I laugh a little. “You can put me down now. You’ve safely delivered this damsel to her house, and your Southern duty is over.”
“Annie?”
I hear Uncle Don’s voice before I see him. He walks down the stairs, then stops when he sees us. Maybe some other person would wonder why a popular actor was carrying his niece through the house like a giant baby, but Don acts like all of this is normal.
“Drew! Good to see you again!” he says, smiling as if Drew is here on a purely social call. “Did you find the book?”
I snort, about to explain that there’s no way Drew would have the chance or inclination to finish a book that’s almost a thousand pages long, but before I can say that, Drew answers, “I’m reading it now.”
“And?” Don asks, eyebrows raised.
“It’s great,” Drew says. “But I’ve gotta ask . . . does Rand ever—”
“Shhh!” Don waves his arms, then points at me. “No spoilers. She hasn’t read it yet. I’ll lend you my copy of the second book so you’re ready to go when you finish this one.”
I turn my head slowly to look at Drew, my mouth open, and he shrugs. And then I remember, once again, that he’s still holding me and I say, “Okay, I’m getting down now.”
As Drew gently places me on the floor, Uncle Don finally notices that something is amiss. “Oh, Annie. What did you do? Do you want Dungeon Master Rick to look at it when he gets here? You know he’s an EMT.”
“No!” I shout, then my eyes bolt to Drew’s face. He’s looking at me with wide eyes. “I just tripped and hurt my foot. It’s the very definition of ‘no big deal.’”
“Can you carry her upstairs?” Don asks, turning to Drew, who’s apparently his new book bestie and most trusted friend now.
“I’m here to serve,” Drew says jovially.
“Oh, I don’t require any further assistance,” I say. “I’m capable of walking up the stairs.” Because the thing is, I really, really don’t want Drew Danforth to see the state of my bedroom and my tiny bed, when he probably has, like, a California King that’s covered in a million-thread-count sheets. Did I even make my bed today? Is there underwear on the floor? I’m not in the habit of leaving any clothing on the floor, but I’m sure this is the one time that all my underwear flung itself out of the drawers and onto the floor for the express purpose of embarrassing me in front of Drew.
I take one step and almost fall into the sofa.
“I’m not sure you are, actually,” he says, picking me up again. I don’t bother resisting. He carries me up the flight of stairs, then nods toward the first door on the right. “This one?”
I sigh. “Yes.”
“Ah,” Drew says as he pushes open the half-closed door. “This is it, huh? Where the magic happens?”
“If by ‘magic,’ you mean articles about hemorrhoid relief, then yes.”
“You’re still insisting that was for work, then?”
“Put me down.” I already had to have one conversation about hemorrhoids with Drew; I’m not having another one in my bedroom, of all places.
He places me gently on the bed, like I’m a doll he’s sitting on a shelf, like I weigh nothing at all.
“Thank you,” I say primly, trying to regain a modicum of dignity, which is hard when a man you barely know has just deposited you on your unmade bed (but, like, not in a sexy way). But Drew isn’t paying attention to me; he’s looking over everything on my desk.
“Are you working on something?” he asks, riffling through a few printed-out pages of my screenplay, and I forget about my foot and leap across the room.
“No!” I shout, grabbing them out of his hands. The pain catches up with me, and I wobble before he catches me. “This is . . . nothing. It’s nothing.”
“Is it a screenplay?” Drew asks, squinting and trying to read the words on the pages in my hand, his hand still on my arm.
I narrow my eyes and take a painful step back. “You’re really annoying, you know that?”
“It’s been said before,” Drew says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Fine. Don’t talk about it.”
“Great.” I stack the papers and place them back on my desk.
“But what’s it about?”
“Oh, my God,” I mutter. “Do you really want to know?”
“More than anything in the world,” he says, the slightest bit of a smile playing across his lips. Maybe when I first met Drew I would’ve thought this was sarcastic or mean, but I’m starting to understand him.
