Page 15 of A Very Snowed In New Year
“Ugh.” Lainey blows disappointed raspberries at her phone. “No, thank you.” She slides her phone into her back pocket. “Let’s go out!”
“I’m doing a dialogue polish on my script.” I hold up my laptop and then nod toward the TV. “And I have to watchWhen Harry Met Sally…before it leaves Netflix in a week.”
“You’ve seen that movie a hundred million times, and you have every Nora Ephron movie ever made downloaded on your phone.”
“Well, I had to delete a few to free up some memory, actually,” I mumble. I didn’t deleteWhen Harry Met Sally, of course. “I’m already in my sweats, though,” I say, knowing how foolish it is to fight her on this.
“I’m going to give you a fifteen-minute glow-up. You’re leaving for New York in, like, three days, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Youhaveto come out with us. This time next year we might all be living in different cities.” She pouts.
That is true. I graduate in less than half a year, and unless I sell a script, which is admittedly unlikely, or if I don’t have a well-paying job here by then, I’ll have to move back home. Not that that would be the worst thing in the world. I do miss New York. But I don’t miss sharing a bathroom with my little brother.
“We need to get you out of your head and get a guy in you. Notthe perfect guy. Justaguy. Get it over with. I can’t take the pressure anymore. Don’t make me tell you the story of my first time again.”
It was in the back seat of a Mustang in a Fatburger parking lot when she was seventeen. It’s really not a good story.
Tracy jogs into the living room, her hands in the air. She’s going through a retro Sporty Spice phase, and it’s working forher. “Yes! Seize the dick! My first time was on a basement sofa that smelled like Cheetos and beer, and the guy tried to convince me I had an orgasm even though he only lasted thirty seconds and foreplay consisted of him trying and failing to remove my bra.” She claps. “Itdidget better, but not with him. Where are we going?! I want to help with the glow-up. We should go to that place on Sunset that you puked in front of,” she says to Lainey.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Lainey says with no irony whatsoever as she scrolls her phone.
I back up the current draft of my current screenplay,How We Got Here, and reluctantly close my laptop. Maybe I’ll meet a nice designated driver who’s a good kisser, with a butt that looks good in jeans, even if it’s not a ten. Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.
“Ugh. Why is she so horrible?” Lainey grumbles, staring at her phone. “Hey, Poops, you know how you’re obsessed with Holden Archer? My sister just posted a revolting selfie with him at a party.” She comes over to show me an Instagram post from her sister, Shay Nicholls.
“Didn’t she just break up with her boyfriend, like, three minutes ago?” Tracy asks.
“He dumped her last week. She is clearly hurting. Look how much highlighter she’s wearing.”
Shay Nicholls is an impossibly pretty starlet who is as talented as she is shallow. At least she seems shallow from what Lainey says, and from what I’ve seen in interviews. But she is as good an actress as anyone who’s been cast as the pretty mean girl in movies and TV shows over and over again can be. She is making a super casual duck face while leaning a little too far into Holden’s personal space. He frowns into the camera. He looks caught off guard to me, like he wasn’t expecting her to snap an “usie.”
But this means he’s here in LA now.
And he looks hot.
So painfully hot.
How can I explain just how handsome Holden Archer is? How the curves and angles of his jawline and chin do not resemble chiseled marble so much as sensual clay that was masterfully and lovingly sculpted by a lady artist who was remembering a young Robert Redford while listening to Zayn sing “Dusk Till Dawn.” How can I adequately describe how his chestnut-brown hair that has natural golden highlights, no matter what length it is, always arches and flops in front to the exact degree that makes my stomach flip. How his thick, dark eyebrows are as expressive as his penetrating blue eyes. The way his lips are shaped as though they were designed to kiss a woman hard enough to bruise, while whispering filthy poetry into her hungry mouth.
He has gotten even better looking in the past three years, in the way that actors do when they get more famous. And he is really famous now. The firstRidersmovie, which released at the end of last year, was the highest-grossing box office performer this yearandlast year. He has had a lot of stylists and trainers working on him. If Zac Efron and Shawn Mendes had a baby…that baby would look like an old shoe that stepped in dog crap compared to HEA. Yeah. His middle name isEverett.E. He is literally going to be someone’s HEA, and I wish he could be mine. He had to get in really good shape to play Zephyr, and they wrapped the second installment of that film series,Winds of Change, several months ago. He’ll be going into production on the third,Tempest Rising, soon after the world premiere ofWinds of Changein February. Also, he was seen at a Post Malone concert with some of his costars and recently got a haircut.
I know way too much about Holden Archer, but I still haven’t seen him in person. I didn’t see him the night I left my diary inthe cab. I didn’t manage to get tickets to any of the Comic-Cons he attended. I didn’t get to the Los Angeles premiere ofRidersearly enough to catch sight of him. I have never seen him while shopping at Whole Foods like numerous acquaintances of mine have in the times he’s been in LA. It almost seems impossible that I never once saw him anywhere in New York even though we lived in the same city for years before he was cast inRiders of Storm and Fire.
I saw him inRidersseven times in the theater, though. I own the digital version—the director’s cut. He is beautiful in it. Truly. I know it was a special effect, getting his blue eyes to have silver flecks in them, but heactedlike a guy who has blue eyes with silver flecks in them. And I am only one of millions of women who wishes he’d ride her like he rode that CGI dragon. Or that she could ride him like he rode the CGI dragon?
Doesn’t matter because I guess it’s never going to happen.
Which is why I keep telling myself to move on.
“Fine,” I say to Lainey, Tracy, and the Universe. “I will go out tonight. I will consider lowering my standards for my First Time, but I will not compromise my integrity as a romantic. The future of romantic comedies in Hollywood depends upon my positive outlook.”
“Atta girl,” Lainey says, holding up her hand for a high five. “Tomorrow night you can stay home to write a new script:When Cherry Met Salami.”
Half an hour later, I’m in the back of an Uber with my roommates, wearing Lainey’s boots with four-inch heels andfalse eyelashes that are so long they will arrive at the club on Sunset ten seconds before the rest of me will. I’m also wearing contacts, which I rarely do, but the tips of the fake eyelashes were touching the lenses of my glasses, making it hard to blink. I thought, at first, that we were just going to go to one of the taverns in Westwood Village, but my companions insisted that we should venture a little farther out so I can meet a different kind of guy. I don’t hate that idea. The outfit I’m wearing is so upscale and fashionable, I feel nothing like myself, and maybe that’s a good thing for tonight. I’m wearing my signature scent, though. Gotta smell like me. We pregamed while they were glowing me up, and by that I mean they made me drink one and a half shots of tequila, which is what it takes to get me out of the house after 9:00 p.m., unless it’s a trip to a twenty-four-hour diner for pie. But this is the opposite of that.
Lainey and Tracy are hate-watching Shay’s Instagram stories about the big Hollywood party she’s at, and I’m trying to visualize how I’ll feelafterI have sex, when my phone vibrates. It’s a text from my dad. He somehow always knows when I’m going to be around drunk men—it’s incredible.
