Chapter 14 Cleo
CLEO
Elijah keeps pulling the doorknob and banging on the edge of the door and kicking it. “God dammit. Please tell me you have a phone hiding somewhere on you.”
I am hearing the words come out of Elijah’s mouth and I am sure that words came out of my mouth just now, and somewhere in my brain I understand why this beautiful man who had his tongue inside of me is panicking, but my body just won’t let me panic right now.
My brain is not entirely back online yet.
My body also won’t let my neck hold my head up straight. I think I might still be having orgasmic aftershocks. All of my lady parts will be rocking around the orgasm tree for the foreseeable future.
“Cleo? Can you hear me? Are you okay?”
I manage to make my eyeballs move in his direction. He is definitely anxious about the door not opening, but he also has this glint in his eye, like You can’t function because I rocked your world, little elf. How you like me now? I like him a lot.
His big dad heart is one of the things I like most about him. Almost as much as I like his tongue. And according to the preview my hand got earlier, I will also be a big fan of his penis.
But I am currently under his employ as an assistant. So I will pull it together and assist him. “Yes. No.” I manage to sit up straight and focus. “Yes, I am okay. No, I don’t have my phone with me. I don’t even have my kazoo. Is the door locked?”
He drags his fingers through his hair, and it’s so cute how upset he is. “No. It’s jammed. There’s a door-jamb issue. I dunno—I’m not a door engineer. I think someone will have to use force to push it in from the outside.”
“Well. I may not have a phone or a kazoo, but what I do have is faith. I have faith in me and you. I have faith that we’ll be fine. Even though we don’t have wine. Wait. Sorry. I switched into rhyming mode. I just know that someone will come by eventually and you won’t miss Paxton’s call.”
He scrubs his face with both hands, and it’s like the sound of his stubble is tickling my ears.
But his anxiety is hugging my heart. “I can’t believe I forgot about the door.
” He leans back against the door and slides down to sit next to me, his long legs bent, resting his arms on his knees.
He unbuttons and rolls up the sleeves of his very nice white shirt and continues, “I think I should say that I have zero regrets about what just happened. You deserved to finally experience that.”
That makes me snort-laugh. “I am also very pleased.”
He grins. “I mean, it seems to me you were incredibly pleased.” He goes back to frowning. “But I can’t believe I forgot my phone. I really want to see how excited Paxton is when he finds out about the presents. And I need to make sure Alyssa has the stuff I sent for his stocking.”
I reach over to hold one of his hands. “His Santa presents?”
“Yeah. I mean, I know Alyssa and Barry are taking presents for him too—I just want to make sure he gets mine… This is the first year I’m not seeing him on Christmas Day.”
I give his big hand a squeeze. “For someone who hates Christmas you care an awful lot about Christmas.”
“Only for Paxton. He’s such a good little guy—I just want him to get everything he wants.”
And my brain is now fully back online. “Elijah. This is it. This is exactly what the script needs.”
“Hero gets stuck in a supply closet with a hot chick?”
“No. It needs a kid.”
He squeezes my hand and then stands up and starts pacing. There’s only enough room for him to take one step to each side, so it looks like he’s dancing and I think that’s great. He’s nodding as he considers this, but he’s clenching his fists like he’s angry. What a weirdo. “Say more.”
“The hero’s already divorced, but he should be a divorced dad.
Instead of a bare Christmas tree, there’s one paper handmade decoration hanging from a branch when he wakes up from that dream at the beginning.
He gets recruited by the organization that monitors alien activity, gets abducted by the aliens, and he’s just trying to get back home so he can give his kid the presents.
It’s Die Hard meets Men in Black. Except the main alien misses his family back on his home planet too. Or…”
“Yes?”
“It could be The Grinch meets Lilo and Stitch.”
I can actually hear the cash-register sound effect in his head. “Keep talking.”
“Like a buddy movie with a recently divorced dad who’s really grumpy and an alien he just happens to come across. He reluctantly rescues the alien dad from some situation to be determined.”
“Go on.”
“Hides him in his crappy divorced-guy apartment.”
“Like E.T. for grown-ups.”
