his head. “He’s not my grandfather. When she finished her service in Korea and came back to the States, she picked up right where she left with Ronald.”
I looked back down at the smiling woman in the photo, clearly so happy and full of life. “But what about Ian?”
“What about him?” Leo said, rather harshly. “In my family, there are obligations—to be with the right person, to have the right job, live in the right city. I’m the one to break that cycle.” He took the photo from me and set it back on the shelf. “I keep her photo to remind me to live my own life. My parents followed a similar path as my grandparents. They were two people who never should have been together but their families deemed it a good match. They divorced before I was four and went on to marry three other times. All I’ve seen my whole life is a series of failed relationships, disastrous marriages, useless stepsiblings. My family has become a wasteland of various strangers who have passed through on the way to another failed relationship. I won’t have that in my life. I’ll never marry, and when a relationship ends, that’s it. I walk away and don’t look back.” He shrugged as if this was all normal. “It’s the way I learned. And I think it’s an interesting enough story to tell.”
“So the movie isn’t a romance,” I said. “It’s a tragedy.”
“Of sorts,” he said. He turned his eyes to me and said, “A cautionary tale.”
It crushed me to think of anyone living that way. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. To cover myself I added, “In the script, I mean. People like love. They like romance.”
He smiled at me, but it was a sad kind of smile. “That’s what I love about you, Sophie Adams. You’re still untarnished enough to believe that.”
It took me a moment to recover for the words. The I love you bit—okay, I love about you bit. But then I heard what he was really saying—that I was naïve, and he would never be anything more to me than the mind-blowing sex of last night.
“I don’t want you to have any false expectations,” he said, putting the final nail through my heart. “With me or the ending of the script.”
I steeled myself against the words, reminding myself again what my goal was—that damned article.
“I’m confused,” I said to Leo, leaning on the desk. “Are you using me for my body or my mind?”
Leo expression softened as he looked at me. “Both. Equally.”
“What do you want to use right now?” I teased.
He leaned across the desk and gently kissed my lips. “Both,” he said.
We ended up back in the living—working on the script. Every time I suggested a tweak for a scene or length of dialogue, Leo pushed me one step further.
“That’s the easy thing to say,” he’d tell me of the suggested dialogue. “Audiences expect her to say that, or in that way. Go deeper,” he’d say. “Say it stronger.” And so I’d come up with a better way for the character to state her point, or a better scene for Vivienne and Ian to meet for the first time.
The work thrilled me more than I ever thought it would. Leo was not easy on me. He was demanding and took on a tone that intimidated me. But I wanted to do well by him, and the story he wanted to tell. Before I knew it, the sun was setting, and Leo ordered dinner to be delivered.
We took a break to eat on the deck as the sun set. We dug into the food realizing how hungry we’d become. Once we got started on the script, we hadn’t taken a single break. The time flew by.
“You never did tell me,” Leo said as he bit into his taco. “What’s your favorite movie?”
“Didn’t we decide that’s a minefield?”
“No, we decided not to talk about music,” he said.
“You decided,” I said. “I could talk about it all day.”
“Please don’t,” he said. “My ears can’t take it.”
“So what, then?”
“Movie,” he said again. “Your favorite. What is it?”
I really didn’t want to tell him. It felt too personal or something. I once read this book that I fell madly in love with. I couldn’t stop talking about it, so my ex, Paul, said he wanted to read it, too. When he finished, he deemed it “obvious,” and I’d felt as if someone had just told me