The Rom-Commers(65)

I was right. Donna smiled at that. Her first real, non-Charlie-related smile this whole time.

And then, as Charlie started to steer us away, Donna put her hand on my arm. “Stay behind for one quick second?”

I looked at Charlie, like Do you mind?

And he nodded, like Go ahead. Then he glanced over toward my table and said, “I’ll be waiting over there.”

Take that, Hollywood. I was someone Charlie Yates would wait for.

Donna Cole waited until Charlie was out of earshot. And then she said, “Quick question.”

I nodded. “Of course. Anything.”

Then she tilted her head and said, “Is Charlie Yates in love with you?”

“What?!”

Donna Cole just watched me, like We both just saw the way he touched your cheekbone, and waited.

“No!” I finally said. “We’re just—just—writing colleagues. Doing—writing stuff together.”

She nodded, like Got it. But then she said, “I’ve just never seen him touch a woman like that, or look at a woman like that, or rescue a woman like that.” Then she thought about it. “Actually, I’ve never seen him rescue anyone. In any way. For any reason.”

“We’re not—” I said. “We’re just—”

Donna looked around the table. “You heard her, folks. No rumors.”

But of course nothing creates rumors like saying “No rumors.”

Judging from the way the table was smiling at me now, being the rumored love interest of Charlie Yates might not be a bad thing—if you weren’t too fastidious about it not being true.

“Okay, then,” I said. “Well. It’s so great to meet you.”

She reached out and took one of my hands in both of hers. “It’s actually great to meet you, too,” she said. “Any friend of Charlie’s truly is a friend of mine.” And then, before she let go, she gave my hand a warm squeeze, pulled me close for a kiss on the cheek, and whispered, “Don’t break his heart, okay? He’s much sweeter than he seems.”





Twenty-Two

“WHAT,” CHARLIE WANTED to know on the walk back to the house, “could you possibly have been thinking?” He was ahead of me, calling back his questions in astonishment. “What the hell was going on in there?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

“Donna Cole,” he went on, “is brilliant, and accomplished, and at the top of her game—and she also won’t think twice about ripping out your beating heart and squeezing it like a sponge in front of you before you die.”

“Really?” I said. She’d always seemed so supportive in the red carpet photo on my vision board.

“Not really. But she’s not someone to mess around with, either.”

“I wasn’t messing around.”

“You weren’t messing around?” Charlie challenged, slowing to let me catch up. “You walked over there on a whim—manuscript in hand—with no plan, no strategy, no forethought, and no idea that T.J. Heywood Jablowmie the Third might be sitting at her table, and then you lingered beside her like a lunatic stalker—and that wasn’t messing around?”

By the end, we were face-to-face. “You sound kind of mad at me,” I said.

Charlie tilted his head like he hadn’t noticed. Then he started walking again. “I guess I am kind of mad at you.”

“I was trying to seize the moment,” I said.

“That is not how you seize the moment,” Charlie said.

“That’s not how you seize the moment,” I said back.

“You can’t accost Donna Cole in a coffee shop, Emma. That’s not how that works.”

“I couldn’t do nothing,” I said.

“Yes, you could.”

“I had to take a shot,” I said.

“But that’s not how it’s done.”

“It’s not how it’s done for you,” I said. “You’re famous, and dashing, and beloved.”

“Did you just call me dashing?”

“The point is, there are people walking around this town right now wearing T-shirts with your dialogue on it. You have directors begging you for scripts. Donna Cole lights up like a marquee when she sees you. You’re on easy street—and you have been from the very beginning. Do you know how lucky you are that a script you wrote in college took off? Or that The Destroyers catapulted you to screenwriter stardom? Nobody has it that easy! You’re a damned unicorn. We don’t play by the same set of rules. I can’t just have my people call other people’s people and say c’est la vie if it doesn’t work out. Nothing has ever been easy for me. I have to hustle. I have to wrench something out of every opportunity.”

“But you don’t.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You got that Warner Bros. internship and you didn’t even go.”

“I didn’t not go because I didn’t know how to hustle,” I said. “I couldn’t go. Because we found out right after I won that my dad needed another surgery that nobody had seen coming, and there was no one else to look after him.”

Charlie looked down then, and I could see him regretting assumptions he’d made about me. I wished I could send a little snippet of this moment to the me from weeks ago, freshly arrived in LA, trapped in Charlie Yates’s car as he berated me for not wanting success badly enough.