Listen Audiobook Version:
Second chances in new port stephen
CHAPTER 4
The back porch was a good-enough place to make a private FaceTime call with only the night insects and the dark for company. Eli held his phone out at arm’s length, trying to find an angle where the camera wasn’t looking up his nose or making him look like death warmed over. It was not an easy task.
Margo picked up after a half second. “E, where the hell are you?”
“Merry Christmas to you too,” he said.
“Christmas isn’t for another nine days, my beautiful gentile. What’s going on?” Margo’s concerned face filled the screen. Her henna-dyed hair was arranged on the top of her head in a lopsided bun held in place by a chicken-patterned scrunchie, of all things. She was wearing her signature heavy eyeliner and bright pink lipstick, and her skin was dotted with flecks of sweat. Eli could see a few scattered pieces of weight-lifting equipment over her shoulder.
“Are you at the gym?” he asked, because he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to crack a joke with his best friend. Only remaining friend, really. “Wow, you’re already a Californian. Soon you’ll be putting flax on everything and telling me how shitty the four-oh-five is.”
“Don’t jinx me,” Margo barked. “LA is already messing with my head. Everyone smiles all the time here. It’s like, fuck off, what are you smiling about? The world is ending in fifteen years and we’re all going to get cancer.”
She was on the West Coast to pitch the mockumentary-style comedy that Eli had given her a handful of notes on. It was called Friends of Dorothy, with Margo herself playing the titular Dorothy. The story followed an ensemble cast of queer people as they attempted to form a commune in rural Washington state. It had all the small-town charm of Schitt’s Creek and the bizarre goofiness of What We
Do in the Shadows with the added bonus of characters handcrafted to be played by some of Margo’s favorite queer and trans actors. Eli knew the concept was strong, but he had a hard time believing it would ever get off the ground. The really good stuff never did, in his experience. Maybe the bigwigs were taking her seriously, if they’d asked her to come all the way to Hollywood for a meeting. Or just feigning progressiveness; it was hard to say.
“But what the fuck’s up with you?” she demanded.
Eli couldn’t help but smile at Margo’s familiar brusqueness. She was older than Eli by ten or twenty years, although Eli had never had the courage to ask for a number. Margo was old-school, a force of nature the likes of which most comedians only dreamed of becoming. She could stalk out onstage and have the whole audience eating out of the palm of her hand in ten seconds flat. As an opening act, she was legendary. As a headliner, she was fierce. And she’d been doing it since the nineties, when lesbian comedians weren’t supposed to be out, let alone killing it.
Back when Eli had first moved to New York to work the stand-up circuit, she had taken him under her wing. “We gals have to stick together,” she’d said, which, at the time, had not been inaccurate. Eli had been performing under a different name then, and a different gender, doing jokes about being a woman that never felt right in his mouth. But after he came out—Margo hadn’t cared. She’d just stabbed her Virginia Slim into an ashtray and said, “You’ll need a new act, huh? So let’s start writing.”
She’d been there through the whole thing: attended his first AA meeting with him, made sure he wasn’t skipping his therapy appointments, helped him pick out big boy clothes that actually fit. She was like his fairy godmother and drill sergeant, all rolled into one.
Eli sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. Margo knew him too well. Well enough that he couldn’t keep putting this off. Besides, she was the only friend left standing in his corner. No one else would even reply to his texts.
“I’m in Florida,” he said.
Margo’s eyebrows rose high enough to disappear beneath her sweaty bangs. “Why?” she said, like the very notion offended her.
“Christmas. Family. You know.” Eli swept his arm around, using his phone’s camera to capture all the strands of lights and tree-shaped cutouts that adorned even the back porch.
“But you never go back home. Not even for the holidays.” Margo frowned on the screen. “You’re not giving up or something, are you?”
Eli ignored that question. “Hey, have you ever run into an ex and thought, damn, if I had just held on to him for twenty years and if he was at all gay, I’d be sitting pretty?”
