by Kris Ripper
“Ditto, ditto, ditto. I mean, partly because dating is hard, but mostly because I just...um...because I think you and I...” I ran down in a puff of unspoken words.
“The statistical likelihood of finding someone else with whom I share this level of both physical and intellectual chemistry seems low,” Sidney said, nodding super seriously. And then almost immediately cracking a smile. “It makes sense to conserve my energy.”
“Um, exactly. Also, I like you so, so much, oh my god.” I buried my face against their shoulder, which took some flexibility given the way we were sitting with our legs between us. To cover up my words, I said quickly, “Speaking of energy, do you want to go home soon? I’m hyper-conscious of the time.”
“I can stay awhile longer.”
“Yay!” I picked my head up. “In that case, should we forage for dinner?”
They grinned. “I’ve spent my entire life thinking of food as a form of fuel I had an obligation to consume in order for the machine to run. You’ve turned it into an adventure.”
“Oh hell yes.” I grabbed their hand. “Come adventure with me into the depths of the Jenkinses’ refrigerator. Only the gods know what we might find there.”
“That sounds exciting and a little bit dangerous.”
I performed an eyebrow waggle. “Much like myself.”
“Indeed.”
* * *
We decided we’d do one last episode of The Love Study the following week and take questions. I wasn’t as intimidated as I had been before by the thought of people calling in or writing in to ask stuff. And it seemed only right to give the folks some warning.
I definitely wasn’t prepared for the uproar our announcement about ending the show would cause.
“Y’all are acting like Declan is dying,” Sidney said finally, amused and exasperated. “He’s perfectly fine. He can visit the show whenever he likes.”
“Wait, I can?”
They shot me a quick smile. “I’m not excommunicating you or anything. You’ve been a guest now. You’ll be welcome again.”
“Whoa. Far out.” I realized I was just staring at them and turned toward the camera. “So yeah, I’m not going to poof out of existence or something. Though that’d be cool. Do you ever sit around wishing magic was real and that was a thing you could, like, learn to do?”
“Poof out of existence?” Sidney asked. “I feel certain I’ve never wished I could do that. No, I take that back. I may have wished that. Not in a happy way.”
“Uh, true. I didn’t catch that until I’d already said it. I meant it in a happy way now. Like poof suddenly I appear. Then when you’re sick of me, poof, I’m gone again.”
They raised their eyebrows, arching over their glasses. “How likely do you think it is I’ll get sick of you?”
I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “You might. I once left someone at the altar, you know. I may be insufferable.”
“Declan, I think that means I should be afraid of you deciding you’re sick of me, right?”
I mock-gasped. “Never! I would never. Perish the thought.” I did a dramatic partial swoon.
“Okay, okay.” They addressed the camera after barely pausing to appreciate my swoon. “More seriously, I wanted to thank all of you for your support the last six weeks. This has been a lot of fun, and it’s been a nice change of pace from the usual Spinster Uncle shows. I know it’s easy to get used to a format and then to want that consistently, so I really appreciate your willingness to allow me to play with the channel a bit.”
“Lobby in the comments if you want Spunk—” I smirked at them “—to do this again. I have some friends who might be willing to give The Love Study a try since it’s been so successful, though they’re out of luck because I totally just snagged the most amazing single person in town. Possibly in the state.”
Sidney seemed momentarily at a loss for words. “I...”
“So yeah, shout it up in the comments,” I said again, kind of covering for them, kind of hoping I could get Mase to agree to do The Love Study. Mostly because Sidney was good at setting people up and also because I thought it might revitalize him on the whole dating front.
Of course, I’d have to convince him, but I thought I might be able to. Maybe.
“I think there might be more comments on this video than any livestream I’ve ever done.” Sidney scrolled. And scrolled. And scrolled. “Um, sorry, everyone. I try not to look unless I’m specifically asking for something but wow, you really like The Love Study.”
“Maybe there will be a season two!” I put in hopefully. I looked directly into the camera. “Some of you out there could use it. You know who you are.”
They shoved me, making me giggle, and rolled into the ad read and outro, adding, “Next week’s episode, the last of The Love Study, will be a Q and A, so please feel free to send your questions by email, Instagram tag, Instagram DM, or voice message. You can also comment or call in with your questions next week. I think that’s it, thank you for watching, and I will spinster at you more next time.”
I waved as they cut the recording.
Both of us exhaled. I leaned back and Sidney leaned forward to continue scrolling.
“Is it batshit?” I asked with some trepidation.
“They are losing their collective mind. I don’t understand why. Do you think they expected us to date for their entertainment forever?”
I put my hand on their arm. “Sidney. That’s exactly what they thought. Isn’t it?”
“Now that we’re saying it aloud...probably. Yes.”
“Jeez, that’s...creepily voyeuristic.”
“Also pretty predictable. This is the age of reality shows and daily vloggers. That viewers expect to witness the ins and outs of strangers’ lives might not be that odd.” They shook their head. “But I’m glad you aren’t tempted to do that. I think I’d have a hard time dating a daily vlogger.”
