I arrived here a good ten minutes early so I wouldn’t be late and feel rushed or flustered. Even though he lives about ten minutes west of me, in Los Feliz, Scott requested that we meet at the 101 Coffee Shop on Franklin Avenue, at the base of the east side Hollywood Hills, because he would be coming from a meeting in Santa Monica and then driving to a meeting on the Universal lot after our meeting. Like thanks so much for squeezing me in, buddy, and congratulations on having so many meetings.

Whatever.

Not having any meetings has given me the time to be really ready for this meeting.

I am going to win this meeting.

I have spent the last two days prepping for it. Kennedy, bless her assistant extraordinaire heart, sent me PDFs of dozens of horror scripts—classics as well as newer ones that had just sold. She sent me Braddock’s horror writing samples. I read them last, but they were good, dammit. I also watched every horror movie on Netflix and HBO, every trailer and clip from hit horror films available on YouTube, had vivid nightmares and anxiety dreams, and Googled “horror movie tropes” until I felt like I had a good grasp on the genre and my mind had been sufficiently saturated by fantasies of Patrick Wilson feeling me up in the bathroom of a haunted mansion instead of Scott Braddock.

It’s one-thirty on a weekday so it’s busy but not too crowded and populated with Beachwood Canyon hipsters (who are better-looking and more moneyed than the Atwater Village hipsters of my neighborhood). I’m drinking my coffee and pretending not to notice when a former cast member of Saturday Night Live gets up from his table and leaves, flipping through my notebook when I hear: “Nice notebook. You like squared pages?” Scott pulls out the chair opposite me and sits down. He’s wearing a crisp white collared shirt and jeans, black-rimmed glasses and a Yankees baseball cap. His writer’s uniform. He slaps his own notebook and pen on the table. He is right on time. I was hoping for the opportunity to berate him for keeping me waiting. Even by doing the right thing, he somehow always manages to do the wrong thing. He’s gifted that way.

“I write neater on squared pages. I write fast when I’m making notes and it forces me to slow down.”

He studies me and nods. “Interesting. You feel the need to rein yourself in. You’re afraid you’ll make a mess of things.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Braddock, I don’t believe our session has begun yet.”

He smiles. “How are you, Duffy? I’m stoked about this—are you?”

“I’m here. We’ll see.”

The cool raven-haired inked-up waitress comes over. She seems to be very familiar with him. “Hey Scott, long time no see.”

“Hey—you weren’t at the Hotel Café last week.”

“I couldn’t make it, I had to work. How was she?”

“Amazing as always. Sam says her next album’s going to be more like the first one.”

“I can’t even wait to hear it. What can I get you?”

“Just a Diet Coke and a chopped Cobb salad.” He doesn’t even look at the menu.

The waitress looks at me. “You want anything else, sweetie?”

I am too busy wondering who this amazing “she” is that he went to see at The Hotel Café to think about food. “No I already ate, thanks.” I still haven’t gotten a handle on this lunch meeting thing, where people eat while talking about work. I’m fine with eating while I work, but eating while I talk about work with another human being? No thank you. That’s what coffee’s for. And also—who the fuck is this “she” person?

He looks at me, like he’s reading my mind, and says, “Last week I went with Sam to see this singer he works with. You’d love her, her name’s Kate Lucca. Her husband’s a buddy of mine.”

Oh. I feel my body relax. “I’ve heard of her actually, I do like her.”

“You should come to Hotel Café with us sometime. ‘Us’ meaning Sam and Maya, since they seem to be inseparable all of a sudden.”

“Yeah, she seems to be spending quite a bit of time with him.”

“He’s head over heels in love with her.”

“Oh? Good.” I don’t like that he has more information about it than I do. I don’t want to talk about this personal connection. I don’t want to open the door to a conversation about our make-out rampage, although from the way he’s acting and looking at me, it’s almost as if it didn’t even happen. Did I imagine the whole thing? “So let’s talk horror.”

“Yes, let’s. I love this idea. I’ve always thought that horror and thriller movies are better date movies than romance. Gets the adrenalin going. It makes sense that they should be made to appeal to men and women.”

I have always thought this as well, but I’m not going to say so. I don’t want him to think I’m just going to agree with everything he says just because he’s written more horror scripts than me. I let the awkward long pause in conversation settle, like I probably will, when I’m fifty.

“Well. You have obviously come prepared. Let’s hear your ideas.”

“No, you go first.” Not falling for that one.

