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“I don’t know how to answer that without sounding like I’m influencing you,” Maggie offered so cautiously that she might as well have been edging onto a frozen pond a few weeks into the thaw. “Instead, I’ll just say ... the press helped me a lot in the last year. If my case hadn’t blown up, if public opinion hadn’t coalesced on my side, I neverwould’ve gotten my settlement.”I never would’ve gotten this job.“I hated pretty much every minute of it, but it did help.”
Tasha drained her mineral water. “Oh, thank you for that incredible insight. I’ve only been dealing with the press my entire fucking life, and I never realized that they might help you. How astonishing. How novel.” She made a sour face and sighed deeply. When she spoke again, her tone had shifted. “I’m sorry. I know you were just answering my own damn question.”
By this point, Maggie was so used to Tasha, she only laughed. “No, I totally deserved that. I’m zero percent surprised you thought of it before we could.”
“Strategizing about the press is, like, what I do to decompress.”
“You shouldn’t talk to them unless you want to,” Ryan gritted out, his first verbal contribution to this conversation.
“No one is saying she has to. We’re just pointing out the obvious,” Cole said.
A minute ticked by. The good part about a pub was that lulls in the conversation never truly felt like lulls because there was always the sweep of other people’s conversations and laughter. The tink of glasses at the bar. The music on the televisions.
Finally, Tasha asked Cole, “Did she seem reasonable?”
Shemeaning Libby Hansen.
“She saw through my attempts at bullshit,” Cole said. “She didn’t ask ridiculous questions. She got personal a few times, but it was about the work. Not just, like, who I’m dating.”
He’s dating someone?!
“Not that I am,” he added quickly, catching Maggie’s eye while he said it, and she realized that her panic must have shown on her face.
Maggie wanted to crawl under the table. She’d thought she was keeping her feelings to herself, but apparently, that was just another piece of self-delusion. Awesome.
Luckily, Tasha was weighing this, and Ryan was entirely focused on the woman next to him, so they both missed Maggie apparently dropping her emotional cards on the table for everyone’s inspection.
God, what must Colethinkof Maggie? Other than her foolish outburst about jealousy, she’d been under the impression that she’d kept the rest of her crush to herself. It was mortifying to know she hadn’t.
“Hmm,” Tasha said. “I’m not going to pretend I haven’t considered taking out every billboard in LA to scream the truth about him. But I’m famous, I’m a millionaire. Would anyone care if my life hasn’t been all sunshine and roses?”
“Fuck yes,” Ryan answered. “Because it’s not just about you. This shit happens all the time. I worked on a show once where a PA told me the showrunner threw a binder at her. It cut her cheek open.” His eyes suggested that, in his head, Ryan was reviewing a catalog of violent possibilities for holding Vincent accountable. “She was too scared to say anything about it.”
“What did you do?” Cole asked.
“Quit.” Ryan was absolutely matter of fact about it. “And I told the producer why. The guy’s still working, so it didn’t do any good.” He looked at Tasha and shrugged. “I’m not trying to influence you. I dunno if that’s a story about why to talk or why to shut your trap, but it’s what I did.”
That sat between them for a minute.
“AfterCentral Squarewent off the air,” Cole said, “there was one of those oral history articles, and I found out that the showrunner had been a major-league douche to all the women in the writer’s room. I was young and stupid and had my head up my ass, so I hadn’t known. But I should’ve, and I should’ve said something.”
Maggie had never heard Cole talk about that before, but based on the man she knew now, she was certain that it haunted him.
“So I talk because Ican?” Tasha asked in clarification. “Because I’m protected, relatively speaking, versus some peon?”
“Maybe.”
Tasha toasted them with her cup. “Well, I’ll think about it.”
That put a damper on the night, though, and within ten minutes, Tasha left to go to bed.
When she was gone, Ryan got to his feet. “You two don’t want me here.”
Maggie didn’t know if that was true. It helped having other people around, sometimes. Then she couldn’t get confused, pretending that this had a date-like vibe when it clearly didn’t. She needed the buffer to keep herself in the land of emotional rationality.
Ryan punched Cole on the shoulder and raised his brows. Cole shrugged back. It was some kind of secret language Maggie wasn’t fluent in.
“Night, Ryan,” she said as he offered a half wave. “What was that about?”
