Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“Somehow?”
“It helps when everyone likes you, I guess.”
The bitterness in his tone surprised Bram. Up to now, he’d only ever seen Zachary completely confident or utterly unconcerned with what anyone else thought.
“Anyway,” Zachary said. “You could have the basic shelter shape for all the rectangular shelters and then cut a plywood face for the ones that needed a shape. You can paint right? I assume anyone who can carve a dragon out of a bunch of trees with a chainsaw can wield a paintbrush?”
Bram grinned. “Yeah, I can do it, no problem. So, what other businesses could we do themed ones for?”
“Coffee shop, movie theatre, library, restaurants,” Zachary ticked off.
“Oh, for the movie theatre, make it look like velvet curtains with those big tassel things opening on the cats,” Bram suggested.
“Cute. A takeout container for a restaurant?”
“Yes! A big to-go cup for the coffee shop.”
“Oh, if we did it on its side so there’s more room for a cat to curl up, we could make it look like the coffee spilled.”
Zachary sketched the cup on its side, so the cat was entering through the top and a spill of coffee was a kind of porch.
“That’s amazing! God, I’m so glad I asked you.”
Bram grinned at Zachary and for the first time, Zachary beamed back at him. It was a toothy, almost goofy grin of such pure sweetness that Bram felt his heart start to pound.
Zachary looked away first, clearing his throat and looking back at the drawings.
“Uh, a peach for Peach’s? Or, um, a peach pie?”
“What’s Peach’s?”
“Oh, it’s a diner. Best pie in town.”
“I love pie.”
“Well, yeah,” Zachary said, as if not liking pie would’ve indicated a distinct personal failing.
The old Bram—the Before Bram—would’ve said, Take me there and let me buy you a piece of pie!
But the new Bram, the After Bram, shuffled his feet and worried a splinter of wood in his pocket until the moment had evaporated and Zachary was focused on his drawing once more.
Zachary looked focused and intent and happy.
“You like architecture a lot, huh?”
“Well. Yeah. But. Yeah, mostly.”
Bram raised an eyebrow.
“Lately things at work have been frustrating. I have all these ideas! All these things I want to make, and the firm I work for...they hired me because they said they liked my innovation, but now all they do is tell me to streamline and simplify my designs to cut costs or appeal to a more generic customer.”
“Maybe you’re working for the wrong firm?” Bram suggested gently.
“Moray and Fisk is the premier firm in the Middle West!” Zachary bristled.
“Okaaay, but what good is prestige if you’re not getting to do what you want?”
Zachary narrowed his eyes and Bram prepared to back off.
“Someday they’ll see it,” Zachary said. “They’ll see my vision and they’ll give me a shot.”
Bram nodded reluctantly. He didn’t really think things tended to work that way. In his experience, no one would ever value your vision as much as you did. No one would ever invest in you more than you would. So the best thing you could do was make your own way. But Zachary’s eyes burned with a zealous conviction that his talents would be recognized, and it wasn’t his place to take that away.
Instead, he asked, “Could I see some of the things you’ve designed? The un-simplified ones.”
“Yeah?” The monomaniacal conviction transmuted instantly into a puppyish excitement that melted Bram’s heart. “Okay.”
It turned out that Zachary Glass was a freaking genius. Bram didn’t see the structures well at first. He wasn’t used to translating a plan into an image in his mind. But as Zachary traced the lines of his buildings with a slender finger and painted him a picture in words, Bram could see them.
And they were magnificent.
“How the hell did you think to do it like this?” he asked.
Zachary’s face was lit with the fire of passion and now he spoke quickly and animatedly.
“It’s all about the interplay of presence and absence in this one.” He tapped the paper. “From the upper floors, you look down, and it seems like everything is going on down on the lower floors, because the open space narrows. That makes the people want to leave their rooms and go check out the restaurants and shops down below. Then for the people down below, once they get tired or sick of being around everyone, when they look up, it seems like a haven—more space, more peace. They want to go up to their rooms, and as the elevator rises, they feel like they’re ascending into the clouds. Did you ever see The Descent? No, of course not. It’s about this group of friends who go caving together and on one trip, they get stuck in a cave system that’s filled with these terrifying—”
Bram became aware, as Zachary cut himself off, that he was clenching the edge of the drafting table, bracing for whatever horrors Zachary was about to spill into his brain.