“Eli—”
“Because the wildest thing happened. Ran into my old boyfriend from high school. Well, childhood best friend. Both. He was both.”
“E.”
“He got hot, Margo. I mean, he was pretty cute back in the day, but it was the nineties, so no one looked great. Baggy clothes and wallet chains, bleh. Now he’s got this whole top-tier DILF thing going on, and I’m like, maybe…?” He pulled a face like he was thinking deeply about his prospects, then shook his head. “But nah. You’ve never met a straighter man. Nick’s like a ruler in human form.”
“Eli, are you lusting after your painfully unattainable ex-boyfriend instead of confronting the reality of your unemployment?” Margo’s face was like a hatchet, and her eyes were twice as sharp.
He fixed his gaze on the corner of the porch ceiling, where a few spiders were hanging out in messy webs. Looked like they’d caught some gnats or something. Good for them, being productive. Couldn’t be me, Eli thought miserably.
Ever since he’d lost his job as a story editor on the long-running comedy series Beck’s Call, Eli had been struggling to find work. It had come to light that the star of the show, a middle-aged white comedian named Winston Beck, had been strong-arming production assistants into giving him “massages” to help with his “stress.” It had apparently been going on for the entirety of the show’s run, and probably would have continued forever if one of the women hadn’t come forward. She’d been nineteen at the time. Nineteen!
Eli was still sick to his stomach over the whole thing. In hindsight, Beck’s shitty attitude toward the women on staff and his tired jokes about heterosexual sex made a lot more sense. But working alongside the guy over so many years, Eli
had never once thought he might be a straight-up abuser. Eli knew better than most just how much bullshit women in their industry had to put up with—he had put up with it, too, before he transitioned; now he put up with entirely different bullshit—so he was doubly responsible for not noticing. How could he have missed all those red flags? How could he have allowed this to happen right under his nose?
In fact, so many people were demanding to know the answer to those questions that he’d deleted his social media accounts. There had been some really vivid descriptions about ways Eli should be murdered, too, which weren’t technically death threats under the Terms of Service. So that was fun.
Didn’t matter now. Beck’s Call had been canceled in the middle of filming its eighth season, and Eli was no longer needed to write the jokes that Winston Beck would deliver as his own. Eli and the other comedians in the writers’ room were not having much luck landing new gigs—one dude named Geoff managed to snag a spot on a kids’ show, but as far as Eli knew, the rest of them were still shit out of luck. Blacklisted to hell and back for even being associated with Beck’s monstrous behavior. Eli was all for consequences, and he didn’t want to be That Guy who whined about getting caught in the line of fire, but he couldn’t help but notice there didn’t seem to be too many consequences for Beck himself. He was still in the news occasionally, spotted eating dinner with women who were not his wife and generally living large. Like nothing had happened.
He swallowed and pursed his lips. “Look, I thought you’d get a kick out of this story, but if you’d rather not hear it—”
“I’d rather you tell me what’s really going on with you,” Margo said. “Have you heard back from the dating show people?” Eli had applied to an open position writing copy for a reality show; that was how desperate he was getting.
He shook his head. “Ghosted. Just like all the others.” He winced as he prepared to tell Margo something he hadn’t told anyone. “I sublet my apartment for a month. Figured while I’m down here anyway, no sense in paying the rent myself.”
Margo’s eyes bugged out of her head. “You’re staying in Florida for a whole month?”
A whippoorwill started chirping somewhere in the dark brush, loud enough to make Eli jump an inch out of his chair. Did nature have to be so loud? And so late at night? He took a second to calm down before focusing back on Margo.
“Possibly longer. I haven’t made any firm plans,” Eli said. He started chewing on the tip of his thumbnail, a nervous habit he used to have as a kid that had only recently resurfaced.
“What do your folks say about all this?” Margo asked.
“I—” Eli worked his tongue around in his dry mouth, then glanced through the sliding glass doors to see if anyone was listening in, but his parents had gone to bed at ten and didn’t seem to be stirring whatsoever. All the house lights were off, and nothing was moving, not even the cat. “I haven’t told them about it yet.”
