Chapter Text
The weather was quite chilly on that Saturday morning, the wind was creeping between the skyscrapers and buildings, howling like a sad wolf and refreshing the whole city. It was nice to be able to sit down in this city and sometimes, Elizabeth felt like maybe, she could do it more, but with her job and all, she already spent all of her free time there, on the small steps in front of the New York City Center, her nose stuck in a book and her face hidden behind her brown hair. Sometimes, a pair of glasses would keep it from coming in her sight, sometimes, she’d tie it in a ponytail, a braid or a messy bun, just so she could keep reading in peace. In all the years she had spent in this giant city, there was no place like the small steps in front of the New York City Center, where the colors on the wall would dance like flames and where the columns would provide fantastic backrests for when she’d be so into a book she’d forget the rest.
Elizabeth had moved to the Big Apple ten years before, when she had picked NYU as the best option for college. She had fallen in love with the city years ago, when her dad took her to a show on Broadway. At that time, life was easy and she remembered the feeling of getting into the train for the two-hours-long journey to New York. Living in Middletown wasn’t a pain, she actually liked the small city but she was meant for bigger things and she knew it. So as soon as she could, she took the train for the big city and spent the day there with her dad, first, then on her own when she turned 17 and it was time to move into a dorm. For as long as she knew, taking the train felt like the first step into a big adventure. It was thrilling, she always had jitters and couldn’t stop dancing on her feet like the ground would swallow her whole if she stopped. Her dad found it endearing, really, her mom never really understood her excitement whenever New York was mentioned. So most often than else, it was just her and her dad, taking the train to the big city. Their first trip was back when she was six, when she was big enough to go to a show in Broadway and he had brought her to a representation of Cats that clearly started her obsession with Broadway musicals. Since then, her dad had taken her to Wicked, to Beauty and the Beast, to The Lion King, Hairspray, Cats again (and again, and again, it was her favorite as it was her first ever), The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables, that she insisted to go see when she was fifteen, after she had read the whole book by Victor Hugo. She had fallen in love with Marius and couldn’t wait to see him live his love story with Cosette, though she imagined herself as Eponine, more than anything. She just felt like the ignored lover was a bit more like she would be, if she ever lived in the fictious world of Victor Hugo’s figment of imagination. Her dad pretended to be Jean Valjean the whole evening and Elizabeth fell in love even more with Marius that night. Les Misérables became one of her favorite book ever and she would read it every time she had nothing else on her to be read list.
When she moved to her crappy dorm room at NYU, she brought her copy with her. Her roommate didn’t get the obsession she had with that damn book, who would even want to read that massive thing for fun? And even worse, enjoy it?! But Elizabeth didn’t care. She had Marius, she had Cosette, she had the streets of Paris and all of this magical thing that was reading. So she often took her copy to different places in the city, to read in peace, until she realized there was no better place than the small steps in front of the theater. There, she was let alone all day long and she would be able to read without any complaint. The bosses inside couldn’t throw her out, she was already outside, and she was sheltered from the rain. It happened sometimes: she would run all the way across the streets to get to her little safe haven, only to get drenched in the pouring rain and when she’d finally see the familiar set of columns in the distance, she’d sigh with relief, slow down her pace and finally crash down on the dry pavement underneath the concrete ceiling that would usually shelter the audience members from the rain while waiting to enter the theater. The space wasn’t private, it was a piece of street that belonged to everyone and while the security staff often tried to get her to leave, Elizabeth loved that spot more than any other to read in peace.
