Page 46 of The Rom-Commers

“What happened?” I asked.

The two of them looked at me, then at each other.

So I prompted, “You said you weren’t going to let ‘what happened’ stop Charlie from writing. What was it that happened?”

Charlie frowned, like he didn’t want to talk about this now. Or ever.

“You should tell her, Charlie,” Logan said. “It explains a lot.”

“It’s not really brunch conversation,” Charlie said.

“I can tell her later, behind your back, if you prefer,” Logan said.

Charlie sighed. Then he turned to me. “I got sick a few years ago. And even though I really am completely—fully—better now, I haven’t done much writing in the wake of it.”

“Any writing,” Logan corrected, gently.

“Any writing,” Charlie conceded.

Logan leaned in, like he was sharing a dark diagnosis. “He’s got the yips.”

I frowned. “What’s ‘the yips’?”

Charlie grimaced like he didn’t love hearing the term applied to him. “It’s a sports term,” he said, “for when an experienced athlete has a sudden, unexplained—”

“Performance problem,” Logan completed.

Charlie looked aghast. “I do not have a performance problem.”

Logan corrected: “An abrupt absence of skills.”

“Oh,” I said, like we were just learning vocabulary. “So it’s like writers’ blo—”

But Charlie gave me a hard look, likeDon’t you dare.

I stopped mid-word.

Logan jumped in to fill the void. “We don’t speak the words for the writer’s equivalent. We just say the yips.”

“I don’t have the yips,” Charlie said. “I’m just… not writing.”

“Not writingat all?” I asked.

“I’ve written one thing since I got sick four years ago,” Charlie said, by way of an answer. Then he added: “The screenplay you’re here to fix.”

So… not writing at all.

Charlie added, “Everything that’s come out in the past few years has been old stuff.”

“Is that why you’re trying to get the Mafia thing going?” I asked next. “Because you don’t have anything else?”

“I also love the Mafia thing,” Charlie said.

“Is that why the rom-com is so unbelievably bad?” I asked then. “Because you… forgot how to write?”

“It’s bad because I didn’t want to write it. And I don’t like rom-coms.”

“But you…” I scrolled mentally through a hundred different protests. “You can makeanythinggood.”

---