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He laughed and linked his arm with mine, strolling along with me as the director corralled her minions and began to follow us to the distillery. On the way there I talked almost entirely to the director—scenes we should shoot, shots we should cut, lighting, color, camera angles—and yet I never lost track of the sensation of Hunter’s strong arm through mine, Hunter’s strong presence at my side. The heat coming off his skin, the heat coming through his eyes.
It was a sensation I believed I could get extremely used to.
As we strolled—well, as Hunter and I strolled; I don’t think the director was capable of less than a full-on bustle, and her as**sistants scurried after her—we passed some of her colleagues conducting interviews with the workers. One fellow, on the older side, self-conscious in his denim overalls, shuffled his feet and said to his interviewer as we passed, “Well, it’s the taste of the South and that’s no mistake.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked Hunter. “I love it; it’s perfect for a tag line!”
“I defer to your expertise,” Hunter said with a formal bow and a teasing smile.
“It’s certainly one possibility,” the director said grumpily. Earlier in the day, I might have taken umbrage at her tone, but by now I knew it was just how she communicated. Compared to some of the things she’d said earlier, this was practically a ringing endorsement.
“There it is, coming right up on your left,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” she said distractedly. “Good…”
As we reached the distillery, the director was frowning thoughtfully up at Hunter, clearly mentally checking off items on a list in her head. “We haven’t got footage of you yet, either,” she said abruptly. “We’ll need that. Bartlett, you got a recommendation for rooms we should use?”
I glowed a little bit inside at this acknowledgment of my understanding of her work.
“The cask room,” I said. “You’ll want to do it after anything that needs natural light, of course, but it’ll be easy to set up the main lights in there, and there’ll be a good color contrast with his outfit.”
Hunter fidgeted. “I’m not sure about an interview…”
“Don’t tell me you’re nervous,” I teased.
“You already have an unfair advantage over me with all your psychological advertising knowledge,” Hunter defended himself. “How can I just give away all my secrets?”
I raised an eyebrow, and trailed a finger down his chest. “Well, if you don’t tell me, I might just go…looking.”
“And is that supposed to be a disincentive?”
The director cleared her throat. “No need to be nervous, Mr. Knox. It’ll be a pretty standard set of questions. The history of the brand, the values, where you get your inspiration, that kind of thing. People will love it. The face of the Knox legacy.”
“That does sound easy,” Hunter agreed, not taking his eyes off mine. A warm smile spread across his face like honey. “There’s inspiration around me every day.”
And I grinned back up at him like a fool, and didn’t care who saw me. “I could say the same.”
#
Long story short, the shoot went great. Sure, we’d be single-handedly supporting some coffee plantation with the amount of caffeine the editing team ingested as they made visual poetry out of the raw footage, but damn, the raw footage in itself was beautiful. It seemed like every worker they’d interviewed had some surprisingly meaningful thing to say about the company and the bourbon and what both meant to them. And our director might have been gruff, but I would have taken a thousand times worse from her to get some of the shots she had captured—the casks stretching on like proud lines of soldiers, the wind ruffling the fields of wheat like fine-spun gold, the sun sinking over the horizon, turning the exact color of the bourbon as it poured out of the large copper still.
It was the afternoon now, and I personally thought we had enough footage to splice together the next Oscar-winning documentary, but our director was relentless, and insisted on one more shoot: the stables. It was there that I was enfolded in a hug by none other than Homer from the bar.
“Well, there you are, girlie!”
“Homer! I’m glad I ran into you!”
A few days earlier, I’d been walking around with the director doing a preliminary look at the scenery, and been surprised to run into my drinking/crying buddy from the little dive bar—who, as it turned out, just dispensed homespun wisdom as a sideline, and spent the majority of his time breeding horses for folks all over the county, Hunter included.
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