Chapter Twenty-Three
THE NEXT MORNING,on FaceTime, Sylvie and Salvador were a little dismayed.
“You had a totally epic kiss,” Sylvie asked, more than once, “and then you just ate roasted chicken?”
“With herbes de Provence,” I said, in our defense.
“You didn’t… I don’t know—confess a bunch of feelings?” Sylvie asked.
“Or have a night of passion?” Salvador suggested.
“No!” I said. “No. It was a first kiss!”
But Sylvie was calling bullshit on that. “You’ve been living together for weeks.”
“But as professional colleagues.”
“So…” Sylvie said. “Was the kiss real? Or was it research?”
“It was real,” I said.
Sylvie and Salvador looked at each other like I was some kind of love weakling. “Are you sure?”
“It was real for me,” I said. “And for him, too—I think. Just based on nonverbal cues.”
Sylvie frowned.
“He said he didn’t want to kiss me for research—and then he kissed me. So that implies it wasn’t research.”
But Sylvie kept frowning.
“What?”
“Could that have been part of the research, though?” she asked. “To pretend it wasn’t research?”
“No!” I said. “That’s crazy!” But was it also a good point?
Now we were overthinking it.
“This is ridiculous,” Sylvie said at last. “Just go ask him.”
“Ask him?!” I gasped in horror. “I will never ask him!”
“You don’t want to know?”
“I desperately want to know,” I said. “But I will just privately obsess over it, like a normal person.”
“Why can’t you just have a conversation? Tell him you like him and see if he likes you?”
“Please,” I said. “If human relationships worked like that, I’d be out of a job.”
Sylvie thought it over for a minute before saying, “Guess it’s time for Plan B.”
“What’s Plan B?”
“I’m FedExing you my slinkiest slinky dress and my strappiest strappy sandals.”
“For what?”
Sylvie leaned into the FaceTime camera, like Duh. “Put them on and see what happens.”
“Just put on a slinky dress for no reason and walk around his house like a lunatic?”
“Like a sexy lunatic,” Sylvie corrected. “It’s a maxi dress with a plunging V-neck made of silky fabric printed with giant tropical leaves. You’ve never worn anything like this in your life. You’re going to discover a whole new side of yourself.”
“What possible excuse would I have for wearing something like that?” I demanded.
“You’re a writer,” Sylvie said. “Make something up.”
UGH. LEAVE ITto me and Sylvie to overthink that lovely kiss and drain its afterglow with overprocessing.
Hadit just been research?
I hadn’t thought so at the time. But the fact that it hadn’t led to anything else seemed to refute that view. We had a mad kiss—and then ate dinner. It hadn’t seemed strange at the time, but the more I overthought it, the less sure I felt.
Maybe I didn’t really want to know.
I sent Charlie an overly cheerful text that said, Day off from swimming today! Enjoy sleeping in!
And then I took a shower and did the best I could with my hair and put on just a hint of eyeliner and lipstick—enough to try to look better without looking like I was trying. And then I tried on ten different outfits to wear before deciding to go with my usual writerly duds under my usual strawberry hoodie so that if that life-ruining kiss last night had, after all, only been research on Charlie’s end, I had plausible deniability.
It hadn’t been research for me.
But I would never, ever admit that—unless it hadn’t been research for Charlie, either.
I showed up at the writing table and couldn’t decide if Charlie had put product in his hair—or if it was just wet. If he was wearing aftershave—or if that was just his deodorant. If he was glancing my way more than usual—or just the regular amount.
One thing was for sure: There was a bouquet of peonies on the table.
“Nice flowers,” I said, sitting down.
Charlie looked over, like he hadn’t noticed them. “Yeah.”
“Were they there yesterday?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Any idea how they got there?”
Charlie nodded. “We were out of coffee this morning, so I had to hit the store.”
“Peonies are my favorite flower.”
Charlie looked up at that. “Are they? I wondered.”
“You wondered?”
“Yeah. Because you always look at them longingly when we’re at the market, but then you never buy them.”
