The Rom-Commers

Chapter Seven

DID NOT SEEthat coming.

One minute, I was fine—or as fine as you can be when your personal hero is telling you you’re worthless—and the next minute, as Charlie held the car door, and I stepped onto the driveway, coming face-to-face with him by a matter of inches, close enough that I could feel his gaze on me like a breeze, I felt a swell of nausea, heard a rushing sound in my ears, and watched the edges of my vision go dark.

Next, I was coming to, flat on my back on the concrete, Charlie’s face hovering above mine, frowning, his eyes dark with intensity. “Emma!” he was saying. “Emma!”

But the sound was muffled, and out of sync a little.

In slow-mo, Charlie moved his head away and pressed it to my chest. Was he listening to my heart? Checking my breathing? I can still see that chestnut-brown hair of his, as if my mind paused to snap a photo. He was on his hands and knees beside me, but next I saw him launch up and run—run!—to the back of his truck to grab my suitcase and drag it toward me. Then he was lifting my legs and resting them on it to elevate them.

Then his face came back to my face, peering close.

“Emma?”

I could hear him more clearly now.

He was handsome. To me, at least. There was no way around it.

Don’t talk about his nostrils. Don’t talk about his nostrils.

Thank god I was too nauseated to speak.

I started to sit up, but Charlie shook his head. “Don’t get up! You’re not supposed to stand. Give it a second.”

I relaxed back against the driveway as Charlie wriggled out of his overshirt, wadded up a makeshift pillow, and tucked it under my head, cradling my face to his shoulder for a second to get it placed.

Dammit. He smelled good.

Whatever his deodorant was, it cured the nausea like a tonic.

I watched him rise again, and then come back from the car with a bottle of water. He squirted some on his palm, shook off the excess, and then smoothed the water over my forehead.

“What are you doing?” I asked, better enough at last to talk.

“I’m cooling you off.”

“I’m not hot.”

“The internet says to.”

Fine. I wouldn’t argue with the internet. It felt nice, anyway.

“You fainted,” Charlie said, looking genuinely worried.

“I’m sorry,” I said, closing my eyes.

“You scared me. You went so white.”

“I don’t think I’ve eaten anything today,” I said. “Or yesterday.”

“Nothing?” Charlie said, like Why not?

I didn’t have the energy to obfuscate. “I was nervous to meet you.”

“So nervous you didn’t eat for two days?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not that scary,” Charlie said.

But I shook my head. “You’re scarier. If I’d known what it would actually be like, I wouldn’t have eaten for a month.”

Charlie was assessing me. “Your color’s coming back,” he said, nodding. “Are you okay to go inside?”

I started to sit up, but he stopped me again.

“Not like that,” he said, and then I felt his arms slide under me and tighten as he rose and carried me toward the house.

I was still woozy, and the motion was a little too soon, so I curled against his shoulder to brace myself. My view from there was the stubble on his neck. And his square, way-too-appealing-for-a-writer jaw. And his Adam’s apple.

My eyes wanted to close, but I talked them out of it.

How many people got this close to Charlie Yates’s Adam’s apple?

We walked through his front door and into a living room, where he set me down on a plush sofa.

“You leave your mansion unlocked?” I asked as he released me.

“It’s on a remote,” he said.

He turned now to other things: wedging a throw pillow under my head, and then grabbing a throw blanket off a chair, draping it over me, and heading off toward the adjacent kitchen.

I followed him with my eyes as he opened a cabinet, pulled out a glass, turned on the faucet.

He came back with the glass and knelt beside me. “The internet wants you to drink some water,” he said, and then, with a tenderness I never would have expected from the person who’d just called me a “failed nobody writer,” he worked his arm behind my shoulders to raise me up to take some sips.

“Okay?” he asked as I lay back down.

I nodded.

How long had it been since anyone had taken care of me in any situation? The last person to do it must have been my mom. Nowadays, it was me taking care of everyone else. When I got sick or hurt now, I just managed it on my own. Which I was fully capable of doing. But I’d forgotten what it felt like to be looked after. I guess I must have missed that feeling a lot—because tears kept rising to my eyes, and I kept blinking them away.

Or maybe it had just been a really long day.

