It was too early–both in the hour and her own introspection–to be asking herself this, so she gazed at the outskirts of industrial Venezia, and said, “Forty-eight hours ago, I was in L.A.”
“And seventy-two hours ago, we were fighting in the garden of an assisted living home in Burbank.”
Sewanee turned to him. “And three months ago, we were in Las Vegas.”
“I still dream about that steak.”
“The steak?”
“It was Wagyu.” He grinned. “And that wine.”
“The wine.”
“The wine.”
At the heat in his eyes, she lost her courage, looked back out the window. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise. Don’t you like surprises?”
“Sure. Long as I know what they are.”
“Where’s the fun in that, eh?”
Sewanee assessed him, the very fact of him, sitting there across from her, on a train in Italy. She felt like she knew so much about him, but it seemed backward, as if she had watched a film from the end to the beginning. “Well, if it’s going to be a while, entertain me. Tell me the story of Brock McNight.”
Nick dropped his chin to his chest. “Jaysus. All right.” He took a breath. “After the band broke up and Jason got out of treatment, we moved back to Prescott to get on our feet. We started seeing old friends and one of them mentioned this kid we all knew in high school, this defensive lineman, Brad. She says, you won’t believe what Brad’s doing now. And she pulls out her phone, brings up a . . .” He lowered his voice to the point where he was almost mouthing the words: “porn site. And Brad had a whole channel. His name was upandcoming69–I know–and he would . . .” Nick shifted in his seat and Sewanee peered at him, already feeling herself start to redden. “He wanks into the camera and–buongiorno!” Nick bleated at the man who’d materialized to check their tickets in the slots by their headrests. He only grunted in reply and moved on.
Sewanee stifled a laugh. Nick leaned in and lowered his voice once again. “And he’d dirty-talk. In this caveman voice. And look: I’m no expert and Brad having a hand shandy is definitely not my, er, kink? But even I could tell it was hot.”
Sewanee wasn’t sure her grin could be any bigger, that the laws of physics would allow it.
“So, me being me, I ran with it. I started messing with Jason, doing the voice around the house. Like, he’d be on the phone with his ma and I’d get right up next to him and say, ‘you like seeing Daddy hard, do ya? Give that tight little ass to Daddy.’”
Sewanee covered her mouth, but too late to smother the laugh that blasted through the train.
Nick helicoptered a hand and Sewanee noticed a little pink tinge appear on his cheeks. “You get the picture. And then one day, I lost a bet to Jason, and the penalty was I had to talk in the Brad voice the whole day. And then whenever I lost a bet–we bet a lot because we’re overgrown children–he’d make me use the voice. Go talk to that girl. Ask for directions. Order takeout. And it started . . . working. People responded to it. And then June was casting one of her books–this is after you stopped doing ’em–and I thought, well, I could do that. Not one of hers, obviously, that would just be–”
“Right.”
“But I sent one of her friends a sample of the Brad voice . . .”
“And the rest is history.”
“Yes. And now it needs to really be history.”
“So, you do want to stop? What you said in the e-mails wasn’t bullshit?”
Nick heaved a sigh. “Sewanee, I’ll say it again. I’ll say it as many times as you want, but nothing in the e-mails–or the texts–was bullshit. That was me. That was real. All of it. Every bit.”
Sewanee believed him. Or certainly wanted to. “But you have such a good thing going. You could maybe pull back a little to focus on the band, but why do you want to stop completely?”
“Because it’s been four hundred books and five draining years and because . . .” He chewed on his lip. “Because I’ve lost track of who I am when I’m not pretending to be stupid Brad.”
Before they knew it, the train was pulling to a stop in Padua and Nick popped up and shuttled Sewanee out of the train and, as she said, “Padua? Why Padua?” Nick led her to a bus. With an eyebrow raise from Sewanee and an answering smirk from Nick, they climbed aboard.
After settling into two small seats, Nick’s knees tucked up hard against the seatback in front of them, he turned to her and said, “So. L.A. Really?”