Chapter 21
It was full dark when I got home, armed with a pizza and a few packages of powdered donuts from the bodega. Believe it or not, the first thing I did after locking the door behind me wasn’t stuff my face. I found my laptop and pulled up my screenplay.
Because as I’d waited for the crosstown bus to get back to Hell’s Kitchen, all the day’s emotionally charged conversations swirling around my head, I had realized why I’d been finding it so hard to work on it.
As long as I didn’t finish it, I couldn’t mess it up.
I’d already made such a mess out of everything else in my life, though. What was one more failure?
I dug out all the discarded Bullet Journal paraphernalia from under my bed and got to work outlining the main beats of my story, using stickers and washi tape and brush-tipped markers to separate the three acts.
If I’d been living in a movie, the rest of the draft would’ve come pouring out of me then, in a montage set to Lady Cerulean’s most bubblegum tones.
But real life—not to mention my brain—was slightly slower than that.
By the end of the hour, though, I did have a bunch of aggressively decorated pages.
And a solid plan for how to get to the end.
Ghosted! was going to be a romcom about this psychic who thought she’d gotten ghosted on a first date, only to find out later that the guy had actually died on his way to meet her.
Then his ghost shows up with a request to help him solve his murder, which of course leads her into getting involved with his handsome business partner.
But it was also about me, and trying to fit into this city, and the funnier parts of my incredibly unrewarding dating life, and…
And yeah, all the ways in which I’d been too scared to fight for what I wanted.
I’m not gonna lie—I’d gotten so used to Dash’s presence as I wrote, whether in the shared doc or by my side, that typing on a fresh, white document and seeing only my cursor was an indescribable kind of lonely. Even without his input, though, the words flowed as they never had before.
Working on scripts for the Duke of Harding, I had learned to write for Dash. I had learned how to structure a sentence to match the cadence of his speech. I knew the words he liked saying, and when he liked to take a pause. As I worked on my screenplay, I learned how to write for myself.
And I did it, going into full goblin mode inside my increasingly messy apartment, fueled by huge amounts of pizza and cookies and other round, flat food.
For more than two weeks, I typed until I gave myself carpal tunnel.
Then I iced my throbbing wrists and typed some more.
I didn’t just finish the third act—I went back to the first and the second and dug into the emotional core of the story in a way I hadn’t really allowed myself to before.
It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was hard enough that at least twice a day I thought about shoving my laptop under my bed.
I actually did it once, but then I came up with this great line of dialogue and I was forced to fish out my laptop and write it down before I forgot it.
So yeah, I may have struggle-bused my way to the end, but I got there eventually.
And when I did, the satisfaction that welled up inside me was so strong that I had to sit there for a few minutes, just…
existing with the knowledge that this was something I had done.
Mariel Rivera, flailer extraordinaire, quitter of everything halfway, had actually finished her screenplay.
And I didn’t know if it was good or anything, but at least it was done.
After I had basked in relief for a day or two, rereading the whole thing about twenty-eight times, I sucked in a deep breath and emailed Grace Hong, thanking her again for offering to read my screenplay and asking if I could send it to her.
And I ended my email by adding a few links and a note that read, Here are a few samples of my work, in case you know anyone who would be interested in more of this kind of thing.
She got back to me way faster than I thought she would.
Wait, you’re the writer behind that Regency guy who’s been going viral?
? Those videos are amazing, and not just because he looks like he was made in a factory.
Any chance you would want to collaborate on a Regency romcom?
Not another Jane Austen adaptation, but something original and ideally featuring people of color.
I’m still in L.A. but I should be getting back to the city next month, so if you’re interested, it’d be nice to chat over coffee.
My hand went immediately to my phone, and I went so far as to type out a message before realizing that it wasn’t Yaz I’d unconsciously tried to reach out to. It was Dash.
It wasn’t just that he’d embodied the Duke. He’d embodied every daydream I hadn’t let myself have. And now that one of them was coming true, he was the one I wanted to celebrate with.
I didn’t know how to reach out to him, though. Or how to make myself text him about something other than work when I didn’t know if he’d even want to hear from me. So instead, I did the next best thing—I went to Second Chance.
