“I was just teasing, baby,” Tina laughed again.  “You know that. Anyway, are you ready to eat?” she asked Bette, switching topics.

“Yeah,” Bette answered, slightly relieved Tina had generously stopped teasing her.  She continued, “Starving.  I got us a table in K’s, the French restaurant Brom had mentioned.  We’ve got about half an hour before our reservation.”

“Oh!,” Tina answered.  “Is it far?  If it’s one of those places in Berkeley…”

Bette cut in, “No, no, T, don’t worry.  It’s in Nob Hill, and we’ll get there in plenty of time, particularly if we meet up in the restaurant, instead of you crossing through Civic Center traffic to get me as we’d talked about earlier.”

“Hmm… traffic does seem bad,” Tina answered.  Bette could also hear honking in the background where Tina was.  “Why don’t we do meet there, then, as you suggest?” the blonde asked as she waited for her car service to wend its way through traffic.    

“Alright,” Bette answered, as she stepped to the curb to flag a taxi down.

“So how’d it go?” she asked Tina as she got into the cab.  She covered the mouthpiece of the phone and gave the address of the restaurant to the cabbie.

Tina was saying, “Well, I didn’t immediately tell him that we were going to agree to his offer of handing us the treatment that he’d owned in exchange for allowing him to direct the movie that would be based on the treatment we won.”

“So you were playing hard to get?” Bette asked.

Tina laughed, “Something like that.  But not at all in a provocative way, baby.  “

“I know, I know, T,” Bette answered.  “What I meant was, you were trying to give him the impression that you or the studio, or both, were extremely reluctant to take this deal … and by harping on this you were priming him so that later in the conversation, when you’d tell him that you were agreeing to his terms, he would think he was coming out a clear winner in the deal.”

“Right on the money,” Tina laughed.  “May make it easier for us to deal with him later also, when we make the movie.  And on a pragmatic side, it may at least make it easier to keep him from escalating costs, etc.,” Tina was saying, and then paused.