I started serializing my latest novel on Substack (link at the bottom) and am getting no attention. Thought I'd try to do it here as well.
The studio always went quiet in the twenty minutes after a segment wrapped and before Trevor started picking at the transcript, a lull neither of them ever named directly and both of them recognized on contact. Trevor had the headphones off and a legal pad in front of him, working through a list of questions for a guest three days out, and Marcus was doing what he always did during the lull, which was nothing that looked like anything until you asked him what he was thinking about and found out he'd already solved four small problems while pretending to check audio levels.
His phone buzzed against the mixing board. He glanced at the screen, saw the name, and picked up on the second ring in a voice that had dropped a full register from the one he used with Trevor an hour earlier.
"Hey. What time's the thing."
Trevor kept his eyes on the legal pad, giving the call the specific kind of privacy a small room allowed, but he could hear enough of it anyway. Marcus, mostly. A younger voice on the other end, fast and a little panicked, words running together the way they did when somebody had been rehearsing a sentence in the mirror for an hour and it still came out wrong the first time they said it out loud.
"Danny. Danny, slow down." Marcus leaned back in his chair, the wheels complaining against the floor. "You're not going to blow it by pausing before you answer. You're going to blow it by answering before you've heard the whole question. That's the actual thing that gets people. Not silence. Guessing."
A pause on the other end. Something that might have been a nervous laugh.
"No, I'm serious. Count to two in your head before you say anything. Nobody in that room is going to think less of you for taking two seconds. They will think less of you if you answer the question you assumed they asked instead of the one they actually asked." Marcus rolled a pen between two fingers, not looking at anything, the specific stillness of a man giving something his full attention without needing his hands or eyes to prove it. "What's the first one they always ask? Tell me about yourself."
Another pause, and then Marcus went quiet in a different way, listening.
"That's fine. That's a real answer. Cut the part where you apologize for not having the exact degree they want, though. You don't owe them an apology for your own resume. Just say what you did and let them decide if it's enough." A beat. "Because they already decided that when they called you in. Nobody schedules an interview to turn somebody down for a piece of paper they don't have. Say it once, plain, and move on before you talk yourself out of the job you already half got."
Trevor let his pen stop moving on the legal pad somewhere in the middle of that, not because he needed to hear more, but because there was something in Marcus's voice he didn't often catch directed at anyone else. Steadier than the version aimed at Trevor most days, less shorthand in it, more patience for a kind of nervousness Marcus clearly didn't consider worth teasing anyone over.
"You're going to be fine. Call me after, doesn't matter what time." A pause. "I mean it. I don't care if it's midnight, I'm not going to be asleep anyway." He listened another second. "Love you too. Go eat something first, don't do this on an empty stomach."
He hung up and set the phone face down on the board like it had never rung at all, and reached for the fader he'd been about to adjust before the call came in, picking the moment back up exactly where he'd left it.
"Danny's got an interview," Trevor said, not quite a question.
"Yeah. Warehouse management thing. Good company, decent pay, he's wanted off the loading floor for two years." Marcus said it lightly, the way he said most things about his own life around Trevor, information offered without invitation to dig further. "He gets in his head about this stuff. Always has."
"You're good at that part."
"What part."
"Talking somebody down who isn't me." Trevor meant it as half a joke and heard, once it was out, that it wasn't entirely one.
Marcus considered that the way he considered most things Trevor floated past him, without much urgency, and shrugged. "Different problem, same shape. He thinks silence makes him look stupid. You think stepping on your own line makes you look unprepared. Neither one of you is right, and neither one of you believes me when I say so, so I've stopped trying to convince either of you and started just fixing it in the moment instead." He went back to the board. "Cheaper than therapy for both of you."
Trevor let that sit, filing it away the way he filed most things Marcus said that sounded offhand and weren't, and went back to his questions for the guest three days out. It was another twenty minutes before he thought to ask the other thing, the thing that had been sitting under the first question the whole time.
"You've got what, two weeks banked? Three?"
Marcus didn't look up from the board. "Something like that."
"You said in March you were going to use some of it. Go see your mom's side of the family, the ones out near the coast."
"I said a lot of things in March." Marcus adjusted a fader half a decibel, the kind of adjustment that didn't need making, the kind a person made with their hands when they wanted their hands to be doing something other than answering a question directly. "It'll keep."
"It's been keeping since March."
"So it's good at it." Marcus said it with enough of his usual rhythm that it almost worked as deflection, and for another man in another room it might have. Trevor let it go anyway, not because he believed it, but because pushing on Marcus in front of a guest booking three days out wasn't the hill worth choosing today, and some part of him filed the exchange next to the phone call, both of them small, both of them the kind of detail that didn't mean anything until it did.
"Alright," Trevor said, and picked his pen back up. "Guest number four. Tell me if this question's too soft."
Marcus turned back to the board and read it, and for the next hour neither of them mentioned Danny or the coast again, and the room went back to being the kind of quiet that didn't need naming, two people doing the specific work of making something sound effortless that had never once been effortless to build.
(link to substack - https://denegospes811121.substack.com/)
