7. Aster
— ? —
Aster
Flora was right about all of it.
The thought keeps circling through my head as I navigate another red carpet, cameras flashing in my face, that fake smile plastered on so hard my cheeks ache. She was right about Cecilia, about the clinging, about the way she’s always finding some reason to be pressed up against me.
I can see it clearly now. Every touch that lingers too long. Every laugh pitched perfectly for the cameras. Every way she positions herself so that we’re photographed together, again and again and again.
It’s persistent and it’s deliberate, and I was too oblivious to notice any of it until my wife pointed it out to me from a couch in Los Angeles.
So tonight I try to do something about it, which turns out to be almost impossible on a carpet.
There’s a whole choreography to these things that nobody warns you about.
You get moved down the line in increments by a publicist with a clipboard, and at every stop there’s a photographer calling your name and a wall behind you and about four feet of floor to work with.
When Cecilia steps into your four feet, your options are to stand there and let her, or to physically move away from her while a dozen cameras are firing, which is a photograph in itself and a headline underneath it.
I try angling my shoulder. I try letting a step-and-repeat pull me one panel down.
I try handing her off to the director, who takes about nine seconds to get bored and drift.
Every single time I look up she’s back at my elbow with her hand somewhere on me, and every single time the shutters go off she’s smiling like we planned it.
By the fourth stop I stop trying, because trying is making it worse. There was a version of this where I made a scene and took the headline and went home clean, and I didn’t take it.
The premiere, the first of the run with the big one back in LA still to come, ends and I duck toward the cinema’s back hallway, looking for anywhere I can be alone for five minutes without Cecilia’s hands on me or a camera in my face.
I find the men’s room, lock myself in a stall, and lean against the door and just breathe for a while.
Flora’s face swims into my mind. The tears on her cheeks the night before I left. Her voice on the phone telling me to stay away from her, with that fear sitting right underneath the warning.
I should have listened from the start. I should have demanded Cecilia be pulled off my promotional schedule the second my wife told me something felt wrong to her.
But no, I had to be professional and keep the peace and put the project ahead of anything Flora was trying to tell me, which is more or less the whole story of the past year.
I splash cold water on my face and stare at my reflection. Ninety-six hours. That’s all that’s left of this thing, ninety-six hours of carpets and step-and-repeats and cameras, and then I’m going home to my wife and I’m going to start acting like it.
I push out of the bathroom and Cecilia is waiting in the hallway.
She’s leaning against the wall across from the door with her arms crossed under her breasts in a way that’s clearly designed to push them up, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth. The corridor is empty except for the two of us, everyone else still back in the main theater.
“What are you doing here?” I keep walking, trying to move past her.
She falls into step beside me. “We need to talk.”
“No, we really don’t.”
“Aster.” She steps in front of me, blocking my path, and her hand lands on my chest. “I’ve been very patient with you. Very professional. But this whole hard-to-get thing is getting old.”
I remove her hand and step back. “It’s not an act.” I hold up my left hand so she can see the ring. “I have a wife. I’m not interested in you.”
“Your wife who sits at home while you’re out here?” She tilts her head and studies me. “Your wife who you never mention in interviews?”
“Don’t.” My voice goes cold. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“I’m just saying what everyone’s already thinking.” She moves closer again, her perfume cloying and too sweet. “We make sense together, Aster. We’re in the same industry, we want the same things. Your wife is sweet, I’m sure, but she’s holding you back from everything you could be.”
“She’s not holding me back. She’s the only thing that keeps me grounded.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” Her smile turns sharp. “Because from where I’m standing, you’ve been running away from her for a year. Tour after tour. Project after project. A man doesn’t run from a marriage he actually wants to keep.”
The words hit too close to home, and I hate that they do.
“I love my wife,” I say firmly. “If you speak about her like that again, I won’t care about the cameras and I’ll stop playing nice.”
Something flickers in her eyes, anger maybe, or humiliation, and then it smooths away into sweetness so fast I almost doubt I saw it at all.
“Look, I’m sorry.” She holds up her hands. “I got ahead of myself. This tour, all the proximity, I misread things.” She extends her hand toward me. “Friends? Please?”
Every instinct I have is screaming at me not to trust her. Flora warned me. My own gut warned me. But we have the rest of this tour to get through together and I can’t afford to make an enemy of her right now, not when the drama would turn into its own headline before we even landed.
I take her hand.
She yanks me forward hard, wraps her other hand around the back of my neck, and crushes her mouth against mine.
It happens so fast I don’t have time to react. Her lips are on mine and her tongue is trying to push into my mouth and my body takes over before my brain can catch up, and I shove her backward with my hands on her waist, breaking contact as fast as I physically can.
“What the fuck?” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, my stomach churning. “What is wrong with you?”
