Falling into Forever (Falling into You) (2 page)

Eva
starts to gather her things, but Jeff holds up his hand to stop her. She smirks back at him as he bends his head to converse with another man in hushed tones. Finally, he pushes a scrap of paper at Eva, who tucks it under her tablet with a smile.

“We’ll give you a m
inute to speak with your client. Clear the room, guys,” Jeff says.

He eyes me again before shooting me an exaggerated wink. I roll my eyes in response, but that only seems to encourage him
, because he does a little stage bow before exiting the room with the rest of the suits.

Eva glances at the paper, stretches her arms contentedly, and
shoves it across the table at me. I take it into my hand, but I don’t look at the numbers, because I’m not ready to look and frankly, I’m not here for the money.

“The deal is
actually better than I hoped for. They’re willing to guarantee that all three of the movies will get made, and there’s a lot of money for you if any one of them falls through. Since you’re the cowriter, they’re going to give you the first stab at revising the screenplay for the first one. If that goes well, they’ll make an offer for the next two. It’s smart for them to realize that they need a feminine touch. Women drive the box office, which is something that men in Hollywood finally seem to be realizing.”

I only heard one word
. “Cowriter? I never agreed to that. This was his baby, not mine.”

“
The book is his, I’ll give you that much. The story is his. But this screenplay is yours, Hallie, and we both know that. And honestly, the reason that all of the studios are clamoring for this piece is the screenplay. Your voice is all over it, and you deserve credit for that.”

“I told you that I didn’t
want my name on it. When, exactly, did that happen?”

“
I added your name to the last revision. I didn’t tell you, because I knew you were going to get all high and mighty about it and say no. But it’s done, so there’s no use arguing about it now.”

I stand up.
“I don’t want any of this.” We’ve fought about this before, and she knows how I feel. “This is for him. Not for me. It’s not mine.”

“This is for you, too,” she says in a low voice. I’m walking out the door when her next words stop me in my tracks.

“It’s got box-office gold all over it. You can go hide wherever you want, but if we don’t do this deal now, they’ll still be beating down your door—next month, next year, in ten years. It’s a great story, Hallie. A Hollywood story. All of it—not just the screenplay. And you’re stuck with it, whether you want to be or not. At least if we get it settled now, there will be some peace for you. You can finish all of this business and start to move on with your life. I know you do want that.”

She’s right
, even though I don’t want to admit it. I’m exhausted and I need some measure of normalcy and that will never happen with the screenplay hanging over my head. I sit back down and open my mouth to respond, but she’s not finished.

“They also want a guarantee
that you’ll do the press junket when they start filming and when it comes out in theaters.”

The
thought of sitting on someone’s couch and revealing all of my dirty little secrets makes me want to throw up. But I nod. That one was always a given. I’ll deal with it later. Avoidance. It’s a good strategy.

“There’s up-front money for the production rights and there’s a nice little piece of the back-end profits on the films, increasing with
each one. Here’s the number.”

She slides the piece of paper
even further across the table and when I give it a cursory glance, I can’t do anything but laugh. It’s a ridiculous sum.

“This is the budget for the movie?”

“No, Hallie. That’s the amount of money that they’re going to give you for the rights to the trilogy and the first script. It doesn’t include what they’ll pay for the next scripts or the back-end, which will be significantly more than that. Lightgate’s willing to give us more up-front, but they’re not budging on the rest of your requirements, so I think we should just take this offer and be done with it.”

Hearing her tell me that this is about to be over is
music to my ears, at least until I look back down again. There are so many zeroes that I can’t even begin to fathom what I could ever do with a tiny fraction of the sum.

Millions and millions of dollars.
For some pieces of paper.

“Take it. I just want to get out of here.”

She jumps up and does a little victory dance, pulling me to my feet and practically lifting me from the ground with her final spin.

“Fabulous!
You won’t regret this. I promise.”

I can’t quite match her enthusiasm, but the relief that all of this is about to be over has calmed my initial fears and the slight rumbling in my stomach reminds me that I haven’t eaten
since the hormone-free room service fiasco. As she leaves the room to rally the troops, I glance around to see if someone had the foresight to leave some food out. I scramble hastily from my chair when I see elaborate baskets with pastries and fruit, complete with tiny jars of expensive jellies, sitting untouched along the back counter. There’s even a fancy silver urn that I’m praying contains coffee.

As Eva reaches the cluster of people standing just outside the door,
I hear clapping and cheering all around. Great. My fleeting moment of solitude is about to be interrupted again.

I busy mys
elf with the condiment packages as loud chatter about casting and location scouting fills the room as people begin to take their seats. I figure that I can spend at least five minutes figuring out which creamer I want to use. I’ve been in enough Starbucks lines to know that people are generally very indecisive with their coffee selections. At least the little packages of hazelnut and vanilla and mocha chocolate peppermint rosemary blueberry pineapple cinnamon are a good excuse to ignore the celebrations, because there’s no way in hell I’m putting that crap in my coffee. I’m pouring in a few drops of plain old cream and cursing the fact that there are no jelly-filled donut options when the air fills with an unmistakable presence that makes my spine tingle.

I grab the table for suppo
rt as all of the celebrations stop precipitously.

I know what’s happened, deep in my bones.

I’m just praying that I’m wrong.

“So, where’s this Benjamin Ellison III? I need to meet the man who’s going to make me a fortune.”

Nope. Not wrong.

