Chapter 8
Chapter 8
“So you wish they hadn’t green-lit your series. Is that what you’re saying?” Zoya Delgado, Jaime’s friend and another showrunner for Videon, didn’t bother to keep the incredulity out of her voice.
Jaime wouldn’t have, either, if the situation had been reversed. He lifted the phone from his ear to bop his head against one of the kitchen cabinets a few times. Yup, he made no damn sense. “I’m floundering. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He and Scarlett had been working for a week now, and they still didn’t have a single usable page written. They were going to have trouble hitting their deadline if they didn’t crack this egg soon.
Instead of doing his damn job, Jaime had found himself fixating on the past ... and lusting in the present. It was dumb and unprofessional, and he needed to stop doing it.
“Of course you know what you’re doing. You do realize that thousands of other people would do serious crimes to be where you are?” Zoya asked, stating the obvious.
“Yup.” Once upon a time, Jaime would’ve been one of them.
“You said to me, several months ago, ‘This is the only project I want next.’ You told me your only backup plan was to get into hemp farming.”
“Hey, that wasn’t a half-bad idea.” Jaime had spent an entire sleepless night researching hemp cultivation on the internet. It wasn’t clear whether it was a con or a high-growth industry where he could get in on the bottom floor.
“It was an entirely bad idea. But I didn’t call you to hear about how hemp is the cash crop of the future.”
“It is, though.”
“Get over your existential crisis, Croft. You’re a pro. You got this. Now that the pep talk is over, here’s the real reason I called: I found the perfect girl for you.”
Jaime almost said I don’t want a girl before he realized Zoya wasn’t offering to set him up on a date with someone: she’d found him an actress.
And despite the fact he still didn’t have anything close to a finished script, something inside him—some small ambitious scrap—sat up. “For Queen’s Kiss ?”
“Yup. We’re auditioning for season four of Waverley , and she wasn’t right for us, but she’s got the exact energy for Scarlett—and she’s from North Carolina, so her accent is perfect.”
“She couldn’t handle the brogue?”
“I wouldn’t let an American affect a brogue on set—I’d get raked across the coals by the Scots more than I already do.” Waverley was a hit everywhere except Scotland, where Zoya had been accused of turning their history into soft-core porn.
Oh well. Everyone was a critic.
“Anyhow, her name is Clara Hess. She’s a vivacious strawberry blonde with a southern accent who you can’t help but root for. And she’s super smart. I’d have no problem believing that this woman could be a chess grand master. If you don’t get her on contract stat, I swear to God I will write something else for her just so that I can use her.”
He knew Zoya would do it too.
“Can you send her agent’s info to Nate?”
“Yes. But you need to get her to do a reading in the next few weeks or someone else will snap her up.”
“I appreciate the heads-up.” This was good on several levels. Jaime needed a deadline. Nothing got words flowing like the promise of contract or production consequences.
“Of course. Why isn’t Nate there, keeping you on task?”
“He’s busy.”
Which ... wasn’t entirely true. Jaime had asked Nate not to come.
Jaime’s producing partner was the rare person he could stand during the writing process. Nate was funny, self-sufficient, good at everything, and an excellent sounding board. That was why they’d been working together since they’d met in college.
But this time, Jaime couldn’t have been clearer if he’d hired a skywriter: he wanted to be alone with Scarlett. He wasn’t going to parse why he felt so strongly about that. It was locked behind a door labeled Here Be Monsters .
“Busy with what?” There was a teasing note in Zoya’s tone—an entire teasing symphony, in fact. The woman had been writing and directing romances for too long.
Jaime had successfully hidden his history with Scarlett from Nate and Videon, but he probably hadn’t managed to keep the glow out of his voice enough to fool Zoya. The woman was like a bloodhound when she got a whiff of romantic potential—potential generally, but romantic potential specifically .
Her ability to see who would be good with whom was why she was so good at casting. If she said Clara Hess was the real deal to play Scarlett, then she was. But Zoya’s prognostication was a problem for Jaime because he’d rather keep his pointless pining for Scarlett to himself.
“Nate’s mentoring some film students from USC.” Which was true, though it wasn’t the real reason he hadn’t come to Virginia. “Anyhow, thanks again for the tip about Clara.”
“Anytime. And you’ll crack the scripts. I know you will.”