I shuffle through the papers on my desk. “It’s a romantic comedy. Obviously. It’s kinda loosely based on Chloe and Nick at the coffee shop, one of those banter-y, love/hate relationships where one of them doesn’t believe in commitment but you just know they’re gonna end up together.”
“So you’re the next Nora Ephron?” Drew asks, pointing to my framed photo of her.
I snort, loudly. “No one is the next Nora Ephron. She was one of a kind.”
Drew leans closer to inspect the photo. “What is it about her that you connect with so much?”
I look at the picture instead of at him. “It’s a lot of things. She worked hard. She was smart and funny and tough, and even when life knocked her down she kept going.”
“Like you,” Drew says. Hardly, I think, but I keep talking.
“That’s not it, though. I think the main thing I love about her work is that it’s sad. Everyone thinks of romantic comedies as being these sappy, unrealistic stories where love conquers all and everyone ends up happy at the end. But that’s not what her movies were at all. Like, in Sleepless in Seattle, you can’t really get any sadder than Tom Hanks missing his dead wife. And in You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan misses her mom and she loses her store. None of that gets resolved by the end. It’s not like Tom’s wife comes back to life, and Meg Ryan still loses the business her mom built.”
“Wow,” Drew says, widening his eyes. “When you put it that way, it sounds like a laugh riot.”
“But then they find love!” I say, my voice rising. “The things that suck still suck, but they’re allowed to be happy. And maybe it means so much more that they’re happy, knowing that they still carry all that sadness with them.”
Drew nods, slides off his coat, and sits down on my bed. There is a very large, very attractive man here in my childhood bedroom, on my bed, a place where large, attractive men usually are not. I wonder, for a second, if he would even fit in my bed, lengthwise. Probably not. I’m afraid Drew can read my thoughts all over my face, so I’m glad when he breaks the silence.
“But your rom-com isn’t that sad, is it?” he asks, leaning back on his elbows. His sweater rides up the slightest bit, showing off those much-praised abs. I can’t even imagine being that comfortable with my body, but he’s so casual about it. “Chloe doesn’t seem very sad.”
I pull out my desk chair and sit down. “I know she’s always listening to upbeat music from the seventies and putting sprinkles on lattes and knitting striped scarves, but her life is hard. Her dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s and her mom split a long time ago, so she’s in charge of him. Whenever she’s not working, she’s usually at his assisted-living place. That’s where all her money goes, and that’s why she’s still going to school.”
“I didn’t know that,” Drew says. “I wasn’t trying to be a jerk.”
I shrug. “How would you know? She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Now that,” Drew says, “I can understand.”
I look at him reclining on my bed and he looks at me and there’s a moment, a slightly too-long moment, where we’re just looking at each other. And then he says, “Hey, I’m sorry I made fun of romantic comedies.”
Our argument at Nick’s flashes through my mind, and I flush with embarrassment. “No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I was just upset because I was on the world’s worst date with the world’s stinkiest man.”
Drew sits up and shakes his head. “I was being an asshole. Like, I tho
ught we were . . .” He gestures back and forth between us. “Bantering or whatever. I didn’t realize how important they were to you. I didn’t know you were taking it personally.”
“Yeah, well. Imagine if someone was making fun of Frasier to you.”
Drew makes a fist. “I swear to God, if anyone said even one ill word about David Hyde Pierce . . .”
He stands up then, takes a step toward me. “You thought I was a jerk, didn’t you?”
I consider lying, but Drew’s being honest with me, so instead I nod. “Yeah. I really hated you.”
He laughs. “Wow. That was . . . candid. I like it. Why did you hate me?”
I stand up and roll my eyes. “Come on, dude. You made fun of my job. You made fun of romantic comedies. Coffee Girl.”
“What about Coffee Girl?” Drew asks, taking another step closer.
“You gave me an embarrassing nickname in front of other people, like I didn’t have a job or dreams or a name. Like I was just some lowly employee who exists only to get coffee.”
Drew snort-laughs, but when he sees the look in my eyes, he sobers up. “Wait, you really don’t like the nickname?”
