Page 23 of Love Unexpected
“Are you a Drake Martinson fan?” a voice whispered beside me.
I looked up to see Alex standing beside me, his arms crossed across his ample chest.
“Oh, um, actually, I was looking for you,” I said, doing my best to squelch a sudden irrational fear that Alex had seen me staring at Isaac and immediately figured everything out.
“Everything okay?” Alex asked.
I paled. Was my discomfort so obvious? “I’m good. Thanks for asking.”
Alex leaned forward, an expectant look on his face. “Okay. But...you said you were looking for me?”
Right.That’s why he asked if everything was okay. He hadn’t noticed me staring at Isaac; he was asking aboutwork.“Oh. Right. That. Something’s up with e-commerce. We’ve checked everything on our end, but it looks like the problem is something CyberWorks needs to fix.”
“Quiet on set,” a voice called out.
Alex motioned me toward the studio door.
My gaze darted back to Isaac’s smiling face for a brief second before I turned and followed Alex into the annex between the elevator and the second-floor studio.
“Have we called CyberWorks about this?”
“Greta did this morning,” I said. “But she hasn’t heard anything back, nothing except that it’s a problem that has affected multiple sites. They didn’t give us any indication of when it might be up and running again. Greta was hoping you might be able to call over and do the Southern charm magic thing you do to make things happen. Those were her words. Not mine.”
Alex grinned. It suddenly occurred to me that if something happened between Isaac and me, I would get to know this man on a much more personal level. We’d be friends, even. Go on double dates. The thought brought a flush to my cheeks that I only hoped Alex hadn’t noticed. I was thinking way too far ahead. Like dial-it-back-creepy-stalker level ahead.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Alex said.
I breathed out a sigh of relief. “Perfect. Thanks.”
He moved toward the elevator, his cell phone already in his hand, but he paused, looking my way and motioning toward the studio door. “Have you ever seen them tape an entire show?”
I shook my head.
“You should go watch. It’s fun to see it happening live. I’ll let Greta know you’ll be back up in a bit.”
Never one to argue with my superiors, I crept back toward the studio, hesitating as I looked up at the light, now red, that hung above the door.
“Just sneak in quietly,” Alex said from behind me. “If you make any noise, they’ll be able to edit it out.”
I offered him a quick nod over my shoulder—he really wasn’t so scary—and snuck back into the studio.
The show was in full swing, Isaac and Steven, his occasional in-studio co-host, tech news specialist, and frequent field correspondent, sat on either side of Drake at a long countertop where all three worked to assemble three-dimensional puzzles of a building I couldn’t quite identify.
A timer running off to the side indicated it was supposed to be a race, but none of them seemed very determined to beat the others. They joked and laughed as they built, none of them making very good progress. When the timer dinged, they all lifted their hands from their models, Isaac with a particularly dramatic flourish.
Isaac’s brand of entertainment definitely wasn’t for everybody. His channel deserved the nameRandom I; individually, the show was filled with things that a lot of people might consider pointless. But there wasn’t a randomness to Isaac’s purpose. He loved to make people happy. And he was good at it.
After the puzzle building, they transitioned to a trivia game with questions that covered everything from Drake’s latest movie to his childhood growing up in Charleston. His fans would love it, and Isaac was being charming enough, he’d likely gain a few hundred thousand new subscribers because of it. Maybe more.
Sensing that the filming was coming to a close, I pulled out my phone and snapped a quick photo of the set, making sure it included a clear shot of Drake Martinson’s profile. Marley would never forgive me if I managed to get this close to one of her favorite actors and didn’t do anything to document the moment. With photo—and phone—securely in hand, I moved back to the studio door, only stopping when I heard Isaac say my name.
Well, sort of my name.
“My friend Ana and I were talking about your movie this morning,” he said to Drake. “She says hi, by the way, and we decided we only have one complaint about how things went down in the final few scenes.”
He’d said my name. On air. He’d called me his friend. Not a fan. Not a follower. But a friend.
Only Isaac could manage to joke his way through explaining to Drake, without insult, why it would have been more satisfying to see Jesslyn wielding a sword to save her brother herself rather than swooning into Henry’s arms. Especially since Drake had played Henry. Isaac’s wordsmithing was impressive, but I could hardly appreciate it for how distracted I was by the thrill of hearing my name from his lips. Our messages were completely secret and totally private, assuming Jade wasn’t reading them—I should ask Isaac about that—and I liked it that way. At least for now. It was almost as if the Isaac that existed inside my phone was a totally different person—an Isaac in some parallel universe. But this, hearing Isaac in the flesh speak of me, reference me by name, was a worlds-colliding kind of moment, and it completely stole my breath away.