Jaime sent a quick text to Nate— I’m going to get you some pages by Monday so you can schedule a reading for an actress Zoya found —and he found himself feeling better. Zoya was one of the hardest working and most talented people he knew. If she had confidence that Jaime would figure it out ... well, then he’d probably manage to do it.
A glance at the clock confirmed that it was nearly nine—his prearranged breakfast time with Scarlett. The thump of bare feet in the hallway followed a second later.
“Morning, sunshine,” Jaime said as Scarlett stumbled into the kitchen.
Over the first week of working together, she’d abandoned more of her polished facade. Today, she had on what he now knew were her favorite plaid pajama bottoms, topped with a torn Achtung Baby sweatshirt, and not so much as a lick of makeup. She hadn’t bothered with her contacts yet, and she was blinking behind her thick-framed glasses. It made her look so young that his heart double pumped for a few beats.
Like a time traveler whose machine had glitched, Jaime was stuck in two moments. His emotions were those of a naive seventeen-year-old who had no idea why he shouldn’t sink into his crush on her, and the rest of him was a jaded thirty-three-year-old who realized that was fucking stupid.
Somehow, he had to get all of himself into the present and toughen the heck up. Then the words would be bound to start flowing.
Jaime pushed a mug across the counter toward her. She accepted it with an incoherent “Gah” that he understood as thanks. In the last few days, as they’d lurched toward something like a routine, he’d learned she started the morning bleary eyed and silent until he poured approximately one and a half pots of coffee into her.
He could almost watch Scarlett come back to herself, milligram by milligram, as she consumed caffeine. It was a relief, honestly. The quiet, vulnerable version of Scarlett freaked him out. Made him feel protective. He much preferred the version of herself that she turned into midmorning, the one who was utterly willing to sink her claws into Jaime if he stepped so much as a toe out of line. The self-aware, strategizing genius who could outthink anyone around her—that was the woman he wanted to write with and about.
He picked up the bowl of oatmeal he’d abandoned when Zoya had called him, and for a few minutes, Jaime chewed and Scarlett sipped in peace. It was easy in moments like this to pretend there was some version of them that could be friends, if nothing else, but then he would remember that she had a world championship to win. That she’d only agreed to let him adapt her book in order to stick it to PAWN. That once the show filmed, he’d never see her again.
Which was sufficiently sobering to get him back, all in one piece, to this moment.
When he’d finished his breakfast, rinsed his dishes, and put them in the dishwasher, he leaned against the counter and watched his writing partner. Her eyes were a tiny bit more focused now, which soothed Jaime.
“Were you talking to someone?” she asked.
“Zoya Delgado. She wanted to pass along a tip about an actress.” When Scarlett didn’t respond to that, he asked, “You sleep okay?” That seemed a safe enough question to broach. He would’ve asked Nate the same thing if he’d been here.
Scarlett drained her cup and pushed it toward him. “Still adjusting to the quiet.”
Jaime filled her cup again. She took her coffee black, which made him feel like a wimp since he doctored his with loads of cream and sugar. “You’ll probably get used to the country again about the time we wrap up.”
Scarlett smiled into her coffee cup, and Jaime would’ve been jealous, but of course, he’d put the brew in there. So it was kind of his smile.
“Maybe. Are we going to get some words down today?” she asked.
Dear Lord, he hoped so.
“I wanted to run something by you. What if we make the protagonist of the show ... not you?”
Scarlett huffed out a laugh. “Um, isn’t it an adaptation of my memoir? How could the protagonist be not me?”
“She could be thinly fictionalized. It’d give you a little privacy.”
And it might unstick Jaime. Ever since Scarlett arrived in Musgrove, he’d become obsessed with what was real and not real, and it was getting in the way of writing. If they washed her stories with a rinse of fiction, he might be able to stop autopsying the past—hers and theirs.
“You were complaining the other day that everyone sees the book as confessional—”
“They just mean it was written by a woman.”
“—and if the show isn’t about you, then they’ll stop saying that.”
Scarlett considered this for several long seconds. “Maybe it also lets us reset.”
“Not get hung up on what’s true or not?” Both with the show ... and with them.
“Yup.”
Jaime could only hope this was what they needed. “Get some breakfast, and then we’ll start. We need some pages by next week so we can test this actress.”
