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SAM
I don’t care how much effort I’ve put into it, my spaghetti bolognese doesn’t tastethatgood. Sure, it’s tasty. But the expression on Tristan’s face suggests it’s practically rapturous. Sometimes I think he may actually be weirder than I am.
“This is so good,” he mutters after moaning around another mouthful. The sounds he makes are indecent. I almost feel like I should leave him alone with his plate, except then I might miss something. “You’re an amazing cook.”
Bubbles of pleasure burst inside me, even as my mind squirms with the need to disagree. “Thank you,” I say, swallowing any qualifying words. My mother used to say a compliment is a gift, and it should be accepted as such. “I’m glad you like it.”
“I can’t believe you have a herb garden.”
My body stills. That’s too much of a stretch. Is he making fun of me?
Tristan saw the hodgepodge collection of pots I have on the back deck when I grabbed some parsley to garnish the meal. The basil is dying, and I’ve harvested the chives to the point of death. Most of the other plants are wilting from neglect. It hardly qualifies as a garden.
There’s nothing in Tristan’s manner to suggest he’s making fun of me, but he wouldn’t be the first to tease the scaredy-cat, assuming my social skills are so stunted I won’t notice. It’s why I spent so much time as a teenager reading books on body language and how to make friends. They helped, but as a downside I became hyper-aware of other people’s cues.
I’ve never been sure which is worse: not realising people are making fun of you or knowing for sure they are.
Tristan’s never struck me as the mean type, though. Maybe he really is simply a man who doesn’t cook and is bowled over by half-decent plates of spag bol.
“I’ll have to invite you over for dinner sometime,” he says, lowering his fork to his empty plate. “So I don’t look like such a mooch.”
A smile twists my lips. “You’re not a mooch, but I’d like that.”
After dinner, we stack the dishes into the dishwasher. Then I make us tea while Tristan pulls a single sheet of paper out of his notebook.
“There are five actions I want you to take next week,” he says when we’re both back at the table. “One for each weekday.” He goes over them in order, from drafting an advertisement for the studio space, through to preparing for meetings with potential clients. I try to look enthusiastic, but already my dinner is threatening to make a reappearance. And that’s from the thought of preparing for meetings, it’s not even the meetings themselves. Because, naturally, one will lead to the other.
Tristan must sense my discomfort because he stops to grab a fresh piece of paper from his bag. “This is something I’ve learned from working with my clients. It might help.” He draws a stick figure in the centre of the page. “This is you,” he says, adding wavy hair and a smiley face.
“My hair is too long.”
Dark eyes lift to the mess on my head. “Close enough,” he says, softly. Returning to his drawing, he adds a circle around stick-me. “This is your comfort zone.”
The circle extends at least five centimetres away from stick-me on all sides. Way too big for my tiny stick-self.
Next, he adds a straight line on the edge of the page and draws a bump on one side.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to the bump.
“It’s a button,” he says, as if it should be entirely obvious. “Yeah, I suck at drawing.”
I find his lack of artistic skill charming. It makes him seem less perfect, more… reachable. Even if I’m not supposed to be reaching, it’s nice to imagine I could.
He writesThe Thingin bold letters and connects them to the button with an arrow. “The button represents the thing you have to do on any given day. You’ll have to leave your bubble long enough to do it.” An arrow indicates stick-me leaving the opulence of my comfort zone to smack the button. “That’s the hard part,” Tristan says. “But once you’re done,” another arrow shoots me back where I started, “you go back to your bubble and stay there for the rest of the day, knowing you’ve succeeded.” His pen circles stick-me several times with slow, deliberate revolutions.
Is he trying to provide comfort to stick-Sam? Assuring him he doesn’t have to leave his bubble again until tomorrow? That’s weird, but also kind of sweet.
Once stick-me has been appropriately soothed, Tristan looks up at real-me. We’re closer than we were before, having moved towards each other as we watched theSee Sam Runshow play out on paper. “What do you think?”
I think you’re hot.Pressing my lips together, I scooch back a little to avoid doing anything stupid. “Wouldn’t it be better to get it all over with in one day?”
“Nope,” he insists. “You’re only allowed to do one thing. No more, no less. Consistency is key.”
“Huh.” I like the idea of limiting myself to one thing per day. Usually, I try to set myself one or two tasks, but then my brain insists I need to do everything and I get so overwhelmed I end up doing nothing. Having a hard limit might help. “It could work.”
“Good.” He nods, putting the papers and pens aside. “It’ll take a few weeks to get new people into the studio, but once it’s done you’ll get a quick boost to your cash flow. Hopefully, that will tide you over until we do the next thing. One step at a time.”