The Barbie blonde from the burlesque event was covering the register, Shy nowhere to be seen.
I gave her a wave as I made my way to the garden, holding my breath a little as I pushed open the back door.
It wasn’t until I stepped out onto the flagstones and my breath gusted out that I realized I’d been expecting…
something. I don’t know. That by some wild, magical coincidence Dash would be there, waiting for me.
As I perched on the swing and twisted myself around, I caught sight of Kitty Marlowe stepping delicately out from behind the tree.
“Well, Kit, looks like it’s just you and me.”
Giving me a disdainful look, she pushed her way through the cat door.
“Yeah,” I said to her retreating tail. “I don’t want to be around me either.”
There was a slight but very definite chill in the air, making me glad I’d worn jeans and a striped vest over my flowered shirt. As the humidity lessened, so did the size of my hair, which I’d bundled into an oversized scrunchie.
In the movie version of my life, the secret garden would have been in full bloom. Just a total riot of pinks and purples and oranges, and butterflies flitting among the leaves, a long tracking shot moving slowly through all the colors before reaching me on the swing.
In reality, it was late September. Leaves in shades of orange and brown drifted down from the branches above me, dancing lazily over the bare flagstones.
Okay, so maybe coming to Second Chance had been a mistake.
Maybe I needed to move on and find a new place to hang out in.
Not a cafe, that was for sure. Or another bookstore. But there was that bar on Tenth where—
The garden door banged open. And I think the small part of me that did believe in wild, magical coincidences must have expanded out into the universe and sent some kind of signal, because it was Dash coming out into the garden, Kitty Marlowe purring in his arms.
He was in a pair of tapered slacks that I’d never seen. Under his black denim jacket, his shirt left the triangle of skin at the base of his neck bare enough for me to notice, with a lump in my throat, that he wasn’t wearing his necklace.
“Oh. Mariel. Hey.” With a scratch between the ears, he set the cat down and took a few cautious steps toward the swing. “I thought Shy was back here—we’re meeting up to go over designs for the next window.”
“I haven’t seen them. I was just…” I shrugged, changing tacks before I finished the sentence. “I finished my screenplay.”
“Hey, that’s great! Congrats,” he offered. “I knew you would.”
I tugged at one of my curls, destroying the shape as I pulled it taut and released it. “That makes one of us, because I was sure that I would abandon it like I do everything else—and pretend I never wanted it in the first place.”
“But you didn’t,” Dash said, a slight flick of his eyebrows betraying his surprise at hearing me talk about my feelings so candidly.
“I stuck with it, believe it or not. All the way to the end. Even though it was hard, and even though it turns out that crafting an emotionally honest story involves, you know, being honest with your emotions. And feeling them, and thinking about them, and all the things I told you weren’t worth doing.
Which, spoiler alert, were absolutely worth it.
And not just for the sake of the screenplay. ”
Dash leaned against the trunk of the tree. “Did your story turn out to have a happily ever after?”
“It did, actually.” I wanted so badly to ask if we had a happily ever after, but instead, all I did was dig my phone out of my pocket. “Also, I made a couple changes to our Duke of Harding bio. I hope it’s okay.”
I tapped my way into our Fling profile and held up the screen so that he could see the words I’d added earlier that day: Created by Mariel Rivera and Dashwood Bennet.
He studied it quietly for a while before saying, “I thought you didn’t want to ruin the illusion.”
“About that…” I tucked my phone away. “It was less about ruining the illusion than being scared to fail out loud. I guess I figured that if the project flopped, no one would really know it was me, so it wouldn’t really count as a failure.
Or something. There wasn’t exactly a lot of thought involved in the process. ”
Another pause, this one shorter. “I thought you were ashamed of me,” Dash admitted. “That you didn’t mind doing this for the money or whatever, but that you didn’t want your name associated with it.”
I shook my head. “I’m so proud of everything we’ve done. And I’m sorry I didn’t make that clearer to you, especially after you told me about that asshole finance guy you dated.”
“I guess I should have been a little more up front about my feelings, too,” Dash said.