I shake my head. “No!”
“I thought it was our fun inside joke, since you spilled coffee on me.”
I shake my head again. “Uh, maybe if you’re trying to establish a fun inside joke with someone else, you should first determine if the other person finds what you’re saying a) fun and b) a joke.”
“I won’t call you that anymore, but I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad. I told you, Annie,” he says, taking another step toward me, and my name on his lips still sounds like a lovely foreign word. “Not taking things seriously is the Danforth way. We mock those we like.”
“Like pulling a girl’s pigtails when you have a crush on her?” I ask, and then I try to laugh but it comes out as a squeak. Drew is very close to me now, and my body is at war; part of me wants to run away from him, from this moment, but my eyes can’t look away from his.
He smiles, then reaches out, grabs one of my unruly curls, and pulls on it oh-so-gently.
This can’t be real. It can’t. This is a weird dream, and any minute now Uncle Don is going to burst through the door but he’s going to look like RuPaul and he’s going to tell me that I forgot to do homework for my ninth-grade math class. And then I’ll wake up and tell Chloe about this at Nick’s, and she’ll say, “Wow, what’s going on in your subconscious, anyway?”
“What are you doing?” Drew asks, looking at my arm.
“Pinching myself,” I say. I pinch myself harder, but I’m not waking up.
Drew laughs, a tiny little sound. He takes another step toward me, so now there’s really and truly no space between us. His chest is against mine, and I’m once again in a situation where I realize how tall he is, a full head above me. I look up at him and start to shake, so I pinch myself again.
“Annie,” Drew says, and he puts his hand over mine. “What does Sexy Gaffer think of your screenplay?”
I shake my head.
“Does he not know you’re a writer?” Drew asks, his low voice incredulous.
“We haven’t talked about it,” I whisper. “Yet.”
Drew shakes his head, the disbelief written across his face, which I can see quite clearly because it’s mere centimeters from mine. We’re so close that I’ve started converting things to metric. “That’s bananas, because I could tell you were a writer from the moment I met you. Well, not the moment when you didn’t speak and I temporarily thought you were French. But after that, I could tell. You have the vocabulary of a writer, and you just . . . seem like you have something to say.”
I get that these words in this configuration wouldn’t mean much to most women. Maybe other women would like to hear that they’re beautiful or irresistible or flawless, but for me, for someone who’s spent years feeling like she had nothing to say, this might be the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me. That Drew saw that in me before he really even knew me . . . it means more to me than anything.
He leans even closer. Another beat and closer still. How is there even still space between us? How much longer can this keep going on? How long do I have to wait before his lips touch my lips and—
“Hey, sweetie?”
The door creaks open and Uncle Don pokes his head into the room. I yelp, jump back, land on my injured foot, and crash into my desk before bouncing off and landing on the floor.
Uncle Don, oblivious as always, doesn’t notice that he interrupted a tension-filled moment in which I think a kiss might have actually been about to happen. Or at least it was a moment in which I wanted a kiss to happen, a thought that fills me with an exciting feelings-cocktail made up of excitement, despair, dread, and just a dash of nausea.
“Annie, honey!” He crosses the room and kneels beside me.
Drew does the same. “Are you okay?”
Drew reaches out, and I pull away. “I’m good. I—actually, can you guys go downstairs? I want to get changed. I’ll be down in a second.”
Uncle Don nods. “I came up to ask Drew if he could help me put a leaf in the dining-room table. The guys are about to come over, and Dungeon Master Rick always complains that the table’s not big enough.”
Drew shoots me that look again, reminding me that I never explained the whole D&D thing to him; he probably thinks he’s helping Uncle Don set up for some weird sex party. I just shake my head and give him a look that I hope communicates I’ll explain later.
“Sure,” Drew says. “I couldn’t live with myself if Dungeon Master Rick was disappointed.”
“He’s a difficult man to please,” Uncle Don says with a sigh, which really doesn’t help the whole “this looks like a sex party” situation.