Margo’s face collapsed. “Dude.”
“I mean, they know about the show getting canceled. But I kind of…” He went back to his thumbnail again, giving it a solid bite before saying, “I let them think I found a new gig.”
“So you lied.”
“I declined to correct false theories.”
“Oy vey.” On the tiny phone screen, Margo pinched the bridge of her nose.
“It’s not a big deal. They’re thrilled that I’m here. I could stay until Valentine’s Day and they wouldn’t bat an eye. Besides,” he said with a sigh, “they think I’m some big-shot funnyman who has New York at his feet. I’m the one person in the family who made it.”
“You mean made it out of that shithole town,” Margo said with her trademark dryness.
“Same difference.” Eli’s shoulders slumped. What kind of loser came crawling back to his hometown like this? It felt like he was right back at square one, like nothing he’d done with his life up to that point meant anything at all. God, Mom would be so disappointed. “I can’t tell them. Not right now. It would ruin Christmas.”
“Right. Your most sacred of commercialized holidays.” Margo rolled her eyes. “Yeah, wouldn’t want to sully your celebration of a teen mom.”
“I know. We goyim have issues,” Eli said. “At this point, I would take anything. A kids’ cartoon, a movie punch-up… hell, I’ll even write speeches for the governor of Florida if it’ll pay the bills.”
“Isn’t he the one who said women can’t wear pants anymore because the devil will turn them gay or something? The women, not the pants.”
“The very same.”
She gave him a concerned half smile. “Well, fingers crossed I sell this pilot,” she said, “then you’ll at least get a writing credit out of it.”
“I barely helped you with the script,” Eli said. “You don’t need to throw me a pity cred.”
“You created, like, at least three of the main characters out of whole cloth! You stayed up late helping me break the entire arc of season one! You’re not a pity cred, E,” Margo said, “you’re practically my coproducer.”
Eli bit back a sigh. “Sure. Yeah.” He was certain Margo was exaggerating his contributions just to make him feel better. She never let him wallow for long.
Margo looked like she was going to keep on him about Dorothy, but thankfully she moved on. “Maybe this is a good time for you to take a crack at a new act. Do you have anything cooking?”
Eli resisted the urge to fling his phone through the screen porch’s mesh and into his mom’s flower beds. Even before he’d lost his job, Margo had been on his ass about writing new material for himself. Truth be told, he hadn’t done any stand-up in an entire year and had no real plans to get back into it. Life had been busy; he’d thought he was in a good place financially with his writing jobs; and if he was honest, he was starting to think his well had run dry. His stand-up used to be the thing that drove him, the reason he’d taken writing gigs in the first place. Now, Eli wasn’t sure he had anything new to say. The thought of getting back onstage made his skin prickle.
“I’ve been noodling around with a couple things,” he finally said. Lied. When it came to people he didn’t want to disappoint, Margo was a close second behind his parents.
“Well, concentrate on that while you’re banished. Oh, and check your email later. I’m going to send you some rewrites for the pilot script. Can you look it over for me?”
“Of course.” Eli bobbed his head. He didn’t mind giving Margo notes. He owed her way more than that, so it was the least he could do. “All right, my whining time is officially over. Tell me all about LA. How many vegans have you seduced since you arrived?”
Margo lit up, her whole face glowing. “Zero. Too busy working. Listen, I think the people at the network really like me. I’ve got another meeting with them on Monday, and then another with the financial team after Christmas. That’s serious, right? You don’t involve money people unless you’re really excited about an idea. That’s what Gerald keeps saying.”
Eli hummed in agreement, although he silently wondered if Margo and her agent, Gerald, were only seeing the best in the situation. The pilot script was really good, but in Eli’s experience, it didn’t matter how wonderful the concept was, or how clear Margo’s artistic vision would be: people like Margo, like him, never caught a break.