I wrinkled my nose. “They’re like nine dollars a stem.”
“So you want to buy them, but they’re too expensive?”
“They’re just not the kind of flowers you buy for yourself.”
Charlie was quiet a second, and I realized he was suppressing a smile. “I’m glad I bought them for you, then.”
WE WORKED ALLday, and I can’t vouch for Charlie, but I had a buzzy feeling of anticipation the whole time. The kiss yesterday, the peonies, the way he kept glancing at me over his laptop screen—these things fluttered around my consciousness like butterflies of hope.
All signs pointed to not research.
It’s a wonder I could concentrate at all.
But then, in the late afternoon, Charlie got a phone call.
His phone started ringing, and he looked down at it for a second before he answered.
“This is Charlie,” Charlie said.
And then, I swear, he’d been listening only a few seconds when, in response to whatever he was hearing, he launched into a massive, hacking coughing fit—almost like a reverse spit take.
He had to set the phone down—that’s how all-encompassing it was.
“Sorry,” Charlie said, when he’d calmed down enough to bring the phone back to his ear. “Could you repeat that?”
Then he listened for a good minute—and as he did, his face went grayer and grayer, and I found myself at full attention, trying to figure out what the caller was saying. But nothing on Charlie’s end gave me any solid clues. “Yes, I did,” Charlie said, standing up now and starting to pace. “It was just for—” he started, and then followed that with “That’s right.” Then his whole body seemed to sink before he said, “You’re kidding me, right? Please tell me you’re kidding.” And then he made his way toward the French doors and—there’s no other way to describe it—hurled himself out to the yard.
I didn’t dare follow—just watched from inside.
I was engulfed in curiosity about what was going on, but he’d gone to the far side of the pool to pace, so I couldn’t hear anything. All I could do was watch his body language and try to read his lips.
Neither of which yielded results.
Was he arguing with someone? Trying to talk someone out of something? Working very hard to stay calm—but not succeeding?
More important: What was it all about? Was it the exec’s mistress saying she no longer wanted the screenplay? Was it the producer himself saying the Mafia thing was off? Was it Charlie’s ex-wife? His accountant? Some relative with bad family news?
I’d never seen Charlie act remotely like this.
The more he paced and argued, the more he coughed—as his breaths caught on each other and tripped over themselves. When the phone call finally ended, and he dropped his arm and let the phone fall away from his ear, he stood there, churning in the aftermath… and then he took his top-of-the-line phone and fully pelted it across the yard.
Then he paced the side of the pool again, grabbing his hair and letting it go, turning one way and then turning back, not seeming to see anything around him.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
And just as I’d made up my mind to go outside and ask if he was okay, Charlie came crashing back into the house, plowed straight over to the liquor cabinet, poured himself the biggest glass of whiskey I’d ever seen, and downed the whole thing.
“Charlie?” I said. “Are you okay?”
What a question. He was not.
Charlie turned at the sound of my voice, like he’d forgotten I even existed, and then came straight at me so fast I took a few steps backward, before he grabbed hold of me in a suffocating hug—and held on and didn’t let go for a long time, pulling in big breaths and pushing them out—that felt more like he was clinging to me for dear life than anything else.
And that’s when I suddenly wondered: Was he sick again?
Before I could ask, he’d gone back for another drink.
“What’s going on, Charlie?” I asked then, from across the room. “Is it— Are you sick? Is that what it is?”
This question really pissed him off. “I told you,” Charlie growled. “It’s just allergies.”
“No,” I said. “I mean sick sick.”
Sometimes you intuit a thing on impulse and you turn out to be right.
This was not one of those times.
Charlie gave me an Olympic-level eye roll that involved not just his face, but his neck and shoulders, too. Then he said, “Not everybody is dying all the time, Emma.”
There was a bitterness to his voice I hadn’t heard before. “I know. I just—”
“Let’s not add your paranoid hypochondria to this situation, okay? It’s bad enough without you backing up a whole dump truck of crazy.”
I blinked.
