I kept my gaze on him for a brief second longer, extended my middle finger against my thigh in plain view and turned to face out the window.
Sacha laughed.
Okay, I smiled. A little but not much.
Neither one of us said a word until he instructed the driver to drop us off at the end of a block that didn’t look particularly familiar. “This place is pretty good,” he noted pointing at a decorated glass door as we climbed out of the cab after fighting over how to pay the fee.
I still wasn’t on speaking terms with him, though I’d caught my breath and followed him inside the restaurant, which wasn’t as cool as I would have liked. The smell of roasted chicken made my stomach growl.
He raised his eyebrows at me from the other side of the table after a waitress brought two glasses of water over. “Still mad at me?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes at him as I took a sip, taking in how he still looked relatively put together and not at all like he’d tackled eight miles half an hour ago. “You run marathons, don’t you?”
“Nah.” He put the glass to his lips, but I could still catch a glimpse of the corners of his mouth. “Half-marathons.”
Half-marathons. “Thanks for telling me that now,” I snorted.
“You didn’t look winded, and I figured you would tell me when you couldn’t go any further.”
I grumbled and shook my head just as the waitress came by to take our order.
She had barely left when the dark-haired man sitting across from me asked, “So, are you on summer break?”
“Nope, I finished school about a month ago. I just… haven’t been able to find a job yet.”
Saying it out loud was weird. I knew it wasn’t unusual to not find a job right after graduating. Half the people that had finished school at the same time as I did were struggling to land one. It didn’t help that the degree I’d gotten wasn’t exactly bursting with employment opportunities either, but it still made me feel a little raw. When I first told my family I wanted to study history, the first thing out of my dad’s mouth had been, “What are you going to do with that degree? Why don’t you do accounting? Or nursing?”
It was a sore subject, to say the least.
Sacha asked what I studied and I told him.
“Are you planning on teaching?” he asked.
“No…” For a second, I thought about telling him that I wanted to do research or work at a museum, orsomething. But I couldn’t. I’d gotten my degree in it because I liked learning about history; that was all. “I don’t really know, to be honest. I’d rather not teach, though. I think I’d be pretty terrible at it. The kids would probably laugh at me if I tried to be firm about something.”
Sacha nodded solemnly. “You’ll find something, just give it some time. I used to get shit thrown at me onstage when I was younger; if I would have given up every time I heard ‘you suck’ being screamed at me, who knows where I’d be right now.”
This guy used to get stuff thrown at him? He had one of the best pitches and ranges I’d ever heard and he killed his performance every night. “You really had people throw things at you?”
He snickered. “Yeah. The first time was at a high school talent show. This asshole threw a Coke bottle at me and by the end of the song, I’d pretty much been booed offstage. I only stayed on because I’m stubborn.”
I had to slap my hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t laugh. “If it makes you feel any better, one time, I had a dance recital when I was probably seven, and I threw up all over the stage. I was so nervous. I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to do it but she made me anyway.” There was footage of it too that someone in the family dug out every couple of years when they needed a laugh.
Sacha covered the lower half of his face with the bottom of his T-shirt, and closed his eyes simultaneously. His shoulders shook with restraint. “What did you do?”
“I cried my eyes out,” I laughed.
“I fell off the stage once,” he added, smiling huge.
“You didn’t!”
“I did. I just walked right off of it—”
Yeah, I burst out laughing, picturing it.
“—It’s the single most embarrassing moment of my life onstage,” he said right before tossing his head back and laughing his ass off. “That’s what I get for not paying attention.”
It was the “onstage” that got me. Once I got myself under control, I raised my eyebrows at him. “Andoffstage?”
