My jaw falls open. “You’re fucking crazy,” I breathe out, trying to wrap my mind around what this means. I now own a slice of my favorite movie. One of the genius minds who came up with it drew this with his very real hands. And now I own it.
By the end of the movie, Lex has given me three more of these storyboard sketches, all shortly after their scene unfolded on the screen. And with each of them, surprise struck me again.
This doesn’t feel legal. Those drawings should be somewhere in a museum, not on my lap. But already, I’m thinking of where I’ll hang them in the apartment we’ll soon share. Or in my home office, which we plan on using one of the spare bedrooms for.
God, I can’t wait!
“You’re not ready for the things I’ll do to you when we get back to your place,” Andrea says as the server takes away our empty dessert plates.
It sounds both like a threat and a promise, so I ask, cocking an eyebrow, “Good or bad?”
“Both. I’ll make you feel very good by doing very bad things to you.”
“I like the sound of that…”
Between her promise just now and the way her foot has been grazing my leg the whole time, I’d say the restaurant was a hit, just like the theater. I’m a little annoyed she guessed it so easily, but it only confirmed how much she wanted to be here. And I have to say, my little raccoon has a knack for picking the right restaurants.
I’m not one for haute cuisine, and I’m not well-versed in Mexican specialties. But the dishes were all excellent, and Andrea moaned with almost every new bite. Plus, I discovered what might become my favorite drink from now on. Margaritas, as it turns out, are the perfect balance of acidic tang and bitterness, with nearly no sweetness to them. It’s clean, sharp, and dangerous in the best way, given how inebriated I feel despite having only three of them.
“Should we go on with our evening plans, then?” I suggest.
“Do you have more planned?”
“Aside from you doing terrible things to me, no.”
She giggles and shakes her head. “And I’m the impatient one?”
“You’re rubbing off on me, I suppose.”
Just as I’m about to call a server for the check, I notice one coming toward us. “Excuse me, sir, you have a call,” he explains once he reaches us, presenting me with a landline phone.
“Me?” I ask, confused. No one knows we’re here. Not even Kevin. “Are you sure?”
“Mr. Coleman, right? Alexander Coleman?”
Andrea and I exchange a grave look, the flirtiness of the moment gone entirely.
A sense of danger prickles at the back of my neck. We both left our phones at my apartment, so whoever that is, I’d imagine they went to great lengths to contact me. Who the fuck could that be?
I nod at the server, who hands me the phone. The moment he’s gone, I press it to my ear and say, “Who is this?”
“Lex, thank God!”
The tension in my shoulders relaxes as I immediately recognize the voice. “Oliver, what the hell?”
The worry on Andrea’s face dims, but not entirely.
“I’ve been trying to call you for hours!” Oliver says.
“We don’t have our phones on us. How did you know we were here?”
“I hacked into your inbox and found an email with the reservation confirmation.”
My first reflex is to lecture him on boundaries and privacy, but I’m aware he wouldn’t have gone to such lengths if there wasn’t something happening. “What’s going on?”
“I was talking to a friend, who also dabbles in hacking and all that, and he told me someone put out a hit on Nammota.”
“What?”
