Page 24 of Love’s a Script (Hearts Collide #1)
Chapter Twenty-Four
The decision to send Mary a pot pie came to Ruben when they were on the phone the night before. He’d thought it would be a fun gesture, something that would make her laugh.
According to the delivery app, the pie had successfully arrived at Mary’s workplace over forty minutes ago, and he worried that someone had gotten to it before her.
He also wished he could verify that the restaurant substituted the mushrooms out for another vegetable.
Had he overstepped in some way by sending her the pie altogether?
Maybe he should’ve given her a heads-up.
Too brain-clogged to focus on the work in front of him, Ruben got up from his desk to make himself a cup of tea, and when he returned, a text from Mary was waiting for him. Incredible. Thank you, it read with an attached picture of the half-eaten pie.
The tension that had gripped Ruben’s neck all morning slowly loosened as he read her message again. He wrote back, Glad you’re liking it!
“What did you say?” Chesa asked, her head suddenly popping over the partition between their cubicles.
Ruben stashed his phone underneath a stack of papers. “What?”
“I thought you were saying something to me.”
“No, I was talking to myself,” he said easily.
The good mood the text had induced carried Ruben to the end of his workday, and an hour after he got home, that good mood reached an apex when Mary called.
“I wanted to thank you again for lunch,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s no problem,” he replied, abandoning the dishes he was washing. “It’s my duty to evangelize about good vegetarian food.”
A pause followed that might’ve precipitated the end of their call, but Ruben quickly asked, “What are you watching?” He was picking up the faint drone of the television in the background.
“Oh, some action movie on cable,” she said.
“What channel?” he asked, moving into his living room.
“It’s not very good.”
“Then why watch it?”
“Because I like it.”
He laughed. “Okay, then, what channel?”
She finally told him, and he turned his TV to Jungle Run IV , a B-movie from the late 80s. The main actor was no one famous, simply a nondescript brown-haired white guy with heaping muscles.
“Have you watched installments one through three?” Ruben asked, baffled by the way the camera swung and turned, absolutely refusing to follow the action unfolding in the multi-person fight. He’d seen more of the mahogany trees in the background than anything else.
“I have,” Mary said.
“For real?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I ask sincerely, what exactly are you enjoying here?”
“It’s over-the-top but fun in a low-budget way. Also, I like the hero.”
“The grunting meathead does it for you, huh?”
“No, not in that way. Not my type, but I enjoy what he represents. At his core, he’s a rebel who defies authority and the laws of physics.”
She was so sincere in her defense that Ruben almost accepted the point of view, but the camera deigned the audience to witness the hero getting stabbed in the stomach. It took him down for only three counts before he rose and continued to fight as if it were but a paper cut he’d received.
“I can feel you thinking,” Mary said. “You’re supposed to experience the mayhem, not question or judge it.”
So Ruben tried ridding himself of all thoughts, sinking into his sofa like a skewered marshmallow over a fire.
It didn’t work, but when the grunting meathead jumped from one ledge to another impossibly distanced ledge with a shout that sounded like an actual lion’s roar had been added in post-production, Ruben laughed until he was doubled over and wiping tears from his eyes.
“See!” Mary said, her voice full of mirth. “You’re enjoying it.”
As the high-octane scene transitioned to a quieter one set in a sparsely furnished cabin, a random woman with oddly clean hair but dirty clothing appeared and tended to his wound with random bits of scrap fabric and murky liquor.
The hero kept calling her “doll,” and Ruben asked, “Does she have a name?”
“They might’ve mentioned it. I can’t remember. But she’s not the same lady from the other movies.”
When a slow saxophone instrumental started playing, Ruben knew what was coming. The action hero and the unnamed woman inched closer to one another before rushing to lock lips and tear at each other’s clothes. The same erratic camera movement used in the fight scene was again employed.
As the couple began lowering themselves onto crates with exposed nails, Mary said, “She’s going to get impaled in more ways than one if she’s not careful.”
“I’m guessing the risk of tetanus is part of the thrill,” he replied.
They watched more of the movie, laughing at the special effects and dialogue and sharing ample commentary on the illogical plot, until Mary suddenly said to him, “I should let you go. Release you from this torture.”
Ruben wanted to protest. He didn’t want the call to end. It beat anything he might’ve otherwise been doing, but his goodnight would’ve been less reluctant if he’d known that for the remainder of the week, he and Mary would spend each evening on the phone together.