Page 45 of Marlowe Banks, Redesigned
“By ‘other choices,’ I assume you don’t mean pursuing a job that limits my creativity to selecting flat or round shoelaces?” She flashed him a painfully forced grin.
He didn’t return it, forced or otherwise. He simply waited while her grin faded.
“Failure sucks. I don’t mean to diminish that, but it’s only an endpoint if we let it define us.” He nudged her phone further from her reach as if he could sense it haunting her. With his hip pressed against the counter and his hand planted a few inches away, the slightest lean would bring her against his chest. She was dying to make that lean, to find comfort in being close to him. It would be so easy. Until, of course, it wasn’t. One dance had caused enoughproblems. She didn’t have a thick skin or a good therapist. So she drew Angus’s sweater more tightly around her body. It was like a hug. Only… not.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re pretty smart?” she asked.
“Not once. Not ever. High praise coming from a Yalie.” He slid his hand across the counter and gave her waist a little nudge with his knuckles. She added it to her list of things she didn’t notice. “Jury’s out on my intelligence and I may be half carrot, but after seeing your website, I can tell you with all due authority that you shouldn’t run errands for Babs Koçak for the rest of your career. You have a creative voice. Use it.”
“Wow. Thank you.” Marlowe swallowed, struggling not to cry. Angus hadn’t said anything new. She’d been telling herself the same things for months, but the words sounded different when spoken aloud and in someone else’s voice. Stronger, maybe, because it wasn’t as easy to argue herself into believing she was wrong.
As the moment settled, she and Angus eased back into cooking. He browned butter in a skillet while she sliced cheese, sneaking a bite and wondering why she bought the tasteless stuff. Budget, of course, but also habit. When faced with options, Marlowe almost always convinced herself she didn’t deserve nice things. It was a constant battle. A low drone of not-good-enough-yet messages had underscored her upbringing. Her relationship with Kelvin amplified that message tenfold. Meanwhile, like everyone else, she was weeding through a complex system of societal influences she couldn’t even begin to unpack. Amid all that, simply enjoying something nice often felt wrong.
“What about you?” she asked as she sliced. “What’s your dream job?”
“Cattle tycoon.”
“Seriously.”
“Garnish whiz.”
“Once more. This time with feeling.”
“Right. A real answer.” He poured the eggs into the skillet and rotated the pan with a practiced twist of his wrist. “I feel like I should say I want to play Hamlet on Broadway or earn an Oscar as a harrowed war vet. Or I want to stop acting altogether so I can produce documentaries about climate change or world poverty. I should be chasing a big, heroic dream, but the truth is, I enjoy what I do, and I think entertainment has value. I just hate the game that comes with fame, the constant filtering, the focus not on actions but on the potential perception of those actions.” He lowered the pan, studying the contents with a furrowed brow.
“It’s great that you already do what you love,” she said, wishing she could offer him a fraction of the encouragement he’d given her.
“Imostlydo what I love. I’ve played a lot of jerks and egotists.” He wagged a spatula at her. “Donotsay typecasting.” He paused as if bracing for the inevitable. She mimed zipping her lips, eliciting a wry, sexy smile not unlike the earlier one she didn’t notice. “One day I’d like to play a nice guy. Someone who’s important enough to move a story forward but who’s out of the spotlight so no one bothers to speculate about what’s real and what’s performance. Then maybe I can live my life without all the noise.” He returned his attention to the eggs, carefully loosening the edges with the spatula.
This time it was Marlowe’s turn to watch him, to see a crease form between his brows and a twitch quiver near his jaw. What she’d interpreted for so long as arrogance was now so obviously something else entirely. Impatience. Exhaustion. Frustration with a constant demand to be “on” for others. An inability to be in his own skin, in his own way.
“You think I’m ungrateful,” he said, not quite forming a question.
“No, I think you’re brave.”
“Brave? You must be referring to that other guy.” Angus leaned toward the living room. “Jeeves? You in there? Our guest has something to say to you!”
“Stop it.” She gave him a halfhearted scoldy look. “I’m serious. Listen.”
While helping finish the omelets, Marlowe described her childhood, how she’d bounced between two highly ambitious parents, both of them pushing a constant message to do more, be more, say more. Try harder. Get smarter. Work faster. Speak up. Lean in. Make a mark. Change the world. Always be reaching, striving, improving, producing something vital. She discussed her conflicted relationship with social media: the way it had the potential to connect her with friends but at the cost of feeling left out of events she wasn’t invited to or present for, and the ways it encouraged members to engage in a relentless competition for followers, likes, and influence. Added to that was the competitive nature of the entertainment industry, the ambition required to meet the right people and promote oneself. Trying to meet the productivity bar was exhausting. And impossible.
“You’re the first person I’ve met who wants his life to be quieter,” she said. “In a world filled with messages to be louder and bigger, to take up more space, to garner more attention, denying those messages seems pretty brave to me.”
“Interesting theory.” Angus shuffled the omelets onto a set of plates, taking his time to sprinkle basil on top of each one, arranging itjust so. Maybe his sudden onset of fastidiousness was due only to the basil, a means of extending their running joke aboutgarnishes, but Marlowe got the impression her comment had made him uncomfortable. For a guy so quick to accept a compliment about his looks, he seemed completely stymied by praise about his brain or his heart.
“Hey.” She set her hand on his arm, drawing his attention up. “How about we scrap everything I said and I just tell you I think you’re pretty cool.”
“I can’t be coolandbrave?” he joked.
“I suspect you can be anything you want to be,” she said, not joking at all.
This time when he smiled, he simply looked happy.
That, she noticed.
Chapter Nineteen
While Angus set up for breakfast outside, Marlowe ran downstairs and swapped her laundry so her final load was in the dryer and she could put on something of her own. She slipped into a pair of cotton shorts, a bra, and a scoop-neck tank top that almost made her look like she had cleavage. The clothes were nothing special, but they saved her from thinking about his clothes and his scent and how his body would look in the boxer shorts she’d been wearing. And how he’d look out of those boxer shorts.
