Page 121 of The Rom-Commers

“Bar fight?!” I demanded, like nothing could be more ridiculous. Writersimaginedbar fights. They didn’t actuallydothem.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Charlie asked then.

“Because you just woke me up.”

He turned around like he was looking for himself. “I did?”

I sighed. “Yes. When you rang the bell for ten minutes straight.”

“I’m the worst,” Charlie said, remembering. “Another reason to stay away from me.”

“Who gets into a bar fight?” I demanded. “That’s a TV thing. That’s not a real thing that real people do.”

Charlie shrugged. “Some guy called Jack Stapleton an overpaid hack.”

“So you justhithim?”

“I meant toverbally sparwith him,” Charlie said, “but he wasn’t much of a wordsmith.”

“You tried for a battle of wits in a bar.”

“It escalated quickly.”

“Charlie,” I said. “You’re such a dummy.”

Charlie nodded in agreement. “It’s possible I was spoiling for a fight.”

“You’re way too famous to be getting into bar fights,” I said.

“This wasn’t a paparazzi kind of place.”

Charlie had wedged himself against the doorframe while he was ringing the bell—and as soon as he tried to unwedge himself to come inside, he stumbled forward, attempted to catch himself, and wound up draping himself over me and collapsing.

“Hey!” I said, buckling under his weight. “Get off!”

From the crook of my neck, he tried to bargain with me in a muffled voice: “Thirty seconds.” Then he lifted his head to check my reaction. “Okay?”

He was looking at me intensely, waiting for an answer.

Or maybe it wasn’t intensity. Maybe he was just trying to focus his eyes.

“Let’s go in, Charlie,” I said. “We need to figure out what to do with your face.”

But Charlie didn’t move. “You always say people falling on each other isn’t romantic—but then it always is.”

His bloody face. His puffy eye. The scrapes on his cheek. The smell of liquor and other people’s cigarettes. “Nothing about this is romantic,” I said.

But I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth.

“That’s debatable,” Charlie said, tripping a little over the syllables.

I shifted into action, strapping my arm around his rib cage to haul him toward the kitchen, but as soon as I did, he started coughing deep, heavy coughs—and I wondered if he’d broken a rib.

I made him work on drinking a bottle of water while I pressed all around on his torso to see if anything felt broken or tender. “I’m fine,” Charlie kept saying. “Nothing’s broken.”

Next, I went through like a whole roll of paper towels to clean the blood off his face. He watched me the whole time.

“Sorry that this is gross,” he said.

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