Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 93785 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93785 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
“Let’s wing it,” I say, putting on my headphones. “Are you ready?”
He puts on a set of headphones that were sitting by the mic. “I’m always ready.”
I grin. “Then let’s make some magic.”
CHAPTER
TEN
Gianna
“Ready?” I whisper as the final notes of the opening bumper wrap the intro.
Drake smiles in a way that’s truly unhelpful under the circumstances, but I shove that out of my mind and focus on the task at hand.
“Welcome to a very special episode of Gianna Knows Things,” I say, exiting the tabs I had open with my notes for Mercy. I won’t need those. “Before we get into why today is going to be so exciting, I want to take a moment to welcome my new listeners who may or may not have found me through a spontaneous live video.” I roll my eyes for Drake’s benefit. “I have no idea what all the commotion has been about.”
I pause and twist toward Francine. She gives me a thumbs-up. Technically speaking, everything is a go.
“I’ve loved seeing all of your guesses this week about my special guest,” I say, getting comfortable. “Some of you have been quite creative, and whoever started the petition to get Lincoln Landry on my podcast—God bless you. It’ll probably never happen, but I love that energy.”
Drake wrinkles his nose, moving his hand side to side as if to say that Landry is overrated. Unable to miss an opportunity to screw with him, I fan my face and blow out a breath. This earns a glare from across the table.
“Today is going to be a lot of fun,” I say, giggling at Drake. “And, since many of you seem to be sports fans from what I can tell with the Landry comments, you’ll be especially stoked about who is sitting across from me. We’re just going to go with the flow and see how things turn out. We might take questions, and we might not. Feel free to drop them in the comments or submit them on our website, just in case. Francine, my producer extraordinaire, will be keeping up with them.”
She makes a face at me through the glass.
My stomach flutters in anticipation of the announcement of Drake. He’s calm, cool, and collected. But I guess I am, too, when I’m walking into a situation where I’m the main character. It’s easy to be confident when you’re the star. As much as I hate to admit it, he’s the star of my show today, and these women are going to lose their damn minds.
He drags a fingertip across his lower lip, the corners of his mouth curling toward the ceiling. It’s a friendly, yet heated gesture, the waves of which scatter beneath my skin. We’ve shared the same space hundreds of times, and we’ve even shared the same screen recently. But there’s something different about this—something conspiratorial and indulgent, as if just being here is somehow crossing a line.
“Without further ado, it’s my pleasure to announce that none other than Drake Bennett, host of Canoodle’s own Sports Take with Drake Bennett is here for the next hour.” I take a breath. “Drake, welcome to Gianna Knows Things.”
He grins smugly. “Thank you, Gianna, but the pleasure is all mine.”
I can hear the echoes of my listeners swooning in the distance.
“Let me start this afternoon by relaying the results of our poll,” he says. “If you missed that conversation, it’s posted on Gianna’s socials. Overwhelmingly, I might add, your listeners agreed with me that sending flowers, or whatever your significant other prefers, post-argument is a good thing.”
“Whoa. Okay,” I say, laughing. “That’s not necessarily what happened.”
“Really? Because I was there and I’ve rewatched that video more than a few times.”
He did? For reasons unknown to me, that makes me happy. “Great. Then you realize that you called for a poll just after arguing with me about whether I like flowers. One could easily construe that the real survey was not a theoretical situation, but specifically about whether I was being honest about wanting flowers or not.”
“Doesn’t matter. The audience overwhelmingly agreed with me. I think my last count was two hundred thousand to two.”
I laugh, shaking my head at him. “You could add together every comment on all of my socials, and it wouldn’t reach two hundred thousand.” I adjust my headphones, the apples of my cheeks aching from smiling so much. “But let’s add to that total by bringing up the legendary Lincoln Landry.”
Drake sighs, rolling his eyes at me.
“In my intro, I mentioned that many of you guessed Landry as my guest today. Since he’s a baseball player, and Drake is a sportsball analyst, I thought we could get his sports take—see what I did there?—about the legendary centerfielder.”
“You want to talk about sports?”
I smirk. “Generally, no. But I think there’s a definite crossover when it comes to our personal areas of expertise on Lincoln Landry.”