I listen as Don and Drew walk downstairs, and as soon as I’m in the clear I pull my phone out of my pocket and call Chloe.
“What’s wrong?” she answers.
“Nothing!” I say. “I mean, I’m a little injured, but that’s not the issue. I think . . .”
I trail off, unable to even put what just happened into words.
“What??” Chloe practically shouts.
I look at my photo of Nora and gulp. “I think Drew and I almost kissed.”
Chloe screams for a full ten seconds, which doesn’t sound like that long but is actually a very long time to scream.
“Are you done?” I ask.
“Yeah. Wait . . . no, yeah, I’m done. What the hell, Annie? How did this happen? How did things go from you being all, ‘Nooooo, Roman Holiday is a bummer’ to ‘Sure, let’s bone a movie star’?”
“We haven’t boned, Chloe. We didn’t even kiss. Uncle Don walked in and I fell over and now they’re downstairs getting ready for D&D.”
“Back up. Why is he at your house? What’s going on?”
I tell Chloe the whole story, and she’s silent for so long that I start to think the call dropped. But then she says, “So how many times, total, have you fallen over today?”
“Twice.”
“Okay. And you’ve also run into Drew and spilled coffee on him.”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t you run into Carter when you met him, while carrying a comically large stack of papers?”
“Right. Your point?”
“Girl,” Chloe says, and I can practically see the expression on her face. “There are two men fighting over you—three if you count Barry—”
“Which I don’t.”
“—And you’re in a rom-com of your own making.”
“I am not, Chloe.”
“You’re the charming, klutzy heroine and you’re in the midst of a lopsided love triangle, and you need to go down there and kiss Drew right now,” Chloe says with bravado.
“In front of Uncle Don?”
“Don doesn’t care,” she says. Her voice grows muffled before she comes back to the phone. “Sorry, Nick’s being a total pill. Like, ‘there are customers’ and ‘I don’t pay you to t
alk on the phone’ and ‘your screaming is upsetting Gary.’”
“Gary doesn’t like loud noises. You know that. And anyway, this feels wrong. I mean, I’m sort of dating Carter—”
Chloe snorts. “Um, you have been on one date with Carter. I’m ten thousand percent sure he hasn’t put his entire dating life on hold just because he got coffee with you. Just promise me we can dissect this moment a million times tonight.”
“Promise. Don’t get fired.”
“Bye.”
I take a look at myself in my vanity, the same one I used to stare into in elementary school when I wished I had boobs. And in middle school when I wished I didn’t have braces. And in high school when I wished, more than anything, that my mom was here.
And now I’m looking into it, wondering what’s happening. I almost kissed Drew—there’s no denying it. I run my fingers over my hair and hastily apply a little more blush and lipstick. But wait, that’s way too obvious; tinted lip gloss is my typical daytime look, and lipstick screams, “Hey, look at me, I’m trying to look hot.” But what’s wrong with trying to look hot? Maybe I want to look like I put some effort into this.
Ugh. I grab a tissue and wipe off most of the lipstick, then put some clear gloss on over it.
I study my reflection. I look okay—like a woman who’s about to walk downstairs and find a movie star with her uncle’s D&D friends, and oh shit, Drew is going to meet Don’s D&D friends.
I hobble downstairs as quickly as I can, round the corner into the dining room, and find . . .
Uncle Don patiently explaining the rules of D&D to Drew while the rest of the D&D guys look on.
Drew looks up and sees me, his face breaking into a smile so big that I would have a hard time standing up even if I wasn’t injured. “Hey,” he says. “You were supposed to let me help you down the stairs.”
“I just thought,” I say, looking around the table, shocked at how well Drew’s fitting in, “that you might want to learn everything there is to know about D&D.”
“This is actually pretty interesting,” Drew says.
“No duh,” says Dungeon Master Rick.
“Drew was telling us about the guy, weren’t you, Drew?” Earl says, nudging Paul. “The guy we saw in the movie. Tatum Channing?”
Waiting for Tom Hanks Page 12
