Page 44 of Good Enough

Currently, they were going over the week’s schedule and trying to come up with contingency plans because there was potential weather coming in the next few days due to a tropical storm. Jumper had been channeling his high school baseball days, imitating batting stances all night long, and once he’d made it through the batting order, then he started to imitate the pitchers. Now the actors were singing a horrifically bad rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” At moments like this, it felt a bit like running an insane daycare.

Waters was sitting on the floor, his back against the couch, trying to concentrate. It wasn’t working, but it wasn’t because of the actors. Kubrick was sitting cross-legged behind him, and she kept leaning over his shoulder to steal potato chips out of his bag. When she wasn’t stealing his food, she was shoving papers under his nose for him to review.

“Did you eat a ton of sugar before coming in here? Christ, woman, slow down. I can’t keep up.”

“That’s because you’re an old man,” she teased.

“Umm… you’re older than me.”

“Pfft. Two months. Barely.”

She laughed at him, then lunged for the potato chip bag, which he successfully thwarted despite the dizzying cloud of lilac scent he’d come to recognize as all Kubrick.

“Get your own,” he groused.

“Mine are gone.”

“Well, eat yours more slowly next time. Don’t just dump them into your mouth directly from the bag. It’s like your own damn version of Pudgy Bunny.”

“Are you calling me a pig?”

Waters began to make pig snorting noises.

“You cheeky fucker! I’m going to give you such a pinch!” That, of course, was another epic fail, and he had to save her from falling off the couch two separate times. The second time, he got a handful of her breast, but other than a solid inhale from him, the fake fight just kept going with her trying to go at him from the other side.

“Do you have any fat on your body anywhere? Shit on a shingle, there’s nowhere to grab any skin.”

“Pretty much zero body fat.” He slapped his abs with both hands.

“But you eat junk food,” she marveled. “I’ve seen you shove a whole donut in your mouth. More than once.”

“And work out way more than I should have to, especially since I’m herding cats here for you.”

She laughed. “They’re not that bad.”

“No,” he agreed, “they’re pretty good. Dawg needs some corralling at times, and Brick needs a gag, but they focus well when they need to.”

“Hmmm. I wonder if Jumper has a ball gag with him,” Kubrick mused.

He turned almost entirely backward. “What?!”

She shrugged with an impish grin. “As for their focus, I put this group together very much by design. I don’t hire problem children. No time or patience for it.”

“You work with Big Bird.” He turned back to face front, more than a bit disturbed by the throwaway comment from her about Jumper.

“Ah, but I didn’t hire him. He hired me. And while I had major reservations and still wonder at my sanity for saying yes, as well as wonder why he wanted me since he detests me so much, I wanted this job almost more than I love chocolate. This could really solidify my career.”

“You don’t need solidifying. Your other work is excellent.”

“You’ve seen it?”

He nodded while reviewing the cover shot storyboards she’d handed him.

“Which ones?”

He frowned, turning some pages so they were the right way round and shuffling them into chronological order. “All of them, I think.”

“Wh-when? Why?”

---