FEBRUARY 2003 #2
“Even the press wouldn’t call this frenemies,” she said.
Her hand lay so close to mine I could feel the static arcing between us.
My fingers twitched, a small jolt. Enough to close the space.
Enough to call that quick brush an accident.
Her hands were cool to the touch, and I wanted to grasp them within my own, to bring them to my lips and warm with my breath.
“No,” I said, sighing and leaning back with her. I turned to face her, this time, for once, prepared for her to be so close. “We’ll have to come up with something else to be.”
———
The tide turned, and it turned quickly. It began as whispers, idle chat and speculation at every drinks reception I went to, with makeup artists on sets, even the drivers who brought me from one party to the next.
Then it hit the press.
Fears Mount over Whereabouts of Joel Ingram as Credit Card Unused for Two Weeks
“Joel wouldn’t disappear without speaking to the team first,” Says West Ham Captain Leandro Ameida
Heart of Stone? Harper Moore Seen in Skimpy Dress Enjoying Cocktails with Friends Kayla Alexander and Stephanie Cameron While Husband Still Missing
I could barely keep still before the Academy Awards.
I was nervous, which wasn’t rare for an award—I wanted each and every one, wanted to collect them like the accomplishments might one day feel enough.
And this was a damn Oscar—the best of the best. I had no singing ability, so a Grammy to complete the EGOT was out of the question, so a second Oscar it was.
Ruchi’s words felt like a quiet whisper—one the hungry, needy part of me was willfully ignoring because I wanted this, no matter the odds stacked against me.
I’d fought for a comeback, and here I was at the Oscars. Fears the Academy were beyond the reproach of my scandalous past abated by the nomination—and perhaps they really were ready to knight me serious, dedicated, devoted Nadine Heywood once more.
But still I knew my nervousness was more than all that. This was my first time with Harper in public since the BAFTAs.
It was only a few weeks ago, but it felt like a lifetime, and each day without the police knocking at our door felt like a day where that eventuality was more and more unlikely.
“I caved,” Amos said, unzipping a pearl pink gown complete with layered taffeta ruffles.
“By making me look like a cake?”
“This is one of mine, Clipboard.” He swatted me. “It rustles as you move. You take up space. You take up sound. You’re a winner, and you’re dressing like one. But you are not, I repeat not, going out clubbing like one.”
It didn’t look as bad on—it was rather nice, actually, the ruffles rippling in a way that made me think of a design sketch, the gentle brush of a pencil on paper and the long, elegant figure within.
Harper’s stylist must have thought along similar lines.
Her floor-length black dress had a cape that swept the red carpet as she walked.
It clung tightly to her, licking her skin like a shroud of shadow.
Her makeup was sharp and bold, sanding her jawline to a razor edge, her cheekbones to sudden juts.
She was alluring in her danger. Like to cut yourself on her was a privilege, to bleed a worthy sacrifice.
If I was the winner, she was the adversary. She was the one here to snatch the trophy.
“Harper, do you know where your husband is?”
“Did you drive Joel away?”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“Do you think he would have run off if you weren’t so upset about Caleb and Nadine?”
“Are you on any special diet to try to win him back?”
“Do you suspect foul play?”
I felt those calls like a cacophony, drowning and painful. Sharp and raw. I stumbled and caught myself just in time. And there Harper was, smiling in the eye of the storm.
She stepped away, and I saw the smile fall.
A second later, I saw her wipe at her eye.
Maybe it was real. Maybe it was for the expectant audience.
But there I was, watching and enraptured. I could barely smile through my own pictures and interviews. I wanted to lash out, to strike anyone who had hurled those questions out so recklessly.
But I couldn’t fix this one for her. I couldn’t make the paparazzi stop.
(I wanted, so desperately, for the them to stop. I wanted, if I’m honest, to spirit her away to a world where the only lashing tongue she might collide with was my own.)
I could only distract. A great big look over there.
