Feeling a little bit like a burglar as she wandered backstage in the lifeless theatre, Loretta crept down the stairs leading to the dressing rooms. The whole building was uncannily silent, although she knew for a fact that almost everyone in the cast and crew were around, tinkering with something insignificant just to pass the time as they awaited for their fate to be decided by their bosses. Oliver had been negotiating—or sweet-talking, most likely—with the DeMeos for four days now, and everyone was waiting for the results with baited breath.
Loretta had been texting Oliver faithfully every hour during the day ever since they made their pact. It had quickly turned into quite a delightful habit—and something to look forward to during the days she was expected to take things easy and stay at home. It was only today, after she had sworn that she was no longer plagued by unexpected bouts of dizziness, that Oliver had allowed her back to the theatre to return her costume and gather some of her things. She had texted him about her arrival but Oliver was, apparently, otherwise occupied and had yet to see the message.
With her luck Loretta was not even surprised that the only person she did run into on her way to the wardrobe department was the colleague who had escaped death on opening night just as narrowly as she had. She faltered, but only slightly, when their eyes met across the length of the backstage corridor.
"Ben," Loretta addressed her co-star, propping the garment bag she was carrying against her hip as she unconsciously made the decision to stay and exchange a few words with the man. "How are you feeling?"
"What's it to you?" Ben retorted sharply, swaggering over to her. He looked older than the last time she had seen him, and not because his stage make-up had been all that flattering—his run-in with death must have really shaken him up.
Loretta couldn't understand his impatience. Granted, everyone was a little bit on edge concerning the future of their play, and Ben had always been quick to take everything personally. When it came to her, however, Ben had taken on an inexplicable attitude of malice early on in the production. Loretta had hoped she could avoid further conflicts with him; and she'd have thought the outcome of their fight would have startled the man, at least, into keeping his distance.
Taken aback when the actor walked straight over to her, even too close for comfort, Loretta added innocently, "I mean, I heard what happened to you. It must have been…" An empathic shudder overtook her briefly. "Awful."
"Yeah? Well, guess what? It was," Ben snarled venomously. "Worst fucking night of my life. Thanks so much."
Loretta twitched backwards. Ben's attacking tone confused her, especially since Dickie had made up with him since opening night and, therefore, Ben no longer had any reason to be mad at her. "I'm sorry that that happened to you," she said slowly, trying to sidestep his irritation.
Ben's annoyed eye-roll was emphasized by his whole body giving an abrupt arrogant shrug. "Oh- Oh, you-," he struggled to find calm words, his limbs twitching restlessly, before he snapped. "You desperate bitch!"
"What?" Loretta squeaked, terrified, when Ben lunged at her. She dropped the garment bag with her costume when he grabbed her by the collar of her blouse and pinned her against the wall behind her. Her first instinct was to make herself as small as possible in his grip, so Loretta pulled her head between her shoulders, her chin brushing against the iron hands tangled at her neckline.
"You thought you could just kill me?" Ben demanded, his hot breath hitting her face. There was a startling note of earnest misery flickering somewhere in the harsh cracks of his voice, and it was not lost on Loretta.
Staring with open anguish into Ben's dark, furious eyes, she protested, "I didn't-"
Ben's large hand moved to squeeze her bruised shoulder, coaxing out an unguarded whine.
"You manipulative cow!" Ben taunted, unaffected by Loretta pressing her good hand up against his chest to keep him at bay. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just call the cops on you now! Huh! Go on!"
"Stop that!" Loretta whimpered miserably when Ben grabbed her by the arms, to shake her, putting unwelcome pressure on her ill shoulder. Reanimated jolts of searing pain shot through her torso, stealing her breath and diminishing her response to a thin sob for when she tried to give voice to her confusion. "Please, I didn't do anything to-"
Her innocent claim was cut off once again when, having heard the commotion, Charles barged out of his dressing room, tall and clumsy, but intimidatingly so. "Ben!" he reacted with appalled alarm and sprang forward to seize the younger actor from behind. "What the hell are you doing?"
Ben's grip didn't falter even when Charles dragged him back by the arms, and with a jolt he yanked Loretta along. They were dragged apart a moment later, however, when Loretta, too, felt two dainty hands at her waist, ushering her away towards the stairs—and their owner was gasping, "Oh my God! Come here, honey."
