He glances quickly over to Kylie, who is watching us with flat curiosity.
“Well,” I say, swallowing my pride, “let me know if you need some help, okay?”
Carter nods, but I don’t stick around to see if he’ll say anything else.
I’m so worked up I can barely concentrate. The worst part of being this mad is that I’m no longer rational. I hear Carter talking on his phone with his door open and I want to hurl a stapler at him for being loud enough for me to hear. I hear Brad thanking Kylie for the coffee she’s handed him in the hall, and I want to yell, “If she was a male assistant, would you expect him to bring you coffee every goddamn hour?”
And I’m so angry that when my phone buzzes with a text from Carter, I can’t even read it. I flip my phone facedown when a second comes in, a third, a fourth, and dive into the process of answering emails, returning calls, and making deals. In essence, the anger fuels me—and if I don’t have five hot scripts in my inbox, at least I have a motherfucking productive day.
Only when I’m home later—way past nine, and with a fishbowl-size glass of wine in my hand—do I read what he wrote.
It’s time for us to cut the shit.
I don’t know what kind of game Brad is playing.
But I get that I’m coming out favored in part because I’m a guy. And that’s fucked up.
I like you. I liked us.
I don’t know how to manage this weird competition. I need you to tell me how I can fix this.
The problem with deciding to cut the shit is that it’s easier said than done. I could reply to his texts, addressing everything, but in a lot of ways that feels like cheating. We know we can text. We know we can get along outside of work. What we can’t seem to do, yet, is interact like rational humans when we’re together at the office, and given that approximately ninety-eight percent of my life revolves around my job, I can’t just accept the text-and-out-of-work approach to our relationship.
So I reply with a simple I feel the same about all of this. Let’s talk more in person—that’s where we always get stuck, and try to get to bed early.
? ? ?
Life has to go on, and because we all took time off to be with family for the holidays, there are a million things to handle. We each have endless producers to follow up with, staffing season to plan, directors and actors to call and cajole, schedules to massage.
It all makes me want to sledgehammer Brad for thinking mid-January was a good time for the department retreat, and my nerves climb higher in my throat with each day that passes without my speaking a word to Carter. I feel Brad’s New York Decision looming like a dark thundercloud.
It’s only about a two-hour drive from LA to Big Bear, but because we’d all planned to drive ourselves, and everyone works until the last second, we end up leaving at the worst possible time—four in the afternoon on a Friday. And yet, when I come outside, everyone is happily piling into a handful of limos parked out front.
A swank ride up to the retreat: a surprise from Brad.
“Limos!” Rose cries, and eight-year-old me can totally relate to the excitement of this, though thirty-three-year-old me remains cynical.
“Gotta treat my people well, don’t I?” Brad says magnanimously, and claps me on the back. “I have high hopes that this retreat is the best one yet. Don’t let me down, kiddo!”
“And Carter!” Carter adds with a nervous laugh, but Brad doesn’t hear him.
Carter and I exchange brief looks, and despite the unspoken everything between us, I know we’re both thinking the same thing: Brad wouldn’t increase the budget for the lunch we planned, so we had to do a lame sandwich bar, yet he can be the big guy and bring everyone to the retreat in limos?
Jess grabs me as we’re about to head out, dropping a small stack of files in my arms. “The invoices for this little adventure,” she says, slightly out of breath. “Sorry that took so long, but the mailroom said they were labeled to go to Brad and I basically had to wrestle them away.” She opens the one on top. “There are a bunch of vendors here I didn’t book, so have a look to make sure it’s all there, and we can talk when you’re back.”
“Thanks, Jess,” I say, and take a deep, cleansing breath. I can do this, I remind myself. “I wish you were coming with us.”
“Ha. Not to hurt your feelings, but hell no. Good luck and”—she looks meaningfully over my shoulder to where Carter is climbing into one of the cars—“have fun.”
Right. Fun.
Amelia and Daryl stand near the sidewalk, waving and smiling their Good luck, you’ll need it smiles. I give them my best I wish you were suffering along with me, assholes smile in return before climbing into the limo.
As nice as it would be to talk and smooth out some last-minute details during the drive up, Carter and I end up sitting on opposite ends of our car. Andrew and Carter exchange glances as their eyes wander over the minibar, calculating how long we need to sit here before they can pop into the champagne. According to Andrew, that duration is approximately the time it takes us to pull away from the front of the building.
I for one am giving that decision hallelujah hands and a hell yes, because we need this entire crew to have as good a time as possible, and that means getting everyone day drunk, immediately.
With a glass of bubbly headed my way and my inability to do any work in the car for fear of getting carsick, I can only join in the shenanigans.
Timothy shit-talks Ed Ruiz from Alterman for a little while—apparently he did some shady things to pull a potential client out from under Timothy—and I silently enjoy the hell out of the story he’s telling, because Ed is a complete fuckwit.
“Didn’t you work with him?” Andrew asks me.
“Yeah, but not much directly.”
And that’s all I’m going to give. I won’t share the time that he vomited on my shoes in a cab on our way back from a work dinner, or that he slept with Ken Alterman’s assistant and got so obsessed with her that he kept her underwear in a drawer in his desk, or that he once reassured an actor on his list that it was totally fine that he “accidentally” had sex with a seventeen-year-old and that Ed would be happy to hide any evidence.
Gossip is fun—don’t get me wrong, I live for it—but I’m rarely the one letting on that I have anything exciting to share. So when Andrew starts telling us about how he saw a very huge A-list actress at a full-nudity sex club with a very important—and very old—male director, I tuck this story away in a little jewel box in my memory.