LATER THAT EVENING,as I lay catatonic on the greige-colored guest bed in one of Charlie Yates’s many greige-colored guest rooms, I got a text from the man himself—across the house.

He’d ordered takeout for us, and I should come to the dining room to eat.

And so I did.

I was miserable, sure—but nowhere near miserable enough to reject dinner.

Charlie was there, seated at the table. And so was half the food in the city of Los Angeles.

Charlie saw my eyes widen at the sight. “I wasn’t sure what you liked,” he said, “so I just got it all.”

I stepped closer to the table and took it in. Sushi, sandwiches, spring rolls, samosas, pizza, pastries, fried chicken… it was all there, and then some.

Charlie was chowing down on a big plate of everything, and he’d set a place for me to do the same.

I took one butter croissant and decided to start small.

Charlie watched me chew, and then asked, after a few bites, “How do you feel? Better?”

“I’m not sure how to answer that question,” I said. Then I talked myself into a section of club sandwich, and a bit of fruit salad, and a few bites of strawberry shortcake before deciding I’d hit the wall.

Was he sneaking looks at me chewing? Was I being monitored? Did I eat like a failed screenwriter?

Just as I was thinking I’d make my escape, he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“I guess so?” I said.

“What, exactly,” Charlie asked, “didn’t you like about my screenplay?”

Oh, god. “You know,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t think we need to get into all that.”

“I just… keep thinking about it,” Charlie said.

“It’ll pass,” I told him.

Charlie tilted his head. “You don’t want to tell me?”

“You’ve already explained to me in very clear terms that my opinion—in your opinion—is pretty worthless. So I just don’t really see the point.”

“What if I’m curious?”

“Why would you be?”

“It’s just—it’s that feeling—when you don’t know something and you just really, really find yourself needing to know.”

I knew that feeling. Of course I did. “An information gap,” I said.

“Right,” Charlie said, like he’d never heard the term before. Then, fainter, like he was mulling it over, “An information gap.”

“Do you not know the term ‘information gap’?” I asked.

“Of course I do. It’s a… gap in information.”

“It’s a writing term for how to create curiosity in the audience by leaving out crucial information.”

“Well, it works.”

How did Charlie Yates not know this term?

“The point is,” Charlie went on, “you information-gapped me—”

“You information-gapped yourself.”

“—and now I need you to fill in the… information.”

I gave it a beat. Then I said, “Why would I do that?”

Charlie shrugged. “Why wouldn’t you do that?”

“Because,” and I couldn’t believe I had to say this out loud, “you didn’t hire me.”

Charlie nodded, like Interesting.

“If you had hired me,” I said then, wanting to be totally clear, “I would happily do that right now.” I gestured toward my backpack in the guest room. “I’ve got ten pages of typed, single-spaced notes. I’ve got Post-its all over the printed screenplay—and comments filling up the margins.” Though, in truth, the margins mostly said things like WTF??! and FFS!!!—more of a chronicle of horrors than thoughtful commentary. “I spent every free minute,” I went on, “from the time Logan told me I had this job until I got on the plane to come here breaking down that screenplay and figuring it out—time I will never be compensated for, by the way.”

Charlie nodded, like he hadn’t thought of that.

I went on, “I could spend hours explaining what I didn’t like about your screenplay. I could go all night.” Then I concluded with, “But you didn’t hire me.”

Charlie nodded, and said, “What if I hired you now—just for that?”

“What?”

“What if I hired you for a consultation? Just for tonight? Tell me what you think, and I’ll pay you handsomely for your time and your thoughts and your trouble.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because you just taught me the term ‘information gap.’”

Well, at least he could admit it.

He could see I was considering it. “What’s your going rate? Two-fifty an hour?”

I had no idea what my going rate was. “Three hundred,” I said.

“Okay. Let’s cover three hours tonight, give or take, and whatever time you spent last week. Plus your time, your stress, your inconvenience, your fainting spell. How’s three thousand dollars?”

“Five thousand,” I countered, not skipping a beat.

That was reasonable, right? We were negotiating in his mansion, after all.

“Sold,” Charlie said.

Wait—what?

Wow. Three cheers for information gaps.

“Sold,” I echoed back. “You write the check. I’ll get my notes.”