“I believe I already did,” she said, smiling.
I kissed her nose. “Can’t you go in late?” I asked. “Stay with me just a little longer…” My hands moved down her body, and she arched into me.
We deepened our kiss—morning breath be damned—and I was just about to lift my old Indiana Pacers T-shirt over her head when someone knocked on the bedroom door.
“Mr. Bradford?”
“Jane! Oh my god!” Dani scrunched under the covers.
I waved away her concerns as I got out of bed. “She knows about us, remember?” I wrapped my robe around me, tying the belt at my middle. “Morning, Jane,” I said as I opened the door.
She peered into the room. “Good morning,” she said, nodding. “Dani.”
Dani, who had hid herself under the covers, peeked her hand out to wave.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“The team,” she said. “They want to talk to you—Dave, Kristin, Ingrid, Kevin, all of them,” she said. “I told them you were indisposed”—again, she glanced at Dani—“but they said you all needed to have a conversation.”
“We need to have a conversation?” I said. “Why now? They’re coming to meet with me here in two days.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“What was their tone?”
“No tone,” she said. “This was all over email, so it was hard to tell.” Jane took a beat. “Maybe they want to tell you how good the book is.”
Shit. This was bad. “If they liked it, they’d just say so. Good news doesn’t require a phone call.” I’d been in this business long enough to know that.
“I don’t know about that,” Jane said. “But I wouldn’t fret over it. Maybe they have some specific notes that’d be better delivered verbally. Things get lost in translation over email.”
“Right,” I said, agreeing with her just to end this chat. It was no use speculating. “Let me get dressed. I’ll be right down.”
I shut the door on Jane and turned back to Dani. “Sorry I have to cut our morning short.”
“What’s going on?” Dani asked, brow furrowed with concern.
I forced a smile, no reason to worry her unnecessarily. “The TV folks want to chat. They probably want me to punch up a couple scenes or something. The usual stuff.” I grabbed a pair of jeans from a pile in the corner and sniffed them. They’d do.
She kept watching me, doe-eyed and fearful.
“It will be fine,” I said, pulling on some clothes. “I’m positive.”
“I’ll be around,” she said, “if you need to talk.”
“Thank you.” I kissed the top of her head and left the room, shutting the door behind me.
Whatever message the powers-that-be were about to deliver would mean bad news for me. I could feel it. The world was crumbling down around me. At least I’d gotten one night of freedom and bliss before the death knell officially sounded.
When I got downstairs, Jane shoved a cup of coffee and a comb into my hands. “Video chat,” she said, nodding at the top of my head as she led me into her office just off the foyer.
Blindly fixing my hair, I plopped down into Jane’s desk chair as she opened up her laptop. The screen asking me to “join meeting” appeared. I took one more deep breath. “Here goes.”
Before entering the lion’s den, I plastered on a smile, picturing all of them physically pouncing on me when I showed up. But when I finally gathered up the nerve and pressed the button, I was the first one there. I waited, my eyes darting to Jane, who, trying to keep things positive, shot me a thumbs up and a too-cheery smiled laced with terror.
The video on the screen sprang to life as squares containing familiar faces popped into view. It was like a middle-aged, Botoxed, and bottle-blond version of The Brady Bunch. My agent, Kevin, was there, and so were the showrunners, Dave and Kristin, and my editor, Ingrid. All of them looked dressed for a power lunch. I tried not to focus on my own visage in the ratty, soiled T-shirt and the combed hair that made me look like a toddler going to Christmas Mass. “Hi, everyone,” I said, businesslike.
“Hello, Matty.” My agent tapped some papers on his desk. “Thanks for joining us. We all read through the manuscript you sent yesterday.”
That had been some fast reading—or skimming. The entire book was five hundred pages.
“We love it,” Ingrid, my editor, said. “Great stuff.”
“Really great,” Dave agreed. His showrunning partner, Kristin, nodded her concurrence. “I’m a big fan of the pirate stuff. Some of your best work.”
I nodded, waiting for the rub. This was always how these things went—they fluffed up their prey before going in for the kill.
“The problem is,” Dave said, “and this isn’t coming from me, it’s direct from the studio. They have some notes. Just a few little tweaks.” He frowned to show me he wasn’t the bad guy, that it was simply killing him to tell me this, as he put on a pair of reading glasses and recited words from a paper in front of him. “They want Cassya to kill the pirate captain.” He glanced up. “Kind of a feminism thing, you know, #metoo and whatnot.”
“Okay,” I said, my mind mentally sifting through how I’d manage that. It’d completely change Cassya and Alyster’s storyline, one of my own personal favorite parts of the book, but it wouldn’t be the first time I had to do something like that. I was always open to notes. Oftentimes they led to good, even great, work. Fresh eyes usually led to big inspiration. “I think I can do that.” I decided to say yes now and figure out the logistics later.
“Also,” Kristin chimed in, “the studio would like—and frankly so would we, if we’re being honest”—she nodded toward her partner—“if Markys could come back to Baryos—”
“Probably around the midpoint, because we’d like this to happen in episode four,” Dave said, waving his hand in front of the camera like he was picturing all of this happening on screen.
“Right, episode four,” Kristin agreed. “We want Markys to return to the kingdom, and we really would like him to fly in on a dragon.”
“Didn’t Kevin tell you we wanted dragons?” Dave asked.
Jane, on the other side of the desk, her face almost completely obscured by the open laptop, had gone wide-eyed. I knew my expression mirrored hers. I thought we’d thwarted the dragon problem.
“Yes, he did,” I said, “but I thought that was just a suggestion, a note you felt you had to give me to appease the studio. You all know that’s the thing about my series. No dragons. No magic. No fantasy-based deus ex machina. Just realistic medieval-type royalty doing their thing.”