Trust Me

in her arms. Her mane of hair flowed over her shoulders and cascaded down onto the table.
    “So the show had a few problems. It was opening night, what do you expect?” Desdemona reached across the table to pat her cousin’s heaving shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault that the audience didn’t get the significance of the flyswatter in the background.”
    “Hey, Juliet, cheer up.” Henry Wainwright, handsome and tawny-haired like the others, gave the despairing actress a sympathetic look. “You couldn’t help it if the theater was filled with a bunch of plebeians from the Eastside tonight.”
    “Henry’s right,” Kirsten said. “Everyone knows those folks from the ‘burbs only want dinner theater stuff. It was the wrong audience.”
    Henry scowled. “It sure as hell was. What were they doing there, anyway? They should have been down at the Fifth Avenue Theater tapping their toes to the new road show production of South Pacific. ”
    “The Limelight’s in trouble financially,” Juliet confided sadly.
    “So what else is new?” Henry asked. “The Limelight has been in trouble since the day it opened. Most small theaters are.”
    “So Ian came up with what he thought was an incredibly clever way to fill the seats tonight,” Juliet said. “He put together a package deal for Eastsiders. You know, dinner and a show in downtown Seattle. Transportation included.”
    Desdemona raised her brows. “Transportation?”
    Juliet made a face. “He chartered a van to bring ‘em across the lake.”
    Henry whistled softly. “Ian strikes again. A whole bus full of Eastsiders brought downtown to see fringe theater. It boggles the mind. He must have been desperate.”
    “Who’s Ian?” Stark asked, mildly curious.
    “Ian Ivers owns the Limelight,” Desdemona explained. “Actually, he is the Limelight. Producer, manager, artistic director, you name it, he does it all.”
    “The Limelight is his baby,” Henry said. “Ian’s mission in life is to become known as the man on the cutting edge of Seattle’s contemporary theater scene.”
    “Why?” Stark asked.
    Every Wainwright at the table looked at him as if he weren’t very bright. It was a novel experience for Stark. He was not accustomed to that expression on the faces of those around him.
    Desdemona took pity on him. “So that he can go to New York and become really important, of course.”
    “I see,” Stark said politely.
    Desdemona bestowed a benign smile on him and then promptly went back to the task of consoling Juliet. “Forget those people from the ‘burbs. Your performance was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Wasn’t it brilliant, Stark?”
    Stark, never at his best in social situations, realized that he was expected to say something intelligent about Juliet’s role in a play that had, to him, been more indecipherable than scrambled computer code. He groped for words.
    “You were the most unusual flyswatter I’ve ever seen,” he finally managed.
    Juliet raised her head and looked at him with dawning hope in her golden eyes. “Do you really think so?”
    “No question,” Stark said.
    Desdemona gave him an approving glance. “Especially at the end when she finally swatted the fly on the wall. Wasn’t that a terrific scene?”
    Stark cautiously edged his espresso cup out of the way of Juliet’s billowing hair. “I could almost feel the sense of utter flatness that the fly must have experienced at the moment of impact.”
    Desdemona’s look of approval changed to something resembling suspicion. Stark raised his shoulder a quarter of an inch. He was doing his best, but he could not deny that he was out of his league.
    What surprised him was not that he hadn’t understood a word of the crazy play, let alone the significance of the flyswatter, but that he had actually enjoyed himself, albeit in a perverse fashion.
    It was because of Desdemona, and he knew it.
    He was still not certain why he had allowed her to drag him back to the Right Touch Catering kitchens for dinner with her flamboyant staff, most of whom appeared to be unemployed actors. He was even more at a loss to explain why he had accompanied Desdemona and some of her relatives to the weird performance in a theater so small he could have fit the entire production, stage and audience, into his office.
    On the other hand, it wasn’t as though he’d had a lot of options this evening. If he were not sitting here in Emote Espresso in Pioneer Square with assorted members of