pairings: Anthony Ramos x male!reader (he/they pronouns for reader) (he/him pronouns for Anthony)
warnings: swearing, gay panic, not proofread
request: no one, I was just bored
Y/N hastily dialed the number on their phone, anxiously waiting as it rang.
"Hey, Y/N, what's up?" the familiar voice on the other end of the phone greeted them.
"You're sick?!" they asked in a disgusted tone, "What do you mean you're sick?!"
"I mean, I'm sick," Lin explained, as if he were talking to a toddler, "You have to go on tonight."
"Wh-what... you can't just be sick!" Y/N stuttered, stalling to avoid the inevitable outcome of having to perform as Alexander.
"Turns out I can."
Y/N rolled his eyes, despite Lin not being able to see it, "Well, I can't go on tonight."
"You kind of have to..."
"What if I was sick, huh? What would happen then?"
"You're the understudy, you can't get sick. And I know you're not sick."
"Bullshit, what if I was dead? What would you do then?"
"I don't know," Lin sighed, "Look, I know it's hard, but you gotta go on tonight. You've done it in rehearsals plenty of times, you'll be fine."
Y/N anxiously tapped the side of his phone. It wasn't so much the rapping or performing that had them nervous, but the person they had to perform with.
Y/N had rehearsed all the romance scenes tons of times, and sharing a kiss with Pippa while pretending to be her husband and the father of her children, making out with Jasmine and standing dangerously close to Renee while pretending to be in love didn't faze him too much. It was more the Intense Gay Stares™ he had to do with Anthony.
At every rehearsal, Y/N would end up a flustered mess the second he made eye contact with him, so they guessed that staring at him as if they were secretly lovers in the American Revolutionary War would result in him passing out due to a panic attack.
He had seen Lin and Anthony do it effortlessly every show, so why did it make Y/N so nervous?
Could it have been because they actually wanted to be secret lovers with Anthony Ramos? Who knows.
"So can you go on tonight?" Lin asked, his voice snapping Y/N out of his thoughts.
Squeezing their eyes shut, Y/N nodded, a pained look on his face, "Yeah... I can."
"Great," Lin said, sighing in relief, "You're a life saver, Y/N. Break a leg."
Sighing, Y/N hung up the phone, "I wish my leg was broken."
Y/N then begun pacing around their apartment. That had always been the best way to find solutions to problems that he had been overthinking.
Unfortunately, an hour wasn't enough time for a solution to magically appear, when Y/N got another phone call.
The caller ID was labeled Anthony R.
Y/N had thought about changing it to something else. A nickname he had thought of for him, and of course the random idea of adding an unnecessary heart emojis next to his name-because he definitely didn't like him like that. But he had shut down those ideas the minute they were thought of, wanting to dismiss the silly fantasy of actually forming a relationship with someone he could barely talk to. He didn't even remember how or why he got his number, considering they never texted if it wasn't for work.
