Chapter 16
EMMA
The hangover begins, not in the morning, but halfway through the next day, in the form of a migraine that builds on the pigment layer behind my eyes.
I bolt awake at six, convinced I’ve missed five interviews, only to find Asher already upright, scrolling his phone with the intensity of a hacker in a techno-thriller.
There’s a line between his eyebrows I’ve never noticed before.
“Say it,” he says as I trudge over in a bathrobe, still scraping sleep out of my face.
“Say what?”
“I told you we’d be everywhere by morning.”
I peer at his screen. Twitter trending, hashtags crawling up and down the columns.
Screen-grab memes of my arms, his hands, the way we looked at each other on the carpet.
The best of them is a split-screen: my face, glaring into the lens, with the caption “LOOKS THAT COULD KILL.” Underneath, Asher’s face, mid-wink, “AND THE MAN WHO DIES FOR IT.”
I snort. “People are insane.”
“They love you,” he says, and I know he means it, but there’s a thinness in his voice that didn’t exist last night.
A knock on the door, then Chantal storms in on a cloud of perfume and crisis.
“They moved up the boat interview,” she says, and tears open my closet.
“You will not wear this.” She chucks a dress across the room.
“You will wear nothing black, nothing sad. We are going for ‘sunlit, carefree, slightly in love but never needy.’”
I look at Asher. “I didn’t realize I had a mood board in my bloodstream.”
He raises a hand. “Don’t ask me. My only job is to show up and be decorative.”
Down on the marina, the crew is already swarming.
They’ve got cameras bolted to the boat’s deck rails, drone pilots checking battery life, interns in matching linen.
The director—not ours, but the one running the “intimate couple interview”—greets us with icy calm.
“Today, you are not actors. You are yourselves. You are new, and very much in love.”
I want to barf, but instead I nod and climb aboard, grateful for the prescription sunglasses that make everything seem about ten percent less real.
Asher leans over and murmurs, “Let’s give them a show.”
We do. For the next ninety minutes, we hold hands and sip bottled water and look out to sea, answering questions so soft they barely register as questions.
What was your first impression of each other?
I'm better at impressions. He was late for the first table read.
What’s your favorite thing about working together?
He says my laugh. I say his professionalism, and he tries to look wounded, which makes me laugh again.
There is nothing scandalous, nothing real. Still, I catch myself watching the way he arranges his body around mine, protective and careful, as if he’s afraid the world might break me if he looks away.
The boat bobs in the wake of a passing yacht. I lose my balance and fall against him, which is precisely what they hope for and exactly what I hate, but Asher catches my elbow and whispers so quietly I almost miss it, “If we ever get tired of this, let’s just run.”
Fooled by the sun and the boat and the warm pressure at my back, I say, “Where would we go?”
He thinks for half a second. “I’d want to see you in Paris again–– when it rains.”
This should make me laugh, but instead it lodges in a soft, secret part of me, the one that still believes in things like places and seasons and time that’s not measured in press cycles. I squeeze his hand, and immediately, we both realize the camera is pointed straight at us.
By mid-afternoon, the world has absorbed our boat interview and spat it out as clips, edits, GIFs.
The studio hosts a lunch at a private villa in the hills above the city, a place so Mediterranean it feels like a simulation: lavender hedges, white stone, an infinity pool that seems to pour directly into the sky.
The cast and crew line up for photos, and every four minutes a new PR person sidles over to remind me to “just be natural.” Which means: don’t eat anything complicated to pronounce, don’t drink too much,and say yes to every selfie.
Myrna, the rarely seen studio exec who orchestrated this stunt, arrives late, her sunglasses glossier than my future, and pulls me aside so fast I think I’ve done something wrong. In the shadow of a cypress tree, she hands me a chilled Diet Coke and lowers her voice.
“Walk-and-talk?”
If I say no, she’ll do it anyway. So I follow her up the gravel path, and we leave the villa’s sounds behind. From here, the bay is a strip of silver, the mountains crowding in behind it.
“You’re doing so well,” she says, phone in her hand but not looking at it. “But they want more.”
“Who’s they?”
“Everyone.” She stops, turns to face me. “Emma, you are what’s working this week. The fan base is shifting. Girls want to be you, guys want to date you, and the studio wants to make you the next big whatever. You could do anything right now.”
I can’t tell if this is a threat or a blessing.
“Okay,” I say. “So?”
“So, I think the Bressard thing is real. The part is yours if you keep playing it the way you are. But there’s a wrinkle: the campaign for Eclipse Run is still building. If you jump franchises too soon, you dampen both. If you stagger, you spike both.”
I feel my scalp tingle. I’m not sure if it’s the sun or the realization that I am already a commodity, a product to be cross-marketed.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You want me to hold off.”
“Only for a month or two. Ride the high. Then pivot.”
I nod, but my stomach is hollow. “Will that make them happy or make me happy?”
She grins, but I know it’s a deflection. “Emma, you’re not a hostage. You’re a star. It’s just smart business.”
She says the last bit in French, and for a moment, I imagine gouging her eyes out with the vintage sunglasses perched on top of her head. Instead, I smile and promise to “think about it.”
We walk back to the villa, and I see Asher across the patio, standing at the edge of the pool, talking to some Euro-producer in the world’s tightest khakis.
He’s not looking at me, but the effect is like a slow drift of gravity.
I want to be beside him, and I hate that I wish that more than Bressard, more than the next script, more than the headline.
I wonder if this is what Chantal meant by “slightly in love, but never needy.” I don’t know how to do one without the other.