“Okay.” He doesn’t even look at his notebook. He inhales, leans back in his chair and says: “Young happy American couple in a whirlwind relationship elopes, on their honeymoon they go to rural UK, let’s say Cornwall, because I have relatives there and it’s gorgeous and remote and windswept and creepy at night, they stay at an idyllic cottage that they got an amazing deal on, and guess what it’s haunted and the wife gets possessed by a demon. She has a history of alcohol and drug abuse, and they thought it was behind them, but the stress of being married all of a sudden gets to her and the husband can’t tell at first if she’s acting weird because she’s on something or if the local stories about the haunting is true.”

Shit.

“I mean, I have other ideas, but that’s my favorite.”

Shit! He knocked it out of the park the first time he stepped up to the plate. I can’t let him win this.

“Thoughts? Hello? We can discuss it after you pitch your ideas.”

My three ideas sound like the premises of Scooby Doo episodes. Do I pitch them, knowing that they suck, or do I get in front of this and accept that he’s got the better story to work with?

I am tapping the tabletop with my pen. “Yeah,” I say. “I like it.”

“Do you? Because I just thought of it when I was driving on the 10 just now, but it seems like there’s a lot we could work with.”

I could kill you. “There is a lot to work with. But…I think it’s the husband who should be the one who’s a recovering addict and who gets possessed. The wife should be the protagonist and the one in peril.”

“I just think any studio would want the wife to get possessed, but we can have other strong female characters, like the wife’s hot sister who comes to visit, and a cool nun.”

“Yeah. Yes, there should be other strong female characters of course, but I still think the wife needs to be the protagonist. The audience needs to be scared for the protagonist, am I right? I’m not going to worry as much about the husband getting hurt by a demon-possessed woman.”

“That’s because you’ve never had a demonic wife come after you with a knife.”

“You were married?”

“It was the woman I was going to marry. And it was a butter knife. But you shouldn’t underestimate the fear factor of a deranged woman.”

I think about this for another minute and he silently watches me mull things over.

He doesn’t take his eyes off of me while he takes a sip of the Diet Coke that has just been delivered to him.

“No,” I say. “I still think the wife should be the one who’s afraid of the husband.”

He blinks. “Hmmm,” he says. He pulls off his glasses and nods his head slowly, while cleaning his lenses with the bottom of his shirt. When he puts the glasses back on, he says, “I think you’re right.”

“Oh no you didn’t.” He just did the move, the obnoxious move that he always did to our writing professors.

“Yeah you’re totally right, I don’t know what I was thinking. Husband gets possessed by demon on their honeymoon. Wife isn’t sure if she married a psychotic asshole who’s gone off the wagon or if he’s possessed or if she’s being paranoid. You’re right.”

I ball up my napkin and throw it at his face. He blinks, doesn’t even duck out of the way, as if he gets hit by napkins balls all day long and knows they can’t hurt him.

“Plus she should get pregnant and at the end there’s the fear that maybe it’ll be a demon baby.”

“Right, that was—that was the other thing I was going to say.” Shit why didn’t I think of that. “Just don’t ever pull that clean-your-glasses shit with me again, dude, I am not falling for that.”

He pulls his glasses off his face and slowly wipes his lenses with his shirt again, wrinkling his brow at me. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but yeah I think you’re right.” He grins.

I reach for his napkin, ball it up, and toss it at him. He gives me a lop-sided grin that would probably be considered attractive by anyone other than me.

“Okay, great. That was easy. Look at us. Working together and agreeing on things…Making out in public bathrooms…”

“Shhhhhh-ut up. We aren’t going to talk about that.”

“Shutting up. I’ve said nothing to nobody.”

It is unnerving, how relieved I am that he’s finally brought it up.

“I would have texted you, but I knew you wouldn’t have responded.”

“You’re talking about it.”

“I’m done. But if I hadn’t brought it up you would have been mad at me for that.”

“Wow you’ve got me all figured out, haven’t you, Dr. Braddock.”

“Okay, I’ll stop. So. Are you excited about writing a horror script? Does it even appeal to you?”

“Oh sure. I’m going to write horror and thriller scripts now. It’s going to be my new thing. See how you like it.”

“What do you mean?” He genuinely seems puzzled by this statement.

“I mean…you got into writing rom coms and YA back at Emerson when that was my thing.”

“Why would that make you mad? You were way better at it than I was. You still are.”

“I know that, but you automatically won points for being a guy writing in a genre that studios want to appeal to more men.”

