The Rom-Commers

Chapter Twenty-Two

“WHAT,” CHARLIE WANTEDto 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.

“Ah,” Charlie said, humbled in a satisfying way. “I didn’t know that.”

“Of course not. How would you? You were too busy stuffing awards into that awards drawer of yours.”

Charlie gave me a look.

“The point is, you’ve had it too easy. I heard you once took a phone call onstage—at an awards ceremony—while receiving an award!”

“That was a really important call.”

I glared at him.

“It was also an accident,” Charlie said. “I left the ringer on.”

“But you answered!”

He gave a half shrug, like Fair point. “That might have been a questionable decision.”

“I’ll say. And that didn’t even surprise me. Because I saw that interview you did with Terry Gross at the Kennedy Center where you were drinking a smoothie the whole time.”

“Should I have been hangry instead?”

“You should have respected the audience! And Terry Gross, for that matter!”

“I offered her a sip,” Charlie said.

I let out a growl of frustration.

“The audience thought it was funny! And so did Terry Gross, by the way. You can get away with anything if everybody has already decided to like you. People love it when you break the rules.”

“Everything you’re saying here is validating my point.”

Charlie decided to get us back on track. “What I don’t understand about that whole Donna Cole debacle back there is why you didn’t just ask me to introduce you.”

I paused.

Now Charlie had to listen to my silence.

That idea had never occurred to me.

Finally, I said, “I didn’t realize that was an option.”

“Why wouldn’t it be an option?” Charlie asked.

“I guess I’m used to just—going it alone.”

“But you’re not alone,” Charlie said.

I shrugged. “Maybe not right here, right now. But in general, in life, I am.”

“You have your dad,” Charlie said.

“My dad’s not a writer.”

“The point is, I was standing right there.”

This seemed like such an odd thing to be irritated about. “Look,” I said, “I’m just hoping you don’t fire me before we finish rewriting the script that you keep insisting doesn’t matter.”

Charlie frowned at that.

“We’re done next week, anyway,” I said then.

“You think we’re done next week and then we’re… just done?”

“Of course,” I said.

“How could you think that?”

“Well,” I said, “for one thing, I overheard you in the bathroom.”

Charlie frowned. “Whatever that means, it can’t be good.”

“Back on the first day—at brunch with Logan. Through that weird lava-rock sink basin. You said this screenplay was doomed from the start. I know what happens once we’re done here. You give the new version to the mistress, she green-lights your Mafia thing, the world adds one more movie with seventies mobsters in tan bell-bottoms to the pantheon, and I take the express train back to obscurity.”

Charlie frowned, like he wasn’t sure which part of all that to object to. Finally, he said, “You heard that—but you stayed, anyway?”

“Yes.”

“But—why?”

I shrugged. There was no other answer. “Because I just—love you.”

Oh, god! That came out wrong!

“Not you!” I corrected fast, my voice pitching up with panic. “Not you—like you you. You meaning your writing. You—like what you do. Your work. Stories! Your genius. Not you! Obviously! Of course!” And right about here, I gave up and let my voice drop into a sigh of defeat. “You know what I mean.”

“I get it,” Charlie said. “Don’t worry.”

“Also,” I added, just to shift topics, “I was hoping I could change your mind.”

“About what?”

Um—about all of it! Hope! Love! Human kindness!“About rom-coms,” I said.

Charlie didn’t respond to that. Just kept walking. Our feet were exactly in sync now, tapping the asphalt at the exact same time, and Charlie’s place was in sight. But next, before we reached the house, Charlie said something so odd, I’d wind up thinking about it for days.

Charlie said, apropos of nothing, “I heard what Donna Cole asked you, by the way.”

“What Donna Cole asked me?”

“Right at the end. When she asked if I was in love with you.”

“Ah. Yes. That was awkward.”

“Don’t worry. It means she liked you.”

“It does?”

“Yeah. It was on purpose. She was making the whole table curious about you. Making you a person of interest. Turning you into a bit of a mystery to solve.”

“Huh,” I said.

“She was doing you a favor. Status-wise.”

“I thought she was just messing with me.”

“Maybe a bit of that, too.”

In front of his house now, Charlie kicked a rock and watched it skitter down the road.

“I’m not, by the way,” he added.

“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.

Then, for a grand finale, I made him do a close read with me of Ji Chang Wook executing a perfect Korean drama cool-guy kiss—slowing the clip down frame by frame and pausing to point out “nuances, subtext, and emotional body language of the kiss journey.”

