Page 52 of Scripted for Love and Poison
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The following day, he was knocking on Divya’s door before seven in the morning.
“I blew it with Sol,” he told his colleague and friend when she opened her door, fresh-faced and with her short hair still wet from the shower. Luke had to admit jet lag had at least one advantage: Divya was already up and ready.
“What now?” she told him, implying that he’d been blowing it with Sol for days. And he had.
“I told her to go back to London,” he said as Divya let him inside, and he collapsed on top of one of the chairs in the hotel room, which may have been full of discarded clothes in varying degrees of cleanliness, but he didn’t care. Fortunately, neither did Divya.
Divya breathed deeply, her eyes darting upward. “Let me guess, she didn’t take it well?”
“She threw me out of her friends’ house and told me not to contact her unless it was to apologize,” he explained, raking his hand nervously through his messy hair.
“And what are you waiting for?” Divya said. She sounded a bit impatient.
“I can’t apologize.”
“Are you serious!?” She definitely sounded cross at him. “You can’t tell a grown woman what to do, mate! And I can’t believe that I am really having to explain this to you. I had you pinned for a feminist ally. I’m sure Sol had too. Not sure any of us would wantanythingto do with you otherwise.”
“I still think she should go back to London. But even if she wanted to, which has been plenty clear to me she won’t do if only to go against me, she still couldn’t because of that stupid Detective Tom Owens!”
“So tell me again why you’re not apologizing, then? She can’t return to London, and it’s out of your control andhercontrol. And by the way, she already has one man telling her she can’t leave the country. She doesn’t need her partner telling her she has to leave it.”
“I mean, when you put it like this!” he said, defeated.
“Luke, I really thought you were better than this.” Divya sounded genuinely disillusioned. It was as if he’d let his favorite teacher down. “Men, mate. You always have to disappoint, don’t you?”
Luke didn’t like the sound of those words. He wasn’t justanother man, certainly not one who was simply a disappointment to women. His two sisters and his mom could vouch for that, right?
“Go on then, off you go back to Sol,” Divya told him, as if realizing he’d finally seen his mistake and was ready to correct it. “Considering it’s rush hour, it’s going to take you a good hour to get there. Plenty of time to practice your apology. Because the first words you’re going to tell that woman are, ‘I’m an idiot. I’m sorry. I won’t pretend to tell you what you have to doever again.’”
“She won’t want to talk to me yet. She’s too mad. The only reason I’m not too worried that I’m not there is because the friend promised me they’d look after her and make sure she was safe. But Sol doesn’t want me around,” he tried reasoning, but Divya was already grabbing him by the elbow, ushering him to stand and leave.
“‘I’m an idiot. I’m sorry. I won’t pretend to tell you what you have to doever again,’” Divya repeated as Luke was now in front of the room’s door again and she was opening it. “She’ll be happy with those words, to start with. You’ll still have to do a full mea culpa after that and try explaining such a stupid lapse of judgment. But I trust you’ll be able to figure out what else to say, right?”
Divya gave him a pointed stare. He’d better start saying the right things.
“Right,” he muttered, still not completely sure what had happened. His colleague was already closing the door to her room on his face when he remembered something else that needed mentioning. “Wait, she told me she’d found something in Simon Smith’s manuscript and is going to call you and let you know. Please pick up when she rings you.”
“Luke,mate, since when do I not pick up the phone when it’s Sol or anybody else?”
“I wasn’t trying to tell you what to do.” He put his hands up as if to plead blamelessness. “I was only giving you the last update on the case.”
“Yes, yes. Off you go. Can’t say I’m particularly fond of you at the moment.”
Luke tried giving his colleague his best puppy-eyed expression in the hopes of regaining some of her sympathy. But as he was going to say goodbye and leave, he got a phone call.
“It’s Marquee Media,” he told Divya as he picked up the call and put it on speakerphone.
“Luke, good morning. How are you? Claudia Hopkins here.” Luke recognized the unmistakable voice of Sol’s former editor. “I know it’s early, but I’m an early-morning person. My bosses wanted me to give you a call. They’d like to know if you have any updates.”
And to think, he’d heard somewhere Americans weren’t direct. It wasn’t as if Claudia had actually asked him how he was doing and meant for him to give her an answer.
“So?” Claudia’s impatient tone cut through the morning air as Luke and Divya looked at each other, interrogating themselves silently and deciding what they could offer.
“We had a very interesting chat with Travis yesterday,” Luke said after a nervous, throat-clearing cough. “And we’re almost prepared to confirm filmmaker Victor Lago had nothing to do with either the poisonings or the disappearance of Simon Smith.”
“Pity,” said Claudia, and she did sound genuinely upset. “It would have made for such a juicy story. The headline writes itself:Has-Been Director Kills Editor, Makes Critic Disappear Because They Dishonored His Snoozefest of a Movie. Or something like that. Shorter, of course ...”
