Chapter 8
Jordan hadn't offered to walk Kayla back to set because he thought it would seem like he desperately and passionately wanted to spend more time with her.
That was true, but he was afraid it wasn't a good look, especially around a woman who probably had men acting like that all the time.
Not that he wanted to play it cool. Jordan wasn't sure he was able to play it cool, really.
But mostly he didn't want to come on like a wrecking ball.
The fact that Kayla had invited him out to dinner when she was next available seemed like a good sign, though.
Like he wasn't coming across as a love-struck fool, even if that's exactly what he was.
So he waited until she'd been gone for at least fifteen minutes before paying the bill and taking Barney out of the ice cream parlor, murmuring, "You were a good boy," to the black-and-white dog.
"We'll take a nice long walk now. Maybe even long enough to tire you out. "
Barney's fluffy flag of a tail curled up and waved like Jordan had issued a challenge.
Well, as long as his knee held out, Jordan was up for it.
"Tell you what, we'll go down and do the river walk, how's that sound?
But I want to go back to the town square to get a doughnut to tide me over on the walk back, okay?
Because the kiosk down there only does hot chocolates and coffee, and no hot chocolate on earth is ever going to live up to the one I just had.
And I don't need coffee after three p.m."
The dog looked back at him, and Jordan realized he was making excuses to a pet.
"All right, fine, the truth is that I want to hang around and see if I can watch Kayla filming for a while.
Is that weird?" He frowned as they slipped their way down the sidewalk.
"No, what's weird is that I'm asking a dog his opinion on my itinerary. Don't judge me."
Barney was clearly judging him. Jordan straightened his shoulders and informed himself that a Border Collie, no matter how smart, did not get to decide on the human's activities for the afternoon.
He had not quite convinced himself of that as they emerged on the eastern side of the square, where the new playground had gone up earlier in the year.
Jordan wished they'd had something like it when he was a kid: it looked like the entire town's worth of under-12s were crawling over it right now, pelting snowballs, playing tag, and generally making an inconceivable amount of noise.
One of the kids yelled, "PUPPY!" and came tearing over, leading about five others, all shouting with similar excitement.
The ringleader skidded to a stop a few feet away from Jordan, and with unmistakable enthusiasm but genuine polite caution, said, "Hello!
Is your dog friendly?" The other kids, mostly about to swarm Barney, stopped suddenly at the little boy's question, as if reminded that they were probably supposed to ask something like that, too.
Jordan grinned at them. "Yes, he is. This is Barney. He's a Border Collie."
"Hi, Barney! I'm Noah." Noah, who was about nine and blue-eyed, pulled his mitten off and put the back of his hand down below Barney's chin so the dog could sniff at his fingers. Only after Barney had sniffed did Noah rub the underside of his chin, then the top of the dog's head.
Jordan's eyebrows rose. "That was very good. Most dogs don't like things—"
"—coming at them from above their heads," Noah said in a world-weary tone. "I know, I know, my mom's told me one hundred million times. Be gentle and slow!" he told another of the kids, who slowed down abruptly and then looked a little like he wondered why he was listening to Noah.
A woman in a big jacket came up behind the little group of kids, calling, "Maria?
Maria, honey, we're supposed to be on set in a few minutes," as one of the girls squealed in delight as Barney licked her hand.
She was a cutie, all big blue eyes and dark hair, a lot like Kayla, though her entire face turned down in a frown as the woman spoke.
The woman said, "Just one more minute with the dog," then waved at someone approaching them.
Jordan turned to see Kayla striding across the snow toward them. His heart leaped, but the little girl, following his gaze, melted into a puddle of regret and mumbled, "Uh oh."
Kayla waved, calling, "Hi Nic, hi Maria," and smiled as she reached them.
Maria, still a small blob of sorrow and still mumbling, said, "I'm very sorry about your hair, Miss Kayla," in what sounded like an oft-repeated apology.
"If the wig had been better secured, it wouldn't have happened," Kayla said with a sigh as she hugged the little girl's shoulders against her hip. "You were just very strong and very fast. Jordan! Oh! Hi!"
"Hi again. So This is the stylist you went to for your avant-garde haircut?"
Maria drew dark little eyebrows down at him, clearly suspecting she was being made fun of, but Jordan, grinning, crouched and whispered, "I knew Kayla when she wasn't much older than you, and I have to tell you, she wore hairstyles like this a lot back then."
Just inside his line of vision, he could see Kayla wrinkle up her face in despair before she hid it behind her hand and mumbled, "I'm afraid he's right, Maria.
I definitely had bangs this short on purpose at least once.
Oh, God, you remember my entire goth phase, don't you," she said to Jordan, who tilted his grin up at her.
"Was that where you cut your bangs to the hairline and the rest of it with a razor and dyed chunks of it really dark blue?"
"He remembers," Kayla moaned, and the woman with Maria—Nic, apparently—laughed.
"Seriously? I thought you were always poised and perfect."
"I wish. I was a tiny round goth with—oh, no, I dyed the bangs green, do you remember?"
"I'd forgotten that! That was actually better than when you grew the bangs out and cut them to match your eyebrow line, though."
"It was supposed to be a widow's peak," Kayla groaned.
"Like a Dracula…oh, never mind. It wasn't a good look, anyway.
" She smiled ruefully at Maria. "So don't worry about the hair, okay, honey?
I've done worse to myself. I mean, also don't grab wigs off anybody's head again, but don't worry about it.
And honestly, the rewrites to the script have made it funnier, so it's all okay.
Anyway, Cyril's taking the rest of the afternoon off—"
Whoever 'Cyril' was, apparently he wasn't the kind of person who was supposed to take the rest of the day off. Even little Maria, who couldn't have been much more than six, looked shocked, and Nic frowned like she hadn't understood what Kayla had said. "Cyril is taking the afternoon off?"