Kimber had rushed out of her opposing dressing room, and the two of them stumbled over Loretta's costume during their retreat. From the distance she was dragged to Loretta could see past Ben, who was struggling in Charles's grasp, and her heart sank at the sight of Oliver standing behind them.
She hadn't meant for Oliver to see her like this. She didn't want him to think of her as some sort of a weakling, who could be tossed around and intimidated, and even though he appeared to have taken on his duties as her guardian with eager devotion, Loretta hadn't meant to add to Oliver's stress.
With Charles it was different, because he was already her ally, so to speak. He had been there when Ben had picked on her in rehearsal, always when Oliver had his back turned, because Ben thought nothing of his colleagues and their prying eyes were not perceived as a threat. Even Kimber had been there to witness Ben pulling on her braid once.
Charles's protectiveness was unassuming, instinctive, like that of an older brother. Loretta still couldn't figure out if he was being kind to her simply out of the pureness of his heart or if this was also his way of playing wingman for his friend—it didn't matter either way. She hadn't found a way yet to express her gratitude for Charles's sympathetic, watchful eye and encouraging, although awkward words after Ben's tantrums, but she appreciated his support immensely.
"You think you can just go around poisoning people?" Ben continued his tirade, thrashing in Charles's arms. His glare pierced through Loretta as if he were still in her face and his irate movements made her jump in response. "Well, fuck you! And rat poison?" Loretta listened in horror at the clipped, aghast account of Ben's ordeal and a twitch of compassion rippled through her mind. "That's disgusting!"
"I didn't- I didn't poison you!" Loretta insisted, appalled at the accusation.
Jerking himself free, Ben scoffed at Charles, "Get your fucking-"
"Now, listen here, Ben," Oliver jumped in as he stepped up to Ben. Even though the actor hadn't made a move to approach her again, Oliver positioned himself between Ben and Loretta, and the jerky restlessness in the gestures that always accompanied his speech betrayed that he was ready to tackle the younger man at any moment. "If you think somebody poisoned you, you take that up with the police. In the meantime, if you so much as lay another finger on Loretta, you're going to bitterly regret the day you ever joined this cast. You hear me?"
"Yeah, all right." Clearly still wound up but cooled off enough to shrug indifferently at Oliver's menacing tone, Ben turned to strut away. "Fuck if I care."
As everyone else watched him retreat to his dressing room, shaking their head in equal dismay and disapproval, Loretta quickly pulled herself together. She had to make her escape before Oliver could get to her and start interrogating her. Even though he would have done so with the best of intentions in mind, Loretta didn't feel ready yet to explain. Her heart was still racing in her chest as she went to gather up her garment bag, impeccably skilled at hiding herself in plain sight.
"Are you okay, sweetie?" Kimber only spotted her as she was trying to make her swift exit through the door to the crossover passageway below the stage.
"I gotta get this to Goldie," Loretta muttered distractedly, pushing through the doors and hoping no one would follow her, so that she could discreetly catch her breath outside the wardrobe department, cradle her sore arm and figure out the most likely route back to her dressing room that would allow her to avoid running into Ben again.
Oliver wouldn't have said he had stalked her through the theatre, but when Loretta's hourly text came, saying, simply, that he could stop hiding behind the piano now, he did experience a sobering stab of self-consciousness. He watched Loretta sigh as she put away her phone, before he approached her from the shadows with a little, comically drawled, "Hello-o."
Loretta's gaze swept the air in Oliver's general direction but she didn't look at him, not even when Oliver sat across from her, on a road case that he steered close enough that their knees were touching. Wrapped in a silvery blue shawl that made her blend maddeningly into one with the park bench from their play that had been moved off the stage to the wings, Loretta looked drawn, and when Oliver spoke to her, the armrest of the bench she was sitting on earned her keen attention.
"Can I ask you something?" Oliver said, trying in vain to catch Loretta's gaze. "What's going on between you and Ben?"
Loretta performed an evasive shrug. "Nothing's going on," she replied with soft defiance.