Uncharacteristically docile, Scarlett accepted a bowl of fruit and some yogurt from Jaime. He’d convinced her it probably wasn’t a good idea to have all that coffee on an empty stomach. But despite all the crap he’d spewed about nutrition, he knew his motives were entirely selfish. They were getting off to a slow start here, and Jaime needed them healthy and rested if they were going to meet their deadline. Anything less would make him a piss-poor leader.
After they’d worked all day, stopping only for lunch, Jaime glanced up from his laptop. Scarlett had sent him a batch of pages, and now she was doodling on a whiteboard that he’d picked up from Ev’s house yesterday.
“Is that a middle finger?”
“It seemed classier than writing Aldo Rivera, go fuck yourself .”
“I still cannot get over the fact that you said that to the president of PAWN.”
“If you aren’t willing to say it to someone’s face, it’d be rude to write it down.” She gave Jaime a guileless look, as if to say Duh . “He told me the fact there are only forty living women grand masters, compared to seventeen hundred men, proves women can’t compete with men. He’s lucky I only told him to go fuck himself.”
“Why didn’t you try to charm him?” Scarlett was plenty good at pouring honey over her voice and manners when she wanted to, certainly.
“He didn’t deserve it. You can’t corral the women in their own tournament and then complain we face less competition. That’s not fair, and it’s not logical—and he wants me to buy that men are better at impartiality and logic. If he believes women can’t compete, let us try it. If he’s right, we’re just going to lose. But the men don’t want us to, so PAWN had to invent a convoluted fairy tale to justify being dumbasses instead. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sweet-talk someone like that into the real championship game.”
“But telling him to fuck off didn’t get you into it either.”
“Sure, but nothing I could’ve done would’ve. And being a brat got me and my argument into every paper in the world.”
Every moment of Scarlett’s life was like that, Jaime had realized. She was better than anyone he’d ever known at analyzing her situation, seeing what the rules and the variables were, and figuring out what she needed to do now in order to get what she wanted several moves down the road. It was how she approached chess, but it was also how she lived her life.
It was mesmerizing as heck, but he also got the sense it was exhausting. How many balls did Scarlett have in the air at this moment, how did she keep track of them, and did she ever drop one?
“How are you going to get into the open-division championship game?” he asked.
Her eyes went to the window, as if she were watching something approach from a distance. Something glimmering and rare and worth waiting for. “You’ll see.”
And Jaime was . . . breathless.
All Scarlett had to do was flash that confidence of hers and he lost his mind. It was science. With that expression on her face, he’d be damned if she weren’t the most beautiful woman in the world.
Which was the kind of thought he only ought to have in the context of writing Emily, the fictional veil they’d invented for Scarlett. He needed to channel all those feelings into writing Emily .
Maybe tomorrow he’d manage it.
“I’m certain I will. Let’s knock it off for the day,” he said lightly, getting to his feet.
“You sure?” She trailed him into the kitchen.
“Yup. I’m making burgers.”
“I can cook, you know.”
Back when they’d been in high school, she’d basically made every meal she and her mom had eaten, though those had been mostly sandwiches, and Lean Cuisines when they were on BOGO special. She’d been especially good at getting the skin of hot dogs crispy. He’d honestly never met anyone who cooked a better hot dog in his life.
These days, he got the sense that she mainly survived because of New York’s army of delivery drivers. But since she’d told him she frequently studied twelve hours a day to prepare for a tournament, he could understand. If the delivery options were any good here, he’d probably use them more too—at least when Videon was on the hook for the bills.
“You can make the salad,” he told her.
“Promise to not say anything about excessive ranch?”
“My only point was that the lettuce isn’t a garnish.”
From the smolder in her eyes, Jaime had the sense that if they’d been in the living room, Scarlett would’ve tapped the middle finger she’d drawn on the whiteboard. “Can it, Croft. I make an exemplary salad.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Everything she did was exemplary.
In the kitchen, he turned on the tiny TV he’d rescued from his mom’s garage. It had literal bunny ears on it, and the picture was kind of fuzzy. He always left it tuned to channel eight, and he only put it on for one hour every day: the one boasting Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!
“I hate these freaking clues,” Scarlett said, getting the salad bowl out of the cabinet. She’d begun navigating his kitchen as confidently as if she lived there. “They never make any sense, and they make me feel like an idiot.”
