Page 3 of The Rom-Commers

“I’m not freaking out,” I said, but in truth I was now clucking around the dining table in a meaningless circle, headless-chicken style. I knew Logan represented some high-profile people. But notthathigh.

“Just from the way you’re breathing,” Logan said, “I can tell that you are.”

“How am I breathing?” I demanded.

“Like a Charlie Yates superfan who is losing her shit right now.”

Fine. He wasn’t wrong.

I took a soothing breath, and then walked to our apartment door, stepped outside, and strolled deliberately down our fourth floor’s exterior walkway. Calmly. Like a non-freaked-out person.

I tried again. “You’re telling me in seriousness that you’re Charlie Yates’s manager?”

“Yes.”

“CharlieYates?” I asked, like he might mean another Charlie. Then, “CharlieYates?” like he might mean another Yates.

“Yes to both.”

I was baffled. “How long has this been going on?”

“About three years.”

“Three years?!” I shrieked. Then, lower, “Did you just say ‘three years’? You’ve been working with my favorite screenwriterfor three yearsand you never thought to mention it?”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t think to,” Logan said, trying to steer us to a calmer place with his voice. “I decided to wait until the right moment.”

I thought about all the joy of being one degree of separation from Charlie Frigging Yates—joy I’d been missing out on for three years. Then I said accusingly, “You ‘decided to wait’?”

“Yes. Because, as you already know, timing is everything.”

Well. He wasn’t wrong there.

I’d made it to the end of our walkway. I leaned over the railing and looked down at the evening lights over the parking lot, and the car lights on the freeway beyond that, and the downtown lights sparkling off in the distance. I knew somebody who knew Charlie Yates. Everything had a bright new shimmer.

“Fair enough,” I finally said.

“I’m telling you now,” Logan said, “because, like I said before, I have a job for you.”

It all came rushing back. “That’s right. You have a job for me—”

“To write a screenplay—” Logan said.

“With Charlie Yates,” I finished, my voice glowing with awe.

“Butrewrite,” Logan said. “Ghostwrite. I need you tofixthis thing—hard.”

“It’s a page-one rewrite?”

“Pagezero,” Logan said. “He’s got a handshake deal with an exec from United Pictures that if he writes this rom-com, they’ll produce that gangster thing he wrote that’s been kicking around.”

Was it weird that a screenwriter of Charlie Yates’s renown had an unproduced screenplay lying around? Not at all. Most scripts by most screenwriters never saw the light of day, in fact. You can make a great living in Hollywood getting paid good money to write scripts that never become movies. But that’s what made Charlie Yates such a legend. Getting anything produced was a feat. But Charlie sold script after script—that became movies, that won awards, that became classics, and that then had people quoting them verbatim year after year.

“I love that gangster thing,” I said. I’d found a bootleg copy on the internet and used up a whole pad of Post-its admiring it.

And I didn’t even like gangster movies.

I didn’t like drug kingpin movies, either. Or prison massacre movies.Or killer clown movies. Or sea rescue movies where everyone gets eaten by sharks.

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