Chapter 10
S he’s doing it?”
I adjust my footing and move my chair into place. It skids backward two inches and I overcorrect, banging into the wall. “She’s doing it.”
Jackson shifts at the other end of the hallway. He’s holding a broomstick as his weapon of choice. I’m armed with the matching dustpan.
“She agreed?” he asks again, tongue stuck between his teeth as he calculates his chances of getting the tennis ball past me and in the trash-can goal. I’m currently undefeated at hallway hockey / soccer / whatever the hell we’re doing. Only half of that is a result of my skill. The other half is Jackson’s complete lack of hand-eye coordination.
“She agreed,” I say, exasperated. This is the twenty-fifth time we’ve been over this. “She should be here any minute, actually.”
Jackson drops the tennis ball on the floor and traps it with the broom. “Do you have a show plan?”
“I always have a show plan.”
“Do you have a show plan that accounts for Lucie?”
I sigh and straighten from my hunched-over position, the dustpan in my lap. “Are you attempting to distract me or are these legitimate questions?”
Jackson rockets the tennis ball down the hallway. It hits the back of the trash can with a dull thud. He tosses his arms in the air and does one slow, wobbly, celebratory spin.
I toss the dustpan at his chair and abandon mine.
“Don’t be a sore loser!” Jackson calls after me. The wheels squeak on his chair as he pushes himself along, trying to catch up. He’s doing a shit job of it, laughing too much to get any momentum. “I was testing a theory.”
I have no interest in hearing what that theory might be. I turn down a hallway, cut through the break room, and make for the studio. I need a door that locks and a soundproof window between me and the rest of the world.
But my booth isn’t empty, and there’s someone sitting in my chair.
Lucie is waiting, toying with the snow globe my dad got me almost five Christmases ago when my mom was unexpectedly admitted to the hospital. He didn’t want us to spend the holiday without gifts, so he went down to the tiny shop in the Hopkins lobby and bought whatever he could find in the discount gift shop. We toasted with ice water in paper cups and laughed at my father’s horrendous wrapping. It’s a good memory, despite the setting. One of my favorites.
I haven’t thought of it in years.
Lucie turns the snow globe over and over in her hands, shaking up the tiny white flakes, watching them land on the miniature Baltimore skyline. Her face is relaxed, eyes soft, a smile curling at the edge of her pale pink lips.
I pull the door shut behind me. “Making yourself comfortable?”
She startles and turns quickly, her long hair slipping over her shoulders. “I didn’t—” She sets the snow globe back on the corner of my desk. “I wasn’t—” She stands and tucks her hair behind her ears, fingertips rubbing at the row of dainty earrings along her lobe. A gesture I’ve seen her do twice now. “I let myself in. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” I tell her. I keep my back pressed to the door, my hands loose at my sides. I’ve never noticed how small this room is before. “This is your booth now too. According to Maggie.”
She gives me a tight smile. “Only for a few evenings a week. For a limited run.”
I nod. “Or until you get sick of me. Whichever comes first.”
She keeps staring at me.
“That was a joke,” I offer. I can’t read her at all.
“It was very funny.”
“That must be why you’re laughing so hard.” I push off the door.
Her eyes follow me. The barest hint of a smile twitches at her mouth. She fights it though. And it somehow makes me like her even more.
“You’re going to tear me apart, aren’t you?” I murmur.
“Don’t worry, Aiden.” Her smile blooms. There’s a secret there, somewhere. “You’re safe with me.”
I sincerely doubt that.
Jackson barrels into the window with his rolling chair, brandishing his broom like a trident and interrupting our staring contest. I see his mouth move but don’t hear a word he’s saying. Thank god.
His eyes land on Lucie and he waves enthusiastically. She lifts her hand in response, forehead crumpled in confusion.
“Is he using a desk chair as a . . . boat?”
“A traveling mechanism of some sort, yeah.” I sigh. I can’t believe he scored a goal on me. “I’d like to say you get used to this sort of thing, but this place always manages to surprise you.”
“Is he the one who does the weather updates?”
“And traffic. He also likes to make sure I’m taking my vitamins and he’s a shit shot at hallway hockey.” I frown, not sure why I felt the need to add that last part. I backtrack. “He’s a fine shot, actually. One of my best friends.”