“Yes! In the prologue the hero is a kid trying to communicate with aliens, and we overhear his mom telling his dad she’s worried because he doesn’t know how to talk to girls but he’s spending all his time trying to talk to aliens.
Cut to the present when he clearly hasn’t learned to talk to the woman he loves, but he did grow up to be some kind of space-technology person.
The alien wants to get back to his planet because he misses his family…
“Maybe the divorced guy isn’t a dad—maybe he’s separated, not divorced from his wife because she wants to start a family and he doesn’t.
He’s a workaholic. Maybe he learns from the alien’s perspective about how beautiful Christmas is and how wonderful it is to have a family.
He uses his special skill to help the alien get home.
Then his wife comes home to find that he’s decorated the whole house for her, and he tells her he wants to have a kid… See what I’m saying?”
He suddenly stands very still and stares down at me like he’s angry, but I can see the wheels spinning.
“I am picking up what you’re putting down, Curly.
” He locks eyes with me, and I don’t say anything because I don’t want to intrude upon his executive thought process.
I can tell that his brain is calculating audience quadrants and budgets and casting potential.
He spins around on his heel, opens one of the boxes of pens he was tossing around earlier, grabs a pad of neon-pink sticky notes, and begins maniacally scribbling.
He scribbles and scribbles and scribbles.
Keeps pulling sticky notes off the pad and slapping them onto the edge of the shelf.
“I really wish I had my phone or the good sticky notes right now,” he mutters.
“But this will do.” He keeps scribbling. “This will do.”
Finally, he writes on another sticky note, stabs at it, with a period, slaps the pen down, and gets onto his knees in front of me. “You are such a brilliant genius.” He takes my face in his hands and kisses me with so much passion, it startles me.
“Thank you,” I exhale.
“Thank you,” he says between kisses. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” His hands are all up in my hair when he pulls back to say, “I could pitch this to the president of production. Go over Steinberg’s head and get that project greenlit based on the new concept alone.
But then I run the risk of losing creative control, and I like this project now, so I want to hire the right people.
” He stares deep into my soul. “Do you want an associate producer credit?”
I don’t even have to ruminate on this. “No, thank you.”
Now he’s the one who’s startled. “What? Why not?”
I caress his surprised face. “I appreciate it so much, but I don’t want some token film credit. Just pay me for my notes.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “You do realize there would be a producer fee, right? Up front.”
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
“If you get a good lawyer, and I can put you in touch with one—he’s a grumpy fucker, but he’s a great lawyer and he owes me a favor—you could negotiate a bonus if the box office gross hits certain milestones. Like five hundred million and a billion worldwide.”
“I will definitely take that. You think it could make that much?”
He nods. “Question. How did you make money in New York during the pandemic?”
Random, but good question. “I did Zoom parties for kids. Virtual entertainment. I worked on optimizing the website and social media for that business, and it grew exponentially during lockdown.”
He leans in, but not to kiss me. “That business? You have other businesses? Besides performing in the theatre?”
“Etsy store and other money gateways, yes.”
“I just—and I don’t mean this in a condescending way—I just don’t understand why you’ve always done these low-paying jobs when you could be running a studio someday.”
Surprisingly, I am not offended at all. His inability to understand how I choose to live my life—that used to be the reason I had so much friction with him. I thought he was so entitled. But he seems to really want to know why I do what I do now.
“I don’t want to run a studio,” I tell him.
“I like every single revenue stream I have created for myself, and I’ve been saving since I started babysitting at the age of fifteen.
” I watch his expression and wait for that to sink in before revealing the next thing.
“I started investing in the stock market when I was eighteen. I have enough money saved for a twenty-percent down payment on a fourplex apartment building here in the LA area. In two years I’ll have enough for another fourplex.
I am all about the passive income, baby.
I’ve had it all planned out since I was twenty-one.
By the time I’m fifty I’ll be able to retire if I want to.
But I won’t want to because I like doing what I do. ”
I can tell Elijah’s old-money brain is melting. He keeps blinking, and then he just says, “Wow.”
“Yeah. If you were worried about me struggling financially, you don’t have to worry about that.”
He stares at me in awe, shaking his head. “You are the most incredible person.”
“I know.”