She shrugs like it’s nothing. “Call it a last attempt.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m ambitious.” She checks her reflection in her phone screen and smooths her hair down. “There’s a difference.” Then she looks up at me with those cold blue eyes. “Are you sure you don’t want to continue this somewhere private? The hotel’s five minutes from here.”
“Hell no.” I back away from her. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
I turn and walk off as fast as I can without actually running. The hallway behind me is still empty, no witnesses anywhere and no cameras that I can see.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with a text from Dylan asking where I disappeared to.
I need to tell Flora. Right now, tonight, I need to call her and explain exactly what happened before it turns into anything else. But she’ll be furious, because she warned me about this woman and I laughed at her, and now I have to tell my wife that another woman put her mouth on me in a hallway.
Flora knows me, though. She trusts me. If I tell her the truth she’ll believe me.
Just not over the phone, not when she’s on the other side of the country and can’t see my face while I say it. If I call her tonight she’ll spend the next four days alone in our house imagining the worst version of it.
Better to wait and tell her in person when I get home, where I can hold her while she rages and she can look me in the eye and see that I’m not lying to her.
I get back to the hotel and stand in the shower for a long time with the water as hot as it goes.
I can still taste her lipstick, or I think I can, which is probably in my head but doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
I brush my teeth twice. I put the shirt I was wearing in the trash instead of the laundry bag, which is insane behavior for a shirt that cost what that shirt cost, and I do it anyway.
Then I sit on the end of the bed with my phone in my hand and Flora’s name on the screen for a long time, and I don’t press the button.
I keep drafting the first sentence and it keeps coming out wrong.
Something happened tonight. Don’t panic, but.
There’s a thing I need to tell you. Every version of it sounds like the opening of a confession, and I don’t have anything to confess, and I know exactly what four days of her sitting alone with a sentence like that would do to her.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway. That I’m protecting her.
The other thing I’m not telling her is that I said yes to New York this afternoon, four hours before the hallway, standing next to the director at a step-and-repeat with a publicist waiting.
I’ve already worked out how to fix it. I’ll move Baja by a week.
She’ll understand, because she always understands, and I’ve been telling myself that sentence for so long that I’ve stopped hearing what it says about me.
I call Flora an hour later, keeping my voice carefully normal. She’s cool with me at first, still carrying last night, and the first thing she asks isn’t about the premiere.
“Did you say no to New York?”
“It’s handled.”
It isn’t. I hear myself say it and I keep going, because stopping would mean explaining, and I’ve already decided tonight that explaining can wait.
She lets out a breath I can hear all the way down the line and asks how the premiere went.
I tell her it went fine. She asks about a photo somebody sent her, Cecilia walking into a hotel lobby at nearly two with me somewhere in the background, and I tell her the truth about that one, that the whole cast is in the same hotel and there was a cast dinner after I hung up with her that ran late, and it’s the only thing I say tonight that I can say with my whole chest. I tell her the interviews were boring. I tell her I can’t wait to see her.
“Four more days,” she says, and I can hear her deciding to let last night go. “Then you’re all mine.”
“Can’t wait.” I lie back on the hotel bed and stare at the ceiling. “What did you do today?”
She tells me about the shelter, about a senior dog who finally found a home after eight months, about the paperwork she’s been fighting with all week. I listen to her voice and my chest aches with how much I miss her.
“I love you,” I say when she winds down.
“I love you too.” There’s a pause. “Is everything okay? You sound weird.”
“Just tired. Long day.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t sound convinced but she doesn’t push it either. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah. Soon.”
I hang up without mentioning the ambush, telling myself it’s for her own good, telling myself she’ll be less hurt if I explain it to her face.
It occurs to me somewhere around the second glass of the minibar whiskey that I have now lied to my wife twice in one call, once with a word and once by letting the single most significant thing that happened to me today go by without mentioning it.
I decide the second one’s a technicality.
I have gotten extremely good at deciding things are technicalities.
The next afternoon my phone disappears. I tear the hotel room apart looking for it, checking every pocket and every drawer and every surface twice, and it’s just gone.
Contacts, messages, photos, all of it. The last time I had it in my hand was at the cast breakfast, on the table next to my plate, with Cecilia two chairs down, which I notice, and then I have a carpet in an hour and I stop noticing.
Dylan hands me his phone and says he’ll use his spare, and I call her, but she doesn’t pick up, which isn’t strange, because it’s the middle of the day and she’s probably at the shelter with her hands full of some animal.
I leave a voicemail instead. “Hey baby, it’s me. I lost my phone somehow. I’m using Dylan’s. I’ll be home in a few days, okay? I miss you. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
I hang up and go back to getting ready for the next event, annoyed at myself and nothing worse than that, because a lost phone is just a lost phone.
Three more days of appearances and then a plane, and every hour of it belongs to somebody else’s schedule, which means the conversation I’ve been dreading can’t happen until I’m standing in my own front hall looking at her.
And God help me, that’s the first thing in twenty-four hours that’s made me feel any better.