Love in 24 Frames (2019 Advent Calendar | Homemade for the Holidays Book 15)

by C. S. Poe

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  By C.S. Poe

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  Love in 24 Frames

  By C.S. Poe

  Declan Groves is a CPA in New York City. His adult life is dictated by routine and borderline monotony. The need to express himself, in ways his career and crippling shyness have never allowed, leads Declan to becoming an amateur stop-motion filmmaker.

  The one problem is that Declan is also in love with the Wandering Artist Studios receptionist Shota Watanabe. Shota has always had a smile and engaging comment ready for Declan, but even if it is more than casual politeness, Declan hasn’t been able to get out more than a tongue-tied sentence at a time. And a man like Shota surely has no intention of waiting forever.

  So when an unexpected change to Declan’s daily schedule throws the two together outside of the studio, it might be the catalyst needed to explore what’s unspoken between them. But if they’re to have a future, Declan needs to find a way to tell Shota how he truly feels.

  THERE HE was.

  The evening front-desk receptionist of Wandering Artist Studios and man I was madly in love with.

  Shota W.

  He was the most perfect human east of the Hudson River, with deep brown eyes, matching hair, and thick, expressive brows. He had a brilliant smile too, and the most kissable lips, beautifully shaped by a peaked cupid’s bow. The angel had no idea he moonlighted as my muse.

  Shota W.….

  The front door clanged shut behind me, and Shota raised his head. “Good evening, Mr. Groves,” he said over the low hum of Scrooged playing on the flat-screen television mounted to the far wall.

  “H-hello.”

  I’d been renting a shared studio at the company’s Lower East Side location for the last six months. And for six months, I’d been wondering what the W stood for on Shota’s name tag. But I’d never been able to work up the nerve to ask. Now the window of opportunity had long since passed, so it was going to have to resign itself to being one of life’s great mysteries. I did not possess the social graces required to bring up the topic six months later without making it supremely awkward.

  I was also considerably older than most of the clients who utilized the art space. When one thinks of a “New York City artist,” they don’t envision a forty-eight-year-old man in a three-piece suit, strolling through the door at seven o’clock after a long day of being an accountant. Yes, Shota W. was maybe in his forties too, but I still didn’t want to be the graying old guy he had to report to management for being a total creep.

  As my niece would say.

  “How are you?” Shota asked, his voice a pleasant tenor.

  Of course, my social graces were about on par with that of a screaming opossum, so I think I came off strange no matter what I did to prevent it. There was a reason I pursued book balancing for a living. Numerical equations were much easier to handle than the human condition.

  I nodded in response. “Yes. You?” I winced. Yes. You?

  But Shota smiled. “I’m okay.” He stood and raised a tangled strand of twinkling Christmas lights. “I’ve been trying to deck the halls, but this is how the decorations were put away last year.” He was still grinning as he lowered the mess onto the desktop. “Some people’s children.”

  Against better judgment, Shota appeared to be waiting for my next response. A sweat broke out under my arms, and I hastily unbuttoned my wool coat with my free hand. I needed to say something. Something smart. Something witty. I’d even be okay with lukewarm funny. I needed something, because, oh God, he was staring at me and I was staring back and neither of us were talking and this was so painful.

  “I—”

  The phone on the desk rang. Shota broke eye contact and looked down. He frowned a smidgen and picked up the receiver. “Wandering Artist Studios, this is Shota.” He took a seat. “Yes, we do have a dance studio. It’s rented by the hour.”

  So much for that.

  I walked to the elevator, jabbed the button with my thumb, and entered as the doors slid open. I chose the fourth floor and looked toward the front desk one more time. Shota was still talking on the phone. He glanced up, met my eyes, and the doors closed.

  Hell.

  I just couldn’t talk to him.

  I’d been trying since 6:49 p.m. on June 3. I’d entered the building soaking wet—caught in a summer rainstorm—and Shota had only been able to find a box of tissues to offer. Exactly eleven minutes later, he’d knocked on my studio door, offered a towel still warm from the dryers in the basement, didn’t charge me for it, and had said, “I work the front desk Monday through Friday, six to eleven o’clock, if you ever need anything.”

  He might as well have said, “Declan Groves, I want you in the worst way,” with how I’d been hopelessly pining after him since that moment.

  But no matter how hard I pushed myself to engage with Shota, it was like a game of Jenga I couldn’t win. The tower of jumbled interactions and half-assed conversations toppled every time, and I was left to restack the blocks and fail again the next day. Sooner or later, he wasn’t going to want to play anymore.

  Which was why I’d devised a new approach for engagement.

  The elevator doors opened and I stepped into the hallway. The studios in the building were all named after a Pantone Color of the Year, with their door painted to match. I shared 14-0848, Mimosa, with a kid who worked in oil paints.

  “Hey, D, what’s up?” Noah Carney called as I entered.

  Of course, Noah wasn’t actually a kid. He was twentysomething. But he was born the same year I graduated college, when I still listened to cassettes on my yellow Walkman and neon windbreakers were hip as hell. So.

  I smiled at him while shutting the door. “Same as usual. How’re you?”

  Noah shrugged lazily. He rocked back and forth across the linoleum floor with his wheeled stool. “I secured a spot in that pop-up exhibit I told you about.”

  “Oh. That’s really great. Congratulations.”

  I tugged my scarf free and walked to my portion of the studio on the right. I set my bag down on the floor, hung up my winter clothes and suit coat, and took a seat on the stool in front of a stop-motion set. I unbuttoned my cuffs and began to roll my sleeves back as I studied the painstakingly constructed miniature New York City street.

  “You’re like an onion,” Noah stated suddenly, his voice breaking the silence.

  I slowly swiveled around to look at him. “How’s that?”

  He pointed lazily at me with his paintbrush. “Peeling away layers. A stuffy, button-up accountant—no offense—but underneath the tweed is a guy with full sleeves.”

  I glanced down at my forearms, bright and richly colored tattoos of floral mosaics covering every inch of bare skin.

  Noah was still talking. “I bet you’re inked in less conservative places too.”

  “I’m not peeling back any more of the—er—onion,” I answered.

  “Some guys would call you ‘daddy.’”

  “I hope not.” I turned my back, scooted to the side, and opened my bag to retrieve my camera.

  “You hope not… which part?”

  “What?” I glanced at Noah again.

  He was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “The guy part or the daddy part?”

  I loosened the knot of my tie. Exhaled. “Daddy. Not my thing.”

  Noah immediately smirked. “I knew it.”

  I removed my camera
from the bag and checked the settings. “It’s not something to be ashamed of.”

  “Oh sure. I’ve sucked a dick or two in my time.”

  Raising my head, I considered that statement while staring at the far wall but, ultimately, let it go.

  “You should go for it.”

  I liked Noah well enough, but he needed to stop talking—stop making suggestions about my mouth or dick or whatever he was getting at—so I could work in peace.

  “Go for what?” I pushed across the floor and turned on some of the smaller lamps surrounding the setup.

  “Shota.”

  I almost careened into the stop-motion display. I grabbed the edge of the table, righted myself on the stool, and looked at Noah. “P-pardon?”

  “Pardon,” he echoed with a light laugh. “Come on, man.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  “I really need to get to work,” I murmured. “Twenty-four frames per second. That’s over fourteen hundred still images for one minute of animation.”

  Noah raised his hands, as if to surrender to my point.

  “Thank you.”

  “But I know you like him.”

  This time I couldn’t stop the annoyed huff of air from escaping. “How—why do you think you know that?”

  “Because your little puppets look like you and him,” Noah answered with a leveled look.

  I swallowed.

  “Fine. Deny it. I’ll take a shot at him.”

  I felt a sudden jolt of panic. Raw—as if I’d touched an exposed electrical wire. I opened my mouth to protest, but there was a loud knock at the door.

  Shota peered into the studio. “I’m sorry to interrupt, gentlemen.”

  Noah looked toward the door and flashed a predatory grin. “You’re not interrupting, Shota. What can we do for you?”

  Shota opened the door wider. He held a stack of envelopes in one hand. “These are holiday cards from the CEO.” He walked inside and offered the first to Noah before explaining, “A gift for all of our long-term rentals. January will be 25 percent off your usual fee.”

  Shota looked at me.

  I quickly thrust myself across the floor on my stool to block his view of the staged puppets on the scene, ran over the strap of my bag, and almost flung myself from the seat entirely.

  Shota’s eyes widened a little.

  Was it too late?

  Had he seen his look-alike on the stop-motion set?

  Oh my God.

  “Mr. Groves,” Shota stated with a sort of bemused expression. “I didn’t peg you as the tattooed sort.” He offered an envelope with my name written neatly across the front.

  “Wh-what?” I asked dumbly, reaching for the offering. “Oh! Yes. They’re, uh—”

  Shota waited.

  I held one end of the envelope.

  He still had the other.

  “They’re tattoos,” I concluded.

  I caught Noah out of the corner of my eye, covering his face with a hand and shaking his head.

  Shota let go. “They’re very nice.”

  Another pregnant, painfully awkward pause.

  “Well… I’ll let you both get back to work.” Shota nodded to us, walked to the door, and glanced at me before shutting it behind him.

  “Awful,” Noah stated.

  “Please be quiet.” I turned my back to him.

  “Just awful.”

  AT TEN to eleven that night, Noah left our shared studio.

  I carefully packed my camera and laptop into my bag, fetched my coat and scarf, and began dressing.

  The stop-motion scene was dark. The puppets were left in place every night so as not to cause any jarring action when the film was played back at full speed. It wasn’t a large set, certainly nothing as complex as The Nightmare Before Christmas’s twenty-foot breakaway scenes—but it did take up a six-foot table, as well as a corner table shoved under the edge that’d been hanging precariously. And I certainly didn’t have the budget Nightmare had had to bring its story to life, so my characters had simple wire frames and ball joints under the padding and clothes. No custom machinery involved. And I didn’t have a team of workers to craft my puppets—they’d all been meticulously built by me.