By this point, Charlie was too exhausted to fight me. “First he pretends to tease her,” I said. “Then he puts his hands in his pockets and strikes a conversational yet masculine pose. Then she steps closer, and then he steps closer. And the whole time, he’s acting like he’s not all that interested. But now look: he’s stepped so close that his thighs are touching hers, and his torso is touching hers—but the genius is that his hands are still in his pockets.”

Charlie looked at me like Why could that possibly matter?

“There is nothing sexier than a man starting a kiss with his hands in his pockets,” I said, like Hello?

Charlie frowned.

“The snug turtleneck also helps.”

“Ah,” Charlie said—sarcastically.

But I had the moral high ground here. I was saving the world one kiss at a time. “Look at how he leans in,” I said, as Ji Chang Wook bent his head lower. “Pretty sure that’s the exact geometrical angle of maximum yearning.”

“How many times have you watched this clip?”

But this wasn’t about me. This was about the craft of writing—capturing human emotion. Did Charlie not care about craft?

“Do we need to watch it again?” I asked.

“Nope,” Charlie said. “I think I got it.”

But he clearly didn’t.

Because if he got it, he wouldn’t have argued with me when I said we should use a pockets kiss for the grand finale.

“It’s not our job,” Charlie kept saying, “to tell the director how to block the scene.”

“We won’t tell him or her what to do,” I kept saying. “We’ll just write it so vividly that she, or he, will naturally do it right.”

“You don’t understand how movies work.”

“Well, you don’t understand how kisses work.”

We wound up arguing about it all through the end of the writing day, all the way through our trip to the grocery story to get ingredients for dinner, and all the way home. We argued while we cooked, Charlie standing next to me, bringing up counterpoint after counterpoint like he was never going to give in.

It was like he liked teasing me. Like he liked getting me worked up.

Like maybe he didn’t even want to finish the screenplay.

“You know what you need?” I finally said as I peeked into the oven to check the readiness of the roasting chicken with herbes de Provence. “You need to kiss someone.”

“What?” Charlie recoiled physically like he had to dodge the words.

“Yes,” I said, clanking the oven door closed. I liked the notion more spoken out loud. “You need to remind yourself what kissing is.”

“I know what kissing is,” Charlie said, now shifting from offense to defense.

“What it feels like,” I said, feeling more and more pleased with how right I was. “Of course you can’t write a totally immersive kissing scene! Not if your heart is a suicidal bird.”

“Now I’m regretting telling you that.”

“Who can you call?” I asked then, raising myself up to sit on the island countertop, ready to get to work on this idea.

But Charlie just took in the sight of me sitting on his kitchen island. “Margaux never let anyone sit on the counter.”

I nodded like this was good. “We’re breaking all the rules tonight, Charlie. We’re leaving our old limitations behind. Now give me some names.”

“Names of what?”

“Of people you could kiss.”

Charlie blinked. “People I could—?”

“Kiss, kiss,” I said, in a tone like Get with the program. “There have to be women in your life who could help you with this. Friends from high school. Divorcées. Or—what about some of the actresses I’ve seen you with on the red carpet?”

Charlie was totally aghast. “You want me to kiss real people—in real life?”

“All you need is one. What about Liza McGee? She’s cute.”

Charlie could not disguise his horror. “She’s, like, nineteen!”

I shrugged. “That’s legal enough.”

“You can’t be serious. I work with these people.”

“Charlie, this is work. This is research.” Then, before he could brook another protest, I said, “What about Brooklyn Garcia?”

“She just had a baby! And she hates me.”

I saw a pad of paper at the far end of the island and stretched way over to grab it.

“What are you doing?” Charlie said.

“Making a list,” I said.

“Of women for me to proposition?” he said.

“Of potential sources,” I said, like this was Woodward-and-Bernstein-level stuff.

I wrote down brOOKLYN GARCIA and LIZA MCGEE and then crossed them out. Then I held my pen to the pad. “Let’s brainstorm some potentials.”

“I’m not doing this,” Charlie said. “I’m not going to call up random women and ask them to kiss me.”

“For research!” I said, like that made it better.

“It’s creepy.”

“It’s for the sake of art.”

“This script is hardly art.”

“It could be. If you would take it seriously.” Then I had an idea. “What about your ex-wife?”

“What!”

“You’ve kissed her before,” I said, like No big deal.

“You have lost your mind.”

“I’m just trying to get you past this mental block.”

“This is not the way to do it. I’m not going to proposition random actresses, or—god forbid—my ex-wife, to do something that literally nobody on earth could possibly even start to understand except for another writer.”

