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“I do what I can.” I took a couple more bites and waited for him to do the same before asking, “Is something bothering you?”
He frowned again and set down the carton, folding his arms across his chest. “That is the question, isn’t it? Why do I bother?”
I tilted my head. “Have I missed some American idiom I’ve yet to learn?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been having issues with my work for a while now. I’ll come up with a good idea, and I’ll try it out, and maybe the first couple pictures will be okay, but then...” He sighed. “I can’t think of how to describe it. I’m not good with words. That’s my cousin Erik’s forté. I just take pictures.”
“I don’t think there’s anything just about the pictures you take.”
“Thank you, Sine.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I might’ve agreed with you at some point in the past, but now...I don’t know why I’m even trying anymore.”
I glanced toward the office door as something occurred to me. “I didn’t see Giselle out there.”
Alix pushed off the desk and began to pace, a sort of wild, restless energy buzzing around him. “That’s because she sent me a text to say that she’d been offered a more lucrative job with a higher profile release. Since I said I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do, I told her to take it.”
“That’s a breach of contract, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “Not really, since it was my decision not to press it. Besides, I couldn’t really blame her. My newest inspiration wasn’t doing shit.”
I considered him, worried at the lack of confidence showing in his eyes. “Maybe the idea was right, but the model was wrong.”
I had a mouthful of food when he slowly turned at looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face. Shite. That hadn’t been the nicest thing to say. I wasn’t trying to be mean, and it really wasn’t anything against Giselle.
I swallowed and scrambled to undo what I’d done. “I didn’t mean it like–”
“You’re right,” he cut me off. His eyes were strangely bright. “I had the wrong person.”
“Giselle is beautiful,” I stammered. “And there are hundreds of other beautiful models out there. All of them just as professional as Giselle and I’m sure she’d understand that you’d be needing a different look. It’s nothing against her, you see–”
He was smiling again, and I knew it was because my accent had gotten thicker. Or, at least, that’s what I thought he was smiling about. Then he said five words that told me I had no idea what was happening.
“You can be my model.”
