“Clear his schedule,” I blurted without thinking.
“You got it,” she said with a sly wink.
“Thanks, kiddo.”
“No problem.”
We hugged briefly, and I left Camilla to her lunch, setting forth to find where Chris had hunkered himself. This was a risk, but I was willing to be a little bold to get what I wanted. And I was pretty sure I wanted him.
I found the sexy art director hunched over his drafting table, drawing out a storyboard with charcoal and parchment, making exacting marks in pitch black on the sheer white surface as though conjuring the images from within the paper itself, like a sculptor or a sorcerer. The images were a bit rough but showed real talent.
Aden was the only one who I had seen that was better, and he was a bit weird to begin with. He’d been drawing for years and had formal training. I didn’t know if Chris had had any formal schooling. If he was an amateur, he was doing really well.
“Oh, hello,” he said, taking out one of his earbuds.
Was he into music after all? I had gotten the impression that he was from a family of professional musicians but didn’t really get it the way they did. Then I paid attention to the sound of the tiny headphone and realized that he was listening to an audiobook… in Swedish.
“You speak Swedish?” I asked bluntly, realizing it might not have been the most appropriate reply to his greeting.
“Not as well as I would like. However, it is always good to have practice,” Chris said with an amused smile. His big brown eyes lit up a bit.
“What is it?” I took a seat on the rolling stool by his drafting table.
“Hanteringen av Ododa.”
“Huh?” Blinking at him, I felt a little impressed.
“Handling the Dead. It’s a horror novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist,” Chris said, with what sounded to me like a perfect Swedish accent.
“Everybody has to have a hobby,” I said, with a casual shrug, as though it wasn’t the strangest thing I’d heard all week.
“Very true,” Chris said seriously. “Can’t work all the time. That way leads madness.”
“Darn’ tootin’,” I said, reflecting on my own long hours at the hospital.
“What’s yours?”
“What’s my what?” I asked, coming back to earth.
“What’s your hobby?” he clarified. Sexy brown eyes looked into my face, making me feel like blushing.
“Oh, I… I can’t, it’s weird,” I said, dropping Chris’s gaze.
His straight black eyebrows lifted in mock shock. “Weirder than listening to post-modern Swedish zombie audiobooks in the original?”
“Okay, point taken, I collect teddy bears. Jeepers doesn’t like them much. I keep them out of reach.”
“Jeepers?” Chris asked, standing up fully and crossing his arms over his chest.
“My kitten,” I clarified, to keep him from thinking Jeepers was the name of my son or some such.
“Oh, how old?”
“Six months. He’s a little tuxedo cat. Black and white.”
“Oh, almost a full-grown cat.”
“Yeah, I guess. He still acts like a kitten, though. Gets into absolutely everything. One day I came home from a swing shift to find he had gotten the ficus out of the pot. To be fair, I hadn’t cleaned his litter box in a while.”
“Fair play to Jeepers,” Chris agreed, with a slight laugh.
“Took a week for him to forgive me. Hid under the couch and refused to eat, but eventually, he came around.”
“Yep, definitely a cat,” Chris agreed.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, indicating the storyboard.
“Oh, storyboards for the new campaign for Circus Circus. Something for the designers to work from. I’m trying a new technique I got out of a book of 19th-century illustrations. It’s difficult, but I think I’m getting it. See how those curves swoop.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t really, but I just couldn’t bear to disappoint him. Besides which, now he had pointed it out they were quite lovely. Almost luscious.
“I’m trying to really make it pop. Aden and Cooper are the only ones who are ever really going to see it, but I still try to do my best. I just figured if I do half-assed work, it will show, and the resulting product will suffer. It is too important for that.”
“Advertising is important?”
“It is for me. I mean the way I see it. Basically, there are two kinds of advertising. Advertising that lies and advertising that shows. Advertising that lies makes promises it can’t keep and fools people into buying things that they likely don’t need. Advertising that shows presents a product in a flattering but realistic light and says ‘hey, here is a thing that exists’ and it could well be something good. Have you ever seen the old coke posters?”
I shook my head. It was interesting to see Chris so impassioned about his work. “Um, no, I can’t say I have.”
“Here,” Chris said, hauling a hefty book up from under his desk. The book was a big, old, hardcover festooned with bright yellow post-it notes. The cover was made up of several images of old-fashioned posters. “Here it is,” he said, getting to the right page.