Dina didn’t say anything. She looked down at her phone, her mouth pursed.
Jeff exhaled. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I know you’re just doing your job, and Tim gave you this job because he’s too much of a chickenshit to do it himself. But I’m not a gullible kid anymore. I know my way around the business, and I’m not going to let anyone push me around. Life’s too short.”
Finally she nodded slowly and dropped her phone facedown on her lap. “Sorry,” she said after a moment. “I hate when Tim does this to me, but I need this job.”
“I get it,” Jeff assured her. “No hard feelings, like I said. But you should probably advise Tim that if he tries any nonsense, it’s not going to go over well.”
“Noted.” She picked up her phone again.
They pulled up at the studio a few minutes later, and Jeff submitted to being made up for television and then prodded into the appropriate outfit by the stylist Tim had sent over. Joe, Max, and Trix were there too, most of them preverbal at this hour.
“Did you three get any sleep at all?”
“I crashed five minutes after I got home,” Trix said through a yawn. “I just hate mornings.”
“Well, have some more coffee. This was your idea.”
Joe didn’t look much better. “Itried.” He tilted his head back so his makeup artist could get to work on the oversize baggage beneath his eyes. “Sarah couldn’t sleep, so she and my cousin stayed up all night watching dance movies in the living room.”
“Aren’t you, like, the designated adult?” Max was already through with the whole hair-and-makeup routine and had been vacuum sealed into his skinny jeans. “Can’t you just tell them to… not?”
“I’m gonna give you a minute to think about what you said.” Joe rolled his eyes. “I’m really in the habit of telling my partner she can’t watch TV in the middle of the night if she can’t sleep. Give me a break.” He swallowed the last word with another yawn. “Anyway, I’m supposed to be the fun one. I’m walking a line here. Gotta make sure I’m cool enough that April comes to me if there’s trouble.”
“You don’t think she’s taking advantage a little?”
Joe’s reply was lost in another yawn.
Despite the early hour, the show got off to a smooth start. Trix took some ribbing for not being a morning person, which everyone laughed at, especially when she pointed out, “Jeff’s normally the worst of us. I don’t know what happened.”
“I went to bed early for two weeks is what happened. It was awful.” He’d loved it.
“Jeff’s been on an artists’ retreat,” Max said sagely. “Except it’s just him and the loons. Actual birds, I mean.”
“It’s peaceful,” Jeff defended, laughing.
The hosts looked at each other with knowing smiles, and then Shae—that was her name, right? Shit, Jeff couldn’t remember suddenly; he was never awake in time to watch this show—said, “We’ve got some pictures, actually, of how peaceful it can be.”
They showed a shot taken from somewhere in the park—a loon on the water at dusk, with the Sound glowing orange-red in the dying light. Then there was a lovely foggy morning in the forest, with a silence so thick you could hear it.
The third picture was a shot of a downtown street around midmorning, on a bright clear day that highlighted the care the shopkeepers took with their storefronts.
Or it would’ve, if anyone bothered to focus on anything other than the two figures sitting on the bench on the sidewalk.
The photograph was taken from an angle, so you could see Carter on the right, his arm stretched out over the back of the bench, his head thrown back in laughter, and Jeff sitting next to him wearing a smaller, teasing smile, just enough to dimple a bit, his eyes glittering with fondness.
“Wow,” said the other host, Gisella. “I’d get up early too.”
Fuck.There was no way Tim didn’t know about this. He probably set the whole thing up and deliberately excluded Jeff from knowing about it to get a “genuine reaction” since he knew he wouldn’t get what he wanted on the album front. Jeff didn’t have a single doubt he did it as a way to prove he could make Jeff’s life difficult if Jeff didn’t fall in line. The subtext was clear—Bring me that album or I’ll make your life hell.
Tim had never understood that Jeff was a professional shit disturber.
“So, Jeff, who’s the guy?”
Jeff sighed internally but pasted on his Professional Media Smile. “That’s my friend Carter. We went to high school together.” He gestured at the photograph and said, “Obviously we still enjoy giving each other a hard time.”
He said it definitively enough to imply that follow-up questions would be shot down in a truly awkward fashion, so the hosts let it pass and moved on to Joe, who was working with an Indigenous nonprofit group that promoted the preservation of traditional art forms.
Eventually the topic moved on to that night’s concert.
