The Rom-Commers(16)

“You’ll be fine,” Charlie said. “Just a quick tip: If you do see a mountain lion, don’t run.”

“Don’t run?” I echoed. Can you lose a conversation? Because that’s what I was doing.

He shrugged. “You can’t outrun a mountain lion.”

“You know what?” I said. “I’ll come with you.”

“Naw,” Charlie said, enjoying this now, “you don’t have to.”

“I want to,” I said.

Charlie, like convincing me had been much easier than he’d expected, came back around to where I was, and, holding my gaze the entire time, stepped close and leaned in until there was less than a foot between us—close enough to spark a What the heck? question in my head—before I realized he was sliding my backpack off my shoulders and then picking up my bags.

He tossed both in the back of the Blazer, and then, when I still hadn’t moved, he opened the passenger door for me. “I’ve got you,” he said. “Hop in.”



* * *



AND THAT’S HOW I wound up spending the night with Charlie Yates.

Although not like that sentence implies.

On the short drive back to his house, I tried to adjust: I was with Charlie Yates. We were in his very cool, vintage—reconditioned and now hybrid, he told me—truck. The Allman Brothers played on the radio. The windows were hand-cranked down. The famous zero-humidity LA air fluttered all around us. Charlie drove one-handed, his free arm resting out the open window.

Almost like I wasn’t there.

I snuck looks at his profile. Had he really just agreed to work with me? Logan said so, but now we all knew exactly how trustworthy Logan was. Still, the dialogue “Fine. Fuck it. She can have the guest room” rang true. Logan could never write dialogue like that.

“Thanks so much,” I ventured then, “for saving me from the mountain lions.”

“Not a problem.”

“I really am so sorry about all of this.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s Logan’s fault.”

“It must have been so weird for you to see me standing at your front door with my suitcases.”

“You have no idea.”

“Logan just called me out of the blue and said he had a job for me.”

“Right?” Charlie said, like What a douche.

“He’s found me lots of jobs in the past, so it didn’t seem all that weird. But it did seem … too good to be true.”

Charlie nodded in solidarity.

“But I trusted him,” I went on. “I took the summer off from my job. I left my family. I put everything else that mattered on hold, and I packed up my life and flew out here. With no idea that you had no idea.”

Charlie shook his head at the situation, like he really got it.

“You are my favorite writer, though,” I said next. “Logan wasn’t lying about that. I love you more than Richard Curtis, and Elaine May, and Billy Wilder. I love you more”—and this felt so sacrilegious, like I might be smote by lightning at the words, but I had to make my point—“than Nora Ephron.”

Charlie held kind of still.

Too much?

Then he gave a small, mechanical nod that read like Got it.

No doubt my cue to stop talking.

But I just had to know. I had to confirm. I decided to proceed as if and see where that got me. “So I just want to thank you. For this opportunity. It’s not easy to change your mind. Especially not in the heat of a crazy moment. But I need to say that this is the hugest of huge deals to me.” And then, realizing it might sound cheesy but unable to find any better words to capture my sincerity, I concluded with “I will do this work with my whole heart and soul.”

I snuck a look at him.

He was frowning.

“What work?” Charlie asked.

“The rewrite?” I said.

At those words, Charlie positively detonated with laughter—the kind of pah you make when you are very surprised by something unspeakably ridiculous. Then he followed the pah with hooting, and chuckling, and slapping his hand on the door of the truck.

This went on for a while.

It was bitter laughter, I decided as he went on—but laughter all the same.

Anyway. I guess I had my answer.

“The rewrite?” Charlie kept saying. “The rewrite?”

I wasn’t laughing myself, needless to say. “Logan told me you’d agreed to everything,” I said. “He said you’d said, ‘Fine. Fuck it. She can have the guest room.’ He showed me the text!”

Like I might prove him wrong.

Charlie took a few deep breaths as he worked to settle. “I did say you could have the guest room. For one night. Before you fly home tomorrow.”

“Ah,” I said.

“It’s so funny that you believed him,” Charlie said. “Didn’t he just lie to you?”

My shoulders hunched in my defense. “Yeah, but … he doesn’t always lie. Most of the time he tells the truth.” Then I had to add, “I think.”

“Well, he wasn’t telling the truth about that.”

“Fine,” I said. “Got it.”

“I mean,” Charlie went on, still marveling at Logan’s gall and my gullibility, “I don’t write with anyone. Ever. Logan knows that. And if I’m really your favorite writer”—he glanced at me like he’d caught me—“you’d know that, too.”