That day, the weather was quite nice. Elizabeth had just finished her day working at a book shop, earlier than planned. Her boss, a sweet old lady who’d owned the shop for decades, had nicely allowed her to leave early, as their customers were getting rarer and rarer with the months. Sometimes, a group of young girls would enter the shop and leave with a handful of books each. These girls would always help to soothe Elizabeth’s and her boss’ minds, as people seemed to enjoy reading out of e-readers rather than real books, nowadays. The young seller knew that it was what modern society was about: numeric files to enjoy them without waiting, to take them everywhere, to sync them between their phones and tablets and readers, but she was a bit of an old school lover and wouldn’t trade the scent of ink on paper for anything else. There was something magic about picking up a book that she knew she wouldn’t find if she were to read on a screen. The sound of the pages turning was a serious delight for her ears, adorned with multiples piercings sprinkled in her cartilage, making them shine with the light. Her eyes, rimmed with thin framed glasses, were always making a back and forth movement from left to right, as she’d read faster and faster everytime. Of course, she had her favourites: Les Misérables, Wuthering Heights, Jane Austen but she also liked to read young adults novels that would remind her of the teenage years she never had. See, Elizabeth wasn’t a very popular girl back in the days. She enjoyed the company of older people who had things to tell and not just about how they kissed John K., the most handsome guy in high school. Cheerleaders, jocks, those were the two casts you had to be in to be popular, back in Middletown. There was no room for intellect, for book nerds, for geeks. So she had a couple of friends, who were enough to spend days with, but never to go out with. They all kept in touch during colleges but Elizabeth enjoyed the company of her boss way more than the one of those girls that she had in common with only her high school years. They never really agreed on movies (Kassandra was a blockbuster fan, enjoying the pleasure of a movie that you wouldn’t have to think about over and over again to understand and Lucy was into old movies, the ones in black and white, the ones with romances that you wouldn’t see anymore. Elizabeth? Elizabeth loved books and only books.), weren’t much of coffee fans so they wouldn’t hang out at Starbucks, weren’t much of sporty girls so they wouldn’t train together and their only outings on rare Saturdays evenings would be bowling and In’N’Out Burgers. They just didn’t really click but they bonded over their loneliness and enjoyed each other’s company more than their solitude. Elizabeth, while leaving the book shop, remembered to pass by their neighbour’s shop, the one that sell old movies on tapes and grabbed one that Lucy would like for her birthday. Lucy was now a young mom in Michigan, so Elizabeth would have to make a nice package with the tape in it and a couple of NYC trinkets that her young Lily would enjoy as well as her husband, James. Lucy was easy to please: an old movie, a couple of snacks, a nice tea blend and a couple of NYC themed objects and she would text back saying that she was over the moon about those. Kassandra was always a bit more difficult but her birthday wouldn’t be for another three months so Elizabeth had time to think about it.
As she walked to her usual reading spot, she could feel herself go warm and fuzzy. There was something special about this place and she loved it so much.. but also, she couldn’t wait to go back to her book, for she loved fairytales and happily ever after’s. That one book in particular was so sweet, it made her remember how badly she had wanted that young romance back in high school. She thought it’d be incredibly sweet to have a boyfriend at school, a boy who’d walk the whole building through just to be at her classroom’s door when her hour of English lit would be over, someone who’d drive to her place just to give her a lift instead of letting her take the bus, someone who’d take her hand and walk her down the halls to the cafeteria.. Someone who’d like her, just because she was good enough for him and not because she was cute enough and he couldn’t score a cheerleader.
When Elizabeth finally crashed on the ground in front of the New York City Center, she felt her heart did a little somersault in her chest. She couldn’t wait to dive her nose in the pages of the sweet chick-lit novel she was deep into already. She had barely checked if the ground was clean enough but she just couldn’t wait anymore. She had waited all day for this moment, ever since she woke up that morning really, so she didn’t have an ounce of patience left in her body. Her bag on her lap, as always, she grabbed her book and let it rest on top of her bag. She swiftly browsed through the pages for her bookmark (she’d never corn her book, what kind of psychopath would give dog ears to a book’s pages? You’d have to be heartless, really) and when she found it, she sighed a little and went directly back to the story of Peter and Lara Jean. In this book, Lara Jean, a teenager, wrote five love letters to her past crushes and they mysteriously get sent. She has to deal with her sister’s ex-boyfriend who got a letter himself, and to confuse him, she fakes a relationship with another of her letters’ recipients. Elizabeth was a sucker for this type of novels, easy to read, full of sweet love and terribly cute. She had finished the first book of the series and was deep into the second one. Whenever she’d read, she wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else: the never-ending soundtrack of New York couldn’t distract her enough from the words sprayed in front of her. She wouldn’t hear the sound of construction or the yells of taxi cabs’ drivers. She wouldn’t hear the constant honking, the noise of cars driven down the streets, the buzzing noise of people walking fast to grab a train back to Queens or Bronx, the loud conversations of business men on the phone with their briefcases in hand, the laughs of little kids excited to go to Central Park to play soccer or to run in the grass, the barks of dogs, the yells of waiters to their chefs back in the kitchens and the constant hum of the city. All she could hear was her imagination go nuts while she’d read the words on the pages in front of her.
