggled with bubbling excitement, which dimmed compassionately when he noticed that Loretta was looking as if she didn't want to see any more action.