The Rom-Commers(15)

That’s how I walked after that: slumped, lopsided, lost.

I’ll just call an Uber and go to a hotel, I told myself, in an attempt at a pep talk.

But I’d never called an Uber. I didn’t even have the app on my phone. And I’d never been to LA. I hadn’t traveled outside the five-mile radius of my apartment in almost a decade. How would I even find a hotel? I was alone, I had no idea where I was, and I was too humiliated to turn around.

I’d walked for about fifteen minutes—and was just starting to panic—when Logan drove up alongside me and matched his pace to mine. His window came down.

“Get in,” Logan called.

I ignored him and kept walking. There was a pebble in my shoe, but I ignored that, too.

“He caved, okay?” Logan called. “He gave in. He says you can stay.”

I kept walking.

“You got the job!” Logan shouted. “You don’t believe me? I have the text right here.”

He held up his phone, but I didn’t look.

“You’re not listening. I’m telling you it worked. He’s in. It’s happening.”

My broken carry-on wheel caught on a rock, but I yanked it so hard I didn’t even break pace.

“You should be thanking me!” Logan called next, a little louder. “It worked, didn’t it?” He shook his phone at me. “He says, and I quote: ‘Fine. Fuck it. She can have the guest room.’”

I didn’t really know what to do in this moment. I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was, I would not get in Logan’s car. Nothing else was clear—at all—except that.

“Are you refusing to spend the night in Charlie Yates’s mansion? Is that what’s happening now? Because I’m telling you: He’s got a wine cellar. And a pool. And a thousand-dollar coffee maker.”

But the pebble in my shoe—or was it maybe a piece of glass?—and I just kept walking.

And walking.

Until finally, faced with my wall of stoicism, Logan gave up and drove off—leaving me behind, now more triumphant and more panicked at the same time.

Really? Was that all the penance he was going to do?

Fine.

How hard could it be to download the Uber app?

I stopped to pull out my phone, and that’s when I saw the low battery alert.

Okay. No freaking out. If worse came to worst, I could find my way back to Charlie’s house and borrow his phone. I turned back to study the terrain I’d just covered.

At least, I thought I could find my way back.

Probably.

If it didn’t get dark first.

I turned back to face the way I’d been going again, scanning the horizon for, maybe, a luxury hotel that was having a 90-percent-off special.

What time did it get dark here, anyway?

On the heels of that thought, I heard Logan pull up alongside me again and idle. Without even looking to the side, or considering if this was the stupidest thing I’d ever do, I tilted my head to the sky and shouted, “Please! Just! Fuck! Off!”

“Really?” a guy’s voice said.

A guy who wasn’t Logan.

I turned, and instead of Logan Scott in a Beemer, it was Charlie Yates in a Chevy Blazer.

A cool, seventies vintage Chevy Blazer, by the way. Baby blue. Windows down. And Charlie Yates in aviators, regarding me and looking—fine, whatever—impossibly cool.

As impossibly cool as a guy in a rumpled Oxford could be.

Way cooler than any writer deserved to be.

I turned to face him. “Sorry,” I said, vastly more polite now. “I thought you were Logan.”

It wasn’t Charlie’s fault that Logan brought me here. Charlie wasn’t doing anything wrong by not wanting to work with me. Yes, he’d said a few mean-ish things earlier. But I wasn’t going to hold that against him. I wouldn’t have wanted to work with me, either, if I were him. He could still be my favorite writer.

This was on me, really, for believing Logan’s cockamamie story in the first place.

“Get in,” Charlie said. “I’m here to rescue you.”

“Oh,” I said, still just wanting to stay as far away from both of these guys, and this whole experience, as possible. “It’s fine.”

Charlie leaned his head out the window then and checked the bright sky like an old sea captain reading the wind. Then he put the Blazer in park—just right there in the road—got out, and came around to face me. “It’s not fine,” he said then. “It’ll get dark in a few hours. And that’s when the coyotes come out.”

“The coyotes?”

Charlie nodded, like Yep. “And the mountain lions.”

“You have mountain lions?” I asked. “In the second-largest city in America?”

Charlie nodded. “Almost four million.” Then he added, “People. Not lions.”

He hadn’t answered my question. “Should I believe you?” I asked, mostly to myself.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” Charlie said. “But I have yet to mention the bears.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“It’s cool,” Charlie said then, calling my bluff. “I can tell you prefer to be”—he looked around—“alone.”

“Wait—” I said, as Charlie started to walk back around toward the driver’s side.