Chapter 5
Chapter 5
A few hours later than Jaime had wanted to start, Scarlett reclined on a couch in his den, looking like an empress. The only thing messing up the picture was the mug of coffee dangling from her hand. Regal folks probably didn’t need caffeine.
For so long, Jaime had only seen the celebrity version of Scarlett Arbuthnot, and he’d only caught glimpses of that on TV and social media. She showed up at every tournament looking impossibly glamorous, putting her femininity on display as if to say If you want to make it an issue, fine. Here I am dressed like a pinup girl . Her image was a finely honed thing—and it was a mask.
In contrast, the woman across from him was real . Her hair was still styled and her lipstick was still perfect, but this was Scarlett, not Scarlett?. That Jaime was privileged enough to peek behind the construction threatened to turn him into a marshmallow.
He had to resist the urge, though, because he needed to keep some distance here. They had a job to do.
Her lips twitched. She knew Jaime was watching her. After a few beats, she sent him a sidelong glance. “Will this get less weird?”
“Less like the first day of class?” Because things between Jaime and Scarlett could never be less weird.
“Yup.” Scarlett splayed a hand on the coffee table between them and leaned toward him. In a low voice, she said, “Tell me”—in that moment, he would’ve told her anything—“how do you write a television show?”
“Well, shit, Scarlett, I was hoping you knew.”
She laughed that big laugh of hers, the one that always seemed to find all the little drafty corners of his soul and plug them up. After a minute, she flopped back onto the couch and gestured with her mug at the yellow legal pads he’d hopefully piled in between them. A lipstick kiss stained the rim of the mug, which was endearing as hell.
“I’m serious—I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He wanted to ask why she’d finagled her way into this, then, but he swallowed the words down. It would only lead to a fight, and he needed to set the right tone for their first day since he was basically in charge here.
“The first thing we ought to do is to figure out how we want to break the book down. Like, what are the necessary chunks, and how do we want to structure the episodes?”
“How did you do that for The Devouring Sun ?”
It was difficult to even remember. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when I started. I didn’t even realize it was going to be a docudrama. I didn’t think it was going to be anything. It started as a journal, and became ...” Jaime trailed off.
Across from him, Scarlett watched him steadily. There wasn’t a hint of prompting or pressure from her.
He’d watched footage of her matches on YouTube, and one of the things that impressed him the most about her play was how contained she was, and how patient. High-stakes tournament chess matches could take hours —hours to do what the very same players might accomplish in a few minutes in a blitz match.
Whatever else chess was, it was a mindfuck. And Scarlett was obviously extremely good at that side of it. When she wanted to, Scarlett could wait as long as it took for someone to make their move.
She waited for Jaime to be ready, as still as a statue. As if time had ceased to matter.
Finally, he said, “I wanted to—make amends. Dad hurt a lot of people.” Even now, years into it, Jaime doubted that he’d taken the full measure of the destruction. He’d probably never catalog it all.
Scarlett didn’t say anything, just kept watching him.
“At first, I was just writing about what I knew had happened, and speculating about what I thought might have happened.” Since he was saying it out loud, and saying it to someone who actually understood versus an entertainment reporter who didn’t know or care about Musgrove at all, the words began to come out in a big rush. “Then I started interviewing people, at least the people who would talk to me, and those who were still alive.” Not to mention those who weren’t in prison themselves, though Jaime had visited folks in prison, too, as long as they were willing to talk to him. “The more people I talked to, the more I just kept writing. At some point, I looked up and I had hundreds of pages of notes, and I had to decide what the hell to do with it.”
With Queen’s Kiss , he knew exactly what the final product would look like. So much of this was already defined for them. The Devouring Sun had been totally different.
That kind of absolute freedom frankly scared the piss out of Jaime. He didn’t know if he would ever be brave enough to write something like that again. He’d take the guarantees and certainties of what he and Scarlett were up to here over the amorphous possibilities of that any day.
Scarlett’s mouth twisted into a grin. “And so you invented a new form?”
“No. Plenty of films blend fiction and nonfiction. The Act of Killing , Nomadland , Four Daughters . I didn’t invent crap.” Jaime was always quick to point out the filmmakers whose work he’d built on. Just because The Devouring Sun was the first film of this kind some people had seen didn’t make it the first one.
“Modesty doesn’t suit you.”
“Then it’s good I’m not being modest.”
Scarlett’s answering smile indicated she liked that. Scarlett had always reveled in a good back-and-forth. No one he’d known before or since was a better sparring partner than she was. All Jaime’s subsequent relationships had been ... safer. Gentler. But without that tug-of-war, he’d felt as if he were playing at love on easy mode.
Her eyes went nova bright as she said, “You know what we should do? We should watch it.”