So that when they called my name on that podium, when the applause burst, I had only a brief moment to think: I won. Not just the award, but all of it. Here I was, a double Oscar winner (one more than Harper—double Harper).
It was more than even I, with my supposedly endless ambition, had ever dared to dream.
And then, as I mounted the stage, my eyes fell to her.
“This award means so much to me,” I began, leaning toward the microphone.
The lights were blinding. I could hardly see anyone at all.
But I knew where Harper was. I always did.
“Over the last few years I have suffered unimaginable loss, and I appreciate every single person who kept me afloat during that time. But one person did quite the opposite. In fact, one person throughout my whole career has made everything so much harder than it should have been. My pain became her entertainment. So holding this award in my hand, after a whole season of fighting it out for them, I just have one thing to say: Harper, how’s your shelf looking?
” I raised the award in the air, so the statue caught the light. “Because mine’s getting heavy.”
———
The room exploded after that, the rest of the ceremony something of a blur.
Well, those were my Academy hopes obliterated for the foreseeable future.
We’d been snubbed by the Guilds as it was, had somehow scraped through to the Oscars, somehow won—and then done something as crass as to bring our drama to the most prestigious stage in Hollywood.
I couldn’t stop laughing. God, imagine if they found out we’d killed someone. They’d probably find this more distasteful: at least we’d kept that quiet. This on the other hand was thoroughly undignified.
“Harper, do you have anything you’d like to say back?” A reporter called, and I felt myself turning to her, but I couldn’t—had to let that moment on stage be my final.
“Harper, what do you think of the Academy’s selection?”
“How does Nadine’s hat trick of wins sit with you?”
Her gaze caught mine, and I saw something raw there. Honest confusion, a dash of relief. An edge of hope.
My team were hauling me out. It was raining when we emerged, and Lana ran out to cover me with a huge umbrella, telling me I had to be at dinner with the director and investors in twenty minutes, and also that Ruchi wanted to speak and she was “not exactly happy.”
But I still couldn’t stop laughing.
———
I got home just before midnight. Harper was already there, leaning against her car door in the pouring rain. The cape was plastered against her shoulders, her hair clinging to every bit of skin it touched.
I felt the rain hit me too, as my umbrella slipped. I barely heard it clatter to the ground; I flicked my gaze to it, and when I looked back Harper had covered the feet between us. She was standing before me.
I thought of the last time she was in front of me drenched like this.
And now—alight and feverish.
“Why? Why did you do that?” A half-beat as she swallowed and then: “Why did you do all of this?”
The question I still didn’t have an answer for—only maybe with Harper so close, her rain-slick skin, her trembling lips … maybe that was my answer.
The hatred was vivid and consuming, but it was also our construction, every slight another brick.
But something else bound it together, something else its foundation.
A moment we looked at each other and crafted our worlds accordingly.
Her and no one else at CADS, and it was her blinding smile and her thigh against mine and her laugh, ringing and ringing.
It was the way she fell into the roles I coveted. The way every single eye turned to her.
A jealousy. An obsession. A tension.
(One I’d been misreading for a very long time.)
Harper pressed her lips together in response to my silence, hesitated over her next words and then spoke them like a plea, the same why, a different appeal: “You just obliterated any chance of the Academy giving you another award.”
“Mutually assured destruction,” I managed. “It’s very us.”
“But,” she could barely parse the words, was staring at me like she might find the answer there in the raindrops clinging to my lashes. “That’s all you care about.”
If the obsession wasn’t only hatred then …
I felt the rain sliding down my lips.
Her eyes met mine in the dark, wretched and desperate. “It used to be.”
Her fingers closed in the ruffles of my dress just as mine threaded through her hair.
I grasped her as I had everything I’d ever wanted—viciously and with both hands clutching tight. She drew me to her like I would have to be pried away, her body pressed against mine. Both of us clawing and desperate.
Both determined to arise victorious.
We kissed like it might absolve us.