The numbers didn’t move no matter how many times Mike ran them, which was, he supposed, the whole defining feature of numbers they didn’t care how many times you asked them to be different.
Rent on the fifteenth.
Two gigs booked between now and then, one of them a rehearsal dinner that paid well but only once, the other a Tuesday slot at the same restaurant that had rebooked him twice now on the strength of nothing but competence and showing up.
The discretionary line that used to fill the gap between what he made and what he needed had shrunk by an amount specific enough to matter and vague enough that he still didn’t have the exact figure memorized without checking the paper in front of him, which he’d already checked three times.
He had a legal pad covered in a column of figures that refused, on the fourth pass, to add up any better than they had on the first.
The old option sat there the way old options always did quiet, patient, not pushing, just present.
He still knew people.
He still had the training.
A single week of actual legal work, even something small, something adjacent, would close the gap without a second thought, and the version of him that used to bill hours knew exactly how easy that particular phone call would be to make.
He didn’t make it.
He’d made a whole different kind of choice a couple years back, the kind that didn’t get to be re-made every time the math got briefly uncomfortable, and picking up a phone the moment it pinched would have turned that choice into a preference instead of a decision reversible, conditional, worth exactly as much as the next hard month made it worth.
He crossed out the fourth attempt at the column instead and started a fifth.
The knock came before he’d finished it, familiar in its rhythm, and he called out without getting up.
“It’s open.”
Phoebe let herself in, guitar case at her hip, and took in the legal pad, the pen, the tension in his shoulders that he apparently hadn’t managed to leave out of his posture, all in the single unhurried sweep she gave every room she walked into.
“That’s a very serious piece of paper,” she said.
“Is that a serious-paper day?”
“It’s a rent day.
Same thing this month.”
She settled onto the arm of the couch instead of the couch itself, close enough to see the column of numbers without quite invading it, and studied the page with the sharp interest of someone treating a genuine problem as a genuine problem instead of something to be smoothed over with reassurance.
“Okay.
How short.”
“Short enough that I’ve done the math five times hoping it’d come out different.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
“Math doesn’t work that way.
I’ve tried.” She considered the page a moment longer, then looked up at him with an expression that had shifted from casual to something more deliberate, the gear-change of somebody deciding to actually help instead of just sympathize.
“I have a client.
Wendell.
Very rich, very sweet, throws this enormous party every year for absolutely no reason, just because he can, and he’s been trying to get ‘live music, something classy’ for weeks and every guy he’s called wants twice what it’s worth because they can smell the money on him.
You’d be exactly what he wants and you wouldn’t have to pretend to be impressed by his house, which apparently everyone else does and he hates it.”
“You’re offering me a gig.”
“I’m offering you a specific, real gig, that pays actual, specific, real money, that exists because you’re good at a thing, not because I asked somebody to feel sorry for you.” She said it plainly, no performance in it, the particular flatness she reserved for things she meant completely.
“I checked.
Before I came over.
I wasn’t going to walk in here with a maybe.”
He looked at her a moment, the offer sitting there uncomplicated in a way that made it easier to take than it had any right to be not money handed across a table, not a favor with strings woven through it, just a door she’d actually already checked was open before she mentioned it existed.
“What’s it pay?”
She told him.
It was enough, comfortably enough, the kind of number that turned the column on his legal pad from a problem into an inconvenience, and something in his chest loosened at the sound of it in a way the discretionary trust line’s absence hadn’t managed to tighten.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant every part of the two words, no version of them edited down to something smaller.
“Don’t thank me.
Thank Wendell.
He’s the one paying.
I’m just the one who remembered you exist and are good at things.” She reached over, plucked the pen out of his hand before he could object, and drew a single confident line through his entire column of failed math, the whole afternoon’s frustration crossed out in one motion. Visit novelping . com for the full chapter.
“There.
Problem solved, or at least problem smaller.
You can go back to being broody about it if you want, but I feel like the moment’s kind of passed.”
“I wasn’t being broody.”
“You were doing the quiet intense math face.
That’s broody-adjacent.” She set the pen down, guitar case still leaned against her hip like it hadn’t quite decided to be put down yet, and looked at him with something warmer than teasing underneath the teasing.
“You don’t have to solve everything alone, you know.
I’m not going anywhere.
Might as well let me carry some of it when I actually can.”
He didn’t have a clever answer ready for that, and for once he didn’t reach for one just let the sentence land the way she’d delivered it, plain and unguarded, and answered it the same way.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” she echoed, satisfied, and reached for his legal pad to write Wendell’s number down in the margin, her handwriting looping messily over the ruins of his failed arithmetic, one real number replacing five wrong ones.
hey quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
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P.S.
in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.