It was meant to end the argument.

But as soon as he said that, we both knew who my next suggestion would be.

“That settles it, then,” I said.

“Settles what?” Charlie asked. “How?”

“Me,” I said, without even stopping to think.

“You?” Charlie asked.

“I’m another writer.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You just said nobody would understand this except for another writer. And I think you already know this, but, just in case”—I pointed at myself—“I am another writer.”

If I’d paused to think it through for any length of time, I would never—never—have suggested it. But I was caught up in the momentum. We’d been arguing all afternoon. He’d been pooh-poohing kissing, and me, and love itself all day. I wanted to get past this. I wanted to shake him out of that stubborn head of his. My kissing-for-research idea was a good one—though I could also see how, for anyone else in the world, it might seem a bit bananas.

In truth, I was kind of the ideal person for this job. I did a ton of research. I understood how important it was. Plus, this circumvented the whole creepily-propositioning-a-random-woman issue. I was propositioning him.

This was the perfect answer.

If the last person Charlie had kissed was the wife who’d left him when he got cancer, maybe he needed something—anything—else to replace that last association. I was no pinup dream girl, fine. But I had to be better than cancer.

I would’ve told him to go find a girlfriend—but we didn’t have time for that.

I could do in a pinch.

“This is a great idea,” I said to Charlie.

“Absolutely not.”

“This is the breakthrough you need.”

“I don’t need a breakthrough.”

“Yes, you do.”

Charlie was backing up now. “Emma, this is nuts. We work together.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s why it’s perfect.”

“This doesn’t—” Charlie said, shaking his head. “This isn’t—”

“I can do this. I took two weeks of scuba-diving lessons to write my mermaid screenplay with a very handsy instructor named Karl. Five minutes of kissing is nothing.”

“Five minutes of kissing?” Charlie said, like I’d just proposed we run a marathon.

“The point is, you’re right.”

“I’m right?”

“I really am the best person for this job. And I’m fine with it. So let’s go.”

But Charlie was shaking his head with a frantic no way in hell vibe.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said.

“We can’t,” Charlie said.

“We can.”

I took a step toward him, but he took a step backward. Then I stepped closer, and he stepped back. “Emma? Don’t. Hey—this is a bad idea. Hey! I’m serious.”

At that, Charlie reached for a pair of tongs on the counter, and he held them up like a weapon.

A weapon of self-defense.

Something about that visual stopped me.

I suddenly saw the scene from a different vantage point: a predatory female writer advancing on her coworker as he defended himself with kitchen utensils.

Wow. He wasn’t kidding. This guy really didn’t want to kiss me.

Like, at all.

To the point where he would brandish a pair of kitchen tongs.

The sting of rejection hit me, and I held still for a second, not sure how to respond.

I dropped my eyes. Then, to the floor, I said, “You really are horrified by this idea.”

“Not horrified—”

“Repulsed, then, I guess.”

“No, I—”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I squinted at the window, instead. “I had no idea that I was such a revolting option.”

“Come on, Emma. That’s not it.”

But it really did seem like it was it. At least, it felt that way.

“Okay,” I said, feeling everything in reverberations. “That’s fine.”

I turned around and started walking away.

I didn’t even know where I was going, to be honest.

Hell of a rejection, huh?

Charlie didn’t even want to kiss me for research.

How unappealing are you, exactly, to not even qualify for a research kiss?

How stomach-turning must you be for a man to take up arms against you?

I could dwell on feminist-y questions like why the hell Charlie Yates of all people got to be the arbiter of my personal appeal later. Right now, only one thing was clear: I’d been fully willing to kiss him. And Charlie Yates—most definitely, most emphatically—had not been even the tiniest bit willing to kiss me.

Fine. Fine.

The rejection descended into a burning humiliation. All I could think of to stop it was to flat-out flee the room. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t care—but I felt so rejected, I couldn’t even do that.

“Emma,” Charlie said, following me.

“I get it. It’s cool,” I said, walking faster. “I’ve just gotta—I just need to—” But my mind was jumbled. What did I need to do? What out-of-nowhere pressing issue could serve as the pretend reason I was leaving?

There was nothing. Nothing convincing, anyway.

“Emma,” Charlie said, with a tone like Don’t.

Don’t what?Don’t get your feelings hurt? Don’t overreact?

Don’t walk away?

Charlie was gaining on me, and I wasn’t sure what I would do when he caught up.

