Page 120 of Two Guys, a Girl, and a Tripod

“You’re welcome.”

“-so what about you? Got any hot dates?”

Natalie snorts loudly while taking a bite of her sandwich. She takes the time to chew and swallow before answering.

“I’m in my ho phase.”

I roll my eyes and we sit in silence except for the waves and the crinkle of the butcher paper around our sandwiches.

“What do you miss about Oklahoma?” Natalie’s question startles me. It’s not something we talk about often, mostly because of my prompt departure, but she brings it up on occasion. I think it’s her way of trying to help me process that I had to flee in a hurry from the place I called home for nearly twenty-eight years.

“Eileen’s,” I say after a moment’s pause. When I catch Natalie’s questioning stare, I add, “Cookies. The best damn cookies in the state.”

“You have so many things to choose from and you pick cookies?” She shakes her head in disbelief.

“They’rereallygood cookies.”

I spend most of Wednesday resting, doing laundry, and packing. I know tomorrow is going to be a long travel day and I have so much planned in the short span of time I’ll be in Miami. I don’t want to risk being exhausted before I even start.

While my laundry is going, I set about editing some content from the New York trip. Other than seasonal videos, I have a lot of clip drops and posts on my subscription pages scheduled two months out. With the holiday season right around the corner, I have to plan out my posts so I don’t double-drop. I’ve gotten good at keeping a backlog in case shoots fall through or I get sick or some other emergency happens to put me off course.

I pull up the raw footage from the shoot with Tony Gerth and layer it over mine. I line up the audios so that the footage is in sync and I can switch between the two layers as needed. Then I start to cut away the excess with about ten seconds on either side of the splits for dissolves or fine-tuning. Before I really start splicing things together and choosing camera angles, I need to figure out which of us has better audio to keep it consistent. I hit play on some of my footage first, listening closely for speech and the various sounds that come from skin-on-skin contact.

“Sounds good,” I mutter to myself. It doesn’t sound like anything is missingfrom my footage, so I switch to Tony’s. Instantly, I know the audio on his footage is better. It’s clearer and catches even the faintest sigh. Well, that makes my job easy.

I spend the next hour interspersing my footage with his, careful to keep the audios matched so they stay in sync.

Just as I stand to check my laundry, a text comes through from Brody and I smile down at my phone.

The only issue I have with travel is the amount ofstuffI have to take. Two enormous suitcases plus a rolling carry-on and a laptop bag are my usual companions and I’ve gotten pretty good at rolling everything to the check-in counter and away from baggage claim. I still fucking hate it. Thank god for Miles.

He’s waiting for me at baggage claim in Miami, the biggest grin on his face like he hasn’t seen me in weeks. I roll my carry-on over to him, noting with jealousy that he just has a backpack and one oversized suitcase, and wrap my arms around his neck. Standing on my tiptoes, I place a quick kiss on his lips, but when I try to lower myself to my feet, he tightens his arms around my waist.

Miles deepens the kiss and I can feel my cheeks warming at the public display. He must sense my tension because he lets me go.

“How was the flight?” he asks, gathering our bags together while we wait for the luggage from my flight to start appearing on the metal carousel.

“Fine.” I shrug. “I read the whole time.”

“The whole time? I slept for the whole first flight.”

“Once I’m awake, I find it hard to go back to sleep. But I got halfway through a new book.” I nod at my laptop bag sitting on my carry-on.

“What’s it about?”

“You don’t want to know,” I laugh. It’s a romance novel and, despite our careers, I doubt he’ll care much about the ‘porn with a plot’, as some people call it.

“Oh, come on. Humor me.” He crosses his arms over his chest and grins. “We have time,” he adds, raising his eyebrows and jerking his head toward the carousel.

“It’s a dark romance,” I mutter after a few more moments of hesitation.

“Adarkromance? What’s that?”

“Well, instead of a cute rom-com playing in my head, there’s blood and death and ‘touch her and die’ and all that good stuff.”

“And?” he asks with a smirk.

“And hella spice.”

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