“Um, do we have to?” Jaime hated watching himself on screen—and hearing his own recorded voice was basically nails on a chalkboard.
Scarlett got to her feet and began hunting around the coffee table for the TV remote. “It’ll be fun. You can do, like, a live commentary track. I promise I’ll be very impressed.”
The look she shot him over her shoulder nearly singed him. He swallowed, hard.
Tossing herself back on her couch, she said, “Resistance is futile, Jaime.”
With her, it always was.
She turned on the television and navigated to Videon. Then she pulled up the first episode of The Devouring Sun and hit Play. “Here we go.”
“Hooray.” Jaime didn’t try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
He’d taken the first shot on his phone, and it showed. The colors were flat, sterile. Jaime was in his father’s truck—which was still sitting in the garage at his mom’s house, across town—driving down Main Street. The brick facades flashed by on screen, and then Jaime came to a stop at a red light. No one was coming the other direction.
A critic had said that was a metaphor, but Jaime knew he hadn’t been that thoughtful.
On the TV, Jaime began speaking. His voice sounded thin and reedy. “My father’s family goes way back in Musgrove, Virginia. The town was founded when the railroad was built to connect with a mine in 1882. A Croft was the second mayor of the town. Crofts have sat on the city council and the school board. My dad always took great pride in that history, and he often said that the reason he came back to town after medical school to become a general practitioner was to keep it up. So it was more than a little surprising when he was arrested the week after my high school graduation. He eventually pled guilty to more than eight hundred counts of illegally distributing controlled substances, for which he received a sentence of forty-one years. He lives in the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, and he’ll probably be there for the rest of his life.”
The streetlight turned green, but before the truck rolled forward, there was a cut to the actors who played his parents, in the actual kitchen of his parents’ actual house. Then to the faces of half a dozen people Jaime would interview in the show: a judge, an addiction counselor, several of Dad’s “patients,” a woman whose husband had died of an oxy overdose.
The speed of the cuts kept accelerating, until the montage felt like a whirlwind. Jaime had no idea how many times he’d reworked this sequence. How many different songs he’d tried under it before he’d chosen this jarring banjo piece.
When they’d acquired the film for distribution, Videon had warned Jaime that this moment—two minutes into a streaming program—was the most important juncture. This was the place where you either kept your audience or they flipped to something else. He’d had to nail this bit.
Jaime had realized then that whatever dreams he had about making art or self-expression or justice, those goals didn’t matter for shit if no one stuck around to see the film. It was all well and good to want to say something, but it’d just be a tree hitting the forest floor unless somebody saw it. He wanted them to see it.
Maybe caring about having an audience made him a sellout, but if so, Jaime could live with it.
The title card flashed on the screen, the words stark against the black background. Before it faded, Nettie Gill’s voice came on. “Sure, I know Dr. Croft. Everyone knows Dr. Croft.”
Scarlett probably knew Nettie. She’d been a teller at the bank, at least until her life had fallen apart, all thanks to Jaime’s father.
Off-screen, Jaime’s recorded voice said, “What do they know him for, Nettie?”
“He’s one of the only doctors in town.”
“Is that it?”
She swallowed. “He’ll give you whatever you want. If you make it worth his while.”
Across from him, Scarlett was watching, rapt. She lifted the remote and paused. Nettie froze midgrimace. How appropriate.
When Scarlett looked at Jaime, the only thing that made the moment bearable was that there wasn’t a whiff of pity in her expression. “Why did you decide to start the show this way?”
Jaime had to detach himself from the sick mess of emotions in his gut. Even after years of therapy, the guilt and revulsion that he still felt when he thought about what his dad had done, and Jaime’s family’s blindness to it, was unbearable.
He drew several sharp breaths before the nausea passed and he could find the words to answer Scarlett’s question. “To hook people. And I figured that a son investigating his dad’s crimes would be pretty darn hooky.” You can’t look away : that was what all the reviewers had said.
“So you began with your dad’s guilt?”
“He did it. That was never a question.” Once Jaime had gotten over the shock of it, he’d never once thought that Dad might be innocent. “I wanted to know what caused him to do it.”
“Your real question was why?” This seemed to surprise her.
“Yup.”
It sounded so cut and dried, but it certainly hadn’t felt—and didn’t feel—that way. Even now, the things he’d recorded in The Devouring Sun made Jaime itchy. Actually, corporally itchy. As if he could’ve taken a Lava bar into the shower and removed enough of his skin to feel clean again.
The answer that Jaime had uncovered, essentially that his dad had done it because of a mix of greed and hubris, had been so depressing. He’d done it for money? For fucking money ? How gross.
