Chapter Sixteen
AND SO, THATfirst week, we settled into a routine: swimming first thing, then showering, then coffee, then sitting across from each other at Charlie’s dining table with our laptops back to back, surrounded by our various favorite writing accoutrements and good-luck charms—trying to ignore each other but not entirely succeeding. We found a sharing feature in Final Draft, which neither of us had ever used, and we forced ourselves to get acquainted with it.
My hope at the start was that we could just work quietly, like we were both used to, and send changes and questions back and forth via the internet without ever having to adjust our normal way of doing things. But of course that’s not how it happened.
I mean, there was a guinea pig on the dining table.
Every morning, like a ritual, Charlie brought Cuthbert out of his cage and loaded him into the barn, where he’d settle in and spend the day alternating between lounging and napping.
“I think I’m going to find the rodent distracting,” I said, the first time it happened.
“Don’t call him a rodent.”
I frowned. “Isn’t he… a rodent?”
“The point is, he’s going through a rough time right now.”
But maybe Cuthbert was a nice mediator. Writing in the same room at the same time with another person was, for the record, not my normal way of doing things.
Not Charlie’s, either. “I usually do this in complete human isolation,” he said, at one point. “I always think that should be the title of my autobiography: Alone Too Long.”
I nodded, like Nice. Then, wondering if all writers had a throwdown autobiography title, I went ahead and shared: “Mine is Someday You’ll Thank Me.”
Another human in the room. While I tried to write. So weird.
It felt a smidge vulnerable, for example, to pull out my lucky sweatshirt—which had a hood that made your head look like a big strawberry with little green leaves appliquéd at the top. When Charlie first saw it, he said, “That’s—wow. That’s really something.”
“It’s my lucky hoodie,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t point out that it hadn’t brought me much luck. Then, quieter, I added: “My mom gave it to me.”
“No judgment,” Charlie said. “I have a lucky handkerchief myself.”
I looked at his pocket, which was empty.
“For awards shows,” Charlie explained, and touched the spot where I was looking. “My wife gave it to me before my first-ever nomination—and then I won. So I wore it again the next time, and I won again. And now I’m trapped. Every time I wear it, I win. So I have to keep wearing it.”
“That’s a powerful handkerchief,” I said.
“Right?” Charlie agreed. “After she left, I thought I should get a different one—but I don’t want to break my streak.”
Other secret writerly behaviors that got exposed as we worked together: I feathered the corners of pages while reading. Charlie absentmindedly tapped his heel on the floor. Charlie wrote exclusively with Bic ballpoints, chewing on the caps and blowing through them, which—who knew?—makes a whistling noise.
Charlie turned out to be a blue-ink person, while I was exclusively black. FYI for nonwriters: blue versus black ink is an essential identity issue. Much like Coke versus Pepsi, or the Beatles versus the Stones, or college-ruled notebooks versus regular. You can be one kind of person or the other, but not both.
I couldn’t help but judge Charlie a little—and I could feel him judging me right back.
I’ll also add that he was a fine-point-pen person, while I had joined the bold-tip community years ago and never looked back.
One-point-six millimeters or bust, baby.
The idea that we might do all our writing in a sleek, virtual, digital, nonhuman way was not sustainable, looking back. It wasn’t long before the dining table was covered with crumpled paper, marked-up printed scenes, snack wrappers, soda cans, spiral notebooks, water bottles, not one but two staplers, pencil pouches, a box of Kleenex, a printer attached to a long extension cord, various ChapSticks, highlighters, and old coffee cups—both paper and ceramic.
I personally liked it better that way. Visible signs of progress.
I got the feeling Charlie did, too.
And even though we both put headphones on, we pulled them off to talk almost constantly. I got to where I could sense Charlie pulling out his earbuds to ask a question or read a piece of dialogue. And can I just say? He had to really watch his pacing when he read to me out loud, because I’d get so caught up, if he slowed down too much, I’d jump in with what I imagined the next line should be.
And then Charlie would look up, and say, “No. But maybe that’s better.”
And then I’d wonder if I’d fallen asleep at the table or something. Because no writer ever thinks that what somebody else wrote might be better.
Astonishing.
The routine just evolved. We’d work all morning, and then sometime in the early afternoon, when we were both losing steam, I’d walk to the neighborhood coffee shop—just two blocks away, if you knew where to go—for a change of scenery and a little me time, and he’d field meetings and phone calls from a roster of Hollywood people that read like the invite list to the Oscars.
