Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Jaime hadn’t anticipated flaming out so spectacularly. Even the Hindenburg had flown for a while before going kaboom. Jaime hadn’t even made it three minutes.
A zeppelin had outperformed him.
He flopped face down on the bed in his hotel room, the rayon comforter scratching his cheek. How was he going to tell Nate Pace, his coproducer and cinematographer, that he’d failed? She’ll hear me out. I got this. He’d said those exact words only a few hours ago.
Jaime had been confident because Scarlett considering and accepting his proposal made sense for both of them. He had the right vision to adapt her book, and it would benefit them both.
Except she hadn’t had the slightest interest in his offer, dammit.
Before Dad had gone to jail, Jaime had been amiable but aimless. Afterward, he’d had to make a choice: step up or lose everything. Jaime chose the former, rebuilding himself as a tower of strength and will. Support his mom and sister and hold their family together through the storm? No problem. Commute to college while working full time, and graduate? Totally doable. Make a docudrama about his dad’s crimes on a shoestring budget and win a truckload of awards? Nailed it.
Through it all, Jaime had learned that he liked to be in charge. He was good at managing details and people, which was why filmmaking suited him.
But that was useless here. Scarlett and Jaime were two massive storm systems, clashing together and spinning off tornadoes. He couldn’t overpower her, and he definitely didn’t dazzle her. The only surprising part was why he’d thought he could.
In his pocket, his phone buzzed. Nate.
Jaime flopped onto his back and answered. “Hey, what’s up?”
“So I’m dying to hear how it went,” Nate said, talking over him.
There wasn’t any point in being coy. “Not well.”
“She didn’t like the presentation?” Nate—who totally believed Jaime was a force of nature—was shocked.
“She didn’t hear the presentation. Rejected it out of hand.”
Nate whistled. “Dude, I can’t remember the last time you whiffed.”
Because Jaime usually got what he wanted. “I may have overestimated how much my history with Scarlett could help.” He hadn’t told Nate the full story; he hadn’t told anyone the full story. It had been easier to simply say We went to high school together .
Truth be told, when he’d found out Scarlett had written a book, he’d been terrified that he was going to find a no-holds-barred account of their relationship in it. Even now, he had no idea if he ought to feel comforted or insulted that he wasn’t in there.
Did we mean nothing? But it had been a high school relationship. It wasn’t as if they were soul mates.
“Look, it isn’t your fault. She clearly doesn’t want to sell the option. We’ve tried everything at this point, and we’ve run out of road. That’s just the way it is sometimes. No big deal.”
It felt like a pretty big deal.
“It’s the one I wanted.” The other projects Nate had pitched to Jaime didn’t come close to getting his blood up the way Scarlett’s memoir had.
Jaime’s phone sounded, and he glanced at the screen. It was a message from Larry Gomez at Videon, with the subject line Good News re: Queen’s Kiss .
“Um, do you see Larry’s email?”
Jaime was already pulling it up. Arbuthnot accepted the terms! Congrats on landing her book. We knew you’d get it, the message began.
Nate was shouting into the phone, “Was this a joke? You asshole, it was a joke. Goddamn it. You really had me going there. You sold the fuck out of that. I should’ve known. I should have known . You always seal the deal.”
“Ha,” Jaime said, without any humor. A sandstorm raged in his head. This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. It had to be some kind of mistake.
But there it was, undeniable in the pixels on his screen: Scarlett’s agent had called Videon to say she was glad someone had finally made the right offer to Scarlett and to lay out their terms.
Wait, their terms ?
“I can live with most of these,” Nate was saying. “I mean, whatever it takes to get her on board, right? We always knew she was going to want some stuff. Beyond money, that is.”
The money stuff was all on Videon. Jaime couldn’t care less where that was concerned—even if it was an eye-popping amount. Jaime had seen her apartment building, so he knew Scarlett had bills to pay.
“The coproducer credit, we anticipated that. Her serving as the chess consultant on set, I mean, we would’ve wanted that anyhow. Our worry would’ve been getting her to agree to it. The cowriting thing, though, that one gives me pause. We think she wrote this book”—meaning that she hadn’t used a ghostwriter—“but we aren’t sure. And even if she could write a memoir, that doesn’t mean she can write for television.”
Up to now, Jaime hadn’t used a writer’s room. He’d worked in a couple of them on friends’ projects, just to get a sense of how they worked—Christ on a cracker, he had Hollywood friends like Zoya Delgado now! Those writer’s rooms had been fine. Historical romances like Waverley weren’t exactly his cup of tea, but he’d learned more about the business, and that was priceless.
The idea of writing his own project with someone else was another matter, though. It made him want to crawl out of his skin—and if the person in question were Scarlett ... holy shit.
Jaime had breathed the same air as her for three minutes in her lobby, and his brain had rebooted. He’d become the human version of the blue screen of death. Would he be able to function alongside Scarlett on set?
