Billionaire Beast

There’s no answer.

I knock again.

There’s still no answer.

I knock and call out Emma’s name, but there’s still nothing.

Finally, I pull out my phone and punch in Emma’s number. Apparently, I’ve forgotten which room is ours, and I really don’t want to have to knock on every door in this hall to find the right one.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” I say, “I think I forgot which room we have.”

“Were you just knocking?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I tell her.

“It’s the right room,” she says, “but I’ve had a little change of heart. I think that you and I need to have a little discussion about what we’re doing here, and this time, I think that I need to be the one to lead it.”

“Oh, give me a break, will you?” I beg.

“First thing,” she says, “I’ll kiss you because we’re going to be kissing onscreen, but we’re not going to spend three hours a night and—how did you describe it? Dozens of little interludes between now and when Dutch calls action?”

“I get that this makes you uncomfortable,” I respond, “but I really think it’s best if we stick to the plan.”

“Do you know where intimacy comes from?” she asks.

“It—”

“Intimacy comes from feeling safe with a person, feeling a sense of security and trust. Knowing that this person, the person that you’re with, isn’t going to judge you if you’ve made a mistake, they’re going to help you pick yourself up. Intimacy comes from two people who feel such affection for one another that there is no part of themselves that they are unwilling to share with each other. Call me crazy, but I don’t think we’re going to be covering intimacy in a weekend, but we’re going to try,” she says.

“What do you have in mind, then?” I ask.

“First off,” she says, “we’re not staying in the same room. Call me back after you’ve booked another room for yourself.”

“Emma, you’ve got to see how unreasonable all this is,” I tell her. “There are lot of things we’re going to have to cover, and we really don’t have time to go over the things we’re not even going to need to—”

“You know what the problem is with your movies, at least the romantic ones?” she asks.

“What’s that?” I return.

This should be fun.

“Whenever you’re with your onscreen significant other, you just come off as fuck buddies,” she says. “There’s nothing beyond the physical, though I will give you credit for making that pretty damn on the money. Why don’t we try things a little differently this time?” she asks. “Why don’t we branch out a little and see if we can bring something new to the screen?”

“You keep saying ‘we,’ but I’m getting the feeling you really mean me,” I answer.

“Good, you’re catching on,” she says. “Now here’s how the night is going to go…”

She goes on to describe just about the opposite of everything I had planned for this weekend with the exception of having dinner together nightly. So that much, it seems, we agree on.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “My method has worked for me on almost a dozen films.”

“Yeah,” she says, “it’s worked well enough to get you passed over time and time again for more serious roles. Ever wonder why people don’t take you seriously enough to offer you those period characters or the troubled geniuses that win all the awards? Maybe it’s because anytime anything serious comes along, you make a joke out of it and just go with your instincts.”

That’s a little close to home.

“Look, I get that you’re trying to do the whole overhaul the Hollywood bad boy thing,” I tell her, “but just because you’ve got some fairy tale wet dream going on in your head doesn’t mean that it’s got anything to do with reality, much less with acting.”