A drop of the creamer
spills over the side of my cup. I’m frozen.

I know that voice
, musical and low and laughing and teasing, better than I know my own. Hell, half of America probably knows that voice better than they know their own. Of course he was here. Of course, he had to be here.

The voices are scrambling for an explanation.

“He’s not…”

“He…”

“The cowriter…”

“She’s…”

Everyone tries to speak at once, but his voice again silences them.

“Cowriter?”

“She’s his…his…”

Eva’s searching for something to say and she’s going to pick the wrong word, the one I don’t want to hear.

“His wife,” I say. I stir the coffee again and again, watching the milky white substance instead of his face as I turn around. “Benjamin Ellison III’s wife.”

CHRIS

Jesus goddamn motherfucking Christ.

She’s stirring a cup of coffee
over and over, and I can’t see her face. Eventually, after what feels like a lifetime of waiting, she looks up just for a moment. Muscle memory takes over and before I even know what I’m doing, I’m crossing the room. Instinctively, I need to be closer to her, to drink in her presence, so long absent.  Only her blue eyes, seemingly made of ice, and the memory of her voice saying the word “wife” stop me in mid-stride.

Of course.
I should have made the connection. How many times did I listen to her tell stories about the amazing Ben Ellison, who came off as a combination of Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa? Apparently, her amazing Ben Ellison was the same person who had taken the literary world by storm with his book series the year before.

I had blown through
all three books in a week while I had a short break from shooting my latest movie in Thailand.

I
was less than three pages in to the first book when, unable to wait a moment longer, I tore myself away to call Jeff. I wanted the script more than I’d wanted anything in a very, very long time.

It had been five years since I wanted anything that much
. Five long, lonely years.

Damn it.

“
I don’t care what it costs
,”
I told Jeff.
“
Get it for me. I want all of them
.
All three books.
I’m going to make a fortune.”

“
I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
It’s not coming fucking cheap,” he retorted. “Those fucking books are everywhere.”
             

Jeff wasn’t cheap either, so I had full confidence in the fact that the trilogy was going to be mine. I expected a rant or a rave about the asshole agent or a competing studio, but he had merely called back the next day
at the exact same moment as a brown envelope was delivered to the door of my hotel suite.

“There’s a screenplay and it’s fucking good.”

He didn’t say anything else. And he was right. It was fucking good. Usually, scripts made from books were crap, filled with rambling speeches and all of the lame parts and none of the good ones. This one was pitch-perfect and even more nuanced, layered, than the book had been. I was only ten pages in before I picked up the phone again.

“
If it’s not locked down tomorrow, I’m ditching this set and coming to New York and I’m not leaving until we have it
.”

Jeff had hemmed and hawed about
impossible literati, but he got the meeting. Since that call, I had thought of nothing but how I was going to convince Mr. Ellison that I was the right person to make his movie. During the whole last week of shooting the stupid buddy comedy, another piece of trash in a long line of pieces of trash, I ran through my arguments in my head. This script? It was going to be my Mona Lisa. I wanted to see the writer in the flesh, to look into his eyes to tell him that I could make this movie, that I understood this character down to his very bones.

Of course,
I hadn’t realized that I had already met Ben Ellison, and that there was little I could say that would convince him that I was the right person to make his movie. I look around for him, but he isn’t here. No, he did me one better, sending his wife instead. That label catches my tongue and twists it, causing me to cough a few times. A blond intern rushes over with a glass of water and I take a long gulp. Damn it. I wish the glass contained something stronger.

The other people in the room
, half of whom I’ve never met before, are looking back and forth between Hallie and me, but thankfully, Jeff makes an asinine comment and everyone’s attention is at least temporarily diverted. As I settle back into one of the plush leather seats, I glance at her again. She’s twirling the little stick in her coffee back and forth, but her hands are shaking and her brow is furrowed when she glances back up. It takes a minute before I see that the ice in her eyes has melted into a desperate plea, meant for me. She doesn’t want me to say that we know each other, I realize suddenly. Part of me wants nothing more than to cross the room in two steps to demand answers to a thousand questions, but that wouldn’t help either of us now.

Fine, Hallie. We’ll play it your way.

“Chris Jensen,” I say, not taking my eyes from her. The effort of trying to make myself sound detached almost kills me.

She relaxes
visibly and nods. “Hallie Caldwell Ellison.”

The sound of the last name cuts deeper than a blade.

The tension in the room is palpable, and Jeff hurries to cut through it. He’s never been a fan of silence. But then again, Hallie isn’t normally, either.

“Chris is planning to play the lead.”

Hallie chuckles, but it sounds nothing like her laughter. Her cadence is all wrong, clipped and serious and harsh.

“Of course he is.”

I need to get out of here.

“I, um, I…”
Now, I’m the one who sounds nothing like myself. I look at her, the way I used to, for strength. But even though she’s looking at me dead in the eye, there’s nothing for me in her face. “I just came in case we needed a closer, you know to deal the deal, but I just heard the news, so I guess that’s it…”

People are saying things to me, but
I don’t hear any of it. I need to look at her, to stare, to inspect her face for any sign that she’s still the person I couldn’t imagine life without. The person who still occupies the first and last thought in my head every single morning and night. As people break into smaller conversations and lawyers start shuffling papers, I lean back in my seat and sneak a glance in her direction. She’s seemingly absorbed in a conversation with the woman in the red dress, but I do notice that the woman is doing most of the talking.