The Rom-Commers(61)

And then, maybe because it was the only response I could think of, I lifted my hand and pressed it against his chest. “Can you feel it now?”

“Yes,” Charlie said. “But it’s not glowing.”

“What’s it doing?” I asked.

Charlie let his eyes drop, like he was really thinking. “You know when birds commit suicide?”

I frowned. “I don’t think—that’s a thing?”

Charlie regrouped. “You know. When a bird sees its reflection in a window and thinks it’s another bird and so it dive-bombs the window over and over, trying to attack, until it injures itself so badly it dies?”

Ah. Huh. “Kind of?”

Charlie nodded. “I think my heart is doing that.”





Twenty-One

IT’S SO HUMILIATING to admit this, but the next afternoon, when Charlie had a meeting with the mistress we were doing this screenplay for and he told me to make myself scarce, there was no mistaking it—I was oddly jealous.

“I can’t stay for it?” I asked.

“Trust me, you don’t want to stay.”

“You don’t know that.”

“This woman would eat you alive,” Charlie said.

“She doesn’t eat you alive.”

“No,” Charlie agreed, “but she flirts with me. Which is weirdly similar.”

We were entering our sixth and final week of writing—which meant I’d only known Charlie for five. Five puny weeks out of my whole lifetime. Why did the idea of some mistress flirting with Charlie bug me so much? “It seems like we should both be here,” I said.

“The thing is,” Charlie said then, “there’s another issue.”

“What?”

“The mistress,” Charlie said, with an apologetic shrug, “happens to be T.J. Heywood’s stepmother.”

I frowned. “The mistress—?”

Charlie nodded. “—is married to T.J.’s dad and cheating on him with this United Pictures executive.”

I took it in. “The mistress is Mrs. Jablowmie?”

“Mrs. Jablowmie Senior,” Charlie corrected. “There is no current Mrs. T.J. Jablowmie.”

“Shocker.”

And then I couldn’t help it. I pulled out my phone and googled T.J.’s father “+ wife”—and got a thousand photos of a woman who looked like she might still be in high school.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“She’s younger than T.J., actually. He brings it up a lot.”

“Wow,” I said. “No wonder he hates women.”

“Does he?”

“Doesn’t he?”

Charlie thought about it. “Yeah. I guess that’s right.”

“So…” I said, still processing. “This teenager is married to the directing legend and very middle-aged Chris Heywood, but she’s also sleeping with this even more middle-aged executive who wants to make your Mafia thing—at the same time?”

Charlie nodded. “That’s pretty much it.”

“And everybody’s fine with it?”

“As fine as it gets in this town.”

I nodded. “She must be a hell of a multitasker.”

“So that’s the hesitation,” Charlie said. “It’s possible T.J. might show up at the meeting.”

“Ah,” I said. And suddenly, Charlie was right. I didn’t need to stay. “But why do you have to meet in person? Can’t you just email?”

Charlie shrugged. “She wants to come by the house,” he said, like that was that.

It bothered me. A lot. “She’s not going to try to seduce you, is she?”

“What!” The very notion prompted a coughing fit. “No!” When he recovered, Charlie said, “Turn off your brain, and go down to the coffee shop. Maybe you’ll run into Spielberg.”

The first time I’d ever gone there, Charlie had said, “That place is crawling with industry people,” and every time I’d gone since, I’d expected to see somebody, anybody.

It had become a little joke. “Who’d you see?” Charlie would say whenever I came home.

“Alfred Hitchcock,” I’d say. Or Robert Altman. Or Fellini.

And we were so deadpan, we didn’t even laugh.

In truth, I’d never seen even one industry person there—and I’d wondered if Charlie had made it all up.

But it turned out, Charlie was right.

That day, while Charlie was hobnobbing with Mistress Jablowmie—and possibly even Teej himself—and I was at the café, working on my laptop and quietly demolishing a banana muffin, who should walk in but the reigning queen of all industry people … the one and only Donna Cole.

I’m not kidding. Donna Cole!

Donna Cole. Director of Time of My Life. And The Lovers. And Can’t Win for Losing.

Donna Cole, whose most famous wise quote—“The most vital thing you can learn to do is tell your own story”—was the centerpiece of my vision board back home. Right next to the iconic red carpet photo of her in a white Wayman + Micah gown with her natural Afro high and bold and stunning like she was the patron saint of fashion and wisdom and rom-coms all rolled into one.