Thank You for Listening(6)

“I was sure,” his shorter companion put in. “Acura Oboe!”

Sewanee sighed audibly and got Adaku’s foot in her shin.

Adaku smiled bigger. “Adaku Obi.”

“Yeah.” The taller one snapped his fingers. “I’m Chuck. This waste of space is Jimbo.”

Chuck had a glassy glint in his eyes Sewanee didn’t like. He kept staring at Adaku. “I gotta tell ya, between you and me? You remind me of this–” He turned to his friend. “Jimbo, you remember Sheniqua?”

Jimbo snorted. “Do I remember Sheniqua.”

Sewanee would never get used to it, the things some men thought they could say. Roy was harmless. But these two? These two were trouble before they ever showed up, wherever they showed up, and particularly in Adaku’s case. As Sewanee debated whether to step in, she placed their accents. East coast. Not New York, not the boroughs. Definitely not Boston. Jersey. Probably the shore. Badda Bing.

“Hey, so.” Chuck dropped a hand on the back of Adaku’s chair, leaning down. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you like white guys?”

Sewanee stood up and said, “Okay,” as Adaku said, lowly, sharply, “Don’t.”

Chuck lifted both meaty hands. “I’m just sayin’!”

Jimbo chuckled. “We’ve had a little too much of a little too much, if you know what I mean.” They fist-bumped. Sloppily.

Sewanee knew there had been a window, a small window, a few years ago, when being recognized had been enjoyable. Now, it felt like surveillance.

Adaku caught the pit boss’s eye. That was all it took.

Chuck, oblivious, stepped closer to Adaku. “You’re special. That ‘it’ thing. You twinkle. All mischievous and shit.”

“Mischievous,” Sewanee said in that well-trained voice of hers, which, despite its low volume, made people listen. “Miss. Chi. Viss.”

Chuck looked at her for the first time, surprised to find her there. “Dat’s what I said.”

“No, you said, miss-CHEE-vee-us. It’s MISS-chi-viss.”

“So?”

“Mis-chi-viss is a word. Miss-chee-vee-us is not.”

Chuck struck a theatrical pose of contemplation, stubby finger on his scruffy chin. He turned to his buddy. “Hey Jimbo, is ‘bitch’ a word?” He looked back at Sewanee. “I say dat right?”

As they laughed, two large men appeared. One took Chuck by the elbow. “Gentlemen, please come with us.” There were brief protests: We didn’t mean nothing; just having some fun; way to treat your fans; you ain’t hot shit, you know. But they were already on their escorted way toward the nearest exit.

Sewanee sat back down. She looked at Adaku and said, “Okay, so not him!” They were sharing a rueful smile when Chuck took one final, loud shot over his shoulder:

“Yo, bitch, catch ya back at Treasure Island!”

ADAKU HAD INSISTED on taking Sewanee to the Rio in the limo. She’d checked into her fourth-floor room, threw open the curtains to reveal a sumptuous parking garage view, made a cup of tea, put on the Golf Channel–her favorite source of white background noise–and worked. First, she went over the questions Mark had given her for the panel tomorrow morning.

Then she began prepping a book she was recording in a few weeks, making word lists and finding the correct pronunciations, identifying the emotional arc of the story, marking breath points in syntactically challenging passages, mapping relationships between the characters, and developing voices and accents. Book prep had become as relevant to her as rehearsal had once been for performing a play or researching a character before shooting a film. But Sewanee Chester hadn’t stepped on a stage or in front of a camera for seven years.

After a few hours, she sat back, realizing she was hungry, and absently fiddled with the elastic of her eye patch above her right ear as if it were a lock of hair. In the beginning, she’d taken it off whenever she was by herself. Now it was just another part of her. She picked up the phone and treated herself to room service.

Then did something she hated: went on Facebook.

She had let her activity lapse after the accident. Too many sympathy posts and then, seemingly overnight, not enough. While people posted photos of their engagements and weddings and first dogs and first houses and first kids and now second kids, the last picture she’d been tagged in had been from the hospital. Adaku by her side, both sporting cheeky thumbs-up. She was frozen in time like that.

But then Mark had gone and said: Romance audiobook fans are insane, you should see the Facebook groups.

So she went to Dixie Barton’s page, a narrator friend who had made a career doing Romance and would be on the panel tomorrow. Her real name was decidedly not Dixie Barton, but Alice Dunlop. Alice had chosen the pseudonym Dixie Barton because she’d been a famous burlesque dancer in the 1940s. Sewanee looked at the groups “Dixie” belonged to:

Romance Rosies.

Midnight Riders.

All Things Romance.

She clicked on the one with the most members–twenty thousand?!–and slipped into another dimension.

There were at least fifty posts a day, some heralding new releases (“book 14 in the Katy Totally Did series is out today! Come to mama!”), some espousing love for a specific book or narrator (“I’ve started hearing Joe Kincaid’s voice in my dreams”), and some asking for recommendations (“anyone got a funny m/m/f threesome book? Must be FUNNY”). Authors were members of this group and narrators were, too. But mostly, it was the fans.