This wasn’t about me, of course. I’d just walked into Charlie’s own personal mysterious bad moment and suffered some collateral damage. But the meanness still stung. I withdrew a bit, and then I said, “I just want to know if you’re okay.”
“Guess what? You don’t have to know everything. Yes, you’re living in my house, and yes, we’re spending a lot of time together, and yes, we get along almost stupidly well—but that doesn’t give you the right to pry into every nook and cranny of my existence. Sometimes I’m going to have shit to deal with that’s none of your damn business.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Great,” Charlie said.
“Don’t tell me, then,” I said.
“I’m not going to.”
“I just wanted to help.”
“There it is, right there,” Charlie said. “I don’t need your help, and I sure as hell don’t want it. So why don’t you just back off?”
HE MARCHED OUTafter that, and I didn’t see him again until after midnight.
I spent the day “working,” but was totally unable to concentrate, walking to the front door every time I heard a car go by. He’d left without his car, and he’d also left his cell phone in the backyard, and I just couldn’t imagine how a phoneless, carless person could be gone so long in LA.
If it wasn’t that he was sick again—what was it?
I called Logan, but he didn’t know. I called Sylvie to process, but we were just like loony birds trading nutty theories. Could he have a secret love child? Could he have been falsely accused of murder? Could his financial advisors have stolen all his money?
“My bet’s on the ex-wife getting remarried,” Sylvie said.
But I wrinkled my nose. “He doesn’t even like her. I’m telling you this was something big. Something catastrophic.” But what?
I WAS ASLEEPon the sofa when Charlie finally got home—and rang the bell twenty times.
I heard the sound in my dream for a minute before realizing it was real. Then I shuffled to the door and opened it.
I think he kept ringing the bell even after I’d answered, but all I remember was the sight of his face—covered in blood. One swollen purple eye, a split lip, and a veritable goatee of blood that had gushed from a recently punched nose.
“Charlie!” I gasped at the sight. “What the hell happened?”
But Charlie just squinted at me. “What happened to what?”
“To your face! You look like somebody beat you with a two-by-four.”
Charlie touched it, like he needed to jog his memory. “Oh,” he said. “Bar fight.”
“Bar fight?!” I demanded, like nothing could be more ridiculous. Writers imagined bar fights. They didn’t actually do them.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Charlie asked then.
“Because you just woke me up.”
He turned around like he was looking for himself. “I did?”
I sighed. “Yes. When you rang the bell for ten minutes straight.”
“I’m the worst,” Charlie said, remembering. “Another reason to stay away from me.”
“Who gets into a bar fight?” I demanded. “That’s a TV thing. That’s not a real thing that real people do.”
Charlie shrugged. “Some guy called Jack Stapleton an overpaid hack.”
“So you just hit him?”
“I meant to verbally spar with him,” Charlie said, “but he wasn’t much of a wordsmith.”
“You tried for a battle of wits in a bar.”
“It escalated quickly.”
“Charlie,” I said. “You’re such a dummy.”
Charlie nodded in agreement. “It’s possible I was spoiling for a fight.”
“You’re way too famous to be getting into bar fights,” I said.
“This wasn’t a paparazzi kind of place.”
Charlie had wedged himself against the doorframe while he was ringing the bell—and as soon as he tried to unwedge himself to come inside, he stumbled forward, attempted to catch himself, and wound up draping himself over me and collapsing.
“Hey!” I said, buckling under his weight. “Get off!”
From the crook of my neck, he tried to bargain with me in a muffled voice: “Thirty seconds.” Then he lifted his head to check my reaction. “Okay?”
He was looking at me intensely, waiting for an answer.
Or maybe it wasn’t intensity. Maybe he was just trying to focus his eyes.
“Let’s go in, Charlie,” I said. “We need to figure out what to do with your face.”
But Charlie didn’t move. “You always say people falling on each other isn’t romantic—but then it always is.”
His bloody face. His puffy eye. The scrapes on his cheek. The smell of liquor and other people’s cigarettes. “Nothing about this is romantic,” I said.