Lucie hums and I move into the room and peek at the desk. She’s still staring at Jackson as he wheels his way back to wherever he came from and I’m trying not to notice. I distract myself by going through my preshow ritual. Eileen has already been here to set up; there’s a brand-new microphone in the space next to mine and a blank notepad. Lucie shifts to accommodate me and I catch a whiff of motor oil. Fresh soap and . . . daisies. She gathers all her hair in her hand and twists it over her shoulder, fingers working nimbly as she tugs it into a braid. I’m mesmerized by the graceful and practiced movement. It’s probably something she does a million times a day, but I can’t look away.
She is not what I expected. Not on the phone two weeks ago, not when she visited Maggie earlier in the week, and not now, standing in my studio looking at me like she has no idea why she’s here or what she’s doing.
“Can I . . . help?” she asks. I tilt my head to look at her. She shifts on her feet when our gazes snap together. “I’m not used to sitting on my hands.”
I want her to sit and relax and maybe talk to me some more about the things she wants for herself, but I’m not sure that’s possible with the way she keeps shifting on her feet. Plus, we’ll have plenty of time to do exactly that when we’re locked in this room together for . . . hours.
I tip my head to the empty coffeepot behind me. “Make us some coffee? There’s a bunch of stuff in the break room to choose from. Whatever you want.”
She reaches for the handle of the carafe. “I haven’t been relegated to coffee-making duties in a while.”
Shit. I didn’t even realize. I reach for the pot in her hand, but she tugs it out of reach, a laugh under her breath. My fingertips skim the soft material of the sweater she’s wearing and I drop my hand abruptly, curling it into a fist. There is about three inches of space in this room and there’s nowhere I can move that doesn’t have some part of me pressed up against some part of her.
“Relax,” she says. “I was kidding. Thank you for giving me something to do.”
She slips out the door to the booth and I watch her through the window until I lose sight of her. My chest feels uncomfortably tight, my breath too short. It’s not a new feeling, just one I haven’t felt in a while.
Preshow jitters.
The social media fervor around Lucie hasn’t died down, and Maggie has been stoking the flames with teasers about a mystery guest. The internet has more or less figured it out; now everyone’s waiting to see what happens next.
I’m waiting to see what happens next. I have no idea how Lucie is going to respond on the air. We plan to officially launch “Lucie Looks for Love” tonight, a working title, suggested by Hughie, vehemently protested by me. But I was overruled and here we are. Standing in the middle of a booth that suddenly feels too small, evaluating all the life choices that have led me here. About to do my best to help a woman find something I’m not even sure I believe in. Something that’s never been good to me.
Lucie comes back in the room with a carafe full of water and a bag of ground coffee. I stare at the green label.
“Where did you find that?”
“Someone hid it in an old Christmas cookie tin in one of the top cabinets.” She stops fiddling with the coffee machine to look at me. “Is that okay?”
“Fine,” I say, my voice amused. I’m the one who hid it in one of the top cabinets, in an old Christmas cookie tin. I’ve had to hide my coffee since the second week I was at the station, when everyone decided to use it as their own. No one’s been able to find it for years—not for lack of trying—and Lucie found it in six minutes. “Why were you looking in old Christmas cookie tins?”
“Because I love Christmas cookies.” She looks at the half-crumpled bag of coffee. “Should I put it back? You’re being weird about it.”
I’m being slightly weird about it. “No, it’s fine.” It’s just a bag of coffee. I shuffle some more things around on my desk. There is significantly less space in here with two sets of everything. “Are you feeling good about tonight?”
She blows out a breath. “I’m feeling . . . fine about it. I guess we’ll see how it goes.”
“You’re going to be great,” I tell her, fiddling with the audio controls, trying to find a space for it that won’t have me driving my elbow into Lucie every time I need to adjust. “Just be yourself.”
“That’s the problem,” she mutters.
I pause my rearranging. She’s frowning at the coffee machine, watching as it slowly brews my clandestine French roast, her hands curled in the sleeves of her sweater. She’s hesitant. Nervous.
“I don’t buy it,” I tell her.
“Don’t buy what?” she asks, startled. I guess not many people in Lucie’s life call her on her bullshit. Except maybe her daughter.
I reach for my coffee mug and my forearm brushes against hers. She doesn’t flinch away or press into me. She stays exactly where she is. “The night you called, I asked you questions and you gave me answers. You didn’t hesitate. You didn’t waffle. You busted my balls and you charmed half the country while you did it. You know what that tells me?”
“That I’m incredibly trusting with strangers in the middle of the night?”
“It tells me you know exactly who you are, and you know exactly what you want. You’ve just buried it under everything else for so long you’ve forgotten.”
Her face softens, her eyes on mine.
