The Rom-Commers(67)
“Not what?”
“In love with you.”
“Oh,” I said. Then, in case my voice sounded weird, I added, “Of course not!”
“I googled it,” Charlie continued, “and I’m not.”
“You googled whether or not you’re in love with me?”
“I googled how long it takes to fall in love.”
“And?” I asked. “How long does it take?”
“Eighty-eight days,” Charlie answered, definitively. “And we’ve only known each other for thirty-one. So. Problem solved.”
Why was Charlie googling this? And what nutty professor came up with that number? And what problem, exactly, were we solving?
“I wish I’d known that back at the coffee shop,” I said then. “That would’ve been a great comeback.”
* * *
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we made it to Act Three, and there were only two—huge, insurmountable—things wrong with Act Three: The ending was 100 percent wrong, and the kiss was terrible.
We were almost done with the rewrite. In a week, I’d pack up all my office supplies and head home. We were galloping toward the finish line now. But I’d saved the hardest part for last.
And by “the hardest part” I meant the kissing. All the physical stuff, really. Charlie had done it so wrong, it felt like there was no way to explain to him how to do it right.
“It’s fine,” Charlie kept saying.
“It’s not fine,” I kept insisting. “All you wrote is, ‘He storms in. They kiss.’ That’s it.”
“That’s plenty.”
“It’s really not.”
“I’m not telling the director what to do.”
“I get that it’s not our job to get in there with blocking. But you have to give them something.” He knew this already. A good screenplay had to make readers see it in their minds. And a good rom-com screenplay had to make readers feel it, too.
I grabbed my laptop and plunked it down in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Charlie started, but then he saw all my open tabs up top with rom-com after rom-com. “Are these—?” he started.
“Compilations of movie kisses,” I answered, like Of course.
“Where did you find these?” Charlie asked.
“On YouTube,” I said, like Duh.
But Charlie shook his head.
“You know—best-of compilations,” I prompted. “‘Best Movie Kisses Ever’? ‘Swooniest Kisses in Movie History’? ‘Most Rewatchable Kisses of All Time’?”
“Rewatchable?” Charlie asked, like he couldn’t fathom what that meant.
“The kisses that you rewatch over and over.”
Charlie just frowned.
“Kisses so good, you’ll watch the movie again just for the kiss.”
Charlie shook his head.
“Kisses so good, you’ll rewind them a few times before you even finish the movie.”
Now Charlie looked at me like I was fully bananas. “Nobody does that.”
“Hello? Everybody does that.”
“I have never rewatched a kiss.”
“That’s because you refuse to let yourself be happy.”
Charlie sighed.
“This is important,” I said.
Charlie narrowed his eyes. “Is it?”
“There is exactly one kiss in your screenplay as it stands, and it’s the tragic Charlie Brown Christmas tree of movie kisses.”
Did I have a full, curated collection of dramatic kissing clips from around the world bookmarked on YouTube?
Yeah. Doesn’t everyone?
I don’t want to show off or anything, but if these clips had been artworks, I could have started my own very impressive museum.
I had clips from all over the world: Turkey and Japan and Azerbaijan and Iceland. It was almost an anthropology project—curating the best human efforts at kissing. I’d subdivided them into categories of style, too: Accidental, Gentle, Drunk, First, Pretend, Angry, Practice, Stolen, Forgotten, and Goodbye. Not to mention Kisses on Horseback, Rooftop Kisses, and Wall-slams.
Through it all, Charlie sat very still, like a captive.
“Why are you fighting me on this?” I asked.
“I’m not fighting you,” Charlie said. “I’m just not writing a whole, big, ten-page love scene.”
“One page,” I said.
“You do it,” he said.
“We’re supposed to do it together.”
“I’ll rewrite the ending at the wedding,” Charlie said, like he could escape.
“Uh,” I said, “that’s also going to have a kiss in it.”
Charlie dropped his shoulders, like Seriously?
“Yeah,” I said. “This first kiss gives us a sense of what’s possible—but they don’t get their happy ending until they get their happy ending.”
Charlie shook his head.
“Just pay attention, okay?” I said. “You might learn something.”
I pulled up a chair next to him and made him watch them all. The waterfall kiss in Enchanted Forest. The in-front-of-a-whole-stadium kiss in Can’t Win for Losing. The rooftop kiss in Donna Cole’s magnum opus, The Lovers. We watched the scenes on my laptop while I physically leaned up against Charlie, trying to pin him in place. We watched people kiss in lakes, in snowstorms, in burning buildings, and while transforming into werewolves. We watched lens flares and misty mornings and pouring rain. We watched slow, tender kisses that felt like melting candle wax and passionate wall-slams that felt like possession. We watched mouths and hands and tilted-back throats.