MARCH 2003
WE LEFT A TRAIL OF SCATTERED CLOTHES BEHIND US, buttons ripped and hooks broken.
Harper drew me across the threshold of my bedroom to push me against the wall, the sharp nail of her thumb brushing the pulse point of my neck, her breath hot against my ear as she told me to take the rest off.
And then, finally, I was bare before her.
She drew her lips along my skin like she was marking territory—every skimming beat a press of her teeth, her tongue. I guided her onto the bed and crawled on top of her.
I wanted to wake covered in bruises, to be marked by her in every way I could. But first I wanted to hear my name. I wanted it to be a sound of pleasure on her tongue, a moan she could not resist.
Before I could draw it from her she clasped my wrists in her hand and pulled so that our bodies fell flush together, her chest heaving against mine.
I met her gaze, wanton and desperate.
“Is this just another way for you to win?” she muttered, gravel in her voice.
I was straddling her, the bones of her hips pressed into my thighs and it took all my strength to find any words at all.
“I never wanted to win.” The BAFTAs, after all, had not felt like victory but devastation.
“Winning would be an end,” I lowered my lips to her neck and breathed against her.
“I wanted to tear at each other’s throats until the end of time. ”
I expected her to acquiesce—to arch herself back and allow me to give her all that she craved. But her other hand came to my chin and tilted it to face her. “I’m serious, Nadine. Tell me this isn’t just another effort to conquer.”
“Maybe it is,” I admitted—because I couldn’t deny there was a part of me that wanted her begging, to cry out for me, to fall apart at my hand. But I wanted to come undone for her too. “But it’s a surrender too.”
Her eyes lit. “It is?”
I nodded and she flipped me, was suddenly straddling me as I had been her. “Surrender then,” she said, and traced patterns into my skin, her mouth hot and wet and demanding. “And defeat me. Everything all at once.”
We gave ourselves to each other, claimed each other—every inch felled, every inch won.
———
At the time, I thought we lost ourselves in our pleasure.
At hers, I took her to that daybed right on her terrace, pinned her hands above her head and bound them with her own shoelaces.
She made breakfast the next morning, her hand deft on the knife, cutting and dicing an apple, biting a slice right off the blade.
I followed its sharp metal tip into her mouth and then I pushed her onto the counter and fell to my knees before her.
And she said she missed the sight; said I was so beautiful just like that as she fisted her fingers in my hair.
I sat while she tried on clothes from my wardrobe, parading them before me and delighting in the show.
Finally she slid onto my lap in a skimpy black sundress and I ran my hands up the back of her thigh.
I breathed her in. (It was my perfume I could smell on her, Santa Maria Novella.
Melograno. Spicy and warm but still a hint of her within it—was that why I’d chosen it?
—pomegranate and patchouli, Harper through and through.) And I insisted she give those clothes back right at that very instance.
Harper, Harper, Harper—her name alone was a gasp, a quick stuttering release.
We forgot the world in each other’s skin (and in each other’s words, whispered over crumpled bedsheets, breathed into each other’s hair as we curled around each other at night).
But I don’t think we lost ourselves at all.
I think we found ourselves—that terrifying, awful hunger clawing within—and a person who did not fear that depravity but rose to meet it with their own.
A ravenous, vengeful, and utterly beautiful collision.
———
“Ah, it appears my dear husband had debts he deigned not to tell me about,” Harper said.
We were sitting in my garden on a corner unit around a low coffee table.
She lay across me, her legs draped over my lap as she read the stack of papers, and I focused on applying blossom pink polish to her toes.
“The money we took out has police investigating potential loan sharks. They haven’t spoken to me about it though, so do we think the detectives are shit or are the press simply making things up? ”
“Wait—is there an official investigation open? I’d hoped it was all just media hysteria.”
“They’re investigating,” she said, voice heavy and serious, though of course that didn’t last long.
“Joel was officially declared missing a few weeks ago, and they’ve been hounding me ever since.
I’ve been playing it like I don’t care—he cheated on me and ran off, after all.
But I’ve started to let some worry creep in so should I escalate it in the face of the loan sharks, because something bad really might have happened to him?
Or should I be angry he kept the debt from me? ”
I blinked—a little startled by the callousness. I looked at her—the lines around her eyes and the way her nails pressed through the pages of the papers. I knew the way she woke through the night, scrambling from the sheets in panicked heaving breaths before she even opened her eyes.