Well, there would be dozens of people around during filming, and he would have a job to do. If he worked himself up to it in small doses, Jaime might be able to inoculate himself, like building up tolerance to a poison.
But first, they would have to write the scripts, and writing wasn’t like filming. It was private and painful, and it took a long time. Jaime couldn’t handle weeks or months of alone time with Scarlett. He couldn’t. He’d vaporize.
“Yeah, I’m not sure about it either.”
“Then why did you say yes?”
Yup, Larry had forwarded Violet Kemp’s email to Jaime and Nate, and there it was: Scarlett was especially glad that Mr. Croft agreed to co-write the first-pass scripts together. She wants to maintain editorial control over her own story, and she only agreed to the deal because Mr. Croft is giving that to her.
Scarlett had clearly made the calculation she would be better off saying that Jaime had given her everything she wanted. Which was ... ballsy and very much like her. It was Scarlett’s latest bold move in a lifetime of brash play.
She knew Jaime wasn’t going to risk scuttling the deal by saying that they hadn’t agreed to shit, even if they hadn’t, because he’d showed up on her doorstep and begged. She knew exactly how invested he was in this story, and so she had all the power.
Jaime was in awe of how her mind worked.
“I didn’t think I had a choice,” he said to Nate.
“You probably should’ve run that past me—and Videon—first.”
“That’s a fair critique.”
“You wanna try and renegotiate it?” Nate asked. “We could get Craig Gillespie”—a lawyer they worked with sometimes—“to call this Violet person up. He can play hardball when he wants to.”
Jaime knew Scarlett, though, and she wasn’t going to budge. She would only do this if she could be involved in every step of the process. And since Queen’s Kiss was the only project he wanted, he was going to have to pay the piper and figure out how to write the damn thing with his ex.
“No, don’t call Craig. Scarlett was clear about this.” At least in her agent’s email.
“Divas,” Nate said with a knowing sigh. “Let’s hope she can write, then. Or if she can’t, that she’s content sitting there and watching you do it.”
Ha. Scarlett had never been passive a day in her life.
“I don’t really blame her,” Jaime admitted. “It is her memoir, after all.”
“True. It’s not as if you would’ve handed The Devouring Sun over to someone else.”
“Definitely not. Scarlett and I ... we’ll find a way to work together.”
Jaime had no idea what that might look like. One thing was for sure, he was going to have to quit lusting after her. Especially since she’d seemed to be totally unaffected by him.
Which was good. Detached professionalism was the only way they were going to get through a year and a half or more of a lot of togetherness.
“I hope she likes moody.”
“Hey, I’m not moody.”
“You absolutely are. But you make up for it by being exceptionally talented.”
Jaime snorted.
The shock of Scarlett’s Molotov cocktail was fading, and Jaime was starting to crawl out from underneath the furniture. He’d gotten the project that he’d wanted. He was going to prove to everyone he wasn’t a one-hit wonder and he could make work that wasn’t based on his own life. He blew out a long sigh of relief.
“I’m really pumped,” Nate said. “When do you think she’ll want to start working?”
“No idea. She didn’t mention her schedule.” In the version of this where Scarlett had listened to his proposal and agreed to grant him the option like someone who wasn’t cosplaying as a feral cat, Jaime had been hoping to get started before the holidays. Getting a workable version of the scripts was the necessary precondition to everything else: scouting locations, planning the shoot, casting, and all the rest. The sooner they could hammer those out—and if he and Scarlett were involved, there would be hammering—the better.
“I’ll write Larry back as soon as we get off this call, with a few dates,” Jaime told Nate.
Scarlett would probably want to work here in New York. Jaime stood up and crossed to the window. Pushing the curtains apart, he looked down at the street, an asphalt ribbon at the bottom of the dizzying canyon of buildings. He enjoyed the city for short stretches here and there, but he couldn’t imagine having to be here for a substantial length of time. He’d miss his regular visits to see Dad, and he’d have to find someone to cover his support group for friends and family of incarcerated persons. New York would be like LA for Jaime. Parachuting in for work now and again was fine, but no place that wasn’t Musgrove would ever feel like home.
Then, like a shot, it struck him.
“The one thing we agreed on, though, that’s not in Violet’s email was where we were going to work.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, she wants to write it in Musgrove.” If Scarlett could play this move, he could too.
“You invited her to the cabin?”
“Yup. She sounded very excited to get back home for a bit.”
As far as Jaime knew, Scarlett had never been back to Musgrove, not even for a vacation. But the only way Jaime was going to be able to get through this was to do it in a place where he felt comfortable, not a place he simply endured.
Musgrove might have been where he’d experienced the worst moments of his life, but it had also been where he had lived through them and where he had found himself. There wasn’t anywhere else where he’d be able to write these scripts.
“Okay, sounds great,” Nate said. “I’m just relieved we got it.”
And Jaime was just sorry he was going to miss Scarlett’s reaction to him claiming home field advantage.