Total pages in book: 28
Estimated words: 25974 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 130(@200wpm)___ 104(@250wpm)___ 87(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 25974 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 130(@200wpm)___ 104(@250wpm)___ 87(@300wpm)
When the curtain goes up, the silent war between Jem and Dawson ends just long enough for their characters to wow the audience with a passionate embrace. As soon as they take their bows, the two Broadway actors go their separate ways. But one night, everything changes.
The audience catches wind of the chemistry between them and the crowds go wild. Show management books them into a media blitz where the two of them have to present a united front and spend even more long hours together. When they have time to talk, the reasons for their war begin to unravel and the chemistry between them sparks hot enough to leap off the stage and into their real lives.
Please note Stealing the Show was first available as part of a group offering called Your Book Boyfriend’s Boyfriend. No changes have been made to the story. This is a novella of 24k words.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
JEM
The kiss was different every night.
Some nights it was a quick peck, and some nights it was a comically exaggerated snog for laughs. There were some shows where Dawson hammed it up for the audience by dipping me dramatically or twirling me before planting one on me. We never rehearsed it or even discussed it in advance. I was as surprised as they were from show to show.
But when our lips touched, one thing was certain. Everything else in the theater disappeared. The eight hundred audience members, the set pieces and props, our fellow cast members, and even the hot stage lights. For that short moment, Dawson was mine and mine alone. It no longer mattered he looked down on me as an amateur who didn’t deserve to be in a Broadway production. I didn’t care anymore that he was a classically trained actor from Carnegie Mellon and Juilliard while I was practically self-taught.
As soon as someone said the next line, “Okay, she’s gone,” we all went back to sitting around the table in the center of the stage for the rest of the scene. Life went on, for approximately twenty-four hours. And then he kissed me again.
I never knew what to expect. Which Dawson would I see out there under the lights?
We barely spoke offstage. After the first week of rehearsals, I’d overheard him complaining about untrained morons coming off the street and landing roles with sheer luck when perfectly good, trained actors were being overlooked.
I knew he’d been talking about me.
I’d kept my mouth shut until the following week when I’d made a snide comment about entitled know-it-alls who think just because they have a fancy piece of paper (or two) they’re somehow better than everyone else.
I’d tried precisely once to ask him about his changeable kisses, to make sure I was playing it appropriately, and he’d said, “It’s improvisation, Jem,” like maybe I’d never heard of the technique before. “Just go with it.”
After that, we’d seemed to enter a silent war. It had been going on for eleven long months. We did what we needed to do to keep our mutual antagonism away from cast and crew dynamics, but we certainly never went out of our way to be friendly, other than participating in group activities where it would seem awkward if we weren’t nice to each other.
It was different once the curtain opened.
I loved my role in the show. Not My Alfred was a fast-paced comedy of errors about a 1930s mob boss who’s trying to keep his life of crime hidden from his perfect, god-fearing wife. Dawson and I were both cast in supporting roles as members of the crime family. Dawson became Lucky Loretto, whose closest compatriot in Alfred’s organization was Trigger DeCaro, the role I played. During the show, we laughed, we strategized, we slammed doors and shoved each other into hiding spots.
We kissed.
Seeing him dressed in his pinstriped suit with spats confused me for a split second every night. For that quick moment, he looked hot as fuck. Tall with a strong jaw and head of thick, dark hair. He was commanding, sexy, competent, and delicious.
Someone I could want.
But as soon as the final curtain came down after the show… it was like none of that had happened. And maybe it hadn’t. Maybe that was how theater life was.
Lucky and Trigger were bros.
Dawson and Jem definitely weren’t.
“Jem, you coming out tonight?” Kota bounced his eyebrows at me in the dressing room mirror. “The Retro has buy one get one cocktails midnight to two for cast and crew.”
I nodded and glanced over at Dawson, who was standing across the small room in just his costume trousers and white tank undershirt. The sweat shone on his skin, and the way his suspenders hung down outlined the rounded globes of his ass in those pants.
“Yeah?” Kota asked.
I blinked and looked back at the mirror. “Sorry. Yeah. I’ll go with. Thanks.”
A few guys from the cast and crew had recently started including me in their after-work drinks. Even though I was usually flagging after the very physical show, I’d learned to rally. Socializing wasn’t easy when you didn’t know anyone in town, but as my sister had told me a million times, “How else are you going to get to know people if you don’t at least try?”
So I went for a cocktail, which quickly turned into four since they were half-off.
“I should get going,” I finally said, dragging my tipsy ass up from the sticky table and dreading the long train ride back to the apartment in New Brunswick, where I lived with my sister and her boyfriend.
“Stay with us,” Kota said with his dimpled grin. “We have an extra room now that Taylor moved to LA and our new roommate was a no-show. It’s about as big as a moderately sized doghouse, but it has a bed and a door that closes.”