Harper had always covered her pain with blunt jabs at the cause—so I could see this effort to bludgeon her way through as exactly that.
“Both,” I answered, letting her get away with the facade. “Be messy and complicated, it’ll look less like a performance.”
“But what if they’re not buying it at all?” she asked, an edge of real concern sawing through. “Maybe that’s why the police haven’t asked me about the loans.”
“They’re just collecting information,” I said, keeping my voice low in the face of her panic. “The press reports differing from the police investigation might be beneficial—it shrouds the whole thing in rumor and hearsay. That’s good for us.”
She threw the paper aside and leaned toward me to bury her face in my hair. “None of this is good for us,” she whined.
“You’re going to smudge that polish.”
“I get them done professionally once a week, Nadine,” she said, still nestled in my hair. “Let them smudge,” she dropped her hand to my thigh, drawing small circles across my skin as her hand ran steadily up. “In fact, I can think of some very fun ways we could ruin your fine work.”
“Harper,” I said, screwing the cap on tightly and setting the polish aside before running my fingers through the hair at the nape of her skull. I tugged back, lifting her face from my shoulder to a breath away from my own and teased: “You’re going to have to be patient.”
My patio doors clicked, then hummed as they slid open.
I looked up, just as Ruchi appeared in their widening gap, her gaze darting from Harper to me.
I let my sunglasses fall a little farther down my nose and regarded her from above them.
“So,” I said. “We’re fucking.”
Ruchi looked at me for a long hard moment before barking: “Oh, for god’s sake.”
She turned on her heel and stalked off, and I wondered if I was supposed to follow her, but I wasn’t in much of a hurry to detangle myself from Harper’s limbs.
Ruchi returned a second later, a familiar-looking man behind her.
Harper screeched and scrambled up. “What are you doing here?”
It clicked: Adrian Navarro. Or in Ruchi’s incessant words: Harper’s fucking PR.
Ruchi cocked her head to the side and arched a mocking brow. “So, we’re fucking.”
Adrian looked between us all and cleared his throat. “How do we want to play this?”
———
Two years—two years!—apparently.
And no, it wasn’t a conflict of interest because no, Harper and I weren’t the center of everyone’s life. “Believe me, the last thing either of us want to do when we get home”—home!— “is discuss the two of you.”
“She’s scrupulous,” Adrian said. “Locks everything up and bans us from talking about work.”
“If I didn’t have that rule I wouldn’t be able to stop bragging about all the times I come out on top,” Ruchi said simply. “Now, back to the two of you. How long?”
“Three weeks,” Harper said quietly, like we were in trouble.
“Three weeks and we caught you already?” Ruchi smirked.
Adrian waved a hand in defeat. “That right there is the bragging I’m normally trying to avoid.”
———
How we wanted to play this was soap-opera slapstick. Loud, messy hatred that kept the print news focused on us. And it didn’t hurt to frame ourselves as too silly to ever do such a serious thing as try to get away with murder.
In public, we were volatile in our abhorrence.
In private, our passion swung to right the scales.
———
“Did you lose your husband beneath the folds of that dress?” I sneered on the carpet of the Met Gala that April.
“Did you lose your head up your ass?” Harper countered. “Want me to send another of my exes digging for it for you?”
In the hotel room that night, her tugging my hair back to expose my neck, her teeth against it before she growled: “I think I want an apology for that one.”
So I pushed her back onto the bed and said: “Work for it then.”
———
“The thing about Harper,” I told Eloise Taverner on This Friday Night, “is she actually believes everyone is as obsessed with her as she is.”
Eloise looked to the audience and winked. “No, I’m sure no one here would know anything about being obsessed with Harper Moore.”
I flipped my phone open during the break in filming. I had a dozen text alerts set up for her name.
Harper Moore Casually Glam in Juicy Tracksuit
Did Harper Moore Know About Joel Ingram’s Affairs?
Harper Moore and Greta Liao on Mother-Daughter Shopping Trip
When I got home, I sat on my sofa and powered on my laptop.
(I had, finally, upgraded from my clunky computer.) I pulled up the texts and searched for the relevant articles.
I tugged on one of Harper’s jumpers (it smelled of her shampoo) and brewed a cup of Harper’s favorite tea (lemon, ginger, and chamomile) and read through every single article about her day.