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He also sent a text to Tyrone letting him know he was bringing a plus-one. Actually, he said he was bringing one of the studio’s producers. After it sent, he realized he didn’t know if that part was true.
“Are you producing yet?” he asked. His voice sounded loud in the quiet of the office.
“Hmm.” She hummed and pointed at her full cheeks. She grabbed a napkin and her water bottle and took a few sips before speaking. “Not officially.”
The way her eyes skated over her phone and her computer made him think she was withholding some key piece of information.
“Maybe what I should have asked is if you stillwantto produce.” He kept his gaze on his food so as not to pressure her for an answer.
Delicate was the ground on which they walked.
“I do,” she replied softly.
He darted a glance up, but she was gazing off into the distance, a gentle expression taking over her features.
“But it’s scary.” She shrugged and blinked, and she was back in the present. “I see how hard it is and I worry I don’t have the skills I need.” She took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “Johnny handles artists so well. Managers, assistants, entourages, all march through the studio and he somehow navigates those relationships while keeping the project focused.”
“You’re not Johnny,” he pointed out and immediately rolled his eyes at his own unhelpfulness.
“Duh.” She snorted.
“What I mean is, your methods might be different, but you handle difficult people very well. And you know that’s only a small part of the process. Your ear is unmatched. You hear more than others. You listen to the soul of the artist that gets lost in the technical. You help them get their true voice across.”
He took a bite, and when he looked up again, she was staring at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “You just don’t usually say things like that.”
“Like what?” But he knew what she meant.
It wasn’t as if he was the stoic, silent type. He talked, he did. But he never said things thatmattered.
Not really.
He could go on for hours and hours about history and artifacts and process. And he had. He was paid to do exactly that on most days.
But saying things that left him vulnerable and transparent? Saying things that revealed how much he’d been paying attention?
Not really his style.
Nikki snickered, propped her right elbow on the desk and rested her chin on her fist. He tried not to let his gaze linger on the brace still on her wrist. Every time he saw it, he heard the sound of her hitting the hood of his car and his stomach filled with lead.
“It’s weird, right?” she asked. “It’s weird for me anyway. Tell me it’s weird for you.”
He wasn’t positive he knew what she was talking about, though he had a pretty good idea, so he stayed silent.
“Like,” she went on, unbothered by his hesitation. “We know each other. We remember these useless facts about one another that normal people don’t know about us. And yet we’re essentially strangers. It’s weird, right?”
He dropped his gaze to his food to collect his thoughts on the matter.
She wasn’t wrong.
He knew her in ways he’d never known another woman.
The way she looked early in the morning with messy hair and a sleepy smile. That she couldn’t cook eggs worth a damn. That she cried more at the part in the movie where the hero gets it right than when he gets it wrong. That she liked shrimp in an above-average way but was too afraid to cook it herself because cooking seafood “freaked her out.”
He wondered what things she remembered about him.
