“Whatcha reading?” I said, bending over to see the title of his book.
“Oh, this.” He smiled, looking somewhat embarrassed as he held up a well-thumbed volume of The Challenges of Child-Rearing. “Figured it might help, you know. With the show.”
I laughed at this. “Colin, we just have to keep them fit, not raise them.”
He chuckled. “I know, I know. But you’ve seen how rambunctious they can get.”
I smiled. Colin really took this job on Rise and Shine very seriously.
“You ready?” he said now.
I sighed. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
It still amazed me that I had even landed this gig—up until my audition, I hadn’t exercised a day in my life. Yet, there I was, every weekday morning, cheerfully urging a group of ten sleepy-eyed kids to stretch, jump, run and tone. Lucky for me, my baby-blue tights were thick enough to hide cellulite.
“Positions, everyone,” Rena Jones, our producer, called out with a glare in Colin’s and my direction. Well, mostly my direction. She adored Colin. And tolerated me. Mostly because she was a stickler for timeliness, while I…wasn’t.
Once Colin and I had positioned ourselves in front of the cameras, I put on my required happy face and chimed in with Colin as we gave a three-minute intro designed to inspire a demographic with probably the lowest body-fat ratio of any age group to jump, leap and stretch, in the name of good health. “Good health is all about habits,” Rena would say, whenever anyone—mostly me—alluded to the fact that most six-year-olds weren’t in need of cardiovascular training.
Still, I took a certain satisfaction in the routine, assured that once the music—a strange mixture of circus rhythms and a singer who sounded like the love child of Barney the Dinosaur and Britney Spears—began, my feet would move into the steps of the opening warm-up dance right along with Colin’s. That when we progressed into the series of stretches, squats and leg lifts, my body was not only limber enough to make all the maneuvers, but could jog, jump and shimmer across the floor while I shouted out inspiring words to the ten little tumblers before us. Children, I might add, clearly struggling to keep up under the eye of their parents, who sat on the sidelines, their faces a mixture of parental pride and paralyzing anxiety that their kid would stumble, fall and be torn too early from the six-week segment they had lobbied long and hard to get said child on.
There was also the reassurance that when the clock against the back wall hit the thirty-minute mark, I would be able to heave a silent sigh of relief (which I disguised as a healthy exhale for the sake of my tiny followers), and bow down into a final stretch before leading the happy munchkins in the applause that ended the show.
“Hanging out with Kirk tonight?” Colin asked as we headed to the small dressing area at the back of the studio. I could tell by the way he always asked that question lately that he took a certain satisfaction in the progress of my relationship. His breakup with Tom two months earlier had been hard—Colin was clearly a one-man man—but he evidently took comfort in the fact that there were others in the world out there who were living monogamously-ever-after.
“Of course,” I replied, with all the confidence a girlfriend should have at the stage Kirk and I were at in our relationship.
Later that very night, however, I realized that Kirk was at a different stage.
I was spending the evening at his place, where I spent most nights during the week. Not only because he lived on E. 27th and Third, which was somewhat closer to the studio on W. 54th than my East Village apartment was, but because we liked to spend our every waking moment together—and every sleeping moment, which was often the case, as Kirk had a tendency to nod off early.
Besides, Kirk’s doorman-building one-bedroom was a welcome respite from the cluttered two-bedroom walk-up I shared with Justin, my roommate and other best friend beside Grace. Kirk’s place was an oasis of order, his closet filled with rows of well-pressed button-downs and movie posters lining the walls with precision (yes, we both loved movies, though Kirk had an unsettling predilection for horror flicks while I liked the classics and anything with Mel Gibson). Even his medicine cabinet was a sight to behold, I thought as I scrubbed my teeth before bed that night. The toothpaste was curled up neatly next to a shiny cup containing his brush; his shaving kit (a gift from the ex that I once tried to replace with a packet of Gillettes, but to no avail) nestled sweetly next to a bottle of Chanel for men (from me, thank you very much, which he only spritzed himself with under serious duress). I also kept an antihistamine there—I had a tendency toward congestion at the slightest provocation: pollen, dust mites, mold. With a contented sigh I spit my mouthful of paste—and water—into the shiny white sink, carefully rinsing out the suds to return it to its porcelain perfection, before I returned to the bedroom, where Kirk sprawled on the bed, laptop in hand, studying the screen intently.
“Time to play,” I said, bounding onto the bed in a pair of boxers and a T-shirt (pirated from his bottom left drawer).
“Just give me a minute, sweetie,” he said, glancing up from the screen briefly to flash me a small smile of acknowledgment.
I settled in beside him, sparing a glance at the screen, which was covered in a series of incomprehensible codes, and picked up the book I kept on Kirk’s bedside table, Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double. Turning to page five, the precise place I had been the last six times I had attempted to immerse myself, I started to read. Well, not exactly read,—my gaze was too busy roaming over to Kirk’s profile.
He had the most beautiful brow line I had ever seen. Almost jet-black against creamy skin and normally smooth, though right now it was furrowed over his gray eyes as they studied the screen, almost without blinking. One of the things I had admired from the start about Kirk was his ability to concentrate against any odds. I didn’t really understand it, frankly, since I inevitably threw away any thoughts of intelligent life the minute I found myself faced with the prospect of sex. In fact, it was Kirk’s seeming lack of awareness of the opposite sex that, oddly enough, had tantalized me from the first.
We met at my “day job,” or second shift, at Lee and Laurie Catalog, where I was a part-time customer service rep to make up for all the money I didn’t get paid as an actor. At the time, Kirk had been working for Lanix, which happened to be the software that Lee and Laurie thrived on, and had come to update our systems. From the moment I saw him, studiously occupied at one of the many terminals that littered the landscape of Lee and Laurie, I was intrigued. Not only was he good-looking, with dark brown hair, intelligent gray eyes, full lips and a strong jaw, he was smart. So smart, in fact, he didn’t seem to notice anyone or anything except the scramble of codes he typed into each terminal as he bounded from cubicle to cubicle. Which was probably why I succumbed to him so quickly, at least according to Grace, whom I called repeatedly to report to on how my every effort at flirtation fell completely flat. Still, I couldn’t stop conjuring up reasons to lure Kirk to my work-station—a lazy mouse, a jammed keyboard (sesame seeds from lunch, but at least I got a smile out of him) and a surprising lack of understanding of the new software updates he’d just installed. And as he patiently wiggled my mouse, dusted my keyboard and explained the new procedures yet again, I made goofy-but-good-natured jokes, standing close enough to “accidentally” brush his arm (delightfully solid) or smile winningly up at his smooth and seemingly unruffled features.
“I’m obsessed with him,” I told Grace during the second week of failed innuendos.
“It’s the challenge,” she replied. “You can’t resist it.”
She was right, I realized later, when I finally gave in to her advice to “just ask him out, for chrissakes,” and he, to my surprise, said yes. But I was hooked good from date one. Kirk was so different from all the men who had come before. For one thing, he made enough money to actually pay for dinner. And I couldn’t help but admire his ambition when he told me his dreams of running his own software company…or his well-toned physique, when things got to that level between us, honed from four times a week at the gym.
Now, as the