shouldn’t have kept listening. I should’ve closed my door, climbed back into bed, and let them have their privacy. But for some reason, I just couldn’t. Call it nosiness. Call it meddling. Whatever it was, I was glued to the spot like Mr Tumnus in Narnia when he was frozen by the White Witch as punishment.
“I never meant to hurt you,” said Alicia. “In fact, from the first moment we met, I desired you. I desired you, but I hated myself for it, because I could see myself in your eyes. More importantly, I could see my father in your eyes. You were everything I always swore I’d stay away from.”
Her words made me catch my breath. Had what I’d said to her in Damon’s dressing room hit home? Was she here to apologise to Julian for messing him around?
“It sounds rather Freudian when you put it like that,” said Julian in his usual glib manner, but there was a tenderness in his voice, one I rarely saw him use with anyone other than me.
“My father was a farmer. He was also a cheater and a gambler. I can’t count the number of times I had to console my mom after another of his affairs came to light, or after he’d squandered all our money on the roulette table. Me and my brothers had to work our fingers to the bone just to scrape by. Nothing ever seemed like enough. The only thing that got me through was telling myself one day I’d be rich and famous, that I’d find a good, honest man to settle down with and be happy. A man who was nothing like him.”
Julian let out a sigh I couldn’t quite interpret. “That would be a beautiful life, Alicia, but perhaps beauty isn’t always what you imagined. Sometimes an artist visualises his work but ends up with something entirely different when he puts paint to canvas.”
“Am I supposed to be the artist in this analogy? Is my beautiful life the art that didn’t come out the way I’d envisioned?” Alicia let out a jaded laugh. “Because yeah, it certainly didn’t turn out like I planned, but it’s far from beautiful.”
“You are beautiful. Maybe that’s all that matters. Beautifully flawed. Beautifully perfect. Beautifully strong. Beautifully fragile,” he murmured, and I imagined he was touching her then, sliding his hand along her shoulder or fingering her silky red hair. “A dichotomy of contrasts.”
“Don’t,” Alicia begged, her voice a coarse plea.
“I won’t,” said Julian. “Not unless you ask me to.”
“And I won’t ask.”
Julian let out another long sigh, this one tired. “No. I know you won’t. I know you don’t want me, and I’m beginning to think I don’t really want you, either. I don’t know what I want. But I’d still like to be your friend if you’ll have me?”
“I could use a friend,” she sniffed.
“Then here I am. What’s troubling you, dear friend?”
She let out a watery laugh. “You. Everything.”
Julian laughed, too, soft and intimate. “I am trouble, this is true. Anything else?”
“Damon doesn’t want me. He never did.”
“If he doesn’t want you, then it wasn’t meant to be,” said Julian. “You can’t make someone love you, darling. That’s just a fact of life.”
Alicia let out a sound of frustration. “It just seems like nothing ever goes how I plan. My personal life is a mess, and on top of all that, I’m starting to feel like I’ve lost the connection with my character. Or maybe I never really had the connection to begin with. We open the show in less than two days, and I don’t feel ready at all. I feel like I’m going to walk out onto that stage and nobody’s going to believe me.”
“They’ll believe you. You simply have to find that connection, that spark. There must be something about Satine that you can relate to, something she feels that you feel yourself.”
“I’ve tried, but I’m way too stressed out half the time to focus,” Alicia said, sounding lost. In that moment, I felt for her. I forgot about all my jealousy and annoyance over her pursuit of Damon and simply saw her for who she was. A woman just like me, a woman who was scared.
“Well, let’s think about her, shall we?” Julian began, his voice kind. “Satine is a French courtesan living in Paris during the turn of the century. She has luxuries and admirers, an adoring audience, but she isn’t a part of normal society. In fact, if she were