That was just how the business worked. Other comedians—thinner, straighter, less-funny comedians—got pilots greenlit all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but way more than people like Eli and Margo did. There were probably hours-long meetings happening right now over whether or not Margo was too old to play the lead—even though she couldn’t be much older than Winston Beck.
“Just don’t get too comfortable out there,” Eli said, trying for a light tone. “The East Coast can’t function without you.”
Margo blew a raspberry at him. It was her mature poise that he’d always admired. “Screw you, Ward. God forbid I actually be positive about something for once. You weren’t in the room with them; they were falling over themselves for Dorothy.”
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed, is all.”
Margo flipped him off. “Get your own shit together before you comment on mine. And tell your parents what’s going on with you before they hear it from some dude subletting your place.” She moved the phone so close to her face only one flashing eye was visible. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t get sidetracked by some old high school flame. Focus on your future.”
“Great pep talk, coach,” Eli muttered.
“What was that?” Margo cupped a hand to her ear. “ ‘Thank you, Margo Kaufman, for making sure my head stays out of my damn ass? For taking time out of your busy star-fucking schedule to listen to me complain? Especially when you’ve got so much on your plate with this pitch?’ ” Her voice rose until it was a high, dog-whistle whine.
Eli couldn’t help but laugh. Even when she was giving him shit, Margo was still one of the funniest people in the world. And she was sticking by him through thick and thin—more thin lately—which he couldn’t say about anyone else.
“Okay, okay.” He gave the camera a wave. “I love you too.”
“Love you. Bye,” she said before disconnecting the call.
Eli took out his earbuds. Margo was right. Getting all excited over reconnecting with Nick was an exercise in futility. It wasn’t like his attraction would ever go anywhere. What was the point of drooling over some straight single dad? Tomorrow, he resolved, he would be a normal person. Going for a normal jog. With another normal person. While they were both being super normal.
He went inside to see if there were any more spritz cookies in the kitchen.
Second chances in new port stephen
CHAPTER 4
The back porch was a good-enough place to make a private FaceTime call with only the night insects and the dark for company. Eli held his phone out at arm’s length, trying to find an angle where the camera wasn’t looking up his nose or making him look like death warmed over. It was not an easy task.
Margo picked up after a half second. “E, where the hell are you?”
“Merry Christmas to you too,” he said.
“Christmas isn’t for another nine days, my beautiful gentile. What’s going on?” Margo’s concerned face filled the screen. Her henna-dyed hair was arranged on the top of her head in a lopsided bun held in place by a chicken-patterned scrunchie, of all things. She was wearing her signature heavy eyeliner and bright pink lipstick, and her skin was dotted with flecks of sweat. Eli could see a few scattered pieces of weight-lifting equipment over her shoulder.
“Are you at the gym?” he asked, because he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to crack a joke with his best friend. Only remaining friend, really. “Wow, you’re already a Californian. Soon you’ll be putting flax on everything and telling me how shitty the four-oh-five is.”
“Don’t jinx me,” Margo barked. “LA is already messing with my head. Everyone smiles all the time here. It’s like, fuck off, what are you smiling about? The world is ending in fifteen years and we’re all going to get cancer.”
She was on the West Coast to pitch the mockumentary-style comedy that Eli had given her a handful of notes on. It was called Friends of Dorothy, with Margo herself playing the titular Dorothy. The story followed an ensemble cast of queer people as they attempted to form a commune in rural Washington state. It had all the small-town charm of Schitt’s Creek and the bizarre goofiness of What We
Do in the Shadows with the added bonus of characters handcrafted to be played by some of Margo’s favorite queer and trans actors. Eli knew the concept was strong, but he had a hard time believing it would ever get off the ground. The really good stuff never did, in his experience. Maybe the bigwigs were taking her seriously, if they’d asked her to come all the way to Hollywood for a meeting. Or just feigning progressiveness; it was hard to say.
“But what the fuck’s up with you?” she demanded.
