Falling in Love + other Conditions of Living

Chapter 17

© kelliekook

If there was something Nathan Wyatt was especially bad at, it was working under pressure.

With that said, he couldn't begin to understand how he'd kept his job so far, let alone done it well.

The station were bumping his show from its weekday 9am–12pm slot to the coveted 6am–9am spot. The morning shows always received the largest amount of listener traffic and most people at Triple K Radio would give an arm and a leg to be in Nathan's position.

And Nathan knew all too well what that meant.

The work didn't stop here, oh no, the promotion was simply the beginning of longer hours, longer days--and worst of all--higher expectations. Everyone would be watching to see how the show would do, whether it could carry this new weight and live up to all the hype.

It was both a satisfying and terrifying truth that Nathan was, frankly, at a loss to deal with. This is where his mind began to wonder Tuesday afternoon, while he sat in his new chair, at his new desk, in his new office, not entirely sure what he was doing there.

After all, it wasn't as if becoming a radio producer had been his dream from the start, in fact it hadn't even crossed his mind when he dropped out of high school eight years ago. But then again, he didn't have much to go by at that age. Lack of talent musically, artistically, and academically had left him frustrated and uninterested in anything he could find at school.

Unwilling to sit there and watch his grades slowly decline (along with his self-esteem) Nathan decided he would be better off if he simply dropped out. His parents hadn't been too happy about his decision, considering his older brother, William, had been studying to be an engineer at the time, and his middle brother, Harrison, had been graduating with the school dux trophy securely in hand.

But if there was one thing that interested the young Nathan Wyatt, it was music. He'd spend hours upon hours listening to the radio and when his parents bought him his own CD player, he'd spent hours upon hours listening to that.

As a child Nathan had dreamt of becoming a world-famous rockstar, but receiving his own guitar for his tenth birthday quickly changed that dream. A few weeks into lessons it became clear his love of music was not interdependent with his desire to make it.

He was not gifted with it naturally, and practicing was not an option. Nathan didn't have the patience to study, he never had, and as it turned out that wasn't the aspect that interested him. It was the way music touched a person – left a person – with a certain feeling or thought.

He didn't want to create music, but listen to it. Admire it, discuss it, enjoy it – and listen. Overall, he wanted to listen.

But, what career path would allow him to do that? As a ten-year-old, Nathan figured it was something equally as magical as a sorcerer.

So a few years went by and different dreams came and went.

He'd always been physically well-equipped, a lucky draw of his parent's genetics his grandfather used to say, and sport had always been a favourite pastime of Nathan's. Athletics never held the same fascination as music had though, so any desire to be an athlete was brief and quickly forgotten.

Naturally, radio eventually popped up through Nathan's continued fascination with music and all its possibilities. Soon, his heart was set on becoming a radio announcer.

Lucky for him, the world seemed to agree, and he quickly landed an internship at the local radio station. Finally, he had the full credentials to leave the small brick classrooms that had filled five days of his week with sheer boredom and do something of significance for once. There was just the issue of parental agreement.