When she had her nose in her book, nothing could get her out of it. Nothing could and not even the tall, blond man who just got out of the black van in front of her. She didn’t see him check her from up there, she didn’t see him get his sunglasses off of his gorgeous blue eyes, she didn’t see the small smirk on the corner of his mouth and she certainly didn’t notice him enter the theater for the first time ever. He was new to the center, it was his first ever visit after he just signed his contract and he couldn’t wait to discover the atmosphere of the center, the high ceiling, the chandelier, the plush seats and the stage. He couldn’t wait to see where he’d perform for the next four months. He couldn’t wait to go back on a stage. He, neither, had a single bit of patience left in his body. He had been waiting for this moment ever since he had woken up and now that it was time, all he wanted to do was to push the heavy door and discover his new workplace. He had a photoshoot planned in barely an hour and a half so he only had little time to visit the center bottom to top before he’d had to pose for hundreds of pictures that would never come out at the exception of a couple, deemed more worthy by the promoters of the show. He wasn’t really used to being on a stage, he was more used to being in front of a couple of cameras, on very detailed sets (or humongous green screens) so it was a nice change. Apart from a (brief, to his tastes) experience at the beginning of the year, he wasn’t really much of a theater guy but he loved the trial and decided he wanted more of it. So he had signed for a series of four months and decided that he would do it wholly. He would enjoy every second of it, every detail of it, every show of his course.
The fact that he already was a famous figure, more even an unusual famous figure for a theater production, made the news even more phenomenal. His fans were going nuts over it, the media wouldn’t stop blogging, tweeting, speaking about it and it made of his buzz an even noisier background. So when he saw the brunette sitting on the ground in front of the theater, he immediately thought that she was here for him. It wasn’t that he had a big ego, it wasn’t that he expected fans or journalists to wait for him on every one of his moves but he was getting used to being stalked and he had made peace with it. If he had to sign an autograph before he could finally enter the theater, then so be it. Anything for a fan of his. But as he walked slowly towards her, he noticed that his shadow didn’t bother her at all. She was entranced in her book, too focused on the pages to be aware of his presence. Selfishly, he decided to enter the theater without a word to the woman. He had been waiting for this day for so long, the woman could always come back to see him if really she wanted to. He’d be here until mid-December, anyway.
For a whole week, Elizabeth had found herself unable to go back to the New York City Center. She left the small bookshops at ungodly hours and was so exhausted that she would come back to her small flat as fast as possible to crash on her bed. She had to wait for the Sunday to finally go back in front of the theater. When she arrived, though, she realized that it was crowded and frowned when she saw that journalists were pressing themselves in front of the Center to talk to someone. She knew that a new piece was supposed to open in a few weeks, as always. The shows would last for four or six months and go away, leaving the Center bare for a new crew and new sets. Was it possible that this new show was special? Maybe a special stage writer? Maybe it was the comeback of an old piece? Elizabeth sighed, coming to the realization that she wouldn’t be able to read peacefully for a couple of hours so she put her book back in her white tote bag and crossed the street again, crashing in the nearest Starbucks Coffee to buy herself a cup of tea. She found herself loved in a loveseat and took her book out of her bag, a little bit heartbroken that the atmosphere wasn’t the one she wanted to bathe herself in. From her little corner in the coffee shop, she could see the buzzing crowd in front of the City Center and the flashes of their cameras. Every ten minutes or so, her nose would rise back from between the pages and she’d see that it was still a mess outside. When finally, forty minutes after her arrival, she noticed that the journalists were gone, she rose from her seat, left her white cup with a lipstick stain on the counter and crossed the street for the third time of the day, to finally crash on the steps as she had originally planned.
She maybe was forty or fifty pages further in her book when she understood why the journalists were all there. Coming out of the theater, a blonde tall guy that she knew from all of these movies Kassandra had talked to her about. Back then, she had the ultimate crush on the guy, she couldn’t stop talking about him and honestly, at some point, Elizabeth started loathing the poor dude, before she realised that there was nothing he could do about it and he wasn’t responsible of Kassandra’s behaviour. That time, she wasn’t absorbed by her book that much that she couldn’t see him passing by. But instead of reacting, she just watched him walk by, obviously busy, his hands in his pockets and his satchel on his shoulder. The whole thing lasted barely five seconds, but to her, it felt like several minutes. It was like, suddenly, in the middle of all this noise and agitation that made New York what it was, the little corner of the New York City Center that she used to call her shelter had dived underneath water and everything felt cottony, slow and muffled. There was only one thing that she could focus on and it was that man, walking towards his car, opening the door and letting his driver know that he was ready to go back home. Later that day, when she went back to her place, she realised that she’d remember the first time she saw him. She’d remember his grey knitted sweater, his brown-rimmed sunglasses, the way his dark jeans fitted his thighs and even possibly the shape of his ass. She’d also remember the beard that crowned his cheeks and the way his hair was pushed back on his head. He looked insanely good and yet, seemed like he had barely taken the time to choose his clothes that morning. She told herself that he had a whole team to make him look perfect while she was on her own, with her small cupboards that she could barely fill with clothes. She lived on thrift stores and hand-me-downs from her mom, while he probably had paid his knitted sweater something like a hundred bucks. She wasn’t from the same world as he, but still, for a second back then, she felt like she shared something with him. Like her shelter suddenly wasn’t only hers anymore.
