Page 84 of The Rom-Commers

He tried again and this time got a nice arc, but the cream missed his mouth and hit his cheek instead. He wiped it off and licked his finger.

“Keep your eyes on the puff at all times,” I said, sounding like a coach. “Bethe dollop!”

Charlie tried again and missed again—hitting the floor, the counter, the tabletop, and somehow the window before getting close to his face again.

I did a few more demonstrations: “It’s all in the timing,” I said. “As soon as it launches, you need to be moving into position. Head back! No fear! You’re a champion!”

When Charlie finally got one, he was so excited, he hugged me. And then he offered to squirt some straight out of the can into my mouth.

An offer I graciously accepted.

We were sticky, the floor was sticky—even the ceiling was sticky. But we’d clean it all up later. Life felt suddenly impossibly bright—the kind of bright that feels like it’s going to stay that way forever.

It was my first birthday away from home. Charlie had made me doughnuts becausehe was grateful I was here. He was almost officially cured, and we were covered in whipped cream, and these doughnuts were so much more delicious than anything cooked by a man who thought you opened canned biscuits with a can opener had any right to be. And right there, in a moment of ebullience, with no sense at all that I might ever regret it, I said, “Why don’t we make a whole meal out of it?”

“A whole meal out of what?”

“Your cancer-free-iversary. Why don’t I make a big, fancy dinner to celebrate, and we can eat doughnuts for dessert?”

Charlie picked up his half-eaten doughnut for a toast. “It’s a date,” he said.

So I clinked my half-eaten doughnut to his, and said, “It’s a date.”

Eighteen

AFTER FOUR WEEKSof living with Charlie, day in and day out, I had to make it official: We were good together.

Good at writing together, and good at living together.

Given how everything started, I might’ve expected the whole rewrite process to be endless clashing, and arguing, and insulting each other. Charlie could so easily have chosen to be offended by some nobody from nowhere trying to tell him what to do. He could have dug in his heels and fought me on every single thing.

And yet—he didn’t.

I had armored up for a field of battle—and somehow we wound up in a field of daisies instead. Having a picnic.

I worked out many theories to explain it. Maybe Charlie really did understand that his version of the script was bad. Maybe he truly had liked my honesty when I ripped it to shreds. Maybe he was telling the truth when he said he liked my writing. Maybe his ego wasn’t as immutable as everyone claimed.

Maybe I’d fallen madly in love with his writing for a reason. Maybe we shared some kind of essential linguistic rhythm, or some comicoutlook, or some moral framework that made it easier to be friends than enemies.

Or maybe we both just really loved writing—in the exact same way.

Maybe writing was our shared love language.

There’s a joke that writers “don’t like to write—they like havingwritten,” and that must be true of some writers. But it wasn’t true of me or Charlie. We liked the process. We liked the words. We liked playing around and trying things. We liked syllables and consonants and syncopation. We liked deciding between em dashes and commas. We liked figuring out where the story needed to go and then helping it get there.

It wasn’t easy, exactly—but it was fun.

It was work that felt like play.

Which is all to say that one day, when we should have been writing, Charlie wanted to take me to a farmers market off Mulholland Drive instead—and swore that we would definitely get work done by talking about the story nonstop there and back, and I believed it. That was absolutely what we would do.

Except we never made it to the farmers market.

The road was windy and breathtaking—built in the 1920s as a scenic drive and strung with the hidden driveways of world-famous people—and Charlie seemed more than happy to tool along it with the windows down and his shades on and the radio blasting 1970s music.

I, in contrast, was terrified.

I didn’t know who designed this road—but it must have been before the invention of safety.Or road shoulders.This thing slalomed back and forth between a steep valley on one side and a low canyon on the other, and only at the most lethal points were there any guardrails. Over and over, we rounded curves where the edge of the road kissed hundred-foot drop-offs. I started gasping and wincing.

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