She ran a hand along the cool metal edge. If he had a hole in his boat, hers was the Titanic. She didn’t have hobbies outside reading and music, which were inextricably tied to work, and the manuscript she had started and stopped writing dozens of times since graduating from undergrad.
Aside from her sister, she had no real friends, but not out of lack of desire. It was more that when the judgmental voice in her head told her that she was too awkward, too needy for anyone to want to be her friend, she believed it.
When she was dating Eli, there was a brief period when Brinton thought things were changing. She’d gotten to know Callie, the girlfriend of one of Eli’s co-workers. Callie worked in fashion PR but was a true music aficionado, which Brinton appreciated.
While Brinton politely declined Callie’s invites to various Instagrammable parties and late-night speakeasies that’d seemed too overwhelming at the time, it was comforting to feel like, maybe, one day, they’d go together. That, perhaps, they had found some easy kinship.
When Eli dumped Brinton, however, Callie ghosted her as if she had an expiration date. Brinton knew it wasn’t personal, just the friendship politics. But it still hurt.
“I guess I’m built for dry land,” she said, suddenly too aware of herself frowning over everything she couldn’t change, so she forced her lips into a watery smile.
There was the weekend book club she ran for Gael, hertwelve-year-old neighbor, and other kids on her block. Children, she found, were far more accommodating of her particular brand of uptight. But a reading circle with preteens probably sounded pitiful to someone with millions of Instagram followers.
He nodded but didn’t push her to explain. She appreciated it. Pulling her recorder from her skirt pocket, she placed it in her lap. “So, you wanted to tell me something?”
Jamie stopped rowing. They were about thirty feet out from the dock. He watched his ring flip around his pinky for a moment.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” Then, he smiled. Not a real one, but the one she remembered at the Grammys.
“Please don’t do that,” she said faintly.
He laughed humorlessly. “Can’t a man smile?”
“Not like that. That’s your on-camera smile. When you’re performing.”
“Ah, been studying me?”
She chucked up her shoulder. “It’s my job. And if this interview is going to work, I need you to be real with me. That’s the man I came here to interview.”
He laughed weakly, nodded to her voice recorder. “Sorry, it’s a bad habit. I wanna be real, I wanna tell you something that’s gonna change everything for me. But I need to work up to it, if that’s cool?”
“That’s fine.”
For now.
“Thank you. So…you had something to ask me too?”
She clicked the record button. “Your father has had quite the Midas touch on your career. But I’d love to know more about your mother, how she’s influenced your music. Like, have you ever written a song about her?”
Jamie clasped his hands tightly in his lap. “You sure got an interesting definition of going slow.”
Brinton shrugged, then shifted her recorder to her knees so the audio was sharp. The recorder was reinforced with duct tape after many years of neglect, but she couldn’t risk a blip. Not when she was this close to her goal.
“There’s so little out there about her, so I thought…”
Her voice sank into the black expanse surrounding them.
“That it’d make for a good story?” he asked, eyes narrowed. The energy shifted to something undeniably tenuous. Tense. For the first time, Brinton couldn’t tell what Jamie was thinking when she looked at his face. It worried her.
“I assumed she was important to you. I saw her picture at the guest house, and I felt like it was a good way to paint who you are. Beyond being a celebrity, or a Grammy winner, or heartthrob?—”
He leaned back, but his posture was slightly less defensive. A smile—a real one—crept across his lips. Then, his teeth grazed his bottom lip, torturously slow.
“You think I’m a heartthrob?” he asked.
She rolled back her shoulders, suddenly tighter with each second his mouth worked over soft flesh. “Some people think you’re a heartthrob. And stop flirting with me. I know the whole lip-biting thing too.”
He chuckled to himself. “All right, that’s fair. There’s a lot people don’t know about me…” He looked like he wanted to say more, but instead, his knee bumped hers. She twitched violently enough that her recorder slid dangerously close to the boat’s low wall, only a few inches up from the waterline. Brinton’s eyes rounded. An inhuman squeak spiraled from her diaphragm as Jamie snatched the recorder mid-tumble.