I just needed a minute to regroup and hide all my feelings behind a mask of indifference—a minute that Charlie wasn’t giving me.

Which seemed wildly impolite.

A minute to hide! Was that so much to ask for?

But that’s when Charlie caught my arm and tugged it.

I stopped and let him turn me around.

I could have ripped out of his grasp and taken off sprinting, I guess. But the game was already up. I was a writer, not an actor. My hurt and disappointment and infinite vulnerabilities were plain to see in every possible way.

The sight of my face just confirmed it all for Charlie.

I watched him reading me in real time.

“Did I—disappoint you just then?” Charlie asked.

I looked down. “No,” I said. But it was an obvious yes.

“Did I hurt you?”

I shook my head, but I didn’t meet his eyes.

“Did you want to do that research kiss?”

“No.” Not convincing.

“Emma…” Charlie said, taking in all this new information.

Finally, I brought my eyes up.

Charlie was leaning in with concern. And intensity. And maybe a whole new understanding of who he had become to me.

He took a step forward—and then it was my turn to take a step back.

“Are you pitying me right now?” I asked.

He took another step closer, and this time, I backed into the kitchen doorjamb.

“It’s fine,” I insisted. “I don’t care.” But I was such a bad liar.

When he took a final step, there was nowhere for me to go.

He closed the gap and leaned in closer. “I didn’t want to kiss you—” he started.

“Yeah. I got that. Thank you.”

But Charlie gave a sharp headshake, like I hadn’t let him finish. “For research.”

I held very still.

“I didn’t want to kiss you for research,” Charlie said again, watching me to see if I got it.

Did I get it?

Neither of us was sure.

Charlie gave it another second—waiting for my expression to shift into understanding.

But I was afraid to understand. What if I got it wrong?

So Charlie gave up on the waiting.

Instead, he cradled my face in his hands and tilted me up to meet his eyes.

Then he shifted his gaze from my eyes to my mouth, and he wasn’t just looking, he was seeing. It was like he was taking in everything about my mouth—from color, to texture, to shape. It was physical, like it had a force, and I swear I could feel it, like he was brushing the skin of my lips with nothing but the intensity of his gaze.

And then he leaned in closer, staying laser-focused on this one place right in front of him.

The anticipation was excruciating.

I watched his mouth as he leaned closer.

And then, just as we touched, he brought his hand into my hair to hold me close.

And I stretched my arms up around his neck.

And the kiss just took over.

His mouth felt smooth and firm and soft all at once, and the warmth and tenderness of it all swirled together with my dawning understanding that this was happening—Charlie Yates was kissing me. And a dreamy euphoria hijacked all my senses, and I felt like long grass billowed by the wind.

I was just sinking into it when Charlie pulled back a little and opened his eyes to check my reaction, like Was that okay?

Um. Was that even a question? We’d need a better word for okay.

I reached up behind Charlie’s neck to pull him back.

Had I been ragging on Charlie for forgetting what kissing was like?

Because I’m not sure I ever knew in the first place.

There’s something about a kiss that brings all the opposites together. The wanting and the getting. The longing and the having. All those cacophonous emotions that usually collide against one another teaming up at last into a rare and exquisite harmony.

I remember pressing my mouth to his, and plunging into a feeling of being lost—submerged in touch and closeness. I remember our arms wreathing and entwining around each other, and pulling tighter and exploring. I remember how my palms wanted to feel everything they could find: the sandpapery stubble on his neck, the muscles across his shoulders, and his solid torso under his T-shirt.

He felt real.

But more than that: he made me feel real.

The kiss lit a warmth that spread through me like honey, softening everything tense, and soothing everything hurt, and enveloping everything lonely.

I’d dated other people before. I’d had a few mild relationships. But I’d never felt anything like this.

And then a thought hit me: This might be love.

Oh, god. This really might be love.

But then, before I could decide if that was a good thing or a disaster, the oven timer for dinner went off.

Loud. Off-key. Insistent.

We ignored it until we couldn’t ignore it anymore, and then we broke apart—him looking exactly as disheveled as I felt.

I walked over to the stove, but then it took me a second to find the oven mitts that were on the counter right in front of me. I pulled dinner out, and set it on the stovetop for a second while I tried to pull myself together.

I guessed Charlie was doing the same.

Because just as I turned to him, unsure of how to shift gears from whatever that just was to doing an ordinary thing like eating dinner… Charlie said, with a slow nod, “I get it now.”

“Get what?” I asked.

Charlie met my eyes. “Why we’re rewriting this story.”