Lance shoveled the lonely egg along with the turkey bacon into the garbage, and set about making a protein shake in the blender. He had consumed half the shake when his iPhone buzzed briefly. When Lance picked it up, the text message that graced the screen didn’t make sense for a moment. You ready? Andy was nearly always short and to the point in his messages, but even this was succinct for him. Then the date came to Lance’s mind: a picture of the number 24 on his desk calendar and the words Meeting w/Ellington & Field scrawled in blue ink just below it.
“Shit,” he said to the empty room. His voice sounded flat, his emotions only fumes of before. How had the meeting slipped his mind? The morning just kept getting better. Another sigh escaped his parted lips as he mounted the stairs yet again and heard the sliding of tires on the concrete drive outside his house, which coincided with two short beeps of a horn. Andy’s here, Lance thought as he ignored another impatient burst of sound from his best friend’s car and tried to decide what shirt went best with disappointment.
“You said you wanted me to pick you up, and then you make me wait out here for fifteen minutes?” The door to the Audi had barely opened an inch when Andy’s voice started to pepper him with accusations. “I suppose you forgot all about the meeting, didn’t you? Typical fucking writer. Typical.”
“It wasn’t fifteen minutes, you asshole. I got your message at ten and now it’s ten twelve—you do the math.” Lance slid into the black leather interior of the car and looked over at the man who sat in the driver’s seat. Andy could have passed for a young Aidan Quinn if the actor’s hair had been a lighter shade of brown and he swore almost constantly. Andy’s eyes were the only feature that ruined the likeness; color was nearly nonexistent. It seemed as if a blue-green had tried to bend the irises to its will but had lost and settled for a watered-down gray. Andy’s slight build looked out of place in the Armani suit tucked into the plush interior of the car. A joke about being a malnourished limo driver surfaced in Lance’s mind before being shoved away. He was pretty sure Andy wouldn’t appreciate it.
“Yeah, excuses. Always excuses. Sometimes I wonder if the world would be a better place if everyone was an Aspie,” Andy said, monotone, as he deftly flipped the car into drive and tore out of Lance’s turnaround as fast as he could go. The tires spun and caught as the landscape fled outside Lance’s window while he struggled to buckle his seat belt.
“Christ, can you slow down? I’m gonna get air sick over here,” Lance said as he finally snapped the buckle home.
“No time, my friend, no time. We’re late and your publishers are going to be very angry when we get there. What’s the expression you like to use? ‘Crawl up your ass’?”
“Jump down your throat, seriously. I’m surprised you haven’t picked that one up yet.”
“Yeah, well, I have more important things to do than learning expressions that don’t really make sense. Like figure out why my star author isn’t done with his rough draft that should’ve been turned in to his editor a month ago.”
Lance turned his head away from his friend and watched the small neighborhood that he resided in mesh with an on-ramp and then transform into a bustling divided two-lane. He opened his mouth and a loud snap filled the car as his jaw clicked into place.
“I hate it when you do that,” Andy said.
“I know.”
“So, are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me why your draft isn’t done.”
Lance sighed and gazed ahead at the asphalt rapidly disappearing under the nose of the Audi. There wasn’t an easy way to explain. He was about to try to describe what had transpired in his mind and in the study of his home over the past six weeks when Andy spoke again.