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.