a-misunderstanding-my-love:

A night at Renaud’s when I was not in the Orchestra but spent the performance backstage, on the pretense of helping Lestat with his costume changes. 

He had one particularly lengthy one, which included a bit of a break from the stage itself (Pantelone had an abusive scene with one of the Zanni, granting the lovers a reprieve). 

Folded into the velvet curtains, his costume hanging upon the wall, Lestat had begun to remove his trousers when I caught him by the hip and spun us deeper into the curtains, his back against the wall. One hand cupping his ass, I remember kissing him as I took him in hand, his groan vibrating through my lips as our tongues fought each other. 

We made hurried love in those curtains, and, though it was not the first time (nor would it be the last), as we finished and Lestat’s moment to return to the stage approached, I laced up his breeches and left a kiss on his hipbone. He pulled me up quickly and kissed me feverishly, his heart thrumming as it often was just before he went on, and I remember my breath hitching as he looked at me and paused. He should have already been onstage, he should have left seconds earlier—he was already late. But he paused, he looked at me, and his kissed me, again, softly this time. “I love you, do you know that?”

I remember that I couldn’t speak—the emotion was stupidly too much for me, my heart too full to answer him.  He grinned as he placed his hat upon his head, cocking it at a foppish angle. “I do, you know. God, how I love you.” And he kissed me again as he hurried out of the wings. 

I would be lying if I said that I never missed him. But the Lestat I miss is that young man, clad in my red velvet coat, making love to me in the wings of that claptrap little theatre.