For the most part, we were surprisingly companionable. For a guy who didn’t care at all about the project we were working on, he seemed to be enjoying himself quite well—enough to make me wonder if there might be an overlap in the separate-circle Venn diagram of our lives: the joy of messing around with words.
Maybe the project didn’t matter.
Maybe the act of writing was so fun he couldn’t help but enjoy himself.
I was enjoying myself, too, to be honest.
Being away from home was not as hard as I’d feared.
To no one’s surprise, Salvador never managed to find his own place, and he and Sylvie FaceTimed me in their pajamas first thing every morning with the Dad Report: daily sodium totals, updates on refills, visual proof of color and sticker charts faithfully filled in. Salvador was taking my dad to the gym down the street twice a week for weight training, and he’d perfected a low-sodium artisan bread. Salvador also played the guitar—which delighted my dad—so the three of them were having nightly after-dinner jam sessions with Sylvie on vocals and tambourine.
I was forced to admit, as the days went on and the good reports kept coming, that two people doing all that caretaking was probably better than just one. More fun, too, apparently. The three of them even ventured to the farmers market one Saturday, bought a whole basket of organic veggies, and made pasta primavera from scratch.
Sylvie sent a group selfie of them slurping linguine at our dining table.
Knowing that helped me worry less. A little. And the less I worried, the more I realized how good it felt not to be worried. It was astonishing how quickly I adjusted to my new life of luxury in Charlie Yates’s mansion. I was fine, they were fine—everybody was fine.
How hard is it to adjust to that?
The one thing I missed at first was cooking. Charlie was—how to put it?—not a foodie.
My second day there, I got the shock of a lifetime when I opened up his fridge—and there was nothing inside it but… luncheon meats.
Yep. Bags of shredded luncheon meats from the grocery deli.
I leaned against the open fridge door. “What’s going on in here?” I asked, when Charlie looked over.
“In the fridge?” he asked.
“There’s no food,” I said.
“There is,” Charlie said, walking a little closer. “There’s pastrami. And corned beef. And Black Forest ham.” He peered at the back. “And those are cocktail olives.”
“You don’t have anything else? That’s it?”
“There’s some beer in the door.”
“But…” I just kept staring at all that meat. “What do you do with it?”
“I just eat it,” Charlie said matter-of-factly, like that was a thing people did.
“Straight?” I asked. “Like, just… handfuls of meat?”
“Forkfuls,”Charlie corrected, like he was offended. “Though, I do mostly eat them right out of the bag, if I’m honest.”
“Charlie, this can’t be healthy for you.”
“It’s fine,” Charlie said. “The Maasai people of Kenya lived in perfect health for centuries on almost nothing but meat.”
“But not pastrami, right?”
“Fair enough.”
A pause.
“I also have cereal, if you want some,” Charlie offered, nodding toward a small pantry in the corner.
“You don’t have milk, though,” I said, checking the fridge again. “What do you put on it?”
“Water,” Charlie said. Like that made any sense.
I tilted my head. And then, trying to sound like his luncheon-meats-based lifestyle was just as valid as any other, I asked, “Do you mind if I—get some other foods?”
“Not at all,” Charlie said.
“I cook a lot at home…” I said then, still trying to normalize it.
Charlie nodded.
“So I’ll probably make dinner for myself in the evenings.”
Charlie shrugged, like that was reasonable.
“And I’m happy to share,” I added. “Unless you prefer—your… piles of meat.”
And so that became another part of the routine—I started making dinner every night. And every night, Charlie hovered around, watching me, like a person making dinner was a total novelty. And he’d act all skeptical, adding commentary like “Don’t cut yourself,” and “I threw up after eating parsley once,” and “Are you crying right now, or is that just the onions?”
Then, when the food was actually ready, he’d set two places at the kitchen table by the window, and fill up glasses of ice water, and say yes to everything I offered, and then chow down—making little happy noises as he chewed and swallowed and served himself seconds—like a person who…
Well, like a person who’d forgotten about the joy of the old-timey human ritual of dinner.
“You’re an amazing cook!” Charlie would exclaim while chewing, over and over, like he just couldn’t believe it.
It felt good to amaze him.
It felt good to do something that was so appreciated. My dad and Sylvie appreciated me, of course, and we all agreed that I could cook. But they were too used to me by now. The thrill was gone.