I only had a passing idea of what a daily vlogger was, but I thought Mason followed some people who posted videos all the time. I kind of understood the inclination to watch, but I couldn’t really imagine being the star of my own constant YouTube channel.
“You’re safe with me. I have no desire to, um, vlog daily.”
“It’s the editing I don’t get. Editing one video a week is exhausting to me. I can’t imagine doing it every day.” They shook their head again. “This is a little...invasive at times. Well intentioned? But it’s as if they are...rather overinvested in our relationship right now. Hmm...this is an...unforeseen side effect.”
I knew I should care about what they were saying, but really I was just watching them, all focused on the computer, sort of musing under their breath about the commenters. I caught “...report you...” and “...that’s um...no...” but mostly I watched them, the furrow in their forehead, the glint of the monitor on their glasses, the angle of their wrist as they navigated their little red mouse.
“Sorry,” they murmured. “Almost done. Probably.”
“Do you want Thai again?”
“Umm...that sounds delicious. Do you mind ordering? Get me any of the curries.”
“Got it.”
By the time the food showed up Sidney was turning off their monitor and I’d put waters on the desk next to the armchairs. They insisted on paying (because: guilt at apparently abandoning me while they worked again, though I just went back to that same film book and read about sound effects). I hadn’t even been meaning to stay for dinner, but it seemed like it made the most sense to order in while they finished up.
In deference to Sidney’s early shift we were very virtuous and only kissed a little before I went home.
Chapter Nineteen
Deb surveyed the disaster progress we’d made with the Fling bricks and took a deep breath. “I didn’t realize we still had a binding machine.”
“Um. I.
..thought that’s...what you wanted? You did say the bricks should be bound. And I found it in one of the store rooms.” I gulped. She had said that. Hadn’t she? I’d written it down! I glanced at Jack, who was no help. “Was that not what you wanted?”
“I did say they should be bound, Declan. I clearly should have been more specific.”
Oh shit. I’d fucked up. Massively, if the way she was staring in bemusement at the pile of rejected prototype bricks was anything to go by.
I tried to apologize, but my throat was too dry to speak.
“I figured you’d have them bound at the printer’s.” She picked up one of the spiral-bound booklets. “You did this with that old machine? It looks like it’s from the bronze age. Or the fifties.”
It wasn’t that old. I’d googled it because we couldn’t find a manual or anything. It did look clunky. It definitely hadn’t been designed to sell based on sexiness; no one would stay all night in line at the Apple store for this baby. (Look, Ronnie and I only did that once, and I haven’t bought an iPhone since, I swear. It’s like a rite of passage or something, spending way too much money on an iPhone the second it’s released. I had to get it out of my system and now I’ve moved on.)
“So you’re saying...” Jack paused delicately. “That we could have simply paid someone else to do this?” He didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help looking at him.
“In theory. This is very nice, though.” She flipped through. “I almost can’t believe you got that thing to produce something this decent.”
At least there was...that? “Sorry. I didn’t know. I went poking around and found this and just...assumed it’s how we were supposed to do it.”
“Maybe we could still give the job to someone else.” Now Jack sounded hopeful, the traitor.
“We’ve got almost half of them done,” I countered. As long as you used a loose definition for “almost” and “done.” To my surprise, Jack didn’t even correct me.
“Oh, I like these. What would you say the total cost was for the supplies you had to buy in order to bind them?”
I knew down to the cent. The facts and figures were all meticulously recorded in a spreadsheet. “Thirty dollars. Ish.”
She turned toward me. “Thirty dollars.”
I gulped again. “Um. Yes?”
“For how many?”
“A hundred.”
“In theory,” Jack added.
“Well, yeah. But we didn’t need all one hundred, so it’s okay that we had a few...practice runs.”
A smile took over Deb’s face. “We usually pay twelve dollars per copy. You two have just saved us a great deal of money on this project.”
I sank down into my chair, which I’d forgotten existed during the period of abject dread following Deb’s arrival. “Oh.”
“To be fair,” Jack said, as if the words were causing him pain, “it was all Declan’s doing. I would have hired out the binding job in a second if I’d known that was a possibility.”
Deb looked at me again.
I shrugged. “We worked together. There’s no way I’d have gotten as many done if Jack hadn’t been working on it during his shifts.” Even though he’d whined at first. It wasn’t necessary to mention that. Probably.
“I didn’t expect you to have started on the bricks in earnest yet. We have a few final edits for the annual report.”
A thump as Jack also sat down. “The report we’ve already had printed.”
“The very same.” Her smile widened. “The good news is it’s just a few changes on just a few pages. No need to have the whole thing reprinted.”
Both of us surveyed our conference table of piles in various stages of punching and binding. “What...does that mean?” I asked faintly.
