all day.
The first time, it happened when I passed him his coffee from Nudge.
“Why do you have two last names?”
“Oh. Uh… Lawczynski was my last name when I was born. But then my dad and his brother, who moved here from Poland as teenagers, with my grandparents, decided to North-Americanize it or something. I’m not even sure why. I asked him, but he was vague about it. My dad is kinda crazy. You ask him a question and he rambles off to something totally unrelated.” Wait. Am I doing that right now? “Anyway, they changed it to Lawson, so that’s what I’ve always gone by. But lately I’ve been rocking the original family name. You know, maturing makes one think about their roots and stuff. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering,” he said.
Later, it happened when I walked back into the control room after refilling my mug. “Is your hair always pink?”
“No. It’s dirty blonde. The pink thing is more recent. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
Later, while we were both working on our laptops, he asked me, “Is April Wine really one of your favorite bands?” That one was so out of nowhere I actually jumped a little.
“Yes. That’s why I put them on my top ten list. But I only listen to them when I’m feeling melancholy or nostalgic for my childhood. My mom was a major fan.”
After that, I started singing “Rock N’ Roll Is a Vicious Game.” Which I figured took some balls, since I couldn’t really hit a note to save my life, and he was the legendary music producer.
He smiled at me.
My pussy clenched involuntarily and I stopped singing, pretending to need to cough.
Five o’clock started creeping up far too fast, and I started to regret that the day was almost over. All day, Cary had drifted between working at his desk with his headphones on and working out in the great room, acting totally normal. Or at least as normal as Cary seemed to get.
And I’d had fun working with him, again.
Maybe it was just me who felt the palpable tension between us every time he came into the room, and felt mildly embarrassed about what happened last night.
Why would he be embarrassed? He had no idea he’d had an audience when he did that incredibly private, sexy thing.
“So… would you have time this week to go through your emails with me?” I asked him as I was finishing up. We were both sitting at our desks, and he slipped his headphones off, the same way he did, patiently, every time I interrupted him. “I sorted out anything that seems worthy of your attention. I can just run though them with you quick and see how you’d like me to respond to them for you? Might take an hour or so.”
“Sure. We can do that. I’ll let you know when I have time.”
“Okay. You know, you have some requests for interviews sitting in your inbox,” I told him, stalling as the last few minutes of my workday dissolved. Those emails had been the most interesting ones; they’d been forwarded to him from some of the record companies he’d worked with, from his lawyer’s office, from Merritt over at Little Black Hole. It didn’t seem like he had an actual point of contact for that type of thing, until now. “Do you ever respond to those?”
“Nope.”
“I could do it for you.”
“Maybe.”
“If I did… what would you want me to say?”
He blinked at me, like it had never occurred to him to think of a response to interview requests.
“It’s good karma, responding to people,” I said. “Don’t you think?”
“Not worth wasting too much of your time on, though.”
“It won’t take much time.”
He sat back in his chair. “Okay. If it’s a request from a fan site or something you can just ignore it. I don’t think most of them expect a response anyway. If it’s from anywhere legit, any kind of major publication or TV, radio, whatever, you can write up a form response that says thanks but I’m not doing interviews right now. You can use that going forward. But if you respond once and they come back asking again, just ignore them.”
“You never do interviews? Even over the phone or email or anything?”
“No.”
“Would you want to, if we vet the questions and I help type up your answers or anything?”
“No.”
“Can I ask why?”
He stared at me.
“Just wondering…” I said, using his excuse to me when he’d asked me questions today.
It worked.
“I don’t do interviews,” he explained, “because when