Two weeks later and Elizabeth was still camping outside the Center whenever she could. Not that she suddenly had another idea than to read there, but she couldn’t deny the small electricity waves that flustered her more than she thought they would. It felt like the theater was no longer her own little safe place but like she was intruding and trespassing a little. It was hers first, dammit! Why did she feel that way? Why did she feel like suddenly, it wasn’t her place to read there anymore? The fact that photographers were still hiding in the coffee shop accross the street made it even more frustrating. Who did they think they were, entering her little sanctuary and making her feel out of place?
It happened on the fifth day of feeling like crap, like she didn’t have the right to come read there anymore. Her nose was deep down into the pages, as always, when the door banged against the wall on the side and out he came, like a projection, like an image straight out of a glossy-paged magazine. He looked incredibly good but Elizabeth didn’t know yet that it was just the usual. She was about to finish the paragraph she was engrossed in when the loud bang of the door made her jump and scream a little, making him jump a little as well.
“Oh my God, sorry, I didn’t mean to make so much noise”, he blushed.
“It’s okay”, she exhaled, her free hand on her chest to calm her heart down.
“Have a nice day”, he smiled.
“Thanks, you too!”
And that was it. The guy walked straight to the car that was waiting for him and he climbed in it. He didn’t turn around to watch her read, he didn’t say goodbye, he didn’t do anything other than get in the car and be driven away. Or so she thought, because she definitely didn’t see him turn in the backseat to observe her and frown at his behaviour. Was he supposed to ask her if she was a fan? Was he supposed to pose for a picture with her? Why was she here? What were she hoping for when she planted her butt on the ground, in front of the theater? Elizabeth didn’t hear him mutter a few words that even his driver didn’t understand and she didn’t see him close his eyes when he realised he must have been a jerk to her.
It took a few days again for Elizabeth to have another encounter. She had a different book, she wasn’t really sure she was actually liking it but since she couldn’t put it away for dear God’s love, she kept reading it and cringing at some parts. She was about to finish a page when something came into her view. And she didn’t mean just something in the far distance that distracted her. She meant something came directly between her face and her book, big enough to block her view of the pages and to make her jump again. When the slight scare feeling slighty came down, she realised it was a dog’s head and she was suddenly caught in a crazy laughing fit.
“Hi you”, she giggled, rubbing the dog’s head. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
The dog barked lightly, like it was afraid of scaring her again but he opened his big mouth and took a large lick at her left cheek, making her laugh even louder. As she scratched his face, her fingers met the rough material of his collar and she calmed herself down enough to take a look at the dog tag around his neck.
“Hi Dodger, you’re a really cute boy”, she smiled, letting him bark a little bit louder. “So, where’s your human, little pal?”
The white, brown and black dog barked a little again, his tail wagging behind him like crazy, his excited body crashing on her book when she patted his back. Soon enough, Dodger’s human came full speed into view and she couldn’t quite believe that it was the same actor as the two previous times. He was out of breath, Dodger’s leash in his hand, finally getting his dog into view and relaxing a little. Putting his hand on his knees to catch his breath, he took a second to be able to talk properly.
“Hi”, he panted. “I’m very sorry about that, my dog got out of his leash and I couldn’t run fast enough.”
“It’s okay”, Elizabeth laughed, getting up and picking her book from the ground to save it from Dodger’s dirty paws. “He’s been sweet, don’t worry.”
“I’m having trouble believing you”, he scoffed. “This dude is a complete nut-job”, he laughed, finally getting Dodger back to clip the leash back into the special hook of his collar.
“I saw his name was Dodger, we bounded a little”, she smiled.
“That’s nice, you made a friend, Dodger!” he laughed, squatting to be at the same height than his dog. “Nice to meet you, I’m Chris”, he introduced himself.
“Nice to meet you Chris, I’m Elizabeth”, she smiled.
“I really have to stop scaring you like that, I was so far and still I saw you jumping when he barged into your view.”
“It’s no big deal, this book was getting cringey anyway”, she grimaced.
“Well, I’m needed in the theater but it was nice talking with you”, he smiled.
“Have a nice day, then. Bye Dodger!” she scooted to scratch the dog’s head one last time.
Chris laughed a little and went straight into the theater, mentally cursing himself for not engaging with Elizabeth a bit more. If she really was a fan, she must have felt like he was the biggest douche around. If not.. Well what the hell was she doing there?