Many people didn’t get that the name of the show was a reference to Icarus.
“We’re getting off track,” Jaime said. “We need to get back to Queen’s Kiss and how we want to structure the episodes.”
“Hmm.” Scarlett tapped the remote on the couch, pondering. “I dunno that I understand my own book well enough to break it down like that, and I wrote it.”
“I’ve got some rough notes, but it may take us a while to wrap our heads around the structure. You know what occurs to me, though: we’ve both written memoirs.”
They’d worked in different mediums, and they’d had different goals. Scarlett had wanted to create institutional change, that was clear. For all that The Devouring Sun intersected with questions about the law and policy, Jaime hadn’t been trying to say anything about those things. His focus was much smaller, much more personal than that. He’d written the show for himself first, and anything else had come later.
That was why Jaime had wanted Queen’s Kiss to be his next project, why anything else would’ve seemed like settling. Because in adapting Scarlett’s book with her, he might have his only other shot to answer something large and abstract he hadn’t nailed in The Devouring Sun : How did you know what had really happened?
“When I was writing The Devouring Sun , it was hard for me to know how to tell the truth. To know what the truth even was.”
“Well,” Scarlett said, “I sure as heck don’t know.”
“I guess we’ll have to figure it out together.”
She lifted the remote. “Can you take more of this?”
“I can stand it if you can.”
That could be the motto for them working together, really.
When the first episode of The Devouring Sun had finished, Scarlett turned the TV off. Jaime was trying to act tough, but he was clearly struggling to watch it, and she didn’t want to torture the man. She’d put him through enough.
“Well,” Jaime said before trailing off. He was sprawled out on the couch across from hers, his gray Henley riding up to expose several inches of his taut belly, which Scarlett was studiously ignoring.
Most of the time.
It was a cosmic joke that Jaime could’ve passed for the best-looking guy on the ninth green but had ended up as a writer. Some wires had gotten crossed somewhere along the way, and only a mean and meddling deity could explain it.
Even still, Scarlett could give the guy an out. “I didn’t know you worked on Waverley .” Violet had told her that when they’d been signing the contract. Her agent had been awfully curious who had finally managed to get Scarlett to fork over the rights to her precious book.
Talking about his career—and not his previous film—clearly settled Jaime down. “Zoya Delgado and I met at an incubator for showrunners, and we became friends. Scottish historical romance isn’t my normal stuff, but thanks to Zoya, I got to know some execs at Videon, and in the end, that paid off.”
Scarlett wanted to ask how much of the steamy stuff he’d written— Waverley was awfully sexy—but she knew that she needed to play things closer to the vest. They had a job to do here. She had to stop juggling knives around him, or eventually she was going to drop one and sever a toe.
Jaime scrubbed his hands over his eyes, which pulled his shirt up farther. He’d grown up, that was for sure. Back when she’d been fingering those abs, he’d been as hairless as the statue of David over in Italy. Now, he was all man, with the dusting of dark hair to show for it.
It really worked for her.
But she didn’t have the time, not to mention the emotional capacity, for it to work for her. They needed to write this show so she could get out of Musgrove and back to her real life.
“So how did you approach Waverley ?”
“Zoya already had things pretty much worked out,” Jaime admitted. “We were just refining her vision. And don’t start—I see that taunting smile.”
“It was more heckling.” Taunting was meaner than she wanted to be. Mostly, she just wanted to tease him some.
Tease him in the absolutely most platonic way.
“If I’d been as directive as Zoya, you would’ve fought me,” he said flatly.
“Of course.”
“Plus this isn’t my story. Tell me this: Why did you write the book?”
“Spite. I had this big blowup with PAWN when they said I hadn’t qualified for the last Candidates Tournament, but really, they were punishing me for making a stink about how they run things. My fight with them goes back to my very first tournament, way back in Tokyo.”
The tournament she’d left him to play in. The tournament she’d opened a credit card to pay for, maxing it out and risking everything—if she hadn’t won enough prize money to pay it off.
That sat between them for a long minute.
“They kept insisting that the restricted league is for women’s own good. That without it, no woman could even play at the international level. So I realized that the only way to force their hand was to go public.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t just announce that they’d agreed you qualified.”
“Ha. Well, unlike you, they would’ve called my bluff.”
“How did you know I wouldn’t?” Jaime asked.
“I didn’t. It was a calculated risk.”
“Do you approach everything as if it’s chess?”
“When that’ll help. Look, chess is about memorization and psychology. There are a finite number of moves on the board. There are only twenty possible openings, for crying out loud. Things get more complicated after that, of course, but if you’re willing to study, anyone can become a decent player.”
“But not a great one.”
