Page 10 of Flipping the Script
"It's curiosity about how humans work. That's what makes your dialogue feel real, even when you think you're bad at writing romance."
Quinn felt heat rise in her cheeks. "I never said I was bad at?—"
"You implied it. Very precisely and intellectually, but you implied it." Solen shifted on the sofa, and Quinn realized with surprise that she'd unconsciously angled herself toward her guest instead of maintaining her usual formal posture. "What if the problem isn't that you're bad at writing romance? What if you've just never let yourself be messy enough to understand it?"
"I don't do messy."
"I noticed." Solen glanced around the apartment again, but this time her expression held affection rather than amazement."But maybe that's why this could work. You bring structure to my chaos, I bring chaos to your structure."
Despite every logical instinct screaming warnings about chaos in any form, Quinn felt something loosen in her chest. "That sounds like a recipe for disaster."
"Or for a really interesting thirty days."
Quinn looked down at her binder, at all her careful planning and color-coded preparation, then back at Solen's expectant face. Somehow, without either of them moving, the space between them on the sofa had shrunk. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that Quinn could see the flecks of gold in Solen's brown eyes, could notice how she worried her bottom lip when thinking.
"Tomorrow morning," Quinn heard herself say. "Ten-thirty at Grind Coffee House. I'll introduce you to my corner booth."
"And I'll try not to rearrange your sugar packets."
"I don't use—" Quinn stopped, recognizing another gentle tease. "You're going to be trouble, aren't you?"
"The very best kind." Solen stood, smoothing down her t-shirt. "Thanks for the coffee and the strategic planning session. Your apartment is lovely, by the way. Even if it does make me want to mess up something just to see what happens."
"Please don't."
"I won't. But I might move this pillow slightly off-center before I leave, just to give you something to fix after I'm gone."
Quinn followed her to the door, surprised by how empty her apartment suddenly felt. "That's psychological warfare."
"That's affection." Solen paused with her hand on the doorknob, expression growing more serious. "Quinn? Tomorrow, just be yourself. The real version, not the performance version. Trust me enough to see what happens when you're not trying to control every variable."
After Solen left, Quinn stood in her doorway for longer than strictly necessary, listening to the elevator carry her away. When she finally closed the door and turned back to her living space, she noticed immediately that one of her throw pillows sat at a decidedly non-geometric angle.
Instead of fixing it right away, she found herself studying how the slight disarray made the whole room look less like a showroom and more like a place where people might actually exist together.
Her leather notebook lay open on the coffee table beside Solen's forgotten coffee cup, and almost without thinking, Quinn picked up her pen and wrote: *Day 1 - Variables I cannot account for: the way she tilts her head when thinking, the fact that her presence makes my apartment feel warmer instead of messier, the possibility that some chaos might be worth the risk.*
She stared at the words for a long moment, then closed the notebook and went to straighten her pillow.
But first, she allowed herself thirty more seconds to see how the room looked with Solen's small rebellion still in place.
5
COFFEE SHOP CHEMISTRY
Quinn arrived at Grind Coffee House exactly thirty minutes before their agreed meeting time, which was precisely fifteen minutes earlier than her usual arrival buffer but felt necessary given the stakes. She claimed her corner table—the one with the slightly wobbly leg that she'd learned to compensate for by sliding a sugar packet under the offending corner—and arranged her materials with surgical precision. Leather notebook positioned at ten o'clock, laptop opened to her color-coded timeline spreadsheet, printed backup copies fanned out like playing cards she was about to lose badly.
Her phone buzzed with Solen's location update: "Running just a tiny bit late! Traffic is being dramatic "
Quinn stared at the theater mask emoji and felt her left eye develop that familiar twitch. In her world, "running late" meant arriving at 2:28 for a 2:30 appointment. Something told her Solen operated on a more... flexible interpretation of time.
She checked her prepared conversation starters for the seventh time. "How was your morning?" felt too generic. "Ready to fool the entertainment industry?" too blunt. "Nice weather fororchestrating a fake romance?" definitely too neurotic, even for her.
The bell above the café door chimed, and Quinn's head snapped up like a meerkat sensing danger. False alarm—just a teenager in ripped jeans who immediately gravitated toward the poetry books section. Quinn returned to her notes, then glanced up again as the door chimed twice more in quick succession. Still no Solen.
Fifteen minutes past their meeting time, the bell chimed again, and Quinn felt her shoulders unknot before she even looked up. Solen swept through the door wearing a flowing emerald dress that seemed to capture and redistribute the afternoon sunlight, transforming the entire café into something warmer. Several patrons looked up from their laptops and conversations, drawn by the same inexplicable magnetism that made cameras love her.
Solen paused just inside the entrance, scanning the room with the kind of genuine warmth that made strangers feel like old friends. When her gaze found Quinn's corner table, her face lit up with what appeared to be actual delight, not performance. She raised her hand in a small wave that somehow managed to convey both "sorry I'm late" and "you look wonderful" simultaneously.
