Chapter One
Vin
My friend Nora said that dating was just like running lines for a play, but she was dead wrong.
I’d thought about it extensively the past couple of days, ever since she and my other friends had gotten me drunk for the first time and found a guy for me to practice on.
“We’ll extract you if it gets weird, I promise,” Nora had said. We’d spotted a guy at the bar, writing in a notebook. He had the kind of hair color that couldn’t decide whether it was brown or gold or red. He was sitting alone.
“Just think of it like a run-through,” she added. “You’re not even in rehearsals yet. It’s practice, no pressure at all.”
Right.
Though alcohol had burned away my ability to think clearly then, I now mentally counted the reasons she was wrong as I drove to my university. I’d graduated last spring, but the theater department had invited me back to help direct a play alongside a visiting professor who would serve as the musical director. If there was one thing I knew, it was theater and running lines.
Which were not at all like dating.
First, and most important, there was no script in dating. So when I went on the dates my mother had set up, the ones where I’d meet nice, educated Indian-American men and gain the romance experience I needed, I had no idea what to say. Those men all seemed to know what to say. I have a master’s in business administration, they’d remark, or How long have you lived here? But when I opened my mouth, all that came out were a jumble of random factoids, like I’d dumped out a game of Trivial Pursuit and was picking up the cards and reading them aloud.
“You're left-handed,” I’d said loudly once I’d reached the practice guy at the bar, the one scribbling away. “Did you know that means you’re statistically more likely to be good at visual-spatial tasks? Also possibly more successful in general. Four of our last six presidents were lefties.”
He paused, looked up, and stared at me with light green eyes. I think they called the color seafoam in crayon boxes, which luckily I managed not to say out loud.
Still, practice was not going well so far.
“Hello,” he finally said. He had a slight accent, and as I watched, one corner of his mouth turned up. “That’s about the weirdest welcome I’ve had yet.”
I blushed and stared. At least the shots I’d downed earlier diluted some of the embarrassment. I probably should have started with a simpler way to establish connection. Like hi.
“Hi,” I said, forty seconds too late, and his smile grew.
No wonder I’d never had a real kiss.
But the practice guy gestured for me to sit on the barstool beside him, and I dropped to the seat, pushing my long dark hair out of my face.
The practice guy’s nose looked like it’d been broken at some point but not set properly. I couldn’t stop noticing. Also, the bar was loud with music and laughter and shouts, so when he told me his name, it sounded like Fish.
“What?”
“Fish,” he repeated. I had met very few men named after sea creatures. None, in fact.
“You talk funny.” Alcohol was making thoughts drizzle out of my mouth. “So your name is Fish?”
“Fish?” he shouted over the din. “I don’t think they serve that here. And I’m British.”
“Oh.” He had a nice, open expression, a mouth that smiled easily, but there was something else radiating from him that I couldn’t put my finger on. Something stranger and maybe sad. It wasn’t entirely unappealing. Maybe it was the busted nose. Up close, his crooked nose and strong jaw were set off by that easy smile and bright eyes, forming a face that was both boyish and manly—and probably a few years older than my twenty-two. It was a shame his parents hadn’t given him a more masculine nautical name like Trout or Perch.
“You’re not, uh, a local university student, are you?” he said above the music.
“No! I just look twelve.” I took off my glasses, like that would help, but then hastily put them on when the room grew blurry. “I graduated last year,” I added. “Do you want to see a form of ID?”
He shook his head and started laughing. “No, that’s alright.”
Over Fish’s shoulder, my circle of friends were clumped together, watching us. Nora twined a strand of long, dark hair around her finger while Brendan, her boyfriend and my best friend, wrapped an arm around her waist and gave me an encouraging smile—as did my good friend Samantha, who sat beside Zach’s bulky frame. Even Ryan, who almost never talked, was watching. Was I doing okay?
I met Fish’s eyes and tried to think of what to say next. Something about the bar... It was one of the oldest spots in town, I knew that. Maybe it was haunted. And then the words just oozed out.
“Do you know anything about poltergeists?”
I cringed at the memory, even though I’d been replaying what happened next over and over in my head. I was so glad that I’d likely never see Fish again. Pushing the memory aside, I parked in the lot at my old theater.
I was back in the place where I was most at home, the theater. I’d already been emailing the past few weeks with Professor Harrington—technically Professor Phineas Wainwright Harrington the III, which Brendan said was a name that came with tweed and a monocle, no doubt. We were putting on a production of Sweeney Todd, and I was thrilled to be helping direct it—between working part-time at a local costume store and experiencing romantic failures. Directing a show about a murderous barber was vastly more comfortable than trying to chat with any practice guys. I was at ease in the theater. There were directions. ...
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