Scarlett didn’t know what it meant to be a great chess player. Some of the winningest players were also some of the all-time biggest jerkwads. Scarlett was no picnic, but she also wasn’t Bobby freaking Fischer.
She shrugged. “Computers have the market cornered on studying. If all we care about is winning, humans should get out of the chess game. I’m not knocking hard work, but I don’t want to feel like a machine, you know?” Scarlett knew she was too mercurial, too earthy for that. “My strength as a player comes from my unpredictability.”
“The psychology is why you’ve always refused to play computers.” Jaime wasn’t asking it as a question. He already knew that was the answer.
“Yup. I like chess because of the human element. I wouldn’t want to play against a machine for the same reason I wouldn’t want to fuck one.” Scarlett rarely cursed outright. She didn’t want to give ammunition to people who expected a girl who’d lived in a trailer park to be low class. But since Jaime had heard worse from her before, she chose the most vulgar word possible to bait him.
Only it didn’t work quite as well as she hoped, because he didn’t get flustered. He just shot those fathoms-deep brown eyes of his to her and said, “Oh, same.”
His pronouncement revved her libido out of hibernation as surely as one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks, the ones with the bells on top that could wake the dead. Which made sense: her sex drive had basically been on life support. All Jaime had to do was reference sex and it sat bolt upright.
This is what you’ve been waiting for: he’s the real deal.
The air between Jaime and Scarlett pulsed with heat, so tactile and real that she was almost worried about the coffee table between them bursting into flames.
Yup, they still had it. They would probably always have it. Their attraction was like plastic. It couldn’t be destroyed, and it would never degrade. Except there was nothing synthetic about it.
After a moment of letting the heat wash through her body, Scarlett pushed it aside. She had to. It was the third rail of this project, and she wasn’t going to touch it.
Tease him about it, sure. Think about it, definitely. But that was where it stopped.
She shook her head, sending a message to herself ... and maybe also to him. “The point is, I don’t accept cheap substitutes.” Not anymore, and not ever again.
Jaime scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, so we want to put that in the show. The feeling of playing in a high-stakes match.”
“Maybe not even a high-stakes match, because some of my most memorable games were back when I knew you.” While the stuff that had come later had been wonderful, there was something about those early years that had been electric. Maybe it was not knowing if she would reach her goals. Maybe it was not being jaded. Maybe it was everything feeling so flipping fresh. Whatever the reason, when she pictured her wins, it was often those first ones, not the later, bigger ones.
This seemed to amuse him. “You’re saying you played matches when you were, like, fifteen that you still think about as much as matches against the world champion?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s—good.” Suddenly, Jaime sounded very far away. He sat up, which sadly made his shirt fall over his torso.
Goodbye, happy trail.
Jaime began tapping around on the coffee table for his notebook and a pen. He’d gotten some basic yellow legal pads for her, but he still used a black Moleskine notebook with graph paper inside and a Uni-ball Vision pen. He’d mocked her once for not knowing how to pronounce Moleskine, and she’d gotten him back by—
“What if every episode starts in medias res?”
“Yeah, can you translate that for us peasants?”
Jaime shot a glare at her. “You’re a genius who’s memorized tens of thousands of chess moves and game diagrams.”
“But I don’t know what in medias res means because I didn’t go to college.”
“I started at Blue Ridge Community College, and my dad’s a felon. Don’t go acting like I’m some elitist.”
“Some of us are born in the palace, some in the fields.”
He rolled his eyes. “In medias res means ‘in the middle of things.’ So we start in the middle of a game, and it’s really immersive. Hyper-close-ups. We see the sweat on your lip, your smeared mascara.”
“I wear waterproof for that exact reason.”
Now, when Jaime’s eyes swept over her, it felt impersonal. He was in director mode now. He wasn’t even seeing Scarlett, the woman. He was seeing the show they were going to make.
“Then right as you reach for a piece—”
“Your chess ignorance is abominable.”
“—we jump back in time. Weeks, months, we can massage that. But we see you prepping for the match. Or fighting with PAWN. Or whatever else is happening in your life at that time. But the end of the episode catches up with the match we saw at the start. It’s like a loop.”
Oh, she got it now. “So I have to pick my ten biggest or most important games?”
“Yes. And each one frames an episode.”
“I like that.” She really liked it.
Jaime hadn’t heard her, though. He was already working, his hand flying over the page. “Make a list of games,” he instructed her, not looking up from his notebook. “Ones that you think might make for a juicy episode—when you were learning, or fighting against something, or when your opponent was especially interesting.”
“Ones where I looked super hot?”
“Sure.”
But he was so absorbed in his work, he didn’t look up. Or maybe he was smarter than she was, determined not to fall into the danger zone again.
“Okay.”
And so she got to work.