Eli couldn’t help but smile at Margo’s familiar brusqueness. She was older than Eli by ten or twenty years, although Eli had never had the courage to ask for a number. Margo was old-school, a force of nature the likes of which most comedians only dreamed of becoming. She could stalk out onstage and have the whole audience eating out of the palm of her hand in ten seconds flat. As an opening act, she was legendary. As a headliner, she was fierce. And she’d been doing it since the nineties, when lesbian comedians weren’t supposed to be out, let alone killing it.
Back when Eli had first moved to New York to work the stand-up circuit, she had taken him under her wing. “We gals have to stick together,” she’d said, which, at the time, had not been inaccurate. Eli had been performing under a different name then, and a different gender, doing jokes about being a woman that never felt right in his mouth. But after he came out—Margo hadn’t cared. She’d just stabbed her Virginia Slim into an ashtray and said, “You’ll need a new act, huh? So let’s start writing.”
She’d been there through the whole thing: attended his first AA meeting with him, made sure he wasn’t skipping his therapy appointments, helped him pick out big boy clothes that actually fit. She was like his fairy godmother and drill sergeant, all rolled into one.
Eli sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. Margo knew him too well. Well enough that he couldn’t keep putting this off. Besides, she was the only friend left standing in his corner. No one else would even reply to his texts.
“I’m in Florida,” he said.
Margo’s eyebrows rose high enough to disappear beneath her sweaty bangs. “Why?” she said, like the very notion offended her.
“Christmas. Family. You know.” Eli swept his arm around, using his phone’s camera to capture all the strands of lights and tree-shaped cutouts that adorned even the back porch.
“But you never go back home. Not even for the holidays.” Margo frowned on the screen. “You’re not giving up or something, are you?”
Eli ignored that question. “Hey, have you ever run into an ex and thought, damn, if I had just held on to him for twenty years and if he was at all gay, I’d be sitting pretty?”
“Eli—”
“Because the wildest thing happened. Ran into my old boyfriend from high school. Well, childhood best friend. Both. He was both.”
“E.”
“He got hot, Margo. I mean, he was pretty cute back in the day, but it was the nineties, so no one looked great. Baggy clothes and wallet chains, bleh. Now he’s got this whole top-tier DILF thing going on, and I’m like, maybe…?” He pulled a face like he was thinking deeply about his prospects, then shook his head. “But nah. You’ve never met a straighter man. Nick’s like a ruler in human form.”
“Eli, are you lusting after your painfully unattainable ex-boyfriend instead of confronting the reality of your unemployment?” Margo’s face was like a hatchet, and her eyes were twice as sharp.
He fixed his gaze on the corner of the porch ceiling, where a few spiders were hanging out in messy webs. Looked like they’d caught some gnats or something. Good for them, being productive. Couldn’t be me, Eli thought miserably.
Ever since he’d lost his job as a story editor on the long-running comedy series Beck’s Call, Eli had been struggling to find work. It had come to light that the star of the show, a middle-aged white comedian named Winston Beck, had been strong-arming production assistants into giving him “massages” to help with his “stress.” It had apparently been going on for the entirety of the show’s run, and probably would have continued forever if one of the women hadn’t come forward. She’d been nineteen at the time. Nineteen!
Eli was still sick to his stomach over the whole thing. In hindsight, Beck’s shitty attitude toward the women on staff and his tired jokes about heterosexual sex made a lot more sense. But working alongside the guy over so many years, Eli
had never once thought he might be a straight-up abuser. Eli knew better than most just how much bullshit women in their industry had to put up with—he had put up with it, too, before he transitioned; now he put up with entirely different bullshit—so he was doubly responsible for not noticing. How could he have missed all those red flags? How could he have allowed this to happen right under his nose?
In fact, so many people were demanding to know the answer to those questions that he’d deleted his social media accounts. There had been some really vivid descriptions about ways Eli should be murdered, too, which weren’t technically death threats under the Terms of Service. So that was fun.
