A/n: sorry it took me so long to get this up. I've been super busy and have had literally NO time to write for the past 3 weeks.
Tuesday:
I arrived at rehearsals twenty minutes early, ready to go and too impatient to wait any longer. Needless to say, Maks wasn’t there yet so I roamed the studio halls. I hadn’t gone far before I ran into Sharna (and when I say ran into, I mean she came barreling around the corner and flew straight into me).
“Oh my God! Sorry Meryl!” she apologized profusely between breaths, her accent particularly strong, a sure sign of her agitation. “I just need to talk to Peta about something!”
“I’m fine,” I assured her, taking her hand as she helped me off the ground.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I assured her, a bit more convincingly.
Sharna took one more look at me before scampering off. Once she was out of sight, I dusted myself off and made my way back to the room where Maks and I were going to be practicing. I checked my phone: five more minutes until Maks would arrive. Seeing no point in returning to the hallway, I began to stretch.
When Maks strolled casually into the room two minutes later, I sprang up from my lunge and ran to hug him.
“Hello, Meryl,” he smiled as we separated. “Good job last night.”
“You too,” I bounced on the balls of my toes as I spoke, unable to contain my energy.
Maks watched for a minute before continuing. “Well, someone’s excited.”
“And you aren’t?” I spoke in an accusing tone.
“I’m not a morning person,” was his excuse. He looked at me incredulously as I kept bouncing. “How are you so, like, awake?”
I shrugged and smirked at him mysteriously. Maks gave me a look that said, I give up and changed the topic.
“So, I thought we should start off by watching last night’s performance.” He held up a disc in a red sleeve, waiting for approval. I nodded my assent and he continued. “And then we can review, like, what went well, what we need to work on, and stuff like that and then we’ll figure out this week’s music. Does that sound good?” I nodded again.
Maks pulled his laptop out of his bag, turned it on, inserted the disc, and settled down on the floor, patting the space next to him. I obliged to his wishes, seated myself right next to him and rested my head on his shoulder in order to better see the screen (or at least that's what I told myself).
Once we were both comfortably situated on the ground, Maks played the video.
"This is what, like, the people watching the show saw last night," he explained. I nodded, my eyes half closed, half listening, too absorbed in the feel of his shoulder on the side of my face to pay much attention.
I tried as best (and surreptitiously) as I could to hold my breath, certain that if I even caught a wisp of his scent I would melt. It took me a couple of seconds to give up on the whole air-deprivation idea and I ended up shifting my head so I could watch the video without distraction.
I hadn’t really watched the package last night so I followed the clips of our rehearsals with interest, curious as to what they had chosen to include. It started off with me walking into the first day and Maks jokingly proposing to me. They then cut to a clip of me talking:
