Hewasa fan, was the thing. As unlikely as that was. Blair Kellermoon was here and he was happy about it. Thrilled.
He didn’t know how to get her attention without using her name.
“Your suitcases are the same color as your car,” he tried.
That did it. She looked up, past the driver, and eff him if her entire face didn’t light up like a God damn Christmas tree.
“Jack! What are you doing here?”
“Surprise?” he said, and he wasn’t sure, from this vantage point, why he’d been so nervous. He opened his arms, and she stepped into them, and they hugged like they were in one of her old rom-coms. Hell, he even picked her up and twirled her around for good measure.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” She swatted him.
He went with the truth. “I don’t know.”
She stared at him for a long time. “Yeah.” Finally she broke with his gaze and started digging around in a big shoulder bag she was carrying. She produced a Ziploc bag. “Here are your crow treasures. Let me settle things with the driver I apparently don’t need.”
Oh no. Just when he thought he’d hit peak sentiment. It was the same junk she’d sent pictures of: a key, a marble, and a ball of foil. But the fact that these had been brought to him, even in his absence, by his crow army. The fact that she had kept feeding them to begin with, despite their falling out. That she had saved their offerings and was hand-delivering them.
It was doing something to him.
They didn’t talk in the car. Well, they didn’t talk about anything real. Blair talked a lot. She conducted one of her monologues that didn’t need a response, telling him about how delighted she’d been to learn there was a Prince store in the Minneapolis airport. About how wide open the sky was here. Her drawl came out when she got excited. He had missed that. She moved on to musing about how if Allie’s cabin turned out to be the one, they would need to decide if they could shoot the exteriors there. More specifically, was there a dock on the opposite side of the lake? And if not, could they install one? Or maybe she could CGI it in.
“You knowIdon’t know,” he said when she paused.
She shot him a smile he was fairly certain was fond.
“Don’t you have people who do this stuff for you?” he asked. “Cinematographers and effects people and such?”
“Yeah,” she said, the fond smile sticking around.
“But this project is your baby,” he said. It was why she was here doing the location scouting herself.
She looked at her lap, still smiling but suddenly seeming kind of… bashful? “Something like that.”
“I don’t know if you’re planning to rent a car,” he said when they pulled into the garage at his building. “But there are guest spots I can reserve for you.” He paused. “How long do you think you’ll be staying?”
“I don’t know. I’m not in a hurry.”
He found he liked that answer.
“If I wear out my welcome, I’ll get a hotel.”
He had to tamp down a smile. Not to mention a fluttery feeling in his chest that he was pretty sure was some kind of embarrassment-tinged pleasure. “You’re not going to wear out your welcome.
“But,” he said a few minutes later as he was unlocking his door, “you mightwantto get a hotel after you see what a comedown this place is from Chez Blair.”
“I can’t wait to see it. This is the place the bigIn Timeadvance bought, right?”
“Yes, but ‘big’ is relative.” He showed her around. “See?” he said when they got to “her” room, formerly his office. “It’s tiny.”
He had to say, it looked pretty good for something that had been hastily IKEA-ed together. He’d painted the walls the same yellow-tinged cream as her living room at home and bought a bunch of impractical throw pillows to cover the bed, which was itself made with a fluffy down duvet—he’d been thinking about how she was always cold.
“It’sperfect,” she said, with a vehemence that seemed disproportionate to being introduced to some furniture named with Swedish nonsense words. She laid her hand on his forearm. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” he said. According to his dad,No problemwas the way illiterate people saidYou’re welcome. Did it follow that Blair made him illiterate? He was beginning to think so. He cleared his throat. “I thought we could hit my local bistro for dinner? Unless you want to order in?”
“Is this the place you refused to divulge the name of toThe New Yorker?”
