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“Yeah, well, I wasn’t thinking straight at the time.” Mostly because he’d been buried deep in her and five seconds away from coming harder than he had in years.
“If I remember correctly, you haven’t thought straight since you were about nine years old.”
That was true.
He couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “Doesn’t change the fact that I won. What are you afraid of?”
“Where you’re concerned? Not much.” Hayley’s smile widened until her eyes were almost hidden by her cheeks. “Can we get back to work, please?”
“If you think you can work without getting distracted by all my sexy brooding.”
He ducked out of the way of the sugar packet.
* * *
“We can’t set the whole thing at one convention. That’s maybe three days, tops. That’s not enough time. Not if you want the audience to think it’s going to last.”
Hayley slapped his hand, batting it away from the Post-it he’d hoped to remove. “So we give them a little personal history.”
Finally. As it stood, they were pretty thin cutouts of people, and a decent backstory would go a long way. A life lived, just out of frame.
Hayley held out her pen to him. He tried to ignore how often he’d seen it touch her lips.
Her hair was tied up today, the soft hem of her white shirt accentuating the slope of her neck. Her pale skin held a subtle glow. It had to be a trick. Nothing glowed under hotel lighting. And yet he couldn’t look away.
She waited. “You’re the character expert.”
Gauntlet thrown, he took the pen from her. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t the sort of film he’d ever watch, because she knew his weakness — the creative itch. The inescapable call to get into the sandbox and make something out of nothing.
“The quickest way is to make them more familiar. This isn’t the first time they’ve been pitted against each other, but it is the first time they’ve had to work together. Then,” he said, pulling a note off the wall,
“instead of the turning point of act two being accidental, we change it so that she sets him up to fail.”
He turned, struck by the force of Hayley’s attention. Even after listening to him complain for two days straight, here she was, waiting with open curiosity, asking for his opinion.
Harrison cleared his throat, turning back to the wall. “She wants to prove that he’s the wrong person to sell it, right? So she tells him on purpose that it does something it can’t or hears him mention it and doesn’t correct him. But when they lose the account, she realizes she fucked up. So when they argue about each other’s methods, she’s feeling guilty, even though she still thinks he should think before he acts.”
Hayley was nodding more enthusiastically now, her pen moving feverishly across a series of notes. “Actually, that’s perfect. And maybe when she begs the buyer to give them another chance, she employs some of his methods —”
“Letting her see the value in what he does,” Harrison finished.
Five new notes went up, filling in the end of act two and the beginning of act three. Hayley beamed, and the power of the expression stalled his heart for a brief moment.
“That was genius. You really are good at this.”
The compliment zipped up his spine. He should be hating this. He wanted to hate this. But it was becoming hard to remember the reasons he should.
He’d never enjoyed writing with someone else. Too many egos at play. When no one wanted to compromise, the resulting film was chaotic. It almost never felt collaborative, and it annoyed him to know he might never have this again.
It was good — too good — the way they worked together. And in a few short days, he’d have to go back to his old ways, pretending he wasn’t missing out.
That he wasn’t missing her.
“I didn’t add much. You came up with most of it.” His voice had dropped to a whisper.
She brushed his hand with hers, the glide of her fingers along his skin gentle. “I mean it, Harry. Thank you. I’m really glad you agreed to stay.”
The distance between them had shrunk. He itched to slide a hand around her waist, tangle the other in her hair. No doubt she’d taste like tea and sugar.
