Chapter 17 #2
The “conference room” is more like an after-hours parlor.
Hal Quincy from Paramount is already there, perched on the arm of a wingback chair.
A Netflix woman—domed glasses, white bob, fashionably severe—sits beside Jessie, who looks calculatedly approachable in flat shoes and a sundress.
Someone from the festival press team plays the role of a neutral observer, a blue notebook open on her lap.
I know my lines. Asher and I enter linked at the fingers—the classic “authentic couple” move. A low hum of approval ripples through the room, and someone in the back even claps.
Hal stands and tugs at his sports coat cuffs. “There they are! Cannes royalty. We’ve been looking for you two for hours.”
He pours champagne into flutes and hands me one, then one to Asher. The Netflix exec gestures for us to sit at the head of the table. The power move is so transparent that Asher gives me an amused glance before pulling out my chair.
Pleasantries begin, followed by sped-up replays of all the good press from the day.
Eclipse Run is trending globally, but more importantly, “the Emma-Asher story” has broken out of its algorithmic sandbox and gone viral with people who’ve never set foot in a theater.
There’s a montage of our kiss from the afterparty, the way we locked eyes at dinner, the damp, windswept walk down the Croisette that didn’t escape fan cameras after all.
It’s horrifying to see myself in slow motion, cut up and meme-d, but some masochistic part of me is thrilled.
“Pure electricity,” Quincy says, clicking through slides on his phone as if we’re in a first-date PowerPoint. My cheeks prickle, though I hold the smile.
The Netflix exec, whose signet ring probably costs more than my first car, clears her throat. “We have a very rare scenario here. The numbers are off the charts. Early reviews are almost an afterthought—you two have become the story.”
Asher tips his glass at me in a silent toast. I swallow the champagne—sweet and destructive on my tongue.
Quincy gazes at me with what feels like grandfatherly pity.
“Has anyone given you the real numbers?” Without waiting for an answer, he reads them off his phone.
Every digit crackles through my brain. International presales are eighty percent higher than any projection.
Even the studios’ skepticism—everyone’s fear that the world would eat a feminist space opera for breakfast—has vaporized.
Now the only question is whether Cannes’ jury, in perennial search of “serious” cinema, will take us seriously.
“We’re in the driver’s seat,” he continues conspiratorially, “but we want to be smart about rollout. Keep people talking.”
The Netflix woman adds, “We want mystery. The sense that you two are—maybe, maybe not. Leave them guessing until the LA premiere. Play it close to the vest. There’s magic in uncertainty.”
