My Best Friend’s Nude Scene – Part 2 by OzEliot..,

My goal had been for things to go back to normal with Liz, but this didn’t qualify. Our Friday night watching the movie might have been a one-time deal, but I kept feeling like every glance my way was her flirting with me. I already felt incredible guilt at what we had done together while Emily was drinking with friends. Not that I was innocent and deserved any sympathy, but I kept thinking I couldn’t win; at first I felt terrible because I thought I had betrayed Liz, now I had definitely betrayed Emily with Liz. I had to cop to that, I knew, but I wasn’t sure I should tell Emily the truth, and I was using up as much time as I could debating it in my head. I didn’t bother asking Liz’s opinion; if she had asked me if Emily knew or if I had told her, I would have taken that as a sign, and the fact she didn’t was a sign of another kind. The truth was that, as bad as I felt, I didn’t feel as bad as I should have. I felt great. I liked thinking about Liz all the time. I had no doubts that I should be with her instead of Emily.

There is nothing wrong with Emily at all, but things had not been good between us for a while, and I had my suspicions why. Being with Liz only confirmed that I would be happier with someone else.

Her thoughts were unknown to me, but Liz seemed to be having a ball. She didn’t show any worries about the DVD getting around–maybe she trusted me that much–and she put the same enthusiasm and energy into her classes and her work designing sets for the upcoming Hurston play the college was doing. Whenever I had to walk through our workshop I would see her bent over a piece of scenery, giving it a coat of paint or adding some details, maybe bolting together two wooden pieces with a hinge, and I sweated at the sight of her round ass in her tight jeans. I think she caught me looking, too.

We had lunch together, another sign that things were back to normal. All she wanted to do was talk about the show of student-produced plays coming up next Friday. Many of us grad students and young instructors were participating, partly out of genuine support for the students, partly because it looked good for our evaluations. It’s not exaggeration to say Liz was the prettiest of the instructors–though 38-year-old Miss Delacourt had inspired a few crushes here and there–and she was like the bell of the ball when the students started asking for faculty to help them with scenes. She had chosen to go with Albert Weiss, a self-assured playwright and actor who always talked a good game about how he only liked “exciting” theater. If I had been her, I would have gone with Nyla Shepard, who was a more powerful actress, but Liz said she liked Nyla, but all of the scenes she had chosen were extremely dark and self-important. With Albert, she was promised a chance to stretch her comedic muscles. I understood how much she wanted to do that.

It was hard to stay focused on what she said at times during our lunches. Even the way she ate french fries seemed seductive to me. While I could have been imagining it, I didn’t believe I was. I remembered what she had told me while going down on me. Never would I have dreamed someone as sexy as Liz would be into me. Here I was, in a scenario I’ve dreamed about, and it was one of the rare times in my life I had a girlfriend and felt like it was wrong to act on my feelings.

At home, Emily’s preoccupation with sex had passed. I tried to turn my attentions on her, but she kept telling me she wasn’t feeling like it–and she would make it up to me later. We watched a lot of TV and she spent a lot of nights on the phone with a couple of friends, Melanie and Chloe. She was more despondent than usual, but she didn’t want to talk about it, no matter how much I coaxed her. I figured I would be better off giving her some space, some time to figure it out for herself. It wasn’t all grim silence and quiet desperation. We had good dinners together, and once she was recharged with calories, before she picked up the phone, she could tell me about her day with some spirit and listen to what I would volunteer about mine. Like Liz at lunch, I talked about the upcoming student production. I had been asked to do a scene with one of my students–we had a kissing scene, and normally I never would have mentioned it, worried about Emily’s ego getting shaken, but giving her that to concentrate on, I thought, helped put her off the trail of what was happening with Liz.

One night, though, Emily caught me watching the DVD again. She asked me why, and I could tell she was afraid of the answer. It’s a curse and a blessing, but I’ve always been able to conjure a lie on the spot, so I told her I had already informed Liz I had seen the movie and just wanted to talk about it with her, make her feel like it wasn’t so bad. The secret to a good lie is a dash of the truth surrounded by untruth. Emily asked me why I didn’t tell her about it before and I just said it had happened that day, and I was still debating whether or not I should tell Emily since Liz wanted me to keep it between us. That satisfied her, though it didn’t leave her too happy with me. At least I managed to deflect the more dangerous accusations of my feelings for Liz.

One of the subjects Emily did want to talk about was Liz–if she was doing well, if she was working in the upcoming show, and after I told her about the DVD conversation, in its half-truth form, she had a lot of questions about how Liz had explained it. I passed on what I had learned, when it didn’t incriminate me. The Saturday after the Friday I had stayed late working on the sets for the Hurston show, I woke up and discovered the DVD of Liz was back in the player. What was worth noting about that was I had most definitely not left it in the player. Emily was watching it, too.

The week of the student theater show was a real crunch, with a lot of late nights. Most of us who were working on the sets for the Hurston show, which opened up a week afterward, were asked to stay late and help get the set finished so it could be raised for tech week. Then in the evenings we were doing our own tech week for the student shows. There were eight 15-minute plays being staged back to back, and some of them were a bit intense, but there was confidence we could get them in great shape by Friday night. The scene with my student, Jill, had a lot of lines, but we both already had them memorized. Student shows were light on sets, but the lighting cues and blocking had to be down if we wanted a perfect show.

When I ran into Liz before the rehearsal that day, I noticed she had cut her hair shorter and colored it black. I told her it looked good and she burned a bit read and smiled at me. I could see her doing it for the scene, a look she wanted to have to sell the character–but it was hard not to think maybe she had done it for me, too.

I sat in the audience and watched Liz’s scene with Albert since I had not seen it before. It also contained a kissing scene, to no great surprise–no doubt he had planned that when he wrote it with her in mind, and she had graced him by choosing his scene to appear in. Not that I was jealous. It was a preposterous thing, like a mini-farce, where Liz’s character comes back to her hotel room and finds a stranger using her shower, just off-stage, of course. She gets flustered because there’s no towels or any clothes to cover up with, and he marches out onto the stage. Albert was planning on doing the scene naked, we could all tell, but only in the most literal sense. He would have his most critical parts covered with his hands, which would keep us from pissing off too many people. But I’m sure his would be the scene everyone was talking about the next day. For the rehearsals, he wore his boxers, lucky us. Liz brought some great energy to it, but she seemed more nervous than it was written. Maybe she felt bad for Albert. Even in his boxers it was obvious he was pretty out of shape. I didn’t envy him trying to keep his hands in place and his posture from giving away too much the audience didn’t want to see.