Roll Credits.

The two most satisfying words I’ve ever typed.

My work is far from finished. I’m not naïve enough to think my script is in good shape. By the time I’m finished editing, I’ll have replaced at least 50% of the words and cut out entire story beats. There needs to be some trimming, that’s for sure. My script is 160 pages right now. Assuming it meets the industry average of a page being one minute of screen time, then my black comedy drama is coming in at nearly three hours. Even accounting for the trend of longer running times in movies, that’s still too much, especially for a dark movie like mine.

I’m still pleased with myself. My outline document was created over a year ago. This script represents a substantial portion of my life, although in truth most of it was written in the last few weeks. It’s incredible how quickly you can bang out a script when you’re mentally in the right mindset.

It’s probably complete trash, but a complete first draft of a movie is more than a lot of people produce in a lifetime. I’m allowed to be pleased with myself for five minutes.

Ten minutes later, I’m tearing my hair out in frustration. The first page is much worse than I remember it, and the second page contains a huge contradiction to events later in the story. I groan loudly to myself and attract Tami’s attention as she’s walking past my room on the way to the kitchen.

“You sound frustrated,” Tami remarks. “Which should be impossible given the amount of sex you’re having these days.”

“It’s my script,” I reply, ignoring her comment about the sex. Parker and I haven’t slept together since the night in ‘the room.’ That kind of sex requires an amount of energy I don’t tend to have during the week when I’m juggling work and writing. We could have more relaxed sex, but I’m not sure if he’s ever in the mood for that. I wouldn’t even know how to approach it with him. I decide to focus on the positives. I’m having awesome sex with an incredible man, and I’m in such a good mood that I can write more words than I’ve ever written before. They just happen to be shit words.

“What’s wrong with your script?” Tami asks, peering over my shoulder. “I thought it was all coming along well.”

“It was. Then I read it. It’s nowhere near good enough to be a movie. Not even close.”

“It’s a first draft. It’s supposed to be shit. I read first drafts all the time, and they are—almost without exception—dreadful.”

“They’re not this bad.”

“Want me to read it?”

I shake my head. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”

“It’s long.”

“That’s fine. You get pretty quick at reading these things in my line of work.”

No one I know has ever read my work before. A few years ago, I posted a couple of pages of a sitcom I’d been working on to an online message board. The comments on there reduced me to tears, and I’ve not sought feedback since. It turns out people on the internet can be nasty—who knew.

For better or worse, I taught myself everything I know about screenwriting. I’ve read books, watched online lectures, and examined real-life scripts from successful and unsuccessful movies. One the pieces of advice that nearly everyone in the industry gives is to seek feedback about your writing. It’s the best way to improve, no matter how painful that might be.

“Okay,” I reply quietly. “But it isn’t very good.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

I create a Word version of the script from Final Draft and send it over to Tami. She disappears to her room to read it, while I spend the next few hours trying to distract myself from the painful thought that someone I know is reading my writing.

There’s nothing on television, so I watch Downton Abbey for the fifth time. After a couple of episodes, I text Parker to see how Olivia’s getting on. I took her to the doctor yesterday because she’s been feeling under the weather. The doctor thinks she has an ear infection and prescribed a course of antibiotics which should clear the problem up in a few days. Selfishly, I hate it when Olivia isn’t at one hundred percent. When she’s feeling well, she makes the day fly by and it never feels like work at all.

She’s looking better, Parker replies. Still tired, but less pale. Thanks for taking her.

No problem. All part of the job.

How’s the writing coming along?

Tami’s reading it now. Fingers crossed she likes it.

When do I get to read it?

Never! I reply. There are sex scenes in there that will be all too familiar to Parker.

Do you have any plans for the weekend? Thought maybe we could do something.

Not that there was ever any doubt as to what that ‘something’ might be, but Parker follows his message up with a winky face emoji. That might be the first time he’s ever used emojis in a conversation. I didn’t even know he knew how to use them. As if to prove me right, he follows that one up with a pink shoe and a cake. God only knows what he was going for there.

I’ll focus on the obvious good part—he wants to spend time with me this weekend. Worst case scenario, I end up tied to the bed ‘suffering’ through countless orgasms as we do things outside the realms of my imagination. Best case scenario, he wants to take things more intimate and make this real.

I’m about to reply when Tami comes out of her room carrying her laptop. She lands next to me on the sofa, and my eyes immediately pick out a lot of highlighted lines on the script and comments down the right-hand side. This could be painful.

“Don’t look so scared,” Tami says. “I loved it.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I can assure you I did. Here’s why I know this is going to work—you’ve got two great leads. There are story issues that need fixing, but the characters are awesome. That’s the most important part, and the hardest thing to get right. Congratulations.”

“I still don’t believe you, but thank you. Now tell me all the bits I fucked up.”

“I’ll start with the easy bits. First, you’re giving too much direction to the actors. Nearly every other line has a parenthetical describing the tone of voice used to deliver it. Directors—and actors—hate that. Second, you need to work on your action lines. You often talk about what characters are thinking and feeling. That should be obvious from the lines they speak and what they do. If it’s not, then you’ve got a bigger problem.”

I nod in agreement. This is good. Constructive criticism doesn’t have to be painful. This will also help me get the page count down. I had a feeling my action descriptions were too long, but once I connected to my characters, I felt this compulsive need to document their every emotion on the page. It doesn’t matter—it’s easy enough to get rid of.

Tami scrolls through the document until she gets to the end of the first act. “I’ve left a few suggested edits for style, but a lot of that is optional. You’ve got the basics of formatting down to a tee.”

“I owe that to the software.”

“Gotta love technology. Okay, so I’ve left comments at the end of each act. I thought it would be useful for you to see what I was thinking at each stage. It’s a first impression.”

“Oh, I like that idea,” I reply. “It’s so hard to know what the problems are with the beginning of the movie when you’re not looking at it in isolation.”

“The good news is I can only spot one major problem.”

“What’s that.”

“Tone. After the first act, the movie felt like a comedy centered around a young woman looking for love and a man who was only after sex. You’ve got great material in there, and I genuinely laughed out loud a few times.”

“That’s good.”

“It is. If you can convince an agent to read through the first thirty pages then you’re onto a winner. The problems come after that. The second act gets dark. Really dark. There’s still some humor in there, but it’s bleak. It goes from being a comedy to being a drama, to almost being a horror movie. Honestly, at one point it was starting to creep me out a bit.”

“Oh. I wasn’t going for that.”

“I figured. And it ends up being funny again at the end, but the shifts in tone are jarring. The good news is I don’t think it will take much work to fix. I’ve left a few suggestions.”

“Thanks,” I reply. “Honestly, I owe you one.”

“Happy to help. For a first draft, that’s a solid script.”

I breathe a sigh of relief, as if I’ve been given the all clear after an important doctor’s visit.

“There is one other thing I wanted to talk about,” Tami says delicately.

“You said there was only one issue with the script.”

“It’s not about the script. It’s about you.”

“Me?”

Tami scrolls down to a sex scene that takes place halfway through the movie. This is the sex scene I don’t want Parker to read. The setting is eerily similar to his special room, and what the characters do is almost an exact copy of what Parker and I got up to the other night. You know what they say—write what you know. I’d rather do that than google ‘bdsm sex’ and go down that rabbit hole.

“It’s this sex scene,” Tami says.

“Too hardcore? I want this movie to be R-rated, but I know movie studios are all about everything being PG-13 these days.”

“Nothing about this movie is PG-13, and if you try to make it PG-13 then it will lose everything I love about it.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “So what’s the problem?”

“This is some extreme stuff.”

“The character likes to be dominated.”

“Does she?”

“Well, it’s complicated. She’s new to the scene, so there’s some uncertainty.”

“You’ve written a lot about her emotional state during this scene. She trusts him and finds the sex thrilling, but she’s constantly worried that something is missing. At the beginning, she wants to have vanilla sex, and at the end, you mention that her favorite part of the entire experience is the cuddle in bed at the end.”

“She’s confused,” I reply. “She definitely enjoys it, though. Should I write “ORGASM HERE” in big letters or something?”

“She loves the sex,” Tami says. “That much is obvious. But she wants more, and even though she supposedly trusts this guy, she can’t bring herself to tell him that.”

“It’s part of her journey. Do you think there’s a problem with the character arc?”

Tami sighs dramatically. “No, Carly. The character is fine. She’s you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s nothing like me. She has a rich family, a step-dad who abused her as a kid, and she got arrested as a teenager.”

“I mean during this sex scene. That’s your voice coming through. You’re the one having this kinky sex. You’re the one who wants more.”

Those words had been easy to write. They’d flowed out of me without any thought whatsoever. Perhaps I put a little too much of myself in this one.

“You’re reading too much into it,” I argue. “I’m just trying to get into her head.”

“If you say so. However, hypothetically, if your relationship with Parker is anything like this, then I suggest you try to change it. You can’t do the submissive stuff all the time. That’s not healthy.”

“I like the submissive stuff. It’s fun.”

“That’s great. And so do I. But if you want more than that, you need to let Parker know before it’s too late.”

“Too late?”

“Before you… you know… fall—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” I’ve devoted more mental energy than I care to admit specifically not thinking about that very prospect.

“Why don’t you go see him now?” Tami asks.

“I’m not working tonight.”

“That’s my point. Show up randomly and see what happens. At the moment, you’re only ever his sub or his babysitter. You need to be his girlfriend too.”

“You’ve changed your tune. You didn’t want me going round there at all not that long ago.”

“Well, he hasn’t killed you yet, so I imagine you’re safe. Plus, if he kills you he has to find another babysitter.”

“That would be a lot of hassle for him.”

If I’m his girlfriend, he might talk to me about his ex-wife. Do I even want to know? I’m convinced he’s innocent, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear all the gory details. His wife was murdered, that much is clear. It’s not just that, though. He loved her, and probably still does. That’s what I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to listen to Parker talking about how he lost the woman he loved and the mother of his child. The real mother. I’ll never be Olivia’s mother, no matter how long I’m with her as a babysitter.

What would Amber do in my script? She wouldn’t stay at home and worry about it. She’d get out there and confront her fears. And she’d be clever about it. I don’t have to make Parker go cold turkey. We can have kinky sex, and then normal sex afterwards, or in the morning. Sounds perfect to me. I get changed into a short skirt that I wouldn’t dream of wearing around Olivia, a top that reveals plenty of my best assets, and some ‘fuck me’ boots. I’m going to see Parker.