But I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth.
“That’s debatable,” Charlie said, tripping a little over the syllables.
I shifted into action, strapping my arm around his rib cage to haul him toward the kitchen, but as soon as I did, he started coughing deep, heavy coughs—and I wondered if he’d broken a rib.
I made him work on drinking a bottle of water while I pressed all around on his torso to see if anything felt broken or tender. “I’m fine,” Charlie kept saying. “Nothing’s broken.”
Next, I went through like a whole roll of paper towels to clean the blood off his face. He watched me the whole time.
“Sorry that this is gross,” he said.
“I’m wondering if we should take you to the hospital.”
“Over my dead body,” Charlie said.
“That’s the whole question,” I said.
“I hate hospitals,” Charlie said.
“That’s not relevant,” I said.
“It looks worse than it is.”
So I googled “How to know when to take someone to the hospital after a bar fight” and discovered that many of the symptoms for a worrying head injury are the same as just being stupidly drunk.
“I’m not going, anyway,” Charlie said. “This is gratuitous googling.”
“I’ll decide if you’re going,” I said, busting out my in-charge voice.
“I’ll do that thing where protestors lie down on the road—and then you’ll have to drag my two-hundred-pound ass the whole way.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Yeah, good luck.”
I’d dragged my dad many places for many reasons. “I’m stronger than I look.”
“Actually,” Charlie said, his voice softening, “I believe that.”
BY THE TIMEI was done cleaning up his face, Charlie looked a lot better. He had a cut on his swollen eye where the other guy’s fist had popped the skin. I leaned in close to peer at it. “You should get stitches for this.”
“Nope.”
“It might leave a scar.”
“There are no words for how much I don’t care.”
I sighed. And then I just kind of gave up. Yes, I’d helped my dad many times—but my dad had wanted me to help him. It was one thing to drag an incapacitated man to the hospital. It was quite another to drag an unwilling one.
“Drink,” I urged, filling Charlie’s water glass.
To my relief, he did—big, sloppy gulps that sloshed out and ran down his neck.
I found some Neosporin and a Band-Aid. Then, while I took my time applying both, I asked, “What was that phone call, Charlie?”
When Charlie didn’t respond, I prompted: “Earlier today? The phone call?”
Charlie shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
“You can, though. You really can.”
But he shook his head again. “That’s need-to-know info.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll ruin your life.”
“It’ll ruin my life?” Just how drunk was this guy?
“Or maybe it’s my life it’ll ruin. But you won’t be too pleased about it, either.”
Once the Band-Aid was on, I shoved myself up under his armpit like a crutch, then half walked, half dragged him toward his bedroom.
At his bed, he collapsed backward across the comforter.
“Do you want to put on pajamas?” I asked.
Charlie kept his eyes closed and shook his head.
His feet were still flat on the floor, so I knelt down to untie his shoes and take them off.
When I finished, Charlie was sitting up—and looking down at me.
“I think,” he said, surprisingly lucid for a moment, “that you’re my favorite person I’ve ever met.”
“Oh,” I said, looking back down. “That’s very nice of you.”
“And I’ve met”—and here, less lucid, he made a big, drunk gesture—“everybody. In the world. And you’re my favorite. Out of all seven billion.”
What did words like that mean coming from a person in this state?
I had no idea.
“How crazy is that?” Charlie asked, leaning closer to study my face, like he might find the answer there. “I’ve known you six weeks, and I already can’t imagine my life without you.”
“Six weeks can be a long time,” I said.
“Not quite six weeks,” Charlie corrected then. “Thirty-seven days.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
“You’re weirdly good at counting, for a writer.”
But Charlie didn’t respond. He just let his gaze travel from my eyes to my chin to my cheekbones to my mouth and back again, taking in the sight of me like he might never see it again.
For a second, I wondered if he might kiss me.
But then, instead, he clutched me to him in a tight hug.
And before he let go, he whispered, “What am I going to do, Emma? You’re going to hate me so much tomorrow.”