For Charlie, every bite was a novelty. Brand-new, and astonishing, and pure, gustatory bliss.
He took to accompanying me to the grocery store in the evenings, helping me find the things the recipes needed. And also purchasing little culinary delights for Cuthbert, like butter lettuce and bell peppers, to supplement his hay and pea pellets.
This Charlie was so different from the Charlie who I’d met on the first day—the one who’d so dismissively called me an amateur.
This Charlie was helpful. And eager. And grateful. And just—fun to pal around with. It got me thinking about how nice it was to do an ordinary thing like go to the market with someone and buy food for a meal you were about to eat together. The companionship and pleasant anticipation. The easy camaraderie. The incidental conversations about anything and nothing: songs on the speaker system, or the psychology of wine labels, or the social significance of Twinkies.
And can I just add? While I got dinner started, Charlie applied himself lovably and earnestly to the eternal project of trying to get Cuthbert to eat something.
Easier said than done. “He’s off his food since losing his brother,” Charlie explained early on. “Guinea pigs are very sensitive.”
I looked at Cuthbert, perched under that unruly mop of fur like someone had dropped a toupee on him.
“He seems okay to me,” I said.
“He should be devouring this bell pepper,” Charlie said, and then we’d both look at the hunk of bell pepper sitting untouched in front of Cuthbert’s nose.
And then I’d casually glance over time and again to see Charlie cutting the bell pepper into a star shape, playing Pachelbel’s Canon through his phone speaker to get Cuthbert into an eating mood, and changing out plates because apparently the texture of Limoges versus Fiestaware can impact a guinea pig’s gustatory experience.
“Sensitive” didn’t start to cover it.
Sometimes I’d eavesdrop on their conversations. “I know you miss him, buddy,” Charlie would say. “It’s hard. I get it.”
On a really bad day, Charlie might slice a carrot into thin sheets on a mandoline and form it into an origami-style carrot flower. Or hum “Bohemian Rhapsody” a cappella while he waited for the nibbling to start. Or both.
“You’ve got a great voice,” I told Charlie.
Charlie shrugged. “He loves Freddie Mercury.”
I don’t want to sound insensitive, but at one point, I said to Charlie, “Won’t he eat if he gets hungry enough?”
Charlie shook his head, like Common misconception. “If he goes too long without eating, his health can start to fall apart. And the thing about guinea pigs is that they’re prey animals. So when they get sick, they hide it. Because the weakest of the herd are always the first to get picked off.”
“Cuthbert,” I said, in a tone of affectionate reprimand, “no one in this room is getting picked off.”
We both gazed at Cuthbert. Then Charlie said, “I don’t think he’s buying it.”
ONE NIGHT, WHENI’d been there for more than two weeks and was feeling very at home, Charlie and I had just come back from another trip to the market when we heard the high beeps of Charlie’s front door disarming and then a woman’s voice calling, “Charlie?”
I’d been handing Charlie cans of crushed tomatoes to stack on a high shelf in the pantry—but at the moment her voice sounded, Charlie grabbed me by the arm and yanked me in with him.
Then he pulled the door closed until the tongue caught in the latch.
“What are you—” I started.
But Charlie shook his head like crazy and lifted a finger to his lips.
It was not a large space. We were corralled tightly by shelves of food, with only room for about an inch between our bodies. Which made me suddenly both exquisitely aware of the electromagnetic energy around Charlie’s body… and aware that Charlie was also suddenly aware of mine.
I shifted to a whisper. “Why are we hiding in the pantry?”
“That’s Margaux,” Charlie whispered back.
“Who’s Margaux?”
“My ex-wife.”
Of course. Margaux. They’d been quite the power couple for a brief moment in time, the year when his movie Forty Miles to Hell and her documentary Women Aren’t Funny—which was just an hour and a half of women stand-up comics being hilarious on the topic of that very thing—were both sweeping up prizes on the awards circuit.
I’d read a few features on her, in fact, over the years. My big takeaway—and please don’t be alarmed—was that she, and these are her words, “didn’t like fiction.”
I’ll give you a minute.
This lady, who was married to one of the most celebrated writers of fiction in the world, didn’t like fiction. If I recall, she’d said that she “just couldn’t get into fictional stories” because they “weren’t real.” One of the articles, in fact, ended with her rhetorical question: “It’s all made up. It’s all fake. How can it possibly matter?”
