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The backstage area of the theater is downright comfortable. Penny lounges on one of the couches and rolls a cigarette as they go through the initial script read through. The playwright, Missy Cooper by name, is calm and intelligent and a little bit crazy. Her brother, Sheldon, who’s been nagged into doing the lighting, is less calm, more intelligent, and a lot crazier; he interrupts the reading every five words to make notes on his copy of the script.
“Yes, for God’s sake, Shelly, the blue spot should follow whoever’s speaking during the angel scenes, and the red spot during the demon scenes!” Missy explodes after the third time he butts in to clarify the lighting color for a scene. “Is it that hard to understand?”
“I can help coach him through it,” Penny offers, “once we have these guys drilled on their lines.”
“Would you, Pen? It would be a big help...”
“I don’t need any assistance,” Sheldon sniffs.
“Sure you do, Shelly.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that in front of people.”
“Chill out, Shelly. Everyone has a nickname,” Penny says.
“I don’t think ‘Pen’ is exactly much of a nickname. There are other ways to shorten ‘Penelope’.”
“Actually, it’s just Penny, not Penelope, and can we get back to finishing this reading? This cigarette wants me to smoke it.”
She finally escapes outside half an hour later. The butt bucket is a literal tin bucket full of wet sand and water and the ashes of a few pages torn from a notebook; someone’s artistic vision violently rejected. She sits in the shade and pulls slowly, thoughtfully, on the cigarette. The breeze brings the smell of brine to her. She likes Texas well enough; it’s better than being land-locked.
Much to her chagrin, she evidently didn’t flee fast enough; Sheldon appears a few seconds later looking thoroughly disgruntled.
“I don’t need your help to learn how to turn a few lights on and off. Frankly, this is below me, and I’m only doing it because our mother insisted I help Missy with her project. It’s detracting greatly from my college hours.”
“What’re you studying?” Penny asks, figuring he can’t be much older than her twenty-three.
His lip curls into a sneer. “I teach theoretical physics. Or at least I attempt to. There’s only so much that one can drill into an inferior mind, and I’ve yet to come across a mind that wasn’t inferior to mine.”
Penny drags on her cigarette and thinks this must be what hate at first sight feels like.
His mind might be superior to everyone else’s, but when the gels need attaching to the relevant lights, he freezes two steps up the ladder and Penny ends up going up herself, cursing his acrophobia as she reaches out precariously to do what should be his job. He’s the one with the long arms, after all.
He complains about her having the actors move too fast for the lights to follow.
She counters that she thought he had the prodigious intellect required to push a few buttons, but if it’s too hard for him maybe they can train a monkey.
The scary part is that Missy looks like she’s seriously contemplating the monkey option.
Penny lets herself get caught up in things like helping out with makeup and stitching fallen hems, and doesn’t let herself think about the look Sheldon had turned up to her while she dangled across the top of the ladder, a look of grudging admiration.
He’s too much of a pain in the ass.
“Testing. Penny, do you read me?”
“Sheldon, you’re standing five feet from me.”
Sheldon gives her an annoyed look and takes a step closer to tap her headphones. “Be serious for once.”
“All right, seriously, you’re standing three feet from me now, and I’m getting feedback, just go up to the booth and try it from there.”
She wanders out the back as he disappears toward the sound and light booth. Turns out the signal on these things is pretty good; she can hear him even when she gets outside and lights a cigarette. She just laughs when he asks if she can see his hand signals from the stage.
“You don’t need hand signals, Shelly. You just need to pay attention to what’s going on.”
“Don’t call me Shelly.”
The sound tech plays a wah-wah-wahhhh sound and she’s treated to Sheldon Cooper cussing him out in the manner of a man who knows God may actually be paying attention and so he has to be very cautious. She loses it at “darn your butt” and coughs laughter right into the headset mic.
“Are you laughing at me?” Sheldon demands in what is decidedly not a backstage whisper.
“No, sweetie.”
Things come to a head at the dress rehearsal. The cast are all there but the sound tech’s got strep throat, and Penny has to direct from the sound booth, yelling down to the stage area. Everyone looks wooden and/or terrified and Sheldon looks superior.
“I knew this wouldn’t work out.”
At least he’s not wearing his headset; it’s lying on the desk with hers, so Missy can’t hear him being disparaging.
“If you’re such a know it all, why don’t you run the sound board as well as the lights?” Penny challenges him.
He fucks up; she knew he would. There’s thunder when there should be a chiming clock and the clock goes off when a shot should ring out and Missy ends up screeching at everyone to just go home an hour after they were supposed to finish.
Sheldon reaches for his bag and Penny grabs his wrist. “Not you, buster.”
Missy nearly breaks a leg dashing up to the booth. “You two need to work this out between you, or tomorrow night we’re going to be totally screwed. I’m going to leave you to it. Pen, keep me posted. You read, he makes noise, or vice versa, I don’t care. Just... please.”
