Two Beats Ahead

Travis Stone was two questions into the Monday morning brief when he noticed it.

Clark was answering before the questions finished. Not interrupting - Clark never interrupted, that was a different kind of sharpness, the kind that wanted the room to know it was sharp. This was something quieter and more unnerving: he was simply two beats ahead of wherever the conversation was going, the way a man gets when he has already run the whole week in his head and is now being polite about waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Travis filed it and kept moving.

The brief was a new outdoor apparel client - a small manufacturer out of New Mexico, third-generation family, the kind of brand that had survived this long by being genuinely good at the thing rather than by being good at talking about being good at the thing. Eddie had the visual concept already started. Rachel had location ideas circling. Cole had the production calendar up on the wall by nine. The week was there, orderly and makeable, and Travis let himself feel the particular satisfaction of a week that was already organized before it started, which was the thing he was best at making happen and almost never talked about.

Alexis was watching Clark.

Travis noticed that too, in the way he noticed everything from the side of his vision, never turning his head toward the thing he was clocking. She'd come in last season knowing nothing about how this room worked and had spent seven months learning to read it the way you learn to read weather - not from the instruments, from the air. Four of those months she'd been a 1099, billing by the project, not quite in, not quite out. Three months ago they'd made her full-time, which was the kind of thing you either noticed immediately or not at all, and this room had mostly not noticed. She was good at it now. Better than she knew. And she was reading Clark this morning the way Travis was reading Clark, which meant they were probably reading the same thing.

Clark, for his part, did not seem to be aware of any of it. He went through the brief, answered the questions that hadn't been asked yet, moved on. In the afternoon he blocked off the next morning on the shared calendar and put nothing in the description. Just the time. An hour and a half, starting at eight.

Travis didn't ask. He had learned, over years of working with Clark, that asking prematurely was the least efficient thing you could do. Clark would say the thing when the thing was ready to be said, and asking before then only made the saying take longer, because Clark would answer the question you asked instead of the question you meant, and the question you meant would still be waiting for you on the other side of the answer.

He drove home with the week already running in the back of his head, the familiar low hum of organized motion, and tried not to think about the Tuesday morning block and what it might be for.

He thought about it anyway. He didn't sleep well, but that wasn't news. Travis hadn't slept well on a Sunday since the agency was two people and a shared drive. Some habits outlasted their reasons.

This entry is part of The Marfa Mavericks, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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