So, yeah. That marriage was probably doomed from Day One.
I don’t know if they make red flags bigger than that.
Anyway—now she was here. In Charlie’s house.
“What’s she doing here?” I asked. Weren’t they divorced?
“She’s here to pick up Cuthbert,” Charlie answered.
“She just comes into your house?” I asked.
“She still has the code.”
That raised more questions than it answered, but okay. “I thought you guys weren’t close.”
“We’re not.”
Next, Charlie heard a sound that I didn’t, and he stood up straighter, eyes wide, like Oh, god, she’s coming this way.
Sure enough, as I fell silent, we could hear her. She must have been talking to someone on the phone. “His car’s here,” she was saying, “but he’s not answering.”
Then she called again: “Charlie? Are you home?”
I looked at Charlie like Maybe we should just turn ourselves in.
And he looked at me like Never surrender.
I heard the ex-wife drop her keys on the kitchen counter and then wander off to another part of the house.
As her voice receded, I whispered, “Maybe we should make a break for it.”
“To where?” Charlie whispered back. “She’ll be back any second.”
“Text her! Tell her you’ve gone out.”
“Just randomly text her my whereabouts?” Charlie said. “I never text her.”
“Are you saying she’ll get a text from you and think, That’s funny. He never texts me. He must be hiding in the pantry?”
“I’m just saying it’s weird.”
“This whole thing is weird!”
Charlie capitulated and reached into his pocket for his phone. But after digging around a minute, he shook his head.
“What?”
“I don’t have it with me.”
That’s when we heard the ex coming back. “He’s definitely avoiding me,” she was saying. Then, a pause. “But it’s strange. The place is a disaster. There’s stuff all over the dining table—like maybe he’s writing again. And dishes in the sink. And—ugh—a box of Twinkies. How’s he supposed to stay healthy if he eats like a middle schooler?” Another pause. Then, “This doesn’t even look like his stuff, honestly. There’s a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table.”
Charlie and I held each other’s gazes, and our breath—united in the act of hiding—as we listened to the sound of her gathering her keys off the counter, and then her footsteps walking away.
The second we heard the front door slam behind her, we burst out of the pantry at the same time like bucking broncos out of the gate, moving too fast for anyone’s good, and I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but somehow I managed to get caught in an overturned grocery sack on the floor just outside the door—one foot entangled in it, I think, and the other stepping on it?—just as Charlie turned back to ask me some question that will now be forever lost to history.
That’s what I remember: Charlie turning around, just as I felt a sensation like someone had tied my shoelaces together—and I went jolting forward into his chest, knocking him backward.
And then we hit the ground.
Pretty hard, too.
I felt my knee knock the slate tiles like a hammer just as Charlie landed with a series of oofs and smacks.
And then he was rolling onto his side and pressing his hand on his tailbone, growling in misery.
I’d landed with my face in his armpit, so I hoisted up and over to get a look at his face.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Charlie’s face was red now, and his jugular was kind of pooching out, and all he could say was “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that hurts.”
“Oh, god. I’m so sorry! Did you land on your tailbone? I did that once in Girl Scouts. This floor is not soft, either, by the way. No give there at all.” I smacked the floor for confirmation. “Do you think you broke it?”
“The floor?” Charlie croaked, like I was crazy.
“Your tailbone!” I said, like he was crazier. “Should I take you to the hospital? What do they even do for a broken tailbone—right? They can’t exactly put it in a cast.”
Charlie had gone back to growling.
“Ice,” I decided then, and I scrambled over to the freezer, returning with a bag of frozen veggies and pressing it to Charlie’s butt.
“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.
“Just—move your hand,” I said.
“Are you trying to put frozen peas on my ass?”
“It’s julienned mixed vegetables,” I said, like I beg your pardon.
“Get them off,” he said, grabbing at the bag.
“We have to ice the area!” I insisted.
“Emma—cut it out. I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
By that point, we were basically wrestling for access to Charlie’s butt, and I tried to snatch the bag away just as he got the bright idea to roll over to block me. The next thing I knew, we managed to rip the bag, scatter julienned vegetables across the kitchen floor, and, in the scuffle, I guess my elbow gave way because I collapsed on top of him—again.
In the wake of it, we waited a second—face-to-face, gazes locked, breaths intermingling, and expressions perfectly matched, like Did that just happen—again?
Then Charlie broke the silence. “You did all this on purpose, didn’t you?”
