Page 15 of Love Off-Limits
She glanced at her watch. “Just about. You gotta finish your ice cream first though.”
We finished our cones as we walked the last two blocks to the gallery. The all-glass storefront had been darkened with black paper that fully blocked the late evening light so when we stepped into the space, we were immersed in darkness. To our left, a tiny screen, about the size of a cell phone, flickered to life. The gallery owner held a finger to her lips, indicating we should remain silent, then motioned for us to head to the left. We walked toward the screen, pausing just close enough to see what it revealed.
Shoes. Or feet, rather. All walking away. The clips were no more than a few seconds long, blended together in a way that one shoe morphed into another, the ground underneath each shoe shifting from pavement to grass to sand to cobblestone. The images had transitioned so quickly, you almost couldn’t tell they were happening.
The next few exhibits were similar, all displaying different aspects of life and the way we move through it. The screens were all small, revealing short clips, bursts of jarring sound, and movement. Shoes against tile floors. Car horns. Screeching brakes. The din of numerous voices in a crowded space. As we moved through the gallery, the clips from the first few screens were repeated on larger screens, only this time, the video clips had additional audio components layered in. Wind whistling through the trees. The crash of waves against the shore. The sound of rain. As the screens got bigger, the frantic, busy clips faded and were replaced with images that matched the audio mix.
It wasn’t a mind-blowing concept. But the way the videos were edited and pieced together was complex. Brilliant, even.
“This is totally amazing,” Darcy said quietly.
I could only nod. Because itwasamazing. That someone had used a video camera to capture such ordinary parts of life and weave them together in a way that told a very specific story. They had likely used the same equipment that I worked with every day, but in execution, this was totally different. It wasn’t just camera work. It was...art.
I wanted to do it.
Not this, exactly. Just...something. Something challenging. Something different.
I turned to Darcy. “My job atRandom I,it’s never going to be anything other than exactly what it is.”
She motioned for me to follow her away from the last exhibit where other patrons still stood. The audio was too much a part of the experience for me to ruin it with words. Safely in a small reception area, she nodded. “Okay. And that’s...a bad thing?”
I shrugged. “I want to do something more.”
She raised her eyebrows and motioned to the exhibit we’d just left. “Something like this?”
I shook my head. “Not this. I’m not...I don’t necessarily think I’m anartistlike Katherine is. But I do feel the itch to create. To tell stories.”
“But you do tell stories,” Darcy said.
“I tellIsaac’sstory,” I said, growing more confident the longer I talked. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been having the thoughts for weeks now. I was just finally giving them a voice.
Darcy nodded in understanding. “But it’s not your story.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “I don’t even know if Ihavea story, Darce.”
She wrapped an arm around my waist, her dark hair pressing against my chest. Darcy hadn’t inherited my father’s height like I had, but we did share the same dark hair and eyes. “Of course you do. But it’s perfectly reasonable for you to feel the need to change things up to make the story more like you want it.”
I squeezed her shoulder, grateful she hadn’t immediately questioned the idiocy of leaving a secure job that paid as well as mine did. I was questioning it enough all on my own. “Olivia mentioned that if I ever found myself in North Carolina, there would be plenty of film work for me to do at Stonebrook. Weddings, events, that sort of thing.”
Darcy dropped her arm from my waist and turned to face me. “Shut. Up.”
I shrugged but couldn’t keep from smiling.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Darcy continued. “Tyler, why haven’t you told me this until now? She actually offered you a job?”
“Not officially. It wasn’t like that. But, I mean, in a manner of speaking. She told me there would be plenty of work. What else could that mean?”
“Um. You should call her and ask her. And then you should talk to Isaac.”
My enthusiasm fizzled the tiniest bit. Icouldcall Olivia. But I wasn’t sure there was a way to do it without looking like I was only looking for a relationship. And she’d made it clear that shewasn’tlooking.
But I couldn’t talk to Isaac. After all he’d done for me, after how hard we’d worked to buildRandom Iinto the machine it was today. How could I walk away from that?
Chapter Five
Olivia
Mom placed two plates of thick homemade bread piled high with slices of fresh tomato straight out of the garden on the counter in front of her. She looked at me, her eyebrows raised. “You want goat cheese?”
