Free Rhythm, Chord & Malykhin by Mariana Zapata Page A

“Half-marathons.”
    Half-marathons. “Thanks for telling me that now,” I snorted.
    “You didn’t look winded, and I figured you would tell me when you couldn’t go any further.”
    I grumbled and shook my head just as the waitress came by to take our order.
    She had barely left when the dark-haired man sitting across from me asked, “So, are you on summer break?”
    “Nope, I finished school about a month ago. I just… haven’t been able to find a job yet.”
    Saying it out loud was weird. I knew it wasn’t unusual to not find a job right after graduating. Half the people that had finished school at the same time as I did were struggling to land one. It didn’t help that the degree I’d gotten wasn’t exactly bursting with employment opportunities either, but it still made me feel a little raw. When I first told my family I wanted to study history, the first thing out of my dad’s mouth had been, “What are you going to do with that degree? Why don’t you do accounting? Or nursing?”
    It was a sore subject, to say the least.
    Sacha asked what I studied and I told him.
    “Are you planning on teaching?” he asked.
    “No…” For a second, I thought about telling him that I wanted to do research or work at a museum, or something . But I couldn’t. I’d gotten my degree in it because I liked learning about history; that was all. “I don’t really know, to be honest. I’d rather not teach, though. I think I’d be pretty terrible at it. The kids would probably laugh at me if I tried to be firm about something.”
    Sacha nodded solemnly. “You’ll find something, just give it some time. I used to get shit thrown at me onstage when I was younger; if I would have given up every time I heard ‘you suck’ being screamed at me, who knows where I’d be right now.”
    This guy used to get stuff thrown at him? He had one of the best pitches and ranges I’d ever heard and he killed his performance every night. “You really had people throw things at you?”
    He snickered. “Yeah. The first time was at a high school talent show. This asshole threw a Coke bottle at me and by the end of the song, I’d pretty much been booed offstage. I only stayed on because I’m stubborn.”
    I had to slap my hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t laugh. “If it makes you feel any better, one time, I had a dance recital when I was probably seven, and I threw up all over the stage. I was so nervous. I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to do it but she made me anyway.” There was footage of it too that someone in the family dug out every couple of years when they needed a laugh.
    Sacha covered the lower half of his face with the bottom of his T-shirt, and closed his eyes simultaneously. His shoulders shook with restraint. “What did you do?”
    “I cried my eyes out,” I laughed.
    “I fell off the stage once,” he added, smiling huge.
    “You didn’t!”
    “I did. I just walked right off of it—”
    Yeah, I burst out laughing, picturing it.
    “—It’s the single most embarrassing moment of my life onstage,” he said right before tossing his head back and laughing his ass off. “That’s what I get for not paying attention.”
    It was the “onstage” that got me. Once I got myself under control, I raised my eyebrows at him. “And off stage?”
    He ran a hand through the loose hair at the top of his head and closed one single, gray eye. “I had to take a crap into a plastic bag once. The bathroom on the bus was clogged, and we were in the middle of nowhere during a thunderstorm.”
    For the record, there’s no way in hell you can hold back a laugh when someone tells you that they took a crap in a plastic bag. Especially not when the story is told in a matter-of-fact voice. It wasn’t possible. On the other hand, it didn’t help that Sacha’s face took ‘striking’ and ‘handsome’ to a different level. I’ve always figured that people in the upper echelon of beauty—sans Mason—were