On purpose?“No, I—” I looked around. “I tripped on a grocery bag.”
I pointed at it, for evidence, but Charlie didn’t even look.
I was still square on top of him, my arm pinned under his side. Charlie closed his eyes. Then he opened them and looked straight into mine. “Or maybe you just wanted to prove that there’s nothing romantic about people falling on top of each other.”
I blinked. “I don’t have to prove that. It’s just empirically true. It doesn’t need proving.”
But as soon as I said it, in that instant, I became aware of all the physical contact we’d just muddled through with each other—and how I was still lying flat on top of him. And then I suddenly thought about what my body must feel like to him, draped over his own like that. And how, other than maybe games of Twister or freak skiing accidents, there weren’t too many situations in day-to-day life where people just lay on top of each other for no reason.
In any other situation, it would be a very different situation.
And once I’d thought that, I couldn’t unthink it.
And if I was reading the room right—Charlie, suddenly, wasn’t not thinking about that, either.
Questions started twinkling in my brain like stars. Did the room just go very still? Did my scraped knee just stop stinging? Was having our faces this close together causing some kind of chemical reaction in my body? And, maybe most important: Did Charlie Yates have the thickest, lushest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a man?
How had I never noticed those before?
Wait—
What was I thinking about?
Had I really been insisting all this time that there was nothing even remotely romantic about two people randomly falling on top of each other?
Because this was working.
Had I just proved myself wrong? In front of the Great Charlie Yates?
This was not going to end well.
And then my weird heart took that moment to start doing its thumping thing again.
“Is that you or me?” I asked.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“The thumping.”
“I’m not thumping,” Charlie said.
I put my hand on his chest. “Yes, you are.” Then, out of fairness, I shifted to my own. “But I’m thumping worse.”
Why did this keep happening?
For a second, I got caught up in the scientific question of it all—but then I looked down to see Charlie shaking his head at me like I was the most exasperating person on earth. “Emma?” he said.
“What?” I asked, like it might be something important.
“Can you get off me now?”
Oh, god! His broken tailbone! What was I doing?
But before I could scramble up, from across the kitchen, we heard a sound that pinned us in place a little longer. A woman’s voice like an irritated schoolmarm’s, demanding: “What the hell is happening in here?”
And in the one second that followed—that felt like ten hours—I didn’t even need to see the wry Thank you so much for this moment expression on Charlie’s face to know that this was, of course, his wife.
Sorry—ex-wife.
AS CHARLIE ANDI scrambled up—Charlie notably not clutching his tailbone now—she watched us, arms crossed, like she’d just discovered a pair of naughty teenagers.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I knew her face already, of course. I’d seen her in many red-carpet photos with Charlie—always dressed in black and wearing superhuman heels even though she was tall to begin with, the two of them smiling like nothing, not even an insurmountable height difference, could scare them. With her straight dark hair slicked habitually back into a low bun, she was always then, as she was right this minute, tall and sophisticated and sleek as a mink.
The opposite of me, is what I’m saying.
I wasn’t short—but I definitely wasn’t tall. And you’d probably come up with a thousand words for me before you landed on “sophisticated.” And if there was one thing I’d never, ever be, it was “sleek.” My curls would make sure of that.
“We were just”—Charlie glanced at me—“doing research.”
She crossed her arms and looked at the scatter of vegetables. “Is that what they call it?”
What was that expression on Charlie’s face? I hadn’t seen it before. Was he embarrassed? Guilty? Something was going on between these two that I couldn’t read.
The ex-wife looked at me and touched her collarbone. “I’m Margaux,” she said, like that should explain everything.
“I’m—” I started.
But Charlie jumped in. “She’s just a writer. Here to do some—writing.”
Huh. That smarted a little. Just a writer.
Margaux tilted her head, like If you say so. Then: “We were supposed to have dinner when I came to get Cuthbert tonight, Charlie. Did you forget?”
“Of course not,” Charlie said.
Um, I thought. We were supposed to have dinner tonight. What was Charlie talking about?
“We were just finishing up,” Charlie explained to Margaux, like we’d been hard at work doing something important.
Margaux nodded, with a vibe like I’ll allow it.
Then she looked Charlie up and down. “We’re already late,” she said then, “so…”
“Right,” Charlie said. Then he looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. “You probably need to get going. I know your car had that… that… flat tire. Why don’t you just take my Blazer and bring it back for our—working day tomorrow?”
