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Yeah, Adrian would have heard worse.
“It’s probably best if I don’t say anything,” Eric decided, and Kojo scoffed.
“Mate, we’ll be here for a while. You’ll have to talk to him eventually.”
“Not about that.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of bloke who tiptoes around the elephant in the room.”
Kojo had a point there. The interviews and documentaries Eric remembered had painted a guy who put himself out there, who tookrisks because it was fun, who liked to entertain. It was part of why Eric had liked him so much—Kevin Pine didn’t hold back while Eric had, and maybe still did.
Unless Adrian was a world-class actor, he wasn’t so different from the guy in those clips Eric had watched. And, yeah—that guy wouldn’t just let Eric off the hook. God, Eric would have to talk to him, preferably without embarrassing himself more than he already had.
Right. And why not buy himself a unicorn while he was at it?
“Whose idea was this again?” he asked out loud.
“Oh, grow a pair.” Kojo sounded unsympathetic. “Who knows, could be he’s up for a live reenactment of your favourite scenes?”
“Your empathy is astounding,” Eric told him, and Kojo’s expression softened.
“Stop overthinking it, mate—I’m sure it won’t be that bad. Let’s take a look around, check out the place, shall we? See what trouble we can get ourselves into between now and when I’m expected in the kitchen.”
That would also give Eric an hour to call one of his artists before he was expected to meet Adrian—plenty of time. “Isn’t the point to stay out of trouble?”
“Now where’s the fun in that?” Kojo asked, flashing Eric a smile that carried both a challenge and reassurance. It took Eric a second to smile back, but when he did, he meant it.
“Lead the way.”
3
“You’re on time.” Open surprise coloured Adrian’s voice and pulled Eric up short.
“Um, yeah.” He glanced around the dining room, empty but for the two of them, the darkness outside held at bay by the warm glow of antique chandeliers. “You said five, so… It’s five?”
“Yeah, it’s just that no one else around here actually shows up when I tell them to.” With a smile, Adrian got up from the piano stool, leaving a stack of papers sitting on the instrument’s black, shiny mahogany surface. Eric itched to move them somewhere else.
He meant to say something normal, instigate a small-talk kind of conversation, but what came out instead was, “Pleasetell me it’s tuned?”
“It is.” Adrian gave the piano a quick, fond pat before his focus returned to Eric. “There’s this guy from the village who used to come up most Saturday evenings to play it. He’s getting a tad too old now, but we still keep it in good shape.”
“Oh. That’s… That’s good.” Jesus, could Eric be any more awkward? He stared at the piano, too aware of Adrian’s attention on him.
“So,” Adrian said slowly, amusement in his tone. Eric immediately tensed up. “Shall we talk about how we haven’t met?”
Words.
Bloody hell, Eric wrote lyrics for a living—heknewwords. Words were his friends, but somehow, they’d picked this very moment to desert him. Traitors.
“I mean…” He chanced a glance at Adrian. “We haven’t?”
“But you know me.” It wasn’t a question.
“I wouldn’t say that I knowyou.” Eric’s face felt too hot again. “Not as such.”
“Huh.” Adrian paused. “Yeah, that’s a valid point. Not everyone gets that.”
“I mean—” Again with the filler words. Eric needed to get his act together and aim for coherent sentences, preferably nothing like ‘I know how far you can shoot your load.’ Oh God. “It was acting, right?” he settled on. “So, like, it was you but also not? And I saw some of the behind-the-scenes stuff too, which … maybe that was a bit more authentic, but still a lot for the benefit of the cameras. I guess.”