Jaime was certain that Scarlett was the smartest person he’d ever known. She certainly had the best memory and the most discipline. But all he said was “ A glamping adventure isn’t the first thing you think of when someone says Event ?”
“Sadly, no.”
As he headed to the fridge to grab the ground beef he’d thawed overnight, Jaime picked up the copy of Consumer Reports off the counter. He’d been reading it this morning before Zoya had called. “Here, I dog-eared a page for you.”
Scarlett took the magazine from him and read aloud. “Best cell phones for battery life?”
“You mentioned yours kept dying in the middle of the afternoon.”
“And you thought this was your problem?”
“No.” But Jaime had thought he could help. This was something of a reflex of his, but, well, it was a good reflex—just like how he kept tabs on Ms. Winifred, an old “patient” of Dad’s who’d just gotten out of rehab for the third time, and on Mr. Jefferies, whose wife had died in November after all their kids had moved away. When you saw that someone needed help, you stepped up. That was the way you kept a community together.
Scarlett flicked her eyes up to him, an amused smile curling on her mouth. “Why the hell do you even get Consumer Reports ? Does it come standard issue with your AARP card?”
“Habit, I guess.”
But two seconds later, when the actual reason hit Scarlett, she didn’t try to hide her shock. “It’s your dad’s subscription, isn’t it?”
Moments of emotional realness from Scarlett, the times when she didn’t affect a glamorous facade or her “Aww, shucks, me, mister?” mask, still went through Jaime like a shot.
Which was why he gave her the truth. “Yup.”
“Does your mom renew it for your birthday every year?” Scarlett had gotten ahold of herself, and the question was light and teasing.
“You joke, but it’s helpful.”
“Do you clip out articles and mail them to your mom and sister?”
He texted them photos—which Scarlett would probably howl over, so he said nothing.
“An incriminating silence, Mr. Croft.” Scarlett picked up a cucumber and set it on the cutting board. But rather than slicing it or continuing to tease Jaime, her tone went serious. “What other duties did you inherit?”
What hadn’t he inherited? “Mowing their lawn. Doing their taxes. That kind of thing.”
“You were just a kid.”
Scarlett’s statement opened a trapdoor inside Jaime, and a softness he shouldn’t feel leaked out. The more time that they spent together, the more it happened. But those tender feelings multiplying in him were like spider crickets, the kind that never stayed in the basement.
Jaime’s voice was rough when he said, “Someone needed to take charge, so I did.” His mom had always seemed so capable to him that it had chilled Jaime to the bone when he’d realized she’d just let his dad manage so many things that went to the core of her life. Of all their lives.
He’d been so worried he would mess something up at first, but eventually, he’d realized that almost all adults worried they might be messing up pretty much every moment of every day. You just learned to accept the existential fear at some point—and that was the definition of adulthood.
On the day of Dad’s arrest, Jaime had been thrust into it sooner than most folks were, that was all. In the end, he discovered he liked dealing with that stuff. It made him feel competent, helpful. It wasn’t as if he worried Mom wouldn’t love him if he didn’t take care of things, but he suspected that his helpfulness didn’t hurt.
“You did good, Jaime,” Scarlett said, her voice soft and even.
His vision was suddenly blurry, and it took a lot to keep the sob that rose in his throat inside. He hadn’t even realized he’d wanted those words, and wanted them from her , until she gave them to him.
“Well, I didn’t have much choice.” It had been like being swept off a boat in a storm. He’d had to paddle for his life.
“You want a beer?” Scarlett asked, as he said, “This calls for a beer.”
Yup. He was going to have several, in fact.
She pulled the fridge open and handed him a bottle before grabbing one for herself. “To Jaime,” she said, after he’d opened them. “Who turned out to be something of a badass.”
“And to Scarlett, who always was one.”
The smile she gave him while she drank was dangerous.
The coziness of cooking and watching Wheel of Fortune and shooting the shit together might feel right, but these evenings with her were more treacherous than taking a stroll on the railroad tracks. Jaime had barely survived their first encounter. He shouldn’t be courting danger a second time—and yet here he was, wining and dining it.
Worse still, some part of him had wanted these nights, with all their seductive peril. When he’d cornered her into writing the show here, this was what he’d been angling for.
Because underneath it all, he wasn’t very bright.