I guess we were hiding the whole living together thing from the ex.
“I can just get an Uber,” I said.
“No,” Charlie jumped in—weirdly eager to get rid of me. “The Blazer’s faster.”
“Okay, then,” I said.
Why was I feeling so rejected? Charlie had a right to go out to dinner with his ex-wife. It wasn’t like we had real plans. We were just eating together by default. And he certainly didn’t have to tell her about every detail of his life—and maybe I was one of those details he didn’t feel like getting into. That was fine. That was fair. And technically, he hadn’t even said anything wrong about me.
I was just a writer.
That’s exactly what I was.
So why was me getting kicked out so that Charlie could hit the town with this tall, slender, straight-haired woman with a perfect pedicure and matching manicure disappointing me so hard?
Oh, well. I could puzzle over that later.
They were waiting for me to go.
“I’ll just leave most of my writing stuff here,” I said, trying not to overact my part. “Since we’ll be doing more writing again when I return—tomorrow.” This was terrible dialogue.
“The keys are on the front hall table,” Charlie said.
I knew that. But I said, “Ah,” like that was news. Then I gave a little vague wave in their direction, the way I imagined someone who was not suddenly the girl not chosen might, and said, “See ya later!” with such forced cheer that I accidentally added a tinge of madwoman.
I walked out to the car before realizing that I’d forgotten my purse—so I U-turned back into the house, and I was seconds from snagging it off the dining table when I heard Charlie and the terrifying Margaux, still in the kitchen. Talking about me.
And get this: Margaux was pressing a bag of frozen corn niblets to Charlie’s tailbone.
And Charlie wasn’t resisting.
Guess he was fine with his wife’s frozen vegetables.
Ex-wife’s.
“That was definitely more than research,” Margaux was saying, a hint of teasing in her voice.
“What would you know about research?” Charlie said.
“You don’t have to be a writer to read that situation.”
Charlie put his hand over the frozen corn to take over, and he stepped back to rest against the counter. “Don’t read the situation, okay? Don’t read anything.”
“I approve. She’s enchanting. I love that crazy hair.”
“Don’t call her hair crazy.”
“The fact that you’re so grouchy is just proving me right.”
“You don’t get to be right—or wrong—about any of this, Margaux.”
“Look, I’m just saying you clearly like her.”
“I don’t like her!” Charlie said.
But Margaux’s voice dripped with teasing. “Are you sure about that?”
“She fell on me, okay? It happens! Sometimes objects in space collide with each other!”
“Do they ever,” Margaux said, just luxuriating in innuendo, clearly enjoying this.
“I didn’t do anything!” Charlie said. Clearly not.
“I support you,” Margaux said. “It’s past time you released the ghost of our relationship.”
“There’s no ghost—and there’s nothing to support,” Charlie insisted, like he’d never heard anything more ridiculous. “She’s nobody. Just a writer. A failed writer, in fact. A person with a tragic past who Logan asked me to work with. Briefly. As a personal favor. She has no job, no money, and absolutely nothing going for her. She’s leaving as soon as we’re done, and I’ll never see her again. So don’t turn this into a whole thing, okay?”
I held very still.
The words were bad, but the tone of voice was worse.
So eye-rolly. So devoid of warmth. So authentically dismissive. As if there were truly no topic less interesting and less important than me.
There was a good writing lesson in there—that being dismissed is worse than being scorned. In a different frame of mind, I might have paused to think about it: Of course not mattering is worse. It means you didn’t even register. It means you’re not even worth getting mad about. It means you’re literally nobody.
Was this how Charlie really felt about me?
I thought about Charlie’s tell—how good he was at pretending the things that mattered didn’t matter.
I felt tempted to hope he was pretending.
But the thing was, he just didn’t seem like he was.
More important: What was more likely—that I was important to Charlie? Or that I would engage in complex emotional gymnastics to wrongly convince myself that I was? Connecting dots that “didn’t need, or want, to be connected.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d said these things, after all. He’d voiced all of this to Logan when I first got here. Nothing here should be a surprise. But that was before he’d read my stuff and then asked me to stay. Before we’d worked together. And lived together. Before he’d revived me from fainting, and googled my heart attack, and used the word dazzling. Had nothing changed for him? Had nothing shifted at all?
Just a writer. A failed writer.
If he was acting, he’d missed his calling.
One thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to wait around here to find out.