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Jonathan showed up at Esther’s apartment with Hawaiian pizza that night, just as promised. He even texted her first, to ask when he should come over, instead of camping outside her door or ambushing her by her car. Progress.
“It’s too early in the summer to be this hot,” Esther complained, switching on the fan in her living room while Jonathan set the pizza box on the coffee table. She’d opened all the windows as soon as she got home, but it hadn’t helped much. “I passed this cyclist on my way home today and I was like, ‘Dude, it’s hotter than the surface of the sun out here, what are you doing? How are your tires not melting into the asphalt?’”
Jonathan dished a slice of pizza onto a plate and passed it to Esther. “The wasps have started swarming around the palms in the courtyard already. They nearly got me when I came home from class today.”
That was the one downside of the courtyard—in July the trees filled up with wasps, and every time you walked past them, you risked reenacting that scene in My Girl where Macaulay Culkin gets murdered by bees.
“Well, of course,” Esther said, sinking down onto the couch. “Ninety fuckillion degrees is the devil’s perfect temperature.”
Jonathan pulled a battered Moleskine notebook out of his back pocket, grabbed the pen tucked behind his ear, and started scribbling.
“What are you doing?” she asked, frowning at him around a bite of pizza.
“I’m writing down what you just said.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s funny. I might use it in a script.”
“Don’t do that.”
He shut the notebook with a snap. “Too late.”
“I hate that.”
He grinned wide enough to show off his teeth. “Too bad.”
He never used to smile this much. She’d thought he was so arrogant and humorless before she got to know him. He was always walking around with his nose in the air, scowling at everyone. She’d hated his mouth and that smug expression it always had. She never knew it could look this playful and warm.
Esther wasn’t sure when her feelings had changed, but he didn’t annoy her at all anymore. Jonathan Brinkerhoff wasn’t so bad, as it turned out. You just had to get to know him to figure that out.
She shook her head at him, smiling as she rolled her eyes. “What did you want to show me?”
“It’s an outline.” He pulled a battered roll of papers out of his back pocket. “I’ve been reworking the sci-fi script. I want to know what you think before I actually start writing it.”
“Give it here.” She waved her hand at him. “I’ll read it while I eat.”
He handed it to her, then turned his back and bent down for a piece of pizza, gracing her with an eyeful of his backside. His Levi’s were just the right amount of tight in all the right places and—what was she doing? Stop staring at his butt.
Esther looked down at the papers in her hand. It was about five pages of notes. She scanned the first page while Jonathan settled onto the other end of the couch. “This is totally different,” she said, looking up at him after a moment.
“I was thinking over what you said about genre-hopping, so I decided to ditch the action-disaster movie stuff at the beginning and make it a more deliberate crossover between two genres I actually like to watch: hard sci-fi and horror.”
“You wrote a horror movie set in space?”
“Well, I haven’t written it yet, but that’s the idea. What do you think?”
“I love it.” Those were Esther’s two favorite genres of movies. She watched horror movie marathons whenever she needed cheering up. Nothing pulled her out of a funk like twenty-four straight hours of Friday the 13th movies, or the entire Evil Dead series.
Jonathan’s face split into a grin. “Yeah?”
“Are you kidding? I love horror movies, and obviously I love space movies. It’s a perfect mashup, because space is already so scary, what with the no-air thing and the claustrophobia—”
“And the existential dread of a cold, dark vacuum stretching out to infinity,” Jonathan added.
“Not to mention the high potential for catastrophic failure.”
“Exactly,” he said, looking pleased with himself.
