Page 99 of The Rom-Commers

“Yes,” Charlie said. “But it’s not glowing.”

“What’s it doing?” I asked.

Charlie let his eyes drop, like he was really thinking. “You know when birds commit suicide?”

I frowned. “I don’t think—that’s a thing?”

Charlie regrouped. “You know. When a bird sees its reflection in a window and thinks it’s another bird and so it dive-bombs the window over and over, trying to attack, until it injures itself so badly it dies?”

Ah. Huh. “Kind of?”

Charlie nodded. “I think my heart is doing that.”

Twenty-One

IT’S SO HUMILIATINGto admit this, but the next afternoon, when Charlie had a meeting with the mistress we were doing this screenplay for and he told me to make myself scarce, there was no mistaking it—I was oddly jealous.

“I can’t stay for it?” I asked.

“Trust me, you don’t want to stay.”

“You don’t know that.”

“This woman would eat you alive,” Charlie said.

“She doesn’t eatyoualive.”

“No,” Charlie agreed, “but she flirts with me. Which is weirdly similar.”

We were entering our sixth and final week of writing—which meant I’d only known Charlie for five. Five puny weeks out of my whole lifetime. Why did the idea of some mistress flirting with Charlie bug me so much? “It seems like we should both be here,” I said.

“The thing is,” Charlie said then, “there’s another issue.”

“What?”

“The mistress,” Charlie said, with an apologetic shrug, “happens to be T.J. Heywood’s stepmother.”

I frowned. “The mistress—?”

Charlie nodded. “—is married to T.J.’s dad and cheating on him with this United Pictures executive.”

I took it in. “The mistress is Mrs. Jablowmie?”

“Mrs. JablowmieSenior,” Charlie corrected. “There is no current Mrs.T.J.Jablowmie.”

“Shocker.”

And then I couldn’t help it. I pulled out my phone and googled T.J.’s father “+ wife”—and got a thousand photos of a woman who looked like she might still be in high school.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“She’s younger than T.J., actually. He brings it up a lot.”

“Wow,” I said. “No wonder he hates women.”

“Does he?”

“Doesn’t he?”

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