It was the last thing I expected him to say.
And he said it as if he’d never seen eyes before. As if he might take my face in his hands and try to examine them close up, like an archeologist would with a fossil. I tilted my chin upward, my eyes—my very big eyes—meeting his straight on.
My heart felt a little like a live wire, jerking around in my chest, throwing off electrical currents. Could these currents be mutual? Did he believe the stereotype about female reporters? Did he think I was going to try to sleep with him? Did he want me to try to sleep with him?
“Can I ask you something?” he asked.
Anything, I thought.
“Mmhmumph,” I said.
He tilted his head, his hair sliding across his forehead. I wanted to brush it to the side. Wanted to run my fingertips down the side of his face and trace the line of his jaw. Wanted to lick—
“Has anyone ever told you that you kind of look like one of those cat-clock things?” he asked.
When I didn’t answer, Gabe put his hands on either side of his face, opening his own eyes wide.
“You know—tick tock, tick tock?” He looked from side to side.
I knew what he was talking about—it was a decent impression—and felt a weird sort of relief at being compared to a plastic, kitschy clock. It made more sense than Gabe Parker, movie star, complimenting me. Or wanting to sleep with me.
It threw some much-needed cold water on my rampaging libido.
“How do you pronounce your name?” he asked, not waiting for a response.
I’d barely said one fully formed word since I’d arrived, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“My manager said Han-ni, but I wanted to make sure.”
My name was confusing for a lot of people. During my last interview—with a breezy starlet—she’d spent the entire time alternating between “Hannah” and “Tawney.” It made a weird sort of sense as my name was basically a combination of the two, and I hadn’t bothered correcting her.
“That’s fine,” I said.
Gabe frowned at me. “But I’m saying it wrong, aren’t I?”
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said.
“It bothers me,” he said. “It’s your name. I want to be able to say it correctly.”
Well.
“Like ‘knee,’ but with a ch. Chani,” I said, using the back of my throat to get the proper half-hacking, half-rolling sound.
As I did, a tiny bit of spit popped out of my mouth and arched in the air between us. Thankfully it fell before it came into contact with any part of Gabe’s person, and he was gracious enough not to comment on it.
I wanted to die.
“Chani,” he said. “Chani. Chani.”
He got it right on the second try, though I could have listened to him say my name all day long. Because he said it as if he was tasting it.
“My makeup artist on Tommy Jacks was named Preeti,” he said. “But everyone on the crew said Prit-ee instead of Pree-tee.”
He gave the puppy a good scratch under her chin and she snuggled up close, tucking her head against his chest. Lucky dog.
“She told me that she used to correct people but it never seemed to stick and after a while, she just got tired of trying.” Gabe shrugged. “I always think about that. How much it must suck to have your name constantly mispronounced.”
He wasn’t wrong—I’d just learned, like Preeti, that most people didn’t care.
Gabe obviously did.
We stood there for a moment—him shirtless and holding a puppy, me with my crush on him growing exponentially larger with every second. And me helpless to do anything about it. I felt like a teenager again, with hormones I couldn’t control. It was disorienting.
“What were you saying before?” he asked.
“About my name?”
He shook his head. “No, when you were coming up the walkway—it looked like you were saying something.”
My face got prickly and warm. Getting caught talking to myself wasn’t exactly the first impression I’d hoped to make.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I just revealed I was kind of spying on you through the window.”
He gave me a sheepish smile, even though I was the one who was beyond embarrassed.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I was, uh, I was just talking to myself.”
There was no way in hell I was going to tell him what I had actually been saying. Between that and being compared to a clock, this interview was already awkward enough.
Gabe looked at me for a long time.
“Do you do that a lot?” he asked.
“Talk to myself?”
He nodded.
“Um, sometimes?” I squirmed a little under his penetrating gaze. “I guess it just helps me sort out my thoughts? It happens when I get stuck on things, sometimes. Like, saying them out loud makes them real? Or, I can organize them better than if they’re just in my head? Almost like a list? Or not really a list, but a documentation of my ideas? For posterity?”
I was rambling about talking to myself. Wonderful.
Gabe leaned back on his heels and let out a whistle, as if I’d just said something profound.
“A documentation of your ideas,” he repeated. “You are a writer.”
Suddenly I got this horrible feeling that there had been some huge, weird mix-up and he didn’t know I was here to interview him. Or I was being pranked.
“Yes? Broad Sheets sent me?” I hated how my voice kept going up at the end of my sentences, making everything a question.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, as if I was the one who wasn’t making any sense. “You write other things too, right? Like, fiction?”
“Yes?”
He grinned at me as if I’d just told him I had the cure for cancer.
“That’s awesome,” he said. “I love books.”
I didn’t know what to think. On one hand, it seemed that all the people who had thought that Gabe was too much of a himbo hick to play Bond might have had a point. On the other hand, he was so damn adorable, it was hard not to find him and his “I love books” comment utterly charming.