Page 5 of Finding Finn
“No, bro. It means that he’s totally on your team.”
“Sis,” I stared at my younger sister as if she had a third eye. “Please, just tell me if he’s cool or not.”
“I mean, we were in the car for about an hour. He seemed cool. I’ll know more when we all go out for drinks tomorrow. I’ve set it all up. It’ll be good for us. I mean, dude was on Broadway!He worked with Jeremy for over a year. Imagine if we could get him to come here for a fundraiser?”
I cackled.
“Shut up!” She slapped me in the back of the head.
“I’m about to shut everything down for the day. You dropped him off at Matilda’s old place?”
“Yeah. I helped him carry his bags in, and… That place is horrible. When they renovated, I think they forgot to renovate. They didn’t even take down that floral wallpaper. Poor guy. You want to grab a pizza?”
“Sure, sis. Just give me a few minutes.”
I really did need to get a life.
3
FINN
I’ve always been someone who dresses for success, and absolutely everything I tried on this morning looked like I was trying way too hard. I stared at my floppy brown hair and grabbed the hair gel, trying to get it to stay up instead of falling down in my face. My brown eyes looked sunken and tired. I should have gone to bed earlier instead of staying up until midnight. But I couldn’t stand it, and I had no idea which box my Kiehls was in. At this point, I didn’t need face cream – I needed surgery.
I shouldn’t have tried to start unpacking. I made it through a few boxes and stopped. I wasn’t an eighty-year-old grandma, so I couldn’t stay in this house for long. The wallpaper made me want to gouge my eyes out, but the doilies and lace curtains were really what drove me over the edge. They were green. Who the fuck had green lace curtains?
I wouldn’t wish them on my ex, and he was a total asshole. That bastard would hopefully rot in hell one day, and I could be the one who refuses to give him ice water. Five years of my life were spent being in love with a man who found another lover the moment I went on tour. I had no idea of the extent ofhis cheating until one of hisholesshowed up at our apartment when I surprised him with a quick trip home. I had left Omaha on a three-day break and thought I’d spend one day with my boyfriend.
Surprise. He hadn’t been faithful.
Another surprise – he chose another dancer.
Marcus sucked. I hated that he had found such success. The bastard had just been nominated for a Tony. Thank God he lost, or I might be in jail for murder. Never date a fucking actor. That should be the motto of everyone.
I really needed to let this go. I needed to let him go. It had been four years for Christ’s sake. Four years of hating someone so much that they took up a huge part of your life.
God, I hated this shirt! I looked like a blood clot. I pulled the maroon polo over my head and tossed it onto the floor.
What was I doing? I stared at my reflection in the mirror.
I still had my dancer’s body – the dancer’s heart and soul – the dancer’s brain of perfection, but I no longer had the dancer’s ability. I longed to be back in class and at the barre with a relevé and a plié. To battement across the floor with a fouetté and a grand jete made you feel alive. To bow with an audience on their feet as they applauded you at the end of a show. The chorus bows first, and then the principals. Then all of us as one. I missed it.
Never again would I know the feeling of being a part of something great with people who were at the highest level of their abilities.
I was back at the basics. I was back where I learned everything I knew. A community of people who worked towards a common goal – to learn, grow, and explore things that a small town rarely did. It was rarely perfect, and sometimes the theatre made very bad choices. I mean, I was in a production of Fiddler on the Roof without one Jewish person in the entire cast when I was just a kid.
My bottle dance was quite epic, even if it was very, very wrong.
I hoped that if nothing else, I’d be able to make some kind of difference here. Even if I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
Oh! I should wear the white polo. Of course, duh!
The theatre was only a couple of blocks away. I suppose that almost everything in this place was only a couple of blocks away. I glanced around while we drove through yesterday, but I was too tired to even go out for dinner. The kitchen boxes I unpacked weren’t even put away correctly. I mean, the plates barely fit in the cupboards. I was going to have to find another place to live sometime soon. Reminder to self – when it says it comes furnished, look at the furniture.
But for now, I needed to go to the office.
I would have to walk through town a bit to get there, and all I could remember was that I turned right out of my house. It was somewhere off the main drag.
I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder before locking my door. The yard was quite pretty. Roses bloomed all along the sidewalk and up the small walkway. It did look like a small English garden. At least there was something lovely about this house.
