Page 5 of Outside the Lines
But if there was one thing I’d learned over the years—you had to keep trying.
I spent the rest of the day attempting to work, but thinking about Ian. After he left, I’d sat down at my table and picked up a paintbrush, but my hands had been too unsteady to go back to painting the model.
Instead, I wandered up to the front of the store to help Jesse shelve and board issues until I’d stopped vibrating. If he noticed my distraction or bounciness, he gave no sign. Sometimes, I wondered if he’d put some pieces about me and Lydia together—we tried to keep our polyamory on the down-low in town, but you couldn’t hide everything. And Jesse wasn’t an idiot.
If he knew, he obviously didn’t care. He was our best employee. Lydia and I often talked about making him assistant manager, should her career take off.
Once I calmed my ass—and dick—down, and my hands were back to their steady state, I returned to my models.
A little before four, Lydia emerged from her studio in the back of the shop and found me with a brush in hand. Sometimes, we worked the same hours, sometimes not, depending on the schedules of our other employees and what freelance lettering and coloring jobs Lydia had going on. She’d been on several tight deadlines for clients the past week or two, but given her bright smile and the crinkles around her eyes, she was done with at least one of them.
Which meant Chinese take-out for dinner. God bless her clients and deadlines. Pretty much the only time I got my egg foo yung fix was when she turned impossible tasks around on time.
I put down the ship I was painting—same one I’d been working on when Ian had come into the store. Lydia leaned over and gave me a peck. Her lips tasted faintly of tea.
“You seem happy.” I cleaned the brush I’d been using in a cup of water, shaped the tip, and laid it down to dry.
“Finally finished one of my lettering jobs. Wasn’t easy with all those different speech types they wanted, but God, the comic’s great.” She peered down at me. “Si, you’re beaming. What’s up? They let you order those Wolf’s Landing miniatures in?”
Heat rose to my face and Lydia’s lips parted a fraction. “Kind of, but not really?”
She gave me her patenteddo go onlook.
“One of the prop guys came by fromWolf’s Landing, looking for supplies. Some stunt dude fell on his miniature set.” I filled her in on the rest of the story and how Ian would be rebuilding the sethere. I left out the part about him seemingly mentally stripping the clothing from my body with every glance.
“The sacred grove. Oh my god, Si, that’s fantastic!” She gripped my shoulder. “And you get to help?” She knew it was a dream come true.
“Maybe? We’ll see.” I paused for a second and gulped down a breath of air. Time for the rest. “I think he was checking me out.”Think? Knew.
Lydia’s smile widened. “Please tell me you flirted back this time?”
Yeah, my wife knew me well. To be honest, I was hopeless with any gender and turned klutzy and dorky the minute I was the least bit attracted. I didn’t flirt well—but I did flirt. She’d seen that firsthand.
“Maybe we should talk about the rest of that over dinner?” Some close friends knew about our open marriage and our polyamory, but it was not exactly something we went around blurting out, especially not in the middle of our store. Washington state may lean liberal, but not every place here did.
She glanced at her watch. “Let me ask Jesse if he wants anything, and I’ll go grab some Chinese.” A moment later, she vanished past the graphic novel display.
Score. Egg foo yung heaven awaited.
I eyed my half-painted spaceship. I wouldn’t be finishing it tonight, not between talking to my wife and chowing down, so I closed up the paints and packed everything away.
If only most things in my life were that easy to handle.
Standing in Anna’s office, I watched as she perfected her expression—a cross betweenyou’re out of your mindandexplain that to me again. “You want to build your set in town, in a comic-book store?”
I tried not to shrink into myself, because my plan was a good one. Anna was intimidating, but fair when she understood why you wanted to do something unorthodox. “It’s been raining all day. It’s going to rain for the next couple of days.”
She rubbed her forehead. “Don’t remind me.” The shooting schedule had been upended completely due to the weather, which happened pretty much every month unless we were filming scenes in the rain. On the other hand, everyone marveled at how authentic the downpours appeared on the show.
It had also been warmer than normal for this time of year, leading to very sticky and damp conditions. “I know the shop trailers are supposed to be cool and dry and—”
“They’re swamp-like right now.”
“The set will dry faster at the store. There’s supplies on hand, and the owner offered me a space to work free of falling stuntmen.”
Anna flinched. Not much, but enough. “Build a set in public, though?”
I shrugged. “Everyone knows the grove’s going up in a fireball. The book’s been out for years. And the graphic novel. And the comic. And . . .”