  The one similarity between my hokey little project and that cult classic was the time it took. Henry Selick produced about one full minute of animation a week, and it’d taken three years to finish the movie. Me, on my own, a few hours a night—let’s say it was a good thing I had no intention of making this a feature-length film.

  Only a few minutes.

  A love story in twenty-four frames.

  I buttoned my jacket while staring at the unlit set.

  The—erm—Shota puppet was in the midst of walking down the street, unaware of the love interest trying to catch up.

  Inspiration taken from the playbook of Real Life.

  Was my pining after the lobby receptionist really so obvious that Noah had caught on to it? It’s not like we were friends. Or hung out anywhere outside of the studio. We barely spoke in the studio, for Christ’s sake. Usually it was the murmur of a radio, his paintbrush stroking canvas, and the click, click, click of my camera.

  I gave the puppets a final glance before collecting my bag, turning off the overheads, and leaving the room. I got onto the elevator and considered Noah’s statement about going after Shota himself.

  Would he?

  I mean, really?

  At the time, it’d felt like an actual threat. Some instinctive, primitive jealousy had been stoked to life inside me at the mere idea of the two of them together.

  But now, hours after my second failed attempt to hold a conversation with Shota that evening, I was starting to wonder if it was a fake-out. Like, to goad me into action. Maybe Noah was doing me a solid and forcing me out of my comfort zone.

  The elevator reached the ground floor. I squared my shoulders. I would talk to Shota. I would say more than some stumbled-over pleasantry on my way out.

  The doors opened with a quiet ping.

  I took a deep breath. Stepped into the lobby.

  Noah was leaning against the front desk. “Just one drink?”

  Shota stood behind it. He smiled politely. Responded quietly.

  My heart missed a beat…

  “There’s a bar around the corner with a great microbrew selection,” Noah continued.

  …and then it broke.

  Shota peered around Noah as I crossed the room. “Oh! Have a good night, Mr. Groves.”

  I murmured some pleasantry… and vanished out the door.

  UNREQUITED LOVE was terrible.

  Even more so at my age.

  I couldn’t properly mourn a relationship that never was and clearly never would be, because I wasn’t a teenager and that sort of moodiness was frowned upon at my nine-to-five. I had to reconcile my clients’ bank and credit card statements with accuracy, efficiency, and as far as my employer was concerned, a smile on my face.

  I ended up taking an early lunch.

  I knew my usual spot would be packed at 12:30 p.m., which was specifically why I took late lunches. The corner window seat at Pho Palace was unofficially mine. Not because I knew the owners or anything like that. It was simply habitual stubbornness that conditioned other regulars into letting me sit there.

  Quietly.

  On my own.

  Enjoying a hot bowl of Bún bò Hue on a cold and miserable December day.

  But I couldn’t wait until the Palace cleared out around 2:00 p.m. As I left Harrison & Cooper, an ominous high-rise not far from Wall Street, I considered ordering food from one of the halal carts parked out front. But the gloomy overcast was promising a mixture of frozen rain and snow, and eating outside sounded about as pleasant as eating at my desk. I shoved my hands into my pockets, crossed Broadway, and headed west along Cedar Street.

  Without warning, the mood-matching weather started pouring over the city in a blinding sheet of f
reezing despondency. I was forced to duck into a corner café at the end of the one-way street. I raked a hand through my wet hair before unbuttoning my coat, then peered around, trying to quickly assess the setup and method of operation without looking wildly out of place. There was a line at the counter, but it looked like employees came to the customers at tables when food was available. The hybrid of help-yourself-sort-of, waitstaff-kind-of was always a minor annoyance. I tended to avoid these sorts of establishments, but a quick look out the windows confirmed I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

  At least it was warm inside.

  And it smelled pleasantly of coffee and hot sandwiches. There was mellow music playing too—nothing particularly good—typical holiday coffee shop tunes—but it blended well with the rain. Made it less… depressing. I got in line, ordered a latte and toasted caprese sandwich, then managed to find an empty table. I draped my wet coat over the back of the seat, sat, and turned to watch the city drown in tones of gray.

  I was going to have to leave Wandering Artist Studios. It was too much to keep working in that space, knowing that Noah got to Shota before I did. That I’d consistently blown every chance I had for six months and now there was nothing I could do to rectify it. Perhaps it would have been okay to keep renting my space if Noah hadn’t caught on to my hopeless infatuation. It’d have been painful, maybe unbearably so, to watch them together. But I’d have suffered in polite silence. Now, though? Noah was a nice kid, but there was no way he wouldn’t be smug as hell about this. Even at half my age, he was everything I never had been. Confident, cocky, so sure—

  My name was called by one of the staffers.

  I turned away from the wintry weather and raised my hand. “Here,” I answered, but then my voice seized in my throat.

  Shota stood a few feet away, wearing a green apron and holding my mug and plate in either hand. He smiled without provocation—bright and beautiful. “That Declan.” He stepped closer and set the items down.

  “H-hi.”

  “Hi,” he returned.

  “You work here?” I managed to ask without stammering.

  “Mm-hm. Wait and bus tables during the day. Answer phones at night.”