The day unspools. There is another screening, another round of applause, a champagne toast in a private cinema that smells like catacombs and roses.
At midnight, I find myself in a cabana with Jessie and Asher, both of them tipsy, both sniping at each other in a kind of affectionate code I can only halfway decrypt.
Jessie tells a story about how she once lost her shoes on a red carpet and had to be carried out by bodyguards.
“Everyone thought I was some kind of fragile debutante,” she says, her voice metallic with bitterness.
“They didn’t see the blisters.” She looks at me with a sudden frankness.
“Let them underestimate you, Emma. It’s the only angle you can trust.”
Later, Asher and I end up back on the balcony of our suite, drinking from the minibar and passing my phone back and forth to read the latest “news.”
One headline, in glossy black bold:
ECLIPSE RUN COUPLE UPENDS CANNES – REAL OR RUSE?
Asher reads it aloud, drawing on the last word. “Ruse.” He sets the phone down and looks at me, suddenly more serious. “Are you worried?”
My first instinct is bravado. I’m about to say, “Of course not,” but then the migraine spikes behind my left ear, and I think, why not? Why not admit it, for once, to him?
I say, “I’m terrified.”
He leans in, elbows on knees, blue eyes over the rim of a stolen coffee mug. “Of what?”
I want to say "of them." Of the internet, the studios, the people whose job it is to convert my face into a currency. But that’s not the truth, not all of it.
“I don’t know who I am when I’m not working,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to sound so bleak. “You ever get that? Like the only way to exist is on camera, or as someone else?”
His mouth quirks. “I know exactly what you mean.”
We sit in silence, the night leaning in, the Mediterranean glittering like the set of a music video I’ll never star in.
“Do you want to run?” he asks. “For real?”
Yes. No. Maybe. I want the question in my mouth, held and turned over, tasted. Instead, I say, “We have thirty-six hours left before the awards. If we run, we damn well make it count.”
He raises his mug to mine, as if toasting to the idea, the possibility, the whole forty-eight-frames-per-second hallucination of the last seventy-two hours.
The next day begins with a press breakfast. The croissants are frozen in the middle, and the juice tastes like a fluorescent light.
Asher’s agent, a minor British arsonist with the face of a choirboy, corners us near the buffet and whispers, “You’re to keep it low-key, yes? No lambada, no pier jumps, you savvy?”
I say, “Define low-key.”
He stares at me, then at Asher, then at me again. “Do you need a chaperone?”
Asher deadpans, “Only if you can keep up.”
With the first free hour we’ve had in days, we walk the Croisette, dodging cosplayers and crews, the boom mics and the desperate satellites of fame. For a minute, I can see what it would look like to be real people, just me and Asher, no camera, no long lens, no expectation.
But even in street clothes, we’re trailed by a mirage—a little bubble of energy, waves of attention. It’s not real, not exactly, but it’s sticky, and it clings to me.
We find a table at an outdoor café, tarps overhead to block the sun. I order coffee; Asher orders tea and a plate of fruit, which he arranges into faces while we wait.
He says, “What do you want to do after this?” It’s not a casual question.
I hesitate, because he already knows the answer. Same as everyone else in this city. Bressard’s next film, the one that’s been in “pre-pre-pre-production” so long some people think it’s vapor. It’s the only project that matters. Every girl at every party is chasing it, and now so am I.
But for once, ambition tastes like ash.
“I haven’t decided,” I say. “Jessie and Myrna want me to hold out. ‘Strike while the iron’s burning, but not so hot it melts,’ or something.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it. He’s calculating, too. I can see the little gears in his head, measuring me, measuring us, against what’s coming next.
“I want to go to England,” he says. He’s not looking at me, instead prodding the blueberries into an oval mouth. “I signed to do that series for Netflix, the one with the horses and the rain and the old castle. Starts shooting in August.”
“I heard about that,” I say, forcing lightness. “You play the brooding lord, or the sexy stablehand?”
He grins, but it’s the wrong kind. “The stablehand. He wins the lord’s inheritance in a game of cards.”
I laugh. “You’d be a terrible lord anyway. Too much hair.”
He grins, but I see the shadow behind it. “You could come for a week. It’s not Paris, but it’s nothing.”
I pick up a berry with my fingers and eat it, feeling the skin break on my tongue. “My life isn’t real enough for horses and rain. I’d get there and explode into dust.”
He looks at me, this time really looks, and I know from the way his jaw ticks that he knows I’m deflecting. I wonder if I want to stop.
“You’re scared,” he says, not accusing.
I nod, and because the dam’s already breached, I say, “I’m not sure I want to devote a whole year to Bressard. I’m not sure…” I trail off, words tumbling out of reach. “I’m not sure the version of myself that comes out the other side would even be me.”
The air is thick with it. I realize I’ve been holding my breath.
He takes my hand, and it’s not a photo op, not a stunt, just a thing someone does when they like you and want you to feel it. “Then don’t decide now. We finish Cannes. We enjoy it. If you want to say yes to Bressard, you say yes. If you want to do something else, we do that.”
“We?”
His eyes meet mine, and there’s a careful vulnerability there. “If you’d let me be part of whatever comes next... I’d like that.”
I want to say “I want,” but it would sound too soft, too easy. So instead, I squeeze his hand back and ask, “Do you ever think maybe we’re just the sum of what people want from us?”
He takes a moment. “Sometimes. But once it’s quiet, once the lights are off, you have to do something just for yourself. Otherwise—” He shrugs, helpless. “Otherwise you’re just a ghost.”
We sit like that for a while, the world flowing by, until the coffee is gone and the berries are gone and we have to head back for the next round.