“You know why you’re here, Lucie, and you know what you want. Don’t pretend otherwise. Let’s find your magic, whatever that looks like. This whole place is Team Lucie.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me.” I reach for the other mug and hand it to her. “Now, pour your coffee and put on your headphones. Let’s run some audio tests.”
“You’re too far away from your mic.”
“What?”
“You’re too far away,” I say again. “You sound whispery.”
“I don’t sound whispery.” She yells to overcompensate and the feedback in my headphones makes me wince. “ You sound whispery,” she accuses, still yelling.
“Okay, now you’re yelling. Just—” I sigh and curl my hand around her mic stand. I tug it closer, then grip the armrest of her chair. I drag her chair toward me until we’re pressed together shoulder to wrist, her outer thigh tucked tight to mine beneath the desk. Her chin tips up as she stares at me with a dumbfounded look, her bangs in her face.
“Did you just manhandle me?”
“I manhandled the chair,” I tell her. “This is better.”
“How is this better?”
I tap the microphone stand in front of her. “Because now the microphone will pick up your normal voice. No more yelling.”
Her eyelashes flutter against her cheeks. This close, I can see the light dusting of freckles across her nose. She does smell like daisies. Fresh flowers with a sharp bite of metal beneath. She exhales and a whisper of her breath brushes against the hollow of my throat. Beneath the table, she tries to rearrange her legs and knocks my knee with hers.
“No more yelling,” she says, her lips moving around the words, which echo through my headphones. Lucie, in high definition. “Noted.”
Someone knocks against the window. Lucie turns to look, but my eyes are stuck on her. Specifically, the curve of her ear and the hair tucked behind it. The three tiny studs along her lobe and the way her fingers trace them. One, two, three.
I clear my throat and turn my head.
There is not enough space in this room.
Maggie knocks on the window again and holds up two fingers. I nod and give her a thumbs-up.
“You ready?” I ask Lucie.
“Probably not.”
I smile. “That’s the spirit. Eileen is doing her thing on the other side of the wall. She’s going to count us in over the headphones.”
“That she is,” Eileen says through our headsets, and Lucie jumps next to me. Her knee drives up into the table and my hand finds her thigh, urging her still. I squeeze gently, letting my thumb trace over the surprisingly soft material. Lucie rattles out a breath and I snatch my hand away, both palms flat on the desk. Together we stare unseeingly at the run of show on the monitor in front of us.
We’re off to an excellent start.
“Give ‘em hell, kids,” Eileen says in our ears. “Counting down from five, four, three, two, one.”
The intro music plays and I look for the part of myself that isn’t a raging moron. I’ve never been someone who engages in casual touch, and I’m not going to start with Lucie. I repeat it like a mantra until it sticks. I will not touch Lucie. I will not touch Lucie. My shoulders relax and I settle in, doing my best to ignore the heat brushing against my left side. She sucks in a nervous breath and I try to ignore that too.
“Hey, Baltimore. Welcome to Heartstrings on 101.6 LITE FM. I’m your host, Aiden Valentine, and I’ve got a special guest with me tonight. She’ll be with us for a while, so give her your best welcome, yeah?”
I nod at Lucie. On the screen behind her, I can see our social media feed picking up steam. The caller log is dark right now, but I imagine it won’t be for long.
A smile hooks the corner of her mouth. “Hi, host of Heartstrings , Aiden Valentine.” She leans closer to the mic, like she’s ducking her head out the tiny window in the back and whispering out over the city. The row homes that line the cobblestone streets of Fells Point and the ones on the hill on the other side of the harbor. The redbrick churches in Little Italy and the high-rises in Harbor East. A whole city on the edge of their seats waiting to see what she says next. Her smile tugs wider. “Hi, Baltimore.”
She says the name of the city in the way that all locals do. Slippery sounds that slot themselves into two syllables. Bawl-mer.
I smile. “Would you like to introduce yourself to our friends at home?”
Lucie takes a deep breath and lifts one shoulder.
“It’s Lucie.” Her eyes slant to mine and hold. “I’m hoping you guys might be able to help me out with a problem I’ve been having.”
And the call log lights up like a Christmas tree.
LUCIE STONE: Are those people calling in?
AIDEN VALENTINE: Yup.
LUCIE STONE: To talk to me?
AIDEN VALENTINE: Yup.
LUCIE STONE: Oh, wow. Get ready to be disappointed, Baltimore.
AIDEN VALENTINE: Get ready to be charmed, Baltimore.