Didn’t matter now. Beck’s Call had been canceled in the middle of filming its eighth season, and Eli was no longer needed to write the jokes that Winston Beck would deliver as his own. Eli and the other comedians in the writers’ room were not having much luck landing new gigs—one dude named Geoff managed to snag a spot on a kids’ show, but as far as Eli knew, the rest of them were still shit out of luck. Blacklisted to hell and back for even being associated with Beck’s monstrous behavior. Eli was all for consequences, and he didn’t want to be That Guy who whined about getting caught in the line of fire, but he couldn’t help but notice there didn’t seem to be too many consequences for Beck himself. He was still in the news occasionally, spotted eating dinner with women who were not his wife and generally living large. Like nothing had happened.
He swallowed and pursed his lips. “Look, I thought you’d get a kick out of this story, but if you’d rather not hear it—”
“I’d rather you tell me what’s really going on with you,” Margo said. “Have you heard back from the dating show people?” Eli had applied to an open position writing copy for a reality show; that was how desperate he was getting.
He shook his head. “Ghosted. Just like all the others.” He winced as he prepared to tell Margo something he hadn’t told anyone. “I sublet my apartment for a month. Figured while I’m down here anyway, no sense in paying the rent myself.”
Margo’s eyes bugged out of her head. “You’re staying in Florida for a whole month?”
A whippoorwill started chirping somewhere in the dark brush, loud enough to make Eli jump an inch out of his chair. Did nature have to be so loud? And so late at night? He took a second to calm down before focusing back on Margo.
“Possibly longer. I haven’t made any firm plans,” Eli said. He started chewing on the tip of his thumbnail, a nervous habit he used to have as a kid that had only recently resurfaced.
“What do your folks say about all this?” Margo asked.
“I—” Eli worked his tongue around in his dry mouth, then glanced through the sliding glass doors to see if anyone was listening in, but his parents had gone to bed at ten and didn’t seem to be stirring whatsoever. All the house lights were off, and nothing was moving, not even the cat. “I haven’t told them about it yet.”
Margo’s face collapsed. “Dude.”
“I mean, they know about the show getting canceled. But I kind of…” He went back to his thumbnail again, giving it a solid bite before saying, “I let them think I found a new gig.”
“So you lied.”
“I declined to correct false theories.”
“Oy vey.” On the tiny phone screen, Margo pinched the bridge of her nose.
“It’s not a big deal. They’re thrilled that I’m here. I could stay until Valentine’s Day and they wouldn’t bat an eye. Besides,” he said with a sigh, “they think I’m some big-shot funnyman who has New York at his feet. I’m the one person in the family who made it.”
“You mean made it out of that shithole town,” Margo said with her trademark dryness.
“Same difference.” Eli’s shoulders slumped. What kind of loser came crawling back to his hometown like this? It felt like he was right back at square one, like nothing he’d done with his life up to that point meant anything at all. God, Mom would be so disappointed. “I can’t tell them. Not right now. It would ruin Christmas.”
“Right. Your most sacred of commercialized holidays.” Margo rolled her eyes. “Yeah, wouldn’t want to sully your celebration of a teen mom.”
“I know. We goyim have issues,” Eli said. “At this point, I would take anything. A kids’ cartoon, a movie punch-up… hell, I’ll even write speeches for the governor of Florida if it’ll pay the bills.”
“Isn’t he the one who said women can’t wear pants anymore because the devil will turn them gay or something? The women, not the pants.”
“The very same.”
She gave him a concerned half smile. “Well, fingers crossed I sell this pilot,” she said, “then you’ll at least get a writing credit out of it.”
“I barely helped you with the script,” Eli said. “You don’t need to throw me a pity cred.”
“You created, like, at least three of the main characters out of whole cloth! You stayed up late helping me break the entire arc of season one! You’re not a pity cred, E,” Margo said, “you’re practically my coproducer.”
Eli bit back a sigh. “Sure. Yeah.” He was certain Margo was exaggerating his contributions just to make him feel better. She never let him wallow for long.
Margo looked like she was going to keep on him about Dorothy, but thankfully she moved on. “Maybe this is a good time for you to take a crack at a new act. Do you have anything cooking?”