Penny slips her a joint she was saving for tomorrow after the opening and Missy takes it without comment beyond a grateful smile. Sheldon gives them both a suspicious look but keeps his mouth, for once, shut.
She reads and he focuses on the sound board, doing the lights with his left hand at the same time as he does the sound with his right. Maybe it’s just the reduced pressure of not having the actors screwing things up so he doesn’t have to stop and start, but he makes it through almost without a hitch.
“That’s better. I thought we were fucked.” Penny scrubs her face with her hands and manages to smile at him.
He doesn’t smile back. “You have a dirty mouth,” he says primly, standing up to leave.
She’s drawn to his mouth because she’s tired and because he won’t shut the fuck up and because his lower lip demands to be sucked on. His hands flutter around her shoulders as if he’s torn between pushing her away and pulling her in closer. She slides her hands down to cup his ass and pull him in between her thighs as she sits on the stool; he follows her obediently. He’s starting to breathe off-kilter by the time she lets him up for air.
“You don’t even like me,” he says.
Penny grins. “Don’t be so sure about that, Shelly.” And with that she pushes him back onto his own stool, drops to her knees on the floor, and starts nuzzling the front of his perfectly pressed pants.
By the time she slips him into her mouth, sucking hard and fast, the thorn in her side is gone and he’s just a man, fingers gripping the back of her neck, interesting whimpery noises torn from his throat. She shoves her free hand down the front of her shorts and he chokes at the sight and floods her mouth with the same sea-salt taste as the air outside.
After that, everything runs smoothly, from the opening night performance right through to bump-out on closing night. The two week season passes in a blur of mornings where she sleeps in, his arm curled around her waist; afternoons where she either goes sight-seeing or shops or hangs around in the wings during one of their few matinee performances; the evenings are the real show, when she waits for the play to be over each night so the actors can take their bows, bathe in applause, and she can go up to the booth and take him home. Some nights they don’t make it out of the booth. One night they’re interrupted by Missy dryly pointing out that Penny’s headset’s still switched on. Sheldon wilts completely and drags his pants back up at the speed of light. Penny smoothes her skirt down and tries to pretend she wasn’t just fucking Missy’s brother on the floor of the sound booth.
She has the feeling that she’s not very convincing.
On Friday night, the last night, she gets a phone call; the audition she’d had a week before coming to Galveston has proven fruitful, and she’s to report to freakin’ Hollywood on Monday. She tells Sheldon without thinking about how he’ll react and that night he clings to her in bed as though he doesn’t want to let her go. It’s weird because she thought this was just a just-for-now thing, especially considering how awkward he’s been some of the times they’ve been together (she wouldn’t be surprised if she was, maybe not his first, but possibly only his second lover), but it’s starting to seem less that way.
“It’s going to be fun. I’m playing a girl scientist who has regular run-ins with the guys she works with. Maybe you could teach me how to pronounce the big words.”
“Maybe,” Sheldon says, effectively terminating the conversation at that point by removing her underwear with one swift, decisive yank. They’ve come a long way fast from you don’t even like me.
He has his forehead pressed against hers and is moving slowly in her when there’s a knock at the bedroom door.
“Are you two decent?” Missy bellows through the door.
“In a minute!” Penny grabs Sheldon’s hips and covers his mouth with hers to stifle her name on his lips.
Missy has news as well. “They want the play in New York,” she announces. “They want me to take The Angel’s Mistress to New York!” She bounces on the foot of the bed. Penny’s just glad that she gave them time to get dressed.
“I want you to come with me,” she says.
“I... I got offered a part in a TV show. I’ve always wanted to act.”
She doesn’t want to give up the stage, but she doesn’t want to lose what might be her only chance to be in front of the camera, where she’s always wanted to be.
“I can go with you, Missy,” Sheldon says. She looks surprised. Penny knows how she feels. “I don’t want you to have to settle for someone inferior doing your sound and lighting. It’s an important part of the show.”
“I really need my director,” Missy says. “Wait. Shelly. You’d really give up your spot at the university?”
“I can go on sabbatical.”
“Even for something that’s off-off-off Broadway?”
“It’s for my sister,” Sheldon says. “I think that makes it worth it.”
“Oh, hell,” Penny says. “I’ll find out the shooting schedule and see if I can work around it.”
Missy squeals and throws her arms around her, planting a kiss on her cheek. Sheldon’s a little more conservative in his initial show of gratitude, but as soon as Missy’s left the room he’s pulling at Penny’s camisole top, a look of intent desire on his face.
The commute’s going to be seven kinds of hell if it works out, but worth it if she gets to direct in New York... and spend some more quality time with the most frustrating, annoying, amazing wannabe light and sound tech she’s ever met.
Besides, they haven’t cast the male lead for the show yet, and Penny’s quietly sure that if he can learn to run a sound board and the lighting all at once, he can figure out how to read a script.
She knows that at the very least they have the right chemistry.