"We had a little discussion," Kayla said lightly. "He needed some time to think about it."
Nic's gaze darted to Maria and back to Kayla, clearly understanding a lot more than Jordan did, although he could at least pick up on the fact that Kayla was being casual about a serious situation so the little girl didn't get stressed out about it.
After a moment, Nic nodded and in a bright tone said, "Well, looks like you've got the afternoon free, then, Maria. Do you want to take a break, or—"
By the time she got that far into the sentence, Maria had let out an unholy yell and gone running back to the playground.
A couple of the other kids followed her, though Noah stayed with the dog, who was now leaning heavily into the little boy's ear-rubbing hands.
"Well," Nic said again, now amused. "I guess that answers that question.
I better keep an eye on her, but it was nice to meet you and your dog, uh, Barney's Human. "
Jordan laughed. "I'm Jordan. Nice to meet you, too."
"Nicole, for future reference," Nic said with a quick smile, then waved and followed Maria at a considerably more sedate pace.
Jordan turned to Kayla, eyebrows rising. "So who's Cyril?"
"The director," Kayla said dryly.
His eyebrows were almost as high as they could go anyway, but they tried to go higher. "The director took the afternoon off? Is that, uh, normal?"
"No." She gave him a tight smile. "Neither is the star threatening to fire him. It's been what, half an hour since we saw each other? A lot's happened since then. But hey, I'm free for dinner tonight!"
Jordan opened his mouth and shut it again a couple of times. "…good? I mean, definitely good, obviously, but…do you want to talk about it?"
Kayla sighed from the bottom of her soul and cast a rueful glance back toward the film set, where people were packing up what needed to be packed up.
"I would love to, but first I've got to go try to talk the Christmas market vendors into something they probably don't want to do.
Maybe you and Barney can be cute and make them more susceptible to my pleas? "
Noah stood up, brushing snow from his knees. "I'll come with you. Everybody knows I'm a mover and a shaker around these parts."
A laugh leaped to Jordan's throat and he strangled it there, turning it to a muffled squeak, because it was clear the little boy was completely serious.
Kayla met his eyes, her own huge with laughter, but she didn't show a hint of that as she turned her gaze down to Noah.
"I could really use a mover and a shaker," she admitted.
"I don't know many who are your age, though. "
Noah waved a casual hand toward the playground. "I got that funded and built. Ask anybody."
Jordan and Kayla both looked toward the playground, then at each other, and finally back at Noah. "Seriously?" Kayla asked a bit faintly. "You…that looks like it was a really big project, Noah."
"It was huge! The mayor said the town couldn't afford it so it would have to be privately fundraised but that the town council would," Noah took a deep breath, eyes squinted as he tried to remember the right words, "…
match funds, that was it, if we got a bid and found out how much it would cost and raised half the amount so I got my Dad to do a bid, he's a carpenter, and we did a big fundraiser and Mr. Keith cut off all his hair and his whole family donated money for his haircut and," his eyes widened again, "it was a lot more than they expected and then Mom helped me write a grant to the state and anyway Miss Tiffany came with her construction crew in the summer and built it after they fixed the gazebo. "
His explanation ran out so suddenly that Jordan jolted a bit, waiting for the next bit.
When it didn't come, he glanced toward the tremendous gazebo in the middle of the square.
It currently held the annual Christmas tree, but otherwise looked as it always had when he was growing up. "…what happened to the gazebo?"
"Oh, they smashed it," Noah said airily. "There were bees."
Kayla, who had womanfully repressed every hint of laughter until that point, let out a braying laugh that echoed toward the sky, then tried to suck it back in with a snort that sounded painful.
"I'm sorry," she wheezed. "I just remembered that meme, you know the one of the hotel that had been knocked down but the sign was still up?
And somebody had put 'There was a spider.
It's okay now.' on the sign?" She looked between Noah and Jordan, who were both eyeing her skeptically, and dissolved into giggles.
"No? Well, 'there were bees' made me think of it, never mind.
Look…Noah, was it? It sounds like you really are a mover and a shaker around here, so if you'd be willing to help me out, that would be great.
You and Jordan and Barney can be my vanguard. "
"What's a vanguard?" Noah asked curiously.
"It's the part of an army that clears the way," Kayla said with a smile, and Noah puffed up with satisfaction.
"Yeah, I can vanguard. What do you need, anyway?"
"I need to convince everybody on this side of the market to not set up any more until we've got these scenes filmed, so the background of the scenes has continuity.
" At Noah's blink, Kayla made a face. "Basically we don't want the market to go from half finished to totally finished and back again in the background.
Movies don't film things in order, see, so we try to keep all of our surroundings exactly the same until we've got the whole scene finished.
And since our director is having a tantrum, we can't film any more today. "
Jordan watched Noah try to take that in, and, to be fair, kind of felt the same way himself.
He'd been an extra, a couple of times. He knew that movies didn't film in order.
It was still kind of hard to really believe it.
It was hard to imagine having to move easily from one emotion to another without the whole story leading up to it, even if doing all the outdoors winter scenes at once made a certain amount of sense.
Eventually, though, the kid nodded. "Okay. Let's give it a shot. Can I walk the dog?"
"Yeah, but hold on to the leash tight, okay? He's kind of an escape artist."
"He won't run away from me," Noah said with great confidence. He took the leash, clicked at Barney, and marched off toward the market like a boy with a purpose.
The second he was out of earshot, Kayla whispered, "A mover and a shaker," to Jordan, and they grabbed onto one another, muffling their giggles into each other's shoulders before running to catch up with Noah.