Eli resisted the urge to fling his phone through the screen porch’s mesh and into his mom’s flower beds. Even before he’d lost his job, Margo had been on his ass about writing new material for himself. Truth be told, he hadn’t done any stand-up in an entire year and had no real plans to get back into it. Life had been busy; he’d thought he was in a good place financially with his writing jobs; and if he was honest, he was starting to think his well had run dry. His stand-up used to be the thing that drove him, the reason he’d taken writing gigs in the first place. Now, Eli wasn’t sure he had anything new to say. The thought of getting back onstage made his skin prickle.
“I’ve been noodling around with a couple things,” he finally said. Lied. When it came to people he didn’t want to disappoint, Margo was a close second behind his parents.
“Well, concentrate on that while you’re banished. Oh, and check your email later. I’m going to send you some rewrites for the pilot script. Can you look it over for me?”
“Of course.” Eli bobbed his head. He didn’t mind giving Margo notes. He owed her way more than that, so it was the least he could do. “All right, my whining time is officially over. Tell me all about LA. How many vegans have you seduced since you arrived?”
Margo lit up, her whole face glowing. “Zero. Too busy working. Listen, I think the people at the network really like me. I’ve got another meeting with them on Monday, and then another with the financial team after Christmas. That’s serious, right? You don’t involve money people unless you’re really excited about an idea. That’s what Gerald keeps saying.”
Eli hummed in agreement, although he silently wondered if Margo and her agent, Gerald, were only seeing the best in the situation. The pilot script was really good, but in Eli’s experience, it didn’t matter how wonderful the concept was, or how clear Margo’s artistic vision would be: people like Margo, like him, never caught a break.
That was just how the business worked. Other comedians—thinner, straighter, less-funny comedians—got pilots greenlit all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but way more than people like Eli and Margo did. There were probably hours-long meetings happening right now over whether or not Margo was too old to play the lead—even though she couldn’t be much older than Winston Beck.
“Just don’t get too comfortable out there,” Eli said, trying for a light tone. “The East Coast can’t function without you.”
Margo blew a raspberry at him. It was her mature poise that he’d always admired. “Screw you, Ward. God forbid I actually be positive about something for once. You weren’t in the room with them; they were falling over themselves for Dorothy.”
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed, is all.”
Margo flipped him off. “Get your own shit together before you comment on mine. And tell your parents what’s going on with you before they hear it from some dude subletting your place.” She moved the phone so close to her face only one flashing eye was visible. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t get sidetracked by some old high school flame. Focus on your future.”
“Great pep talk, coach,” Eli muttered.
“What was that?” Margo cupped a hand to her ear. “ ‘Thank you, Margo Kaufman, for making sure my head stays out of my damn ass? For taking time out of your busy star-fucking schedule to listen to me complain? Especially when you’ve got so much on your plate with this pitch?’ ” Her voice rose until it was a high, dog-whistle whine.
Eli couldn’t help but laugh. Even when she was giving him shit, Margo was still one of the funniest people in the world. And she was sticking by him through thick and thin—more thin lately—which he couldn’t say about anyone else.
“Okay, okay.” He gave the camera a wave. “I love you too.”
“Love you. Bye,” she said before disconnecting the call.
Eli took out his earbuds. Margo was right. Getting all excited over reconnecting with Nick was an exercise in futility. It wasn’t like his attraction would ever go anywhere. What was the point of drooling over some straight single dad? Tomorrow, he resolved, he would be a normal person. Going for a normal jog. With another normal person. While they were both being super normal.
He went inside to see if there were any more spritz cookies in the kitchen.
Latest threads
Second Chances in New Port Stephen free digital...
- Thread starter adminnovelsaudio
- Start date
Second Chances in New Port Stephen free digital...
- Thread starter adminnovelsaudio
- Start date
Second Chances in New Port Stephen free digital...
- Thread starter adminnovelsaudio
- Start date