Plot Twist

by Bethany Turner

  “So not an actress,” he finally said. “Though I would hold ‘I really am so very desperate to be alone with you’ right up there with the great performances of our time. Brando in Streetcar, Welles in Citizen Kane . . .”

  “And at least one or two of the award-winning performances from Saved by the Bell: The College Years,” I added with a grimace, which made him laugh again.

  “Then what is your Hollywood dream? We’ve all got one, right?”

  I was hesitant to give the predictable West Coast answer, true though it might be. “I’m working on a screenplay.”

  “Wow! You’re a screenwriter? Have I seen anything you’ve written?”

  “Not unless you read a lot of Heartlite greeting cards. I write for Heartlite. The screenplay is just a dream.”

  He leaned up against his car and crossed his arms. “As a matter of fact, I think I’ve read everything Heartlite has ever done. I’m a bit of a fan boy, actually.”

  He wasn’t belittling what I did for a living any more than I had meant to showcase my skepticism about his impending big break. He couldn’t help but ooze charm and sincerity from every pore.

  “Try me. I think I’m all caught up through the Fall Collection.”

  “Okay, let’s see.” I grinned and played along. “Oh, I know. Here’s one of my biggest hits. ‘You’re lovely in the way you dress, and how you fix your hair. You’re lovely for the way you always make me feel you care.’”

  “Ooh! I know this one!” he shouted, standing up straight. “But I know, you no-good loser, that you’re having an affair . . .”

  “And if you don’t stop seeing her, I’ll have you killed, I swear.”

  “Happy anniversary!” we exclaimed in unison through our mirth.

  “Maybe I should start a line of cards like that,” I said as I swiped at the moisture in the corner of my eyes. “The ‘Real Life Collection,’ you know? My job would be much more interesting. Husband having an affair? There’s a card. My kid beat up your kid on the playground? There’s a card. Can’t pay this month’s rent but you want to let your landlord know that you at least thought about it? Well, we’ve got a card for that.”

  He nodded. “I like it. That would have been so handy when I accidentally ran my grocery cart into that BMW last week.”

  I was still chuckling as my imagination ran on. “Just think of all the possibilities in LA alone. When you have to fire your agent. When your agent has to fire you. For your friends when they have a horrible audition. The ‘Break a Leg’ line alone will be a game changer.”

  His eyes widened, and he looked down at his watch. “Is that the time?” The panic and urgency suddenly invading the relaxed air between us was nearly tangible. “I am so sorry, but I’ve got to run. I’m about to be late for an audition. I completely lost track of time. I hate to cut this short,” he insisted.

  “Oh no. Don’t think anything of it. Just get going.” I stepped away from his car so he could open the door. “I’d send you a card if I could, but, you know, break a leg.”

  “Thank you.” He climbed into the driver’s seat, but his eyes didn’t leave mine.

  “And thanks for getting me out of that situation back there,” I called out as he shifted the convertible into gear and adjusted his rearview mirror slightly. I didn’t want him to go. Not yet. It felt like there was more to say, but this guy—of all guys—deserved every shot at his big break, and I wasn’t going to be the reason he missed it.

  “You wouldn’t have had any trouble at all getting yourself out.” He grinned. “But I do think my way was more fun.”

  He backed out of the parking spot. I waved and smiled and began making my way to my own car. I’d only walked about ten feet, however, when I heard running footsteps approaching. I glanced over my shoulder and laughed as I turned around. “Do I need to come up with a ‘Sorry you missed your audition, but it’s your own dang fault’ card?”

  “Let’s make your movie.”

  Amusement turned into bafflement. “What movie? What are you talking about?”

  “Your screenplay. Let’s take a big leap for no other reason than maybe we can believe in each other’s dreams when it gets tough to believe in our own.”

  Tears began to pool in my eyes, and I didn’t even know why. “I’ve barely even begun my screenplay—”

  “That’s okay. I’m pretty sure I’m not worth casting at this point anyway. But you keep writing and I keep auditioning . . . and then we meet back here in, what? Five years?”

