by Jessica Ashe
There’s a different atmosphere at work. I notice it the minute I step foot in the building. One of the receptionists was excessively nice and cheerful when she’s usually a bit miserable, while the other one gave me the evil eye even though he’s typically the happiest guy in the office.
People stop talking when I approach. The elevator goes silent when I step inside. That’s not the type of boss I am. I typically say ‘good morning’ to my employees and they smile and return the greeting. I’ve worked hard to make this a place where people can speak their minds, and I hold ‘office hours’ once a week where any employee can come and talk to me. Despite what I get up to in the evening, I don’t rule the office with an iron fist and that’s helped create a friendly place where most of my employees are happy.
Not anymore. Things haven’t been this bad since I was arrested for Shannon’s murder.
I crash down in my chair and pull the letter and my check book out from my bag. Carly could have posted this for me, but I don’t want her asking questions about the letters she needs to post once every couple of months, or once every few weeks if he keeps this rate up.
He only wants $5,000 this time. That’s one of the smallest amounts he’s ever requested, although coming so soon after the $15,000 I paid him a few weeks ago, it feels more like a top up. I stare at the letter for a few minutes, but I’m determined not to let it consume me. I’m going to end up writing the check, so I might as well get on with it. That’s all I use my checkbook for these days. Every facsimile slip is a record of all the payments I’ve made to Johan Contra over the years. I’m not going to total it up. That would be too depressing.
Speaking of depressing…. I turn my computer on to see if there’s any reason why all the employees are pissed at me this morning. My inbox has the usual assortment of crap: emails marked urgent when they’re anything but; and emails that look innocuous but demand urgent attention. Oh, and someone left an earring in the ladies’ bathroom on the third floor. I don’t see how I can be blamed for that.
I’m about to call Grady into my office when he shows up anyway. I quickly stuff the letter and the check I wrote in a drawer and offer him a seat.
“Feeling better?” Grady asks.
I had to give Grady a separate excuse, because he knew I didn’t have any meetings yesterday. Being ill was the only thing I could think up. I’m not all that creative. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a twenty-four-hour thing.”
“There’s a bug going around my department. Knocked a few guys out of action for a week. I was worried you might have that.”
“So was I at one point, but I got plenty of sleep and now feel refreshed. Well, relatively. Did anything major happen here yesterday?”
Grady frowns. “No, not that I know of. Why’d you ask?”
“There’s a weird vibe in here today. People are acting differently around me.”
“Ah.” Grady looks awkwardly at his feet. His one flaw as a senior figure is that he’s too nice to give bad news or discipline people.
“Come on, spit it out.”
“Word’s getting around.”
“About what?”
Grady raises an eyebrow. “You know what.”
“Shit.” The sale. “How did that happen?”
“No idea. To be honest, it’s a miracle we managed to keep it under wraps for so long.”
“Find out who’s talking and make sure they keep quiet.”
“That’s not realistic.”
“Not that many people know,” I point out. “It shouldn’t be a long list.”
“No, you’re right. There’s just me and you. And Sandra at Pacific Technologies. And a few of the finance guys in my team. And the operations director. And your secretary. And Sandra’s team. Our attorneys. Her attorneys. The CPAs. And the—”
“Okay, you’ve made your point. This is bad. No wonder the atmosphere is tense. Half our employees must be worried about their jobs.”
“You can’t keep everyone happy all the time, Parker. All this means is that we need to act quickly to cut off any panic. Are you any closer to a decision?”
I shake my head. After yesterday, Grady’s suggestion of chilling out on a beach for the rest of my life holds a lot more appeal than it used to, especially if I can convince Carly to hang around for more than just the kinky sex.
“Sandra never improved her offer,” Grady says. “We’re not going to get another cent out of them.”
“It’s not about the money.”
“The only people who say that are the ones who already have plenty of it.”
“I’m thinking about the employees,” I snap. “You know as well as I do, that Sandra is going to slash the headcount the second the ink is dry.”
“You can’t fight capitalism. You made your fortune by designing equipment that put people out of jobs. This is how things are.”
The difference was, I didn’t know those people. They were numbers on a spreadsheet, and I told myself that for every employee who lost his job because of my technology, I would eventually end up hiring two more. That never happened. I have over a thousand employees, but that’s less than half of those who lost their jobs when my equipment replaced them.
It’s a bit late to get sentimental now. I’ve made millions, and stand to make a small fortune if the sale goes through.
“I’ll decide this week,” I promise. “Tell Sandra that by close of business Friday she will have her answer.”
“Any idea which way you’ll go?”
“Nope. Have you surveyed the other shareholders recently? If we are going to sell, I’d like as many on board as possible. We need 90% to make things fly through smoothly. With me and you, that’s 82%. What about Mitchell and Cameron? They’ve got 5% each. That would put us over the top.”
“They were happy to sell on the very first offer. They’ll be cracking the champagne if this new and improved deal goes through.”
