He grins, clearly finding something amusing in her embarrassment. ‘Okay.’ He pushes a gin and tonic across the table towards her.
‘Thanks,’ she says with a smile. ‘So how was the castle in Scotland?’ A sentence you don’t say every day.
‘Oh, it actually wasn’t quite right,’ Ash says. ‘But I think I’ve found the perfect one in Sussex, so I’m off to check that out next week.’
She leans towards him to hear him better over the noise of the bar, and as she does, their knees bump together under the table. Heat immediately flares up her thigh, just from that small point of contact. She shifts away as subtly as she can.Stop it, Lissa.
‘So you can do a lot of your work from the UK?’
‘Yep,’ he says easily, taking a sip of his beer. She nods thoughtfully, and his eyes travel the lines of her face in a way that feels intimate. The corner of his mouth crooks up. ‘You’re wondering why I don’t stay put if I can work from anywhere.’
‘Well, I mean I wasn’t going to put it quite like that, but yes. If you’re scouting locations in Scotland and Sussex, why would you choose to live in Belgium?’
He shrugs. ‘Why not?’ An answer he gives a lot, it seems. ‘I’m freelance, so I can pick projects depending on where I am at the time. The pay isn’t mega, but it’s decent, so it allows me to be flexible – and it’s not like I have a mortgage to pay. I hate the idea of being stuck in one place for too long, you know?’
She nods, even though she doesn’t know, because she has no choice but to stick around in Bath. And she doesn’t like it, the thought that he can so easily pick up and move, even though she knows she shouldn’t feel as strongly about that as she does.
‘How do you choose a location?’ she asks, changing the subject to something that feels a little safer. ‘How do you know if something is right? Or do you ever think it is and then the singer disagrees?’
It’s a lot of questions all at once, but he doesn’t seem to mind. ‘I don’t know, it’s like a feeling? Which sounds incredibly wanky, I know. But I listen to the song on repeat before I even chat to the artist and the director, then I have my own ideas going in, and usually we’re on the same page. Where we’re not, we talk it out and get there. I try to really understand what the artist wants, and some of them are brilliant and happy to chat it through for ages, usually the ones just starting out. So then I have the idea of the type of place we’re looking for, and then it’s a case of going there andfeelingit. I play the music through my headphones and imagine it there and … I don’t know. You can either see it or you can’t.’ He shakes his head. ‘Sorry. I’m rambling.’
‘No. It’s interesting. I didn’t even know it was a real job until I met you, to be honest.’
‘I didn’t know it existed either. I sort of stumbled on it.’
‘Because you love music?’
‘Yeah. I met someone who did the same thing when we were both auditioning to be in a band. I didn’t get the gig, but I did get a new career goal.’
Lissa’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘A band?’
He laughs. ‘I play the guitar – a bit. Sort of thought I should give being in a band a go, but really I think maybe it wasn’t for me.’
‘So do you love it? What you do now?’
‘I do,’ he says slowly.
‘But?’ Lissa prompts.
He smiles a little. ‘But I sometimes feel like I’m, I don’t know, a step away from the music. Like there’s something else out there I could be doing.’ He shakes his head. ‘I think that’s just what everyone goes through, though, you know, wondering if they’re in the right career, wondering if there’s something better.’
‘Yeah,’ she says on a sigh. ‘I think I know that feeling.’
He twists the neck of his beer bottle, watching her. ‘You don’t love your job?’
She grimaces a little, realises what she’s doing and straightens her face. ‘I don’thateit. I don’t love my boss, that’s for sure, and I get a bit bored. But it’s not terrible. It’s just not …’
‘Inspiring?’
She smiles at him. ‘Yeah. It’s just not inspiring. I’ve been applying for a ton of other things, but I’m having no luck, so …’ She breaks off with a shrug.
‘If you could do anything, what would it be?’
She blinks at him. It’s such an obvious question. It’s what you get asked as a child, or at a job interview when they ask you where you see yourself in five years’ time. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, feeling stupid for it. But the thing is, she doesn’t feel like she has the luxury of only going after her dream job, because she needs something that enables her to pay her bills, and some of her mum’s, and to be on call in Bath when she’s needed. She’s the reason her mum is the way she is, after all. ‘Something to do with art, I guess,’ she finishes lamely.
‘You’re an artist? That’s cool.’
‘I’m not really an artist. I mean, Icanpaint, but that’s not what I want to do. It would just be nice to, I don’t know, use it somehow.’ But there’s been another thought playing around her mind since meeting little Rosy at the charity shop. There must be so many kids out there like Rosy, like Lissa herself, who have lost siblings. So many kids whose parents might be struggling, unable to give them what they need, because of their own grief – because losing a child, it’s unlike anything else, isn’t it? And what if she could do something to help those kids? But she has no idea just what form that help would take. She doesn’t think she has it in her to be a therapist, because don’t you need to have your own shit together for that? So she doesn’t say any of it out loud.