Oliver paused to see if Loretta would reconsider and take back her so obvious lie. "He was hurting you. Just now, downstairs," he pointed out when no such miracle seemed about to happen. Instead, Loretta turned her face away with stubborn nonchalance. No doubt she would have transformed into a splinter of the mute white wood of the bench if she could have. Oliver knew that in order to get to the bottom of the situation, he had to contain both his anger with Ben and his fervent concern for Loretta, to force his emotional attachment to take the backseat and let the director in Oliver Putnam take the wheel.
"I'm really- I'm at a loss, 'cause normally I have a very vivid imagination. But I just can't imagine what could have made him hate you like that." Oliver considered her lengthily, assessing the persistent, stoic facade that Loretta had crafted for herself and felt at home in and comparing it to the frailty of the woman beneath. "How could anybody hate you?" he added tenderly.
"You heard him," Loretta replied with a thin note of absurd contentment ringing in her voice. "He thinks that I poisoned him."
"But he hadn't been poisoned yet when he pushed you off the lighthouse."
Loretta's lips parted in surprise at Oliver's direct approach. She had clearly been hoping that this truth would not reach him, and Oliver wondered for the umpteenth time this morning how much of what had been going on during his production had escaped his notice. Charles had been evasive but incredibly well informed about Ben's dubious exploits, including, as it turned out, a fair number of small-scale conflicts with Loretta—which Oliver hadn't had any idea about.
Clinging to her innocent lie, her eyes darting sideways for possible onlookers, Loretta asked, "Who told you he-"
"He did, didn't he?" Oliver demanded, although he had meant to be kind.
Loretta didn't seem to mind his tone—it was as if she hadn't even noticed it. She appeared more preoccupied with chewing on her admission, reluctant to let it out. Adamantly Oliver held the tension, trapping his star with his unrelenting gaze, and the question remained present in the insistently still silence between them.
"We had a fight," Loretta finally surrendered, and Oliver's enthusiasm faltered. Against all odds, he had still been hoping that Charles could have been wrong both about Ben's behaviour in general and about the incident on opening night. Watching his star's face flush with recalled shame, Oliver felt awful. He had promised, in his own way, to protect her from all harm, and allowing Loretta back to the theatre, where she could run into Ben, felt like the most heinous act of betrayal.
"Why didn't you say anything?" he wondered in a voice heavy with despair. "He could have killed you."
"Oh, Oliver…" Loretta rolled her eyes with unconvincing calmness, trying to brush off the gravity she had to have been fully aware of.
"You know I'm right."
There was a painful beat of hesitation before something broke inside Loretta. The strong mask fell away, unveiling a tragically wounded expression of tremulous anguish. It was a look that told Oliver, beyond any doubt, that she hadn't been feeling safe and that she had been mistreated to an extent she could not cope with on her own.
"So… Why did he do it?" Oliver needed to know, as he swallowed the overwhelming feeling of guilt that had crept up to him. "What were you fighting about?"
Loretta sank back against the park bench, folding herself more tightly into her shawl, but she was no longer hiding her eyes from him. "He accused me of trying to steal Dickie from him," she explained with unflinching candidness. For a moment Oliver thought he had misheard her or that perhaps this was yet another, even more dedicated attempt at evasiveness, but the resigned passivity in Loretta's gaze made him reconsider. She must have realized he would be knocking on Ben's door next if she didn't tell him the truth now. "Dickie quit that night, just before… And Ben blamed me."
"But that's ridiculous," Oliver argued against the most preposterous motive possible, despite the fact that he was immensely relieved about Loretta having no reasonable blame whatsoever in what had been going on. "Why would that be your fault?"
"I did encourage him," Loretta admitted placatingly. "But only because Dickie looked so unhappy with him. I didn't mean to… stir up any trouble."
His heart threatening to burst at the meek regret with which Loretta finished her confession, Oliver considered her with fond sympathy. "Of course not," he said softly, accepting her story in all its bizarre simplicity.
Oliver promptly recognized his chance to step out of his professional role once again and reached out to clasp Loretta's hand, only to have to draw his hand back without it ever having reached its destination, because, as it turned out, one was never really alone in the theatre.
"Hey, girl!" Cliff called out to Loretta, eyes aglitter and cheeks flushed with excitement, as he flounced up to them. "What's this I hear from Kimber about Ben going off on you?"
Fuelled by a vigorous feeling of acute injustice, Oliver let his considerate fatherly calm be thrown aside by Cliff's animated tone. "Oh, it was outrageous!" he declared, ready to gossip.
