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“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I blurt out, as Dom and Sarah get onstage and we stand by the window, up next. When Sarah’s silky voice drawls the first line, I look away.
James, however, looks cool as a cucumber.
“How do you do that? Aren’t you nervous at all?” I say.
“I don’t know any of these people.”
It’s a ludicrous point wrapped in logic. “So?”
“I have nothing to prove to them.”
“Yes, but . . .” I don’t even know what to add. “Still.”
“Still what?”
I throw out my hands. “Still. It’s just—I don’t know—human nature to care.”
“What other people think?”
“Yes.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t care what other people think.”
This I find to be absolutely, unmistakably absurd. It’s one thing to say it. It’s easy to say things like this. But to mean it? Actually?
I cross my arms over my chest. “You really don’t care if you get on that stage and make a fool of yourself.”
“No.”
“You’re saying even if you were a terrible singer—really awful, off tune, couldn’t sing the right key if your life depended on it—you’d be completely unbothered about sounding like a monkey stepping on a roasting chestnut in front of a room full of people.”
“That’s a very descriptive image, but yes, I wouldn’t mind.”
“At all?”
“At all.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“Not even a little bit,” he says, as sure as the day is long.
I purse my lips. It can’t be. Nobody in the entire universe can be that idealistically unbothered by the human race. “I’d love for you to prove it.”
And at this, he hesitates. The first expression of doubt crosses his face.
I raise my finger and point at him triumphantly. “Ha. I knew you couldn’t be that bulletproof.”
I’m just moving my attention back to Sarah, who has taken it upon herself to go for an elbows-out, move-to-the-front solo, when James says, in a tone far more serious, “Are you asking me sincerely to sing off-key on purpose?”
The question is so odd, I look back at him.
“The answer is yes, if you are,” he says. His gaze is steady.
Oh my gosh the man is serious.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