“First they’ll need to work their asses off. Sandra’s team has a reputation for thorough due diligence. They won’t let this go through without a fight.”
“Tell me about it. I have a trip to Vegas planned this weekend. If you give the go ahead, that’ll be my last free weekend for quite some time.”
“Vegas?” I ask quizzically. Grady never struck me as the Vegas type. “You go there often?”
“Not really,” he replies. “Me and some college friends went there just after turning twenty-one, and now we all try to regroup there as often as possible. It’s not easy. Most of them have families and what have you. Still, should be fun. You can come if you like?”
“Thanks, but the weekends are all about Olivia.” And Carly if I play my cards right.
“Of course. Okay, well I’ll leave you to it. Good luck with the big decision.”
Grady leaves me alone. I still can’t concentrate on work, so I grab the letter from my drawer and walk down to the mail room to ensure it goes out today. He always demands an urgent response and I don’t want to test him. Not when there’s so much at stake.
Chapter Sixteen
Carly
Roll Credits.
The two most satisfying words I’ve ever typed.
My work is far from finished. I’m not naïve enough to think my script is in good shape. By the time I’m finished editing, I’ll have replaced at least 50% of the words and cut out entire story beats. There needs to be some trimming, that’s for sure. My script is 160 pages right now. Assuming it meets the industry average of a page being one minute of screen time, then my black comedy drama is coming in at nearly three hours. Even accounting for the trend of longer running times in movies, that’s still too much, especially for a dark movie like mine.
I’m still pleased with myself. My outline document was created over a year ago. This script represents a substantial portion of my life, although in truth most of it was written in the last few weeks. It’s incredible how quickly you can bang out a script when you’re mentally in the right mindset.
It�
��s probably complete trash, but a complete first draft of a movie is more than a lot of people produce in a lifetime. I’m allowed to be pleased with myself for five minutes.
Ten minutes later, I’m tearing my hair out in frustration. The first page is much worse than I remember it, and the second page contains a huge contradiction to events later in the story. I groan loudly to myself and attract Tami’s attention as she’s walking past my room on the way to the kitchen.
“You sound frustrated,” Tami remarks. “Which should be impossible given the amount of sex you’re having these days.”
“It’s my script,” I reply, ignoring her comment about the sex. Parker and I haven’t slept together since the night in ‘the room.’ That kind of sex requires an amount of energy I don’t tend to have during the week when I’m juggling work and writing. We could have more relaxed sex, but I’m not sure if he’s ever in the mood for that. I wouldn’t even know how to approach it with him. I decide to focus on the positives. I’m having awesome sex with an incredible man, and I’m in such a good mood that I can write more words than I’ve ever written before. They just happen to be shit words.
“What’s wrong with your script?” Tami asks, peering over my shoulder. “I thought it was all coming along well.”
“It was. Then I read it. It’s nowhere near good enough to be a movie. Not even close.”
“It’s a first draft. It’s supposed to be shit. I read first drafts all the time, and they are—almost without exception—dreadful.”
“They’re not this bad.”
“Want me to read it?”
I shake my head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
“It’s long.”
“That’s fine. You get pretty quick at reading these things in my line of work.”
No one I know has ever read my work before. A few years ago, I posted a couple of pages of a sitcom I’d been working on to an online message board. The comments on there reduced me to tears, and I’ve not sought feedback since. It turns out people on the internet can be nasty—who knew.
For better or worse, I taught myself everything I know about screenwriting. I’ve read books, watched online lectures, and examined real-life scripts from successful and unsuccessful movies. One the pieces of advice that nearly everyone in the industry gives is to seek feedback about your writing. It’s the best way to improve, no matter how painful that might be.
“Okay,” I reply quietly. “But it isn’t very good.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
I create a Word version of the script from Final Draft and send it over to Tami. She disappears to her room to read it, while I spend the next few hours trying to distract myself from the painful thought that someone I know is reading my writing.
There’s nothing on television, so I watch Downton Abbey for the fifth time. After a couple of episodes, I text Parker to see how Olivia’s getting on. I took her to the doctor yesterday because she’s been feeling under the weather. The doctor thinks she has an ear infection and prescribed a course of antibiotics which should clear the problem up in a few days. Selfishly, I hate it when Olivia isn’t at one hundred percent. When she’s feeling well, she makes the day fly by and it never feels like work at all.
She’s looking better, Parker replies. Still tired, but less pale. Thanks for taking her.
No problem. All part of the job.
How’s the writing coming along?
Tami’s reading it now. Fingers crossed she likes it.
When do I get to read it?
Never! I reply. There are sex scenes in there that will be all too familiar to Parker.
Do you have any plans for the weekend? Thought maybe we could do something.
Not that there was ever any doubt as to what that ‘something’ might be, but Parker follows his message up with a winky face emoji. That might be the first time he’s ever used emojis in a conversation. I didn’t even know he knew how to use them. As if to prove me right, he follows that one up with a pink shoe and a cake. God only knows what he was going for there.