"But I'm all right and that's really all there is to it," Loretta quickly interjected, straightening up and putting on what might have passed for a charming smile if Oliver hadn't known it was a ruse.
"Okay…" Cliff drawled, stunned but willing to drop the case since he would be hearing all about it soon enough. "Well, mom's on her way over and she wants all the details."
Oliver watched as a flash of alarm started from a spark of some kind of realization behind Loretta's eyes and set off a quick chain reaction in her whole body—she jumped. "No-no! It's all fine. Ben and me—we're fine," she protested, a thin note of panic fluttering through her voice. "There's really no need for Donna to-"
"Ben pushed her off the lighthouse and now he thinks she tried to poison him," Oliver burst out pointedly, but the triumphant feeling of revealing this screaming villainy was tarnished when he noticed how Loretta shrank back, just a tad, her lips strained but quivering. Her shoulders dropped so faintly that she almost managed to disguise it as part of the agitated rising and falling of her chest, but Oliver detected it anyway.
While Cliff hid behind his phone and Loretta chewed on her lower lip in an unintentionally, agonizingly fetching manner, Oliver pondered the conundrum of why Loretta would allow or want this dreadful injustice against her to go unnoticed. He couldn't comprehend it, and at the same time he felt as if he had done something wrong, as if he had failed her somehow and betrayed a secret trust he hadn't even defined yet for himself.
When their other, indisputably leading producer eventually showed up, her purposeful heels clacking all the way across the empty stage, the tension between the colleagues jointly feeling like children about to be told off culminated—and was abruptly dissolved when she spoke.
"Oliver." Donna's voice was clipped but not exactly displeased. "Cliff tells me you're having trouble keeping your cast under control."
Feeling a compulsion to stand in her sobering presence, Oliver straightened up with a self-conscious snort of guilt.
Donna didn't wait around for him to explain the backstage drama. "You boys run along and find the older Glenroy," she instructed, sweeping past the director and confidently taking his seat. "I want to see him, in something as closely resembling an office as possible in this accursed building."
In spite of her adamant demand that immediately sent Oliver and Cliff on a search for the man in question in two different directions, when Donna turned to Loretta, all the resolution was wiped from her face, and she appeared open and calm, warm even.
"Now, dear. I want you to tell me about Ben."
As far as he was concerned, Oliver would have told Donna absolutely anything if she had spoken to him in that tone. And when he looked back at the pair of women from the door to the stairway, he was stunned to see Loretta already opening up to her. Oliver was constantly impressed with the producer for, somehow, always knowing the right way to treat every single person in her cast to get the result she was looking for. It must have been that famous mother's instinct or something.
Oliver turned to head on his quest with an incredibly assured lightness in his chest, knowing that for now he could leave both Loretta and the fate of their show in Donna's hands. She was fierce but she was fair.
As the men involved piled into the theatre manager's artistically cluttered office, pushing aside hatstands and stumbling over misplaced footlights, Donna kept tapping at her phone, aggressively and aimlessly swiping from one app to another without looking at any of them. It took all the skill she had in her to disguise the ecstatic leap she was about to take at the chance to be rid of their incompetent leading man now that she knew he had been violent towards his colleague—twice. It wasn't often that fate leant a helping hand to producing, but Donna was not about to turn up her nose at it.
This way she would be killing two birds with one stone and saving both the production and, as it would happen, Loretta. She was entirely prepared to threaten legal action on Loretta's part if Ben wouldn't let them end his contract, because while his poor acting and general knack for being a nuisance weren't enough to fire him, Donna would not stand for any woman in her cast being knocked about.
Even though it was really Oliver who was supposed to be in charge and notwithstanding the conditions that had sent Ben to the hospital on opening night, a twinge of guilt pulsed through her at the thought that such atrocities could take place in her—or rather, Cliff's, of course—production. The appalled sympathy with which she had listened to Loretta's side of the story resurfaced each time she let her gaze wander to the actress sitting perched on top of an old oak chest, containing, probably, relics from old Shakespearean productions.