  I laughed as I thought of the meaningless doodles in my notebook. “You definitely have more faith in yourself than I have in myself.”

  “Okay, then. Ten.”

  I shook my head in dismay. “I’m pretty sure you’re a crazy man.”

  “So what if I am? Worst-case scenario, I get to spend the next ten years knowing there’s a screenwriter out there writing a role for me, and you get to spend the next ten years knowing there’s an actor whose greatest ambition is to be in your film.”

  “I think right now your greatest ambition should be to be in any film! You’ve got to go, before you miss—”

  “I know. I’m going. But ten years from today—” He looked at his watch. “February 4, 2013, I’m going to be sitting in there on our couch.”

  “I may not even recognize you. Once you hit the big time and have fake teeth and a fake tan,” I said in the sincerest tone I could muster.

  “I’ll be the one with an armful of Academy Awards.” He began walking backward toward his car, parked a few spaces away with the door still open and the engine running. “So, are you in?”

  “Sure. Why not? February 4, 2013. I’ll be here, completed screenplay in hand.”

  He reversed his backward trek and hurried over to me one more time, cupping my shoulders and drawing me in for a gentle embrace. As he pulled away, he brushed his lips against my cheek and whispered, “It’s a date.”

  My skin tingled from his unexpected touch, and my heart pounded with adrenaline and illogical hope.

  “This is insane! A lot can happen in ten years!” I called out once I regained use of my voice.

  “I’m counting on it.” He climbed in his car and smiled at me as if there was nothing else to say. But as he drove past, he shouted, “Regardless, we’ll always have Sri Lanka!”

  I shook my head and laughed as he disappeared from view. And then I realized there had, in fact, been one more thing we should have said. But maybe there was something about feeling like you’d known someone your entire life that made you forget to ask their name.

  February 4, 2004

  I had entered February 4 on my online calendar, just in case I decided to follow through with my date with destiny in 2013, and then I hadn’t given it much thought. Oh, I thought of him occasionally when I got coffee. When I walked into a room and a soap opera was on television, I wondered if he would appear as Cop #2 or Man on Pier, perhaps. But I hadn’t given any serious thought to our 2013 plan. Not until the moment when I sat on the floor of my West Hollywood apartment and heard the ding of my computer, indicating I had a reminder. I started laughing, which led to Fiona, my roommate, asking what was so funny.

  I still didn’t know his name, and it didn’t matter. In the telling of my story he became Sexy Irish Guy, and that was good enough. It was a good story—a story that was probably made great because we didn’t know each other’s names. I felt nostalgic as I shared it, and each detail made me smile. As I sat there on the floor, I thought of the progression that had occurred in my mind. With the benefit of sentimentality and the distance of time, he had transitioned from cute to handsome to undeniably sexy. And unquestionably Irish.

  “Maybe we should go tonight, just in case.”

  “Go where?” I asked, opening my eyes and brushing away the memories.

  Fiona threw her hands up in the air. “To get coffee, of course!”

  “Oh. Well, I’m meeting Liam for dinner, but we should be done by the time you get off work. I could
meet you after. Or I could bring him along?”

  “No, ding-dong. You can’t bring Liam! What if Sexy Irish Guy is there?”

  I should have known. Of course Fiona’s romantic-comedy instincts had kicked in with a vengeance.

  “What? No! Why would we go tonight? I’ve still got nine years.” I chuckled at the thought. It was all so absurd. What were the odds that he and I would both still be living in Los Angeles in nine years? That we’d both remember? Maybe he wasn’t as nerdy as I was and hadn’t thought to put a reminder on his calendar.

  No, Olivia. The chivalrous, strapping, acting Irishman is most assuredly not as nerdy as you are.

  Maybe the coffeehouse would close down. Maybe he’d be too embarrassed to show up and reveal he’d gained fifty pounds, gone gray, and given up on his dreams altogether. Or maybe that would be my excuse.

  “What if he’s there waiting, just in case? What if he’s spent the last year thinking of you, wishing he’d gotten your number—”

  “Or at least my name?” I closed my laptop and stood to go into the kitchen, grabbing a snack to tide me over until dinner.

  “Maybe he’s just hoping he’s not too late. It’s been a year of regret, and he’s worried he missed his chance. Livi, listen to me. What if he has decided to go to that coffeehouse every single February 4 until he dies, just in case you’re thinking of him too?” Her eyes and mouth flew open. “It’s like The Notebook!”

  For months Fiona had been a bundle of nerves and anticipation since learning that her favorite Nicholas Sparks novel was being made into a movie, and I’d been subjected to her endless cycle of sighs and tears as she continually reread it cover to cover. She seemed bound and determined to make sure her intimate knowledge of the source material allowed her to track every out-of-place rainstorm and abandoned plantation by the time the film released.

  I peeled my banana and snorted. “It’s nothing like The Notebook.”

  “It’s a little like The Notebook.”

  “Yesterday you thought going to the store was like The Notebook.”

  “No, that’s not true. All I said was it was weird that we couldn’t find the grocery list, and maybe someone had hidden it from us, like Allie’s mom hid the letters Noah wrote.”

  Fiona Mitchell. Roommate, hopeless romantic, best friend, and my favorite human on planet Earth since the first day of kindergarten when we both peed our pants and had to sit in the office together waiting for our parents to bring us dry clothes. We had been inseparable for the twenty-five years since.

  “It’s not like The Notebook—thank goodness—and he’s not going to be there tonight. Or next February 4. He’s probably not even going to be there in 2013. It doesn’t work that way, Fi. As much as you want to believe life is a Tom Hanks rom-com, it’s really not.”

  She took a noisy bite of raw carrot. “No one in a rom-com ever thinks they’re in a rom-com.”

  “There wasn’t even anything romantic about it!” I protested. “Seriously. He was a nice guy with a nice sense of humor and a nice head of hair, and we had a nice conversation and we clicked in a nice, platonic way. And then he got in his nice little convertible and drove away to his nice little audition for his nice little acting job. That’s it. The end.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t become something more!” Fiona trilled as she walked into her bedroom to change clothes for work.

  After high school Fiona and I had attended Boston University together. I earned my degree in mass communications while Fiona was the recipient of BU’s first, and to my knowledge only, degree in undecided. Seriously. Just because she’s magical like that. She studied hard, never partied, and passed even her most difficult classes with flying colors. At the end of four years, she still hadn’t declared a major. She had taken classes ranging from Film Scores of Ennio Morricone to Advanced Evolutionary Biophysics, temporarily convinced each time that she had found her calling. But another calling always came along. When I decided to move to LA to try to make it as a writer in Hollywood, she decided to go with me, confident it was finally time to put her BA in Undecided to good use.

  While I plugged away as a writer of bad poetry for Heartlite, my best friend landed awesome job after awesome job. In 2004, she was handling public relations for Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. That meant she arranged media coverage for movie premieres and was quite often called upon to work with celebrities to make sure they weren’t seen entering with whichever scandalous date they weren’t supposed to be seen with. More than one Hollywood heartthrob had entered Grauman’s with Fiona on their arm, just because she was doing her job, and then left with her on their arm, just because they’d realized how fabulous she is.

  “I don’t want it to be more, Fi. I would gouge out my eyes before I’d start a relationship with an actor, and I certainly don’t need some ruggedly handsome, funny, charming stud of a man in my life. Who needs that pressure? Besides, I’ve got Liam.”

  Liam Howard could not be accused of being any of those things—apart from charming, though his charm was more of the dorky variety. He was totally brilliant and kind and pretty sexy himself in a hot nerd sort of way. But he couldn’t have been more different from my coffeehouse stud. There was nothing rugged about him, that was for sure. He was more like Clark Kent at his best—not in the beginning when Lois is annoyed by him, but later, after they’ve had a few heart-to-hearts and she’s beginning to subconsciously see in him what she sees in Superman. That was Liam. Minus the Superman stuff. Liam would need much more than contact lenses and a change of clothes to become The Man of Steel, but that was okay. We aren’t all meant to be superheroes, and we aren’t all meant to date Superman.

  “Liam?” she asked, peeking her head out from her bedroom. “Really, Liv?”

  “Really, what?”

  “I just wish you wouldn’t settle on Liam.”

  “I’m not settling. I like Liam.”

  “I like Liam too. I do. But he’s so dull.”

  “He is not dull!” I exclaimed, doing my best to disregard all the thoughts that began flooding my mind. Unrelated thoughts that weren’t worth dwelling on. Primarily, if I had to classify them, thoughts about how dull Liam was.

  Liam was a supporting character, just like me. Why anyone would ever want to be anything else was a mystery. I’d spent my life with Fiona by my side—a leading lady if ever there was one. And that meant she was always on, because everyone was always watching. She never got a break from the spotlight, and for her that worked. She had never known anything else or even thought about the fact she was the star, I suspected. It was just her lot in life—like it was my lot in life to stay in the background, provide support, be a little bit quirky, not worry about my dress size quite as much, and date the Clark Kents of the world. Like all supporting characters, I might have had fewer lines, but I had the best lines. A tough gig to beat.

  The only problem with dating Liam was that he didn’t always appreciate the brilliance of my lines. He had no sense of humor. None. The man could explain the breakdown of chemical particles and recite the names of all the presidents—along with their date of inauguration, their vice president, and the Supreme Court justices named during their term—but he didn’t know funny if it fell on him. That was a problem, but not a deal breaker. If things worked out between us, I would always have the Fionas and Sexy Irish Guys of the world to acknowledge my humor.

  Fi came out of her bedroom, transformed into a significant Hollywood player with the simple addition of a short skirt, high heels, and a lot of eyeliner. It didn’t take much for her. I had always been blown away by her effortless beauty, and even more blown away by the fact that it didn’t matter to her. It was a tool and often a valuable resource, but she was never defined by her perfect cheekbones and her sultry eyes and her deep, rich, auburn tresses for which most of us would, if not sell our soul, at least lease it out for the weekend.

  “You know, your home life wasn’t bad. You have parents who love and accept you, a good job, d
ecent friends . . .” She smirked at me as she tilted her head and put in her earring. “Someday I hope we can get to the bottom of these issues of yours.”

  Issues. I didn’t have issues. “He’s a sweet, smart guy who treats me well. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Nope. Nothing wrong with that. What there is something wrong with is the fact that one year ago, months before you started dating Liam, you met another sweet, smart guy—”

  “We don’t know that he’s smart,” I protested.

  “He’s heard of Sri Lanka.”

  “Well, even I’ve heard of it.”

  She held up her finger to silence me. “But . . . but not only is he sweet and smart, he’s also gorgeous. Spontaneous. Ambitious.”

  “Liam just got promoted—”

  “And, oh yeah, Sexy Irish Guy made you laugh. When was the last time Liam made you laugh?” I opened my mouth to answer but was rendered speechless when she added, “And I do mean intentionally.”

  The expression she saw on my face resulted in a fair amount of smugness on hers. She threw her Burberry handbag over her shoulder, completing her look, as she continued. “But if you choose to stay with Liam and completely ignore the perfect Irishman, that’s up to you. It is kind of you, I must say, to be so self-sacrificial. Every woman in Los Angeles is grateful that you’ve left him on the market. In fact, right now, at some little ‘ladies who lunch’ thing on Rodeo Drive, you’re probably being toasted. You’re a saint for letting him be, Olivia Ross. A saint!”

  “I’ll see you later.” I smiled, ignoring her jabs. “Have fun being fabulous, doing fabulous things.”