I’ll focus on the obvious good part—he wants to spend time with me this weekend. Worst case scenario, I end up tied to the bed ‘suffering’ through countless orgasms as we do things outside the realms of my imagination. Best case scenario, he wants to take things more intimate and make this real.
I’m about to reply when Tami comes out of her room carrying her laptop. She lands next to me on the sofa, and my eyes immediately pick out a lot of highlighted lines on the script and comments down the right-hand side. This could be painful.
“Don’t look so scared,” Tami says. “I loved it.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I can assure you I did. Here’s why I know this is going to work—you’ve got two great leads. There are story issues that need fixing, but the characters are awesome. That’s the most important part, and the hardest thing to get right. Congratulations.”
“I still don’t believe you, but thank you. Now tell me all the bits I fucked up.”
“I’ll start with the easy bits. First, you’re giving too much direction to the actors. Nearly every other line has a parenthetical describing the tone of voice used to deliver it. Directors—and actors—hate that. Second, you need to work on your action lines. You often talk about what characters are thinking and feeling. That should be obvious from the lines they speak and what they do. If it’s not, then you’ve got a bigger problem.”
I nod in agreement. This is good. Constructive criticism doesn’t have to be painful. This will also help me get the page count down. I had a feeling my action descriptions were too long, but once I connected to my characters, I felt this compulsive need to document their every emotion on the page. It doesn’t matter—it’s easy enough to get rid of.
Tami scrolls through the document until she gets to the end of the first act. “I’ve left a few suggested edits for style, but a lot of that is optional. You’ve got the basics of formatting down to a tee.”
“I owe that to the software.”
“Gotta love technology. Okay, so I’ve left comments at the end of each act. I thought it would be useful for you to see what I was thinking at each stage. It’s a first impression.”
“Oh, I like that idea,” I reply. “It’s so hard to know what the problems are with the beginning of the movie when you’re not looking at it in isolation.”
“The good news is I can only spot one major problem.”
“What’s that.”
“Tone. After the first act, the movie felt like a comedy centered around a young woman looking for love and a man who was only after sex. You’ve got great material in there, and I genuinely laughed out loud a few times.”
“That’s good.”
“It is. If you can convince an agent to read through the first thirty pages then you’re onto a winner. The problems come after that. The second act gets dark. Really dark. There’s still some humor in there, but it’s bleak. It goes from being a comedy to being a drama, to almost being a horror movie. Honestly, at one point it was starting to creep me out a bit.”
“Oh. I wasn’t going for that.”
“I figured. And it ends up being funny again at the end, but the shifts in tone are jarring. The good news is I don’t think it will take much work to fix. I’ve left a few suggestions.”
“Thanks,” I reply. “Honestly, I owe you one.”
“Happy to help. For a first draft, that’s a solid script.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, as if I’ve been given the all clear after an important doctor’s visit.
“There is one other thing I wanted to talk about,” Tami says delicately.
“You said there was only one issue with the script.”
“It’s not about the script. It’s about you.”
“Me?”
Tami scrolls down to a sex scene that takes place halfway through the movie. This is the sex scene I don’t want Parker to read. The
setting is eerily similar to his special room, and what the characters do is almost an exact copy of what Parker and I got up to the other night. You know what they say—write what you know. I’d rather do that than google ‘bdsm sex’ and go down that rabbit hole.
“It’s this sex scene,” Tami says.
“Too hardcore? I want this movie to be R-rated, but I know movie studios are all about everything being PG-13 these days.”
“Nothing about this movie is PG-13, and if you try to make it PG-13 then it will lose everything I love about it.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “So what’s the problem?”
“This is some extreme stuff.”
“The character likes to be dominated.”
“Does she?”
“Well, it’s complicated. She’s new to the scene, so there’s some uncertainty.”
“You’ve written a lot about her emotional state during this scene. She trusts him and finds the sex thrilling, but she’s constantly worried that something is missing. At the beginning, she wants to have vanilla sex, and at the end, you mention that her favorite part of the entire experience is the cuddle in bed at the end.”
“She’s confused,” I reply. “She definitely enjoys it, though. Should I write “ORGASM HERE” in big letters or something?”
“She loves the sex,” Tami says. “That much is obvious. But she wants more, and even though she supposedly trusts this guy, she can’t bring herself to tell him that.”
“It’s part of her journey. Do you think there’s a problem with the character arc?”
Tami sighs dramatically. “No, Carly. The character is fine. She’s you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s nothing like me. She has a rich family, a step-dad who abused her as a kid, and she got arrested as a teenager.”
“I mean during this sex scene. That’s your voice coming through. You’re the one having this kinky sex. You’re the one who wants more.”
Those words had been easy to write. They’d flowed out of me without any thought whatsoever. Perhaps I put a little too much of myself in this one.