Oliver was invited to join her there with a fondly permitting shrugging gesture and by Loretta pushing aside a pile of sheet music. The papers made a rustling thump as they slipped behind the chest and sent a faint cloud of dust up into the air, but Oliver soothed Loretta's instant apologetic regret by claiming that the theatre manager—an old friend—couldn't play a decent accompaniment if his life depended on it. The pair of them giggled, heads tilted towards one another, and Donna got the irritating impression that there was something else she didn't know about her company this time around. Perhaps she really was starting to slip.
She couldn't allow herself to permanently mess up her last and Cliff's fist production, so when Dickie Glenroy was ushered into the office, it didn't take her long to get to the point.
"We're making some changes to the cast and I'm afraid Ben has to go," was her final conclusion after a deceivingly soft welcome. "We're looking for a new star."
If the manager was surprised, he was at least professional enough to hide the fact, for he stood his ground with admirable confidence. "I'm afraid that's not up for negotiation," he replied, the corners of his mouth twitching into something of an incredulous wavering smile, doubting, perhaps, that the purpose of this gathering was really as indisputable as it appeared. "These two deals mean a lot to Ben."
"Two deals?" Cliff piped up.
"The play and the documentary," Dickie explained. "I mean, if he lost the play, he would lose the documentary, too."
"Well, then I'm afraid Ben has just turned himself into a world-class loser because we want him out." Donna frowned and rephrased that. "He is out."
"But this is Ben's big Broadway debut," Dickie was adamant, speaking over the uncertain noises that Oliver was making at the discouraging loss of all the work he had been doing with Ben. "He has been working very hard on his performance. I can't let his name be sullied by letting him be recast. Ben would be devastated."
"Well, he should have thought of that before he shoved his co-star off the top of that lighthouse," Donna retorted casually, pushing back the impatient urge to tell the man himself what she thought of his ways of treating women.
Someone had to keep a cool head in this production. It most certainly would not be the extravagant kaleidoscope of emotions that their director was, and since Cliff's foot was already tapping to a suspiciously familiar rhythm, she had to solve the situation quickly and efficiently to avoid that little restless tapping from turning into a disturbing mute dance number.
"What?" Dickie asked weakly, put on the spot but apparently still unenlightened. This was the first time that he looked at Loretta since he arrived, and a release of some sort of tension took place in his posture when he considered her.
"Yeah, Dickie," Oliver said slowly. His scandalized fire had burned out and in its place was a deflated despondency. "It turns out that what happened to Loretta, uh, that wasn't exactly what you'd call an accident."
"I'm sure it was," Loretta put in soothingly, never one to want to cause trouble, the dear novice. "In a way."
It was almost as if she didn't want Ben to be dismissed, in spite of his inexcusable conduct. Donna would have thought Loretta knew her own worth better than that, but then again during the few rehearsals that the producer had visited Loretta had shown herself to be an incredibly humble woman. Someone else had to stand up for her if she wouldn't do it herself, and their play would greatly benefit.
"The point is that we can't have Ben working with Loretta, not after the way he attacked her this morning," Donna summarized, barely containing the relieved elation that she could not reveal.
His eyes widening with alarm, Dickie staggered as he turned to Loretta and in a soft voice inquired, "What did he do to you?"
He looked a little lost when Loretta shook her head, refusing to recount the incident again. But Donna was left with no doubt that the manager would ask her again, in private most likely, seeing as the older Glenroy seemed accustomed to repenting in his brother's stead.
"Well, I'll- I'll have to talk to Ben- about this," Dickie stammered, as if he had any reason to feel guilty. Donna would have imagined that by now the man had grown immune to feeling ashamed for his brother's arrogance. "Would you give me a minute?"
Loretta excused herself soon after Dickie left, claiming she had things to wrap up in her dressing room. It was most likely that she didn't want to be there for the confrontation that would inevitably take place between Ben and his employers as soon as his brother told him about their decision.
"And while we're looking for a new detective, do something about the play," Donna snapped, halting Oliver who had stood up to follow the actress. While Ben might have been the weakest link of the show, it was far from the only thing that Maxine Spear's review had mentioned.
"Huh?" Oliver reacted, distracted, watching that whimsical pair of braids disappear into the hallway.
"Make it sing, somehow," Donna elaborated, assuming that the director would know what Maxine had meant by her piercing remark. Of course, she didn't mean for Oliver to really make the play sing. Musicals cost more money, after all. "This is your chance to give it all the Oliver Putnam you've got."
