I swallow, thoroughly put in my place. She did a hell of a lot on Friday night and didn’t drop a single ball. “You’re promising stuff on this flyer that can’t be delivered.”
“Someone told me he wanted to start a business at the end of this. Here it is.” Georgiana waves in the general direction of our tiny house. “I went to the printing shop this morning to have more flyers printed because I almost ran out yesterday.”
“Georgiana—”
“Save it, Raiden. The only thing people are doing is signing up for a mailing list. On sign up, they get an email that says they should watch this space and more information will follow soon. That ball is in your court. You can play it, or you can walk off the court and have something else you can regret for the rest of your life.”
She stares at me, waiting for a response, but my words have dried up. Not because I can’t say them, but she’s knocked me speechless.
“Right,” she says, standing up abruptly from her chair. “I’m going to get coffee now, and breakfast. You man the stand. They’ve opened the doors and people are going to flood in. There’re going to be a lot of questions from visitors, so roll with it until I get back.”
My stomach twists into a neat little knot. “I-I don’t like talking to s-strangers.”
“Well, maybe strangers like talking to you,” she says, staring me straight in the eye.
I drop my gaze, forcing myself not to panic.
“They’re just people, Ray, and funnily enough, they love what you’ve created here. They want to see the man behind the build, so focus on them one by one. This is a case for seeing each individual tree and not the forest.” With these final words, she smiles and walks off in the direction of the food court.
That old feeling of being totally fucked flows over me, but before I can walk away as if I don’t belong here, people are already heading my way. I swallow as I watch Georgiana disappear into the growing throng of people. It can’t get worse than what it’s already been, and if Georgiana believes in me and accepts me as I am, maybe I should believe in me too and allow people to accept me as I am.
39
GEORGIANA
Baptism by fire is the only way to do it. I’d left for coffee and breakfast but decided to do a turn of the whole convention before going back to our tiny house. I even idled away another forty minutes, going into the remaining contestants’ tiny houses. Once I’m done, I understand why people love ours so much. There’s just something about the clean lines of Raiden’s design, the colors he’s chosen, and the package as a whole that elevates it from the rest. All the teams have building experience, but Raiden’s layered experience shows.
After two and a half hours, my sympathy gets the better of me and I stalk up to our tiny house where Raiden is standing behind the desk, surrounded by a handful of people. He is actually smiling. And nodding. And talking. He points with his chin in the direction of the house and leads the way inside to show a visitor something. It has to be getting cramped inside, because a cluster of people pile out as soon as they’ve entered.
I sidle up to our desk and take over when someone asks a question. When Raiden walks out minutes later, he looks at me and shoots me a small smile.
“Trees and not the forest, hey?” he jokes.
“Works like a charm, doesn’t it?”
He chuckles and we’re swamped by more people. As the hours tick by, I’m in awe. Raiden stumbles, he stutters, but every time, he picks himself up and carries on. Now and again, he goes into Yoda talk, but overall, he’s doing fantastic.
Towards the end of the day, Raiden has stopped stuttering completely. He’s settled into some standard answers to all those repeat questions, most of them about him building more houses, putting up tiny house plans for sale, giving talks (to which he just shakes his head, eyes wide), and requests for him to start a YouTube channel with step-by-step, how-to videos, to which he throws a thumb in my direction, saying To admin, you should talk.
It’s ten to five, and although the crowd hasn’t dwindled yet, I’m ready to get out of here. Alone. This might have been a fun culmination to our tiny house journey, but on Friday, Raiden made it clear that we’re done. These past forty-eight hours I’ve held myself together by a thread, and I’m not going to lose my composure here, not now, not ever. I’m only here to fulfill a promise made to myself. That promise might involve Raiden, and I might have been a sucker for punishment in the past, but I’m done with that too.
I reach for my purse in the desk drawer and straighten. “I’m out of here. You can pack the remaining flyers in the drawer for tomorrow morning. I’m not printing more since the convention is done after the auction.”
“Thank you. Let me know how much I owe you.”
“It’s nothing.”
“We’ll see.” He studies my face, and his soft gaze makes my heart leap with hope and is almost my undoing. “Where’re you going?”
“I’m exhausted.”
“You want to grab dinner?”
“No, I’m good.” After the past three days of stuffing my face with takeout and crap in general, I’m going to have to do a kale cleanse. The mere idea makes me shudder.
“Where’re you staying?” Raiden asks.
“Just down the road at a motel.”