I nodded and moved back toward the RV. “Then let’s get back to work.”
“Yes, master,” he muttered from behind me. “Whatever you say, master. Even though I just had a near death experience and everything. You should be tucking me into bed and singing that Warm Kitty song. But nooooo, someone wants to get his precious order in. Why, back in my day—”
I didn’t hear the rest because I slammed the RV closed between us, shutting him out.
“What the hell?” he shouted from outside.
“You said to keep the RV door closed at all times,” I replied. “I don’t make the rules.”
That evening after we’d destroyed a couple of rotisserie chickens I’d picked up on the way in, and Cooper had made all kinds of Sir Pecks-A-Lot jokes, we ended up sitting across from each other at the little dinette table with our laptops. I’d already placed the order, but I needed to enter all of the items into a spreadsheet to keep them straight for cost purposes. Cooper was busy working on figuring out a logo for our new brand, and he kept muttering to himself under his breath.
It was kind of endearing.
“Not purple. No one likes purple,” he said.
“I like purple.”
He didn’t bother to look up. “You don’t count.”
“Mpfh.” I went back to my spreadsheet. After a few minutes, I finished that and moved on to typing up a list of projects and tasks that needed to be done first before I could get started on the cabin work itself. If I didn’t make a plan, I’d be all over the place and unable to focus.
“I’m going to mount a few cameras around the clearing,” I told him.
Cooper finally lifted his head. “What for?”
Was he joking? “For capturing video.”
“Of what?”
I rubbed my hands over my face and scratched my fingers through my beard while I swallowed down my initial response.
“Of our work on the cabin. Of our lives here. Of us.” He still looked confused. “The v in vlogging stands for—”
Cooper shot me a look. “I get it. But I thought we’d just take video as we went along.”
I shook my head. “No. We need to time-lapse the entire project from several different angles. That’s the video that will bring in the most subscribers. Haven’t you seen Shawn James?”
“Who?”
“My Self Reliance? The guy in Canada who hand-built a log cabin by himself and vlogged the whole thing?”
“My YouTube watching is a touch more… shall we say… comedic than that.”
I huffed. “Well, watch it. It’s a great vlog, and the videography is well-done. I spent some time scrolling through how other people have set up cameras for this type of project, and I sketched out a plan if you want to see it.”
“Yeah. I guess that would be a good idea. I wouldn’t want to stumble over to a tree to take a piss and not realize it was being recorded for posterity.”
I sifted back through my notebook until I found the right page and then shoved the spiral across the table, pointing to the big rectangle in the clearing. “Here’s the RV. You actually parked it exactly where it will be the least distracting in the shots, so that’s good. I think if we put the three mounts here, here, and here, we’ll cover most of the angles we need. I have a drone we can use for the aerial shots, of course, but the main stuff will be shot with this killer Sony camera and a Zeiss lens.”
Cooper tilted his head at me and smiled. “Listen to you, chatterbox. Did you accidentally snort some coke or something?”
I felt my face heat. “No, I just… I really like this stuff. It’s mechanical, you know? Like tools. Like fixing stuff. Once you learn the settings, it’s not as scary. Like when I was little and I picked up my dad’s chalk line out of the toolbox. It looked like the weirdest thing ever. How could a chalky rope be useful? But then I saw him snap it on a piece of plywood for the first time, and suddenly I got it. This camera stuff is like that.”
Why wasn’t I shutting up? And why did this RV seem so small all of a sudden? I could feel the heat from Cooper’s legs against mine under the table. Cooper’s hand ran lazily through Nacho’s coat where the dog lay sprawled on the bench seat with his big golden body pressed against Cooper’s hip. Nacho’s legs hung off the seat in all directions, but his head was happily propped on Cooper’s thigh. He was clearly in heaven.
I clamped my lips together and focused back on the sketch. “Um, so that’s about it. I thought when we get some good sunset light, I could do a drone flight over the property and capture some 360-degree views and stuff. People seem to like that.”