“That whole little speech was not the speech of someone lightly involved in the fandom.” Marcus’ eyebrow rose as he considered me.
I coughed. “Well.”
“Well what?” He was desperately hiding a laugh.
“I might have been into it a lot more when I was in high school. And maybe I read the Memory Alpha wiki once in a while to see if I remember anything.”
Marcus started laughing, unable to hold it anymore. “It’s no worse than me reading Wookiepedia for shits and giggles.”
Slumping into my chair, I laughed along with him. “Okay, fine, fair enough. Trekker and a Star Woid.” When we finally calmed from laughing, I glanced over. “Really, though? A voice actor?”
I knew exactly what I was doing.
He nodded. “Yeah. Someone told me long ago that while I might not be able to sing well, my voice was clear and strong and I kind of took that to heart. I went to Boston to see if I could develop it. I did pretty well. I have a second income from my audiobooks.”
Thereit was—my opening. “I saw that on the wall of fame in your apartment. I hope you don’t mind I was snooping.”
“It’s on the wall and you’ve been in my place more than I have lately.” The second half of his sentence was bitter, but only just.
“What’s it for?”
“Male narrator of the year.”
I swatted his arm. “I can read that. What book did you get it for?”
He scratched his head, and blushed. “Too Far the Near Shore.”
I gasped, loudly. “Holy shit, that was you? You read a Pulitzer nominated book?”
“Yeah,” he said, quietly. “I don’t do them under my real name. You can read, you saw it. But the author listened to some of my other audiobooks and he liked the voice. So he went out of his way to find me and beg me to record it.”
“Why aren’t you crowing that from the nearest trees? That book was amazing, and the audiobook was…phenomenal. Wait…did you also do the sound engineering on it? All the special effects?”
“I have a second award for that,” he answered.
“Oh myGod, Marcus! Why don’t you have your name in lights over the next Disney Animated marquee?”
He swallowed, nervously. “Because just about everything else I’ve ever narrated has been gay or straight romance.” His eyes slipped to mine. “And the world doesn’t look kindly on romance at all. It’s considered a crap genre, even if it is full of the world’s bestselling books at any given time.”
I could see him wilting. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you tell someone you work with the romance genre, in just about any capacity, they look down their nose at you. That Thomas Renault hunted me down to do the book was a fucking miracle. No one in academia wants to consider the genre as a legitimate pursuit. Despite there being romance all over the literary canon. DuMaurier, the Brontës, Bram Stoker, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wilde, Hugo, Morrison… Genre literature is not respected. Not horror, not sci-fi, not fantasy, not romance. The academics consider it below them, when in fact it is the very essence of the human condition. Even disguised as the Night King, Maud’dib, or a Langolier.”
Staring out at the field, I blinked a few times. “Is your degree in Arts or Psychology? Because, damn, dude.”
He sighed. “That escalated quickly.”
The laugh burst out of me again. This man was brilliant and funny. No wonder I agreed to walk his dog.
MARCUS
HE WAS GAY.
Chase was gay.
He was into men. He liked dick.
Oh, dear God in Heaven, he played for my team and I was so, so screwed. It was bad enough I had been staring after his ass when I thought he was straight, but then I had seen his naked torso. Now, all that combined with the fact that he was gay.
