Olivia stopped laughing. The weight of what he said slammed into her like a wrecking ball and left her breathless. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. If you come to the studio office tomorrow, we can discuss in more detail. I’ll have my team email you the meeting information. I hope to see you there.” He hung up and left her blinking at her phone in shock.
He couldn’t be serious. No way. Right?
Her head was spinning, and the stale Pop-Tart had dried out her mouth. She opened the fridge and found a hard seltzer, telling herself Sunday morning booze was permissible since on any given Sunday after a visit with Grandma Ruby, there was a chance she’d be out brunching and three mimosas deep with her best friend Mansi anyway.
Calling her best friend suddenly seemed like the best idea since Mansi never failed to talk sense into her and she was a lawyer who could probably explain her rights regarding everything that had just happened.
She took her seltzer to her couch and put her phone on speaker.
“Hey,” Mansi answered, out of breath and surely on her Peloton.
“Hi. So, you know that showName Your Price?” she said with no further preamble.
“The one where they pay people to do shitty things? Yeah,” Mansi said, her breath tight. How she could bike and talk at the same time, Olivia didn’t know. She imagined her in her home gym in her Westwood high-rise. Mansi made gobs of cash in the corporate law sphere and was one of the most intelligent people Olivia had ever met. “Also, what’s with that clip of you and Chuck online?”
Olivia sat up and sloshed her seltzer. “You’ve seen it?”
“Yeah. It’s all over the web. I assumed you knew.”
Olivia thumbed her phone to find that the clip was indeed trending. “Oh god.”
“What’s the matter? You guys look hot.”
That fact was, admittedly, hard to deny. But that didn’t meanOlivia wanted hundreds of thousands of people gawking at her in her underwear.
“Thank you, but regardless, I don’t know who posted it, andName Your Pricejust called me about being on their show. So, can I sue someone or something?”
The whir of Mansi’s bike slowed in the background. She took a deep breath, and her words began coming in a more fluid stream instead of staccato bursts. “Maybe. What happened?”
Olivia sighed out a big breath, exhausted by it all. “Long story, but Chuck and I broke up yesterday morning and that argument was the culmination of it. I guess someone caught it on camera from across the street. Now it’s online, and the executive producer ofName Your Pricejust called and offered me a million dollars, I think, to come on the show. They want to meet tomorrow.”
The whirring stopped altogether. She heard a thump like Mansi had hopped off her bike. “Um,what?”
“It can’t be real, right? I mean, it sounds ridiculous.”
“Wait, wait, hold on. First, you broke up with Chuck?”
“Yes.”
“That’s big news.”
Olivia silently agreed. It was big news. And despite her having shouted it to the masses in the video, Mansi knew her well enough to confirm because her dating history with Chuck had been erratic.
“Are you okay?” Mansi asked.
Olivia paused, tripped up by her friend taking a moment to ask because she realized that she hadn’t taken a moment yet herself to think about it. The truth was, she’d been avoidingthinking too deeply about it for the knowledge that doing so would put a needling anxiety in her gut. Her hardwired fear of being alone would reach up and grip her around the throat if she wasn’t careful. So instead, she thought about how angry she’d been on Saturday morning and how angry she was now that their fight had been broadcast all over the internet.
“I’m fine,” she told Mansi.
Mansi was quiet for long enough that Olivia wondered what she was thinking. There was a strong possibility that she didn’t believe her, but she didn’t press. “Okay,” she eventually said. “And second, the EP called you?”
“Yes. Like five minutes ago.”
“What did you say?”
“He didn’t give me much chance to say anything. He said they’d email me the meeting invite and then hung up on me.”