“I think all you’ll need to do is have these five or so pages reprinted, and then swap them out for the current version.” Now the smile resembled that of an alligator toying with its prey. (I didn’t know if that was something alligators did, but it seemed in character for them.) “No big deal for a couple of guys who can bind things by themselves, right?” She held up the report she’d grabbed and kind of shook it before placing it carefully back on the pile it had been in. “Good work. I’m very pleased with the results. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
In the silence after she left the room I tried to decide if Jack was pissed at me, or in general, or something else entirely.
Then, abruptly, a sound I’d never heard before emerged from his mouth. It took me a few seconds to work it out. He was laughing.
“I can’t even believe we did this. Not only did we make a ridiculous amount of work for ourselves, we now have to do it all over again.”
“I’m sorry.” I meant it too. Deb had seemed happy about the money, but she’d also seemed sort of dumbstruck by the whole fiasco. Which didn’t exactly bode well for either of us. “I honestly had no idea we could just...order them printed and bound. I mean, obviously I knew that was a thing, but I figured it was expensive and frowned upon. Once I found the bookbinding machine I thought that’s how they must do it.”
He waved a hand. “I probably would have thought the same thing. If I’d really considered it, I would have realized that a place like this wouldn’t do their own report binding. Hell, Declan.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s funny. Honestly. And Deb loves to save money, she meant that.”
“Oh. Good, then. I guess?”
“Twelve dollars per book. We’re in the wrong line of work.”
“Seriously.” I sipped some water, trying to soothe the stress-ache in my throat. “What’s the over-under on me being fired by end of business?” I tried to make it a joke, but it felt a little too real, the screw-up a little too fresh.
“Not a chance.” He paused. “They’d wait until after the event.”
I almost forgot he was a coworker and threw something at him.
He laughed again. “Sorry. Look, it was an honest mistake, it resulted in a money savings for the company—”
“Not necessarily. They’re paying our labor where they wouldn’t have had to otherwise.”
“Yeah, but this time was budgeted for the Fling already, and we’ve used it in a way that maximized savings in other areas. I swear, it’s fine.”
I slumped. “I’m such a tool.”
“You’re not. You could even argue—and if you ever tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it—that Deb should have made it clearer what she expected. Though with her this sort of thing is more of a strategy than an error.”
“What do you mean?”
He stood and began uncoiling the reports we’d already coiled, in anticipation of, you know, plugging in five new final pages oh my god what had I done. I tried to get my breathing under control and focused on what Jack was saying.
“...to know Deb through her wife, who was one of my professors and pulled me in like a little waif. Anne’s the same way. She’d leave an assignment open-ended just to see what people would come up with. I know it seems a little backwards, but this will endear you to Deb more than producing the same thing she expected you to produce. Of course, that’s only if we pull the rest of the Fling off.”
The notion of Jack as a “waif” derailed my internal mortification train. “So you’ve known them for a long time?”
He glanced at me. “How old do you think I am?”
“Not...that old. But if you went to undergrad out of high school, then you’ve known your old professor for a while.”
Seeming to decide I wasn’t insulting him (if that was a perk of me making a fool of myself with a book binding machine, I’d take it), he shrugged. “A while.”
“Is that why you’re working here?”
“I applied for my job just like everyone else.” Not as defensive as he would have been a few weeks before, but a little touchy all the same.
<
br /> “Uh, yeah, it really had not occurred to me that Deb hired you to be nice. Like, for a long time I thought she only kept me around because she liked me, but that’s obviously dumb. She’s not that kind of boss.”
“True.” He paused. It felt like a pause. Not a terminal point.
So I waited.
And sipped my now cold coffee.
And watched him uncoil reports. Which was soothing except for the guilty voice in the back of my head that kept prodding me to help.
“My grandparents are having trouble living independently,” he said finally. “They raised me, and despite the problems we’ve had in the past, I care a lot about them. It’s hard to see them struggle. I’d had a relatively high-pressure job before this and I couldn’t keep up with the strain of it while also trying to watch over them when I wasn’t at work, so I...quit. And started working here.”
Whoa. Dire Jack had a semi-tragic backstory. Not that I should have been surprised, but in a way I was. “I’m really sorry about your grandparents. That sounds super hard.” Super hard probably didn’t scratch the surface of it, but it was the best I could come up with on the spot.
“It’s difficult to convince independently minded people they need more help than they can get on their own.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
He began stacking the uncoiled completed reports in alternating vertical and horizontal sections. “Do you want to pull up the new final five pages? Should we send them to the printer or print them ourselves?”
“Maybe the printer? They should match.”
“That’s true. Some of the printers here are high quality, though if there are images we might want to have them professionally done. We could print a few test pages and see if it’s a noticeable difference.”
“Good call. It’d be faster to print them now and get them swapped out for the bad pages immediately. Also, I think that might help with my sense of mortification; if I have to do that tomorrow, I’ll feel bad all over again.”
He waved a hand, elegantly dismissing my ennui. “This is all just details we’re learning for next time we do this. Like demand a finalized report by a certain date. And price check having the reports bound, especially if they’re longer than this. We can’t comfortably punch more than twenty pages, which is manageable at this length, but for longer it probably wouldn’t be worth the labor.”