It was evident that no one had been in her dressing room since she and Oliver left it on opening night. Her clothes, which she had come for, were still piled neatly on the stool behind the dressing screen and the chair that Oliver had pulled up to hers at the dressing table was still there, as if two theatre ghosts had been sitting face-to-face for five days straight.
Until today Loretta had only had Oliver's word for it, but the confidence with which Donna DeMeo had declared that they would be needing a new leading man had finally given her some real confirmation that she could expect the show to continue. There was not much she would have to pick up from here if their producers ever did decide to kill the show. Except for the pair of shawls hanging on the door, she hadn't made much of a home of the little room and it struck her now that perhaps she ought to.
It was against those shawls that she drew when, standing at the door and trying to decide where the most strategic place to inconspicuously run into Dickie and avoid Ben would be, she heard a door down the hallway being roughly yanked open.
"Where is that little witch?! I'm gonna have a word with her." The furious announcement made Loretta grip her phone tightly and calculate how many seconds it would take for her to find Oliver's number in her contacts. "What-"
A hasty shuffle accompanied Ben's annoyed, short expression of confusion, and Dickie's voice sounded closer to Loretta than his. "You stay away from Loretta."
There was a note of panic in his demand, and Ben must have noticed it, too. In an irritating tone of superiority he taunted, "Or what? What are you gonna do?"
Without a moment's hesitation, even before Loretta could start to fret about the possibility of Ben raising a hand against his own brother, Dickie replied, his voice deathly steady, "If you touch her again, I promise you, you're gonna find out why those school bullies never got to you."
An intense astonished chill went through Loretta at the intimidating threat and at the evident indication that, in a way, Dickie had picked her over Ben. She had never heard him like this. In fact, she hadn't really thought Dickie had it in him to stand up to his brother in such an unrelenting manner.
Ben was already backing off, but it was in his nature to always have to have the last word. "What are you? Her keeper? Her boyfriend?" he teased with a cruel smirk at Dickie's absurdly surprising boldness ringing clearly in his voice.
"I'm her- friend."
Loretta's heart jerked painfully where, against all logic, she longed to hear Dickie admit that he was her son.
With that characteristic belittling arrogance that said, I know better than you do, Ben mentioned, "You know she's just a selfish opportunist, right?"
This time Dickie did pause before answering, not so much for lack of a reply but, as it turned out when he spoke and his voice was heavy with emotion, because this was something he hadn't been prepared to share with his spiteful brother. "Loretta is the most wonderful- She's the kindest person I've ever met."
As Loretta held back the touched sob that was climbing up her throat, Ben huffed, "Pfft! Whatever," turning from the conversation. Dickie took off after him to go and see their producers and the hallway became quiet again.
It was probably for the best that Ben was going to throw him out on his ear. This suffocating trapped feeling that he hadn't been able to shake in the producers' office only confirmed how right Loretta had been all along about Ben's vicious grip on his life.
Ashamed of having changed sides so easily, Dickie felt like a disappointment to both himself and Loretta, who had only ever meant to help him and had been so unjustly punished for it. He supposed he had let her down by joining up with Ben again after his shocking brush with death, but he would set things right now.
"I suppose if Ben's out of the play, I won't be coming around here much longer."
It was the only thing he could think of to say when he saw Loretta lingering in the foyer. She was probably waiting for Oliver—it hadn't escaped Dickie's notice how closely the two of them had been sitting together back in that cluttered office—and he didn't mean to keep her for long, but he had to make sure that this was not the last time he would see her.
He was not ready to let go of that inexplicable, absurdly charming sense of belonging that Loretta's presence brought him. Dickie cherished the time he had with her. Loretta had been exceptionally kind to him and even though Dickie didn't take it for granted, he didn't want to read too much into her attentiveness. After all, she owed him nothing. Dickie knew he had no claim on Loretta's friendship, and after what she had been put through, she was certainly under no obligation to stick around.
Although Loretta forced her features into a strong mask, the crestfallen ache in her eyes was not lost on Dickie, and he was touched by her reaction. Loretta had always managed to make him feel appreciated. For an instant, although he was clearly deluding himself, Dickie even entertained the notion that perhaps Loretta had avoided telling on Ben to keep the Glenroys, himself included, on the show.
"Well, we could still… keep in touch. Right?" Loretta proposed tentatively, and a flood of relief washed over Dickie.
"I'm so glad you said that because…" He couldn't tell Loretta how precious she had become to him because he couldn't even explain it to himself, but he did mean to ease the quivering agitation that had reached her voice. "You wouldn't happen to be in need of a manager, would you?"
"Oh, Dickie," Loretta sighed gently. A radiant joy broke out on her face, then faltered. "But I… I wouldn't be able to pay you as much as Ben did."
"I don't- mind, actually," Dickie insisted, replying to Loretta's instant astonishment with a reassuring smile. "I would just really like to help you out. You deserve it."
Donna's critical words about their play were still ringing in his head when Oliver stepped out into the gallery and immediately recognized the gentle voice carrying to him from downstairs. On his way over to the grand staircase he glanced over the railing and saw Loretta swaying on the spot in the downstairs foyer, humming a familiar song from an old musical. He had never seen the show himself, had been too young and too uncultured when it had been on Broadway, but to hear the melody echoing through the old theatre house still made him feel nostalgic.
Of course, that was not what Donna had meant, but Oliver was suddenly struck by a keen longing for music and the crazy, fascinating notion that Death Rattle could be reimagined as a musical. But that was a thought for another day.
"How's that arm doing?" Oliver asked as soon as Loretta spotted him, half-way down the stairs, and the arms she had wound around herself in that comforting position she so often assumed loosened. The melody came to an abrupt stop.
"I still can't lift it more than…" Loretta demonstrated her current state of recovery by raising her arm a little. She stopped at an already familiar slicing pain and lowered her arm again when she saw Oliver grimace with apparent regret at asking. "Well, this. But it'll get better with time."
"How much time?" Oliver inquired, his tone pleasantly sympathetic rather than impatient.
"You'll have to stick around and find out," Loretta allowed herself a coquettish suggestion.
Oliver's eyes became alive with a happy gleam. "With pleasure," he declared, making Loretta giggle like a young girl.
She couldn't really believe her luck. After a bumpy start to the day, everything was starting to look up for her. She still had her job, she was not going to lose Dickie and therefore still had plenty of time to gather her courage to tell him the truth about herself and him, and Oliver had just implied that he would stick by her side for a while yet.
"Come on," he said with a peppy lilt. "Let's get out of here. How 'bout I take you to dinner?"
The prospect of a proper date, if this was what it was to be, with Oliver was immensely tempting, but Loretta was eager to see that side of Oliver that he reserved for close quarters again. Besides, she liked to make an effort when going out to eat, and it would have been too much of a hassle to pop over home to change out of her jeans, especially since she was already with Oliver now.
"No, you don't have to take me out. I'll cook," she proposed. At the unconvinced hesitation in Oliver's expression, she reassured him, "No solid food. Is chowder okay?"
"Soup?" Oliver was surprised.
Bringing her voice to a low alluring tone, Loretta tempted, "I do a fantastic sweet potato chowder."
With a fascinated glint in his eye, Oliver gulped hungrily. "Yeah, that- that sounds good."
Elated at the promise of a shared time but mostly because her plan had been accepted so quickly, Loretta beamed at him. "Great!" For just a moment she allowed herself to revel in Oliver's muted fascination with their thrilling plan, before gracefully changing the topic, "Well, in that case, I'll have to go grocery shopping."
Oliver hummed his understanding. "Is it a secret recipe or can I assist?"
"Hm?" Loretta, having already turned towards the doors, was halted by his sweet unwillingness to let her escape his company.
Oliver took his place beside her as they marched out of the Goosebury theatre, and shared his exciting idea of the rest of their day, gaining confidence with each word. "You know what, I've had a thought. If I brought you and the groceries over to my place," he elaborated, no doubt, with every intention of making sure that Loretta didn't do any carrying today, "I could assist with the cooking, I could gain an extra few hours of unashamedly watching you pottering about, I could introduce you to Winnie and Mrs. Gambolini. If I'm feeling very bold, I could even serenade you, because your place doesn't fit a piano but mine does. How'm I doing?"
Loretta, who had been listening with dreamy rapture, had to stop and gather her wits or she would have let slip something sacred and intimate that she had not yet realized.
"I would love that."