“So you’re mad at me for being a guy and you’re mad at me because studios are sexist.”

“And I’m mad that you suddenly decided to be directly competitive with me.”

“How did that make me competitive with you?”

“Oh my God seriously? You don’t even consider me a competitor, do you? I’m that insignificant in your mind.”

He leans forward. “No. Fuck—no that’s not…”

The waitress places a chopped Cobb salad on the table in front of him.

“Everything okay here, can I get you guys anything else?”

“We’re good, thanks,” he says.

“Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Gosh, Scott, why is it that every time you’re here a woman is yelling at you?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

She walks off, smiling.

Was I yelling? I wasn’t yelling. I stare down at my notebook. “You know what, I don’t think this is going to work.”

“Erin. Listen to me. I don’t consider myself as a competitor of yours in the rom com genre because you’re way better at it than I am. I wrote a rom com script at Emerson because I was hoping you’d give me a lot of notes and that we could eventually work on something together. But you started ignoring me. So I wrote a young adult script and you started acting like I was the anti-Christ.”

“You can’t possibly have that low of an emotional IQ.”

“You’d be surprised.”

I guffaw.

“This isn’t Black Swan. I’m not trying to steal the lead from you.”

“That’s exactly what you’d say if you were trying to steal the lead in Swan Lake.”

“Well, if you start fantasizing about me going down on you while your mom bangs on your bedroom door, let me know.”

“Oh shit I forgot about Black Swan. Let’s write a psychological horror script about an artist of some kind!”

“Uh, how about next time.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“Whatever you say, boss.” He starts shoveling salad into his mouth. He swallows before launching into the kind of rant that used to make me want to set him on fire back at Emerson. “I think this is the perfect thing for us to write. This is about a woman facing her fears. She’s in love with this guy—it’s the best sex of her life—I’m spitballing here—she didn’t believe in romantic love before she met him because her dad left her and her mom. He used to beat her mom. She internalized the mother’s fear of her dad and therefore all men and love and marriage. But. This guy is a recovering alcoholic. She met him a year into his sobriety. She’s never seen him drunk before, but she’s heard stories. Our love has changed him, she tells her mom. We’ll be okay as long as we have each other.”

“Uh huh.”

“He has to go to Cornwall for work,” he goes on. “She goes with him. She says goodbye to her mom and sister, her anchors.”

“Right.”

“And he starts drinking.”

“At the neighborhood pub. She’s heard stories about the house they’re staying in being haunted. Which is scarier—the man she loves and married is an irresponsible angry violent man, or her husband has been possessed by a demon?” Fucking hell, you’re brilliant. My nipples are hard. I’m in over my head. Fuck you, Braddock. I can’t do this. “You really came up with this on the drive over?”

“Yeah, it’s rough, I know, but we’ll figure out the details, obviously.”

I need to contribute something here. This feels way too unbalanced. “What should we call it? How about Demons? Something simple like that.”

“No title.”

“What?”

“We aren’t giving it a title.”

“Yet, you mean? I know we don’t have to right now, but I like to come up with good titles.”

“We’re never giving this script a title. Here’s what it’s going to be called: Untitled Duffy-Braddock Horror Script. That way, when it’s out there your name’s out there too. Our name.”

Shit, he’s right. I always see articles in the trades or blogs about “Untitled So-and-So Brothers Script” and I always think gosh they’re so lucky they got their names in the title, and here he is actually doing it on purpose. “Interesting. Big of you to put my name first.”

“Just sounds better.” He checks the time on his phone.

Yeah yeah you have another meeting to get to, I know. “So. Obviously, in order to make this work, we’ll need to be strictly professional with each other. We won’t hang out, we won’t…” I lower my voice, “make out, we will just get the work done, mostly get it done separately, over email, finish a script, sell it, and then go on to separate projects after this one.”

“Sounds great.”

“We should be able to have a solid outline in like, two weeks at the most, right?”

“Yeah for sure.” He looks at the calendar on his phone, while I look at mine. “Hey, are you going to Shauna’s wedding?”

Shit. “In San Luis Obispo?”

“Yeah, in two weeks.”

“You’re going to that? I didn’t realize you were that good friends with her.”

“Believe it or not, there are a few things you don’t know about me, Erin Duffy. I really like her bride, too. We all hung out the last time I was up in San Francisco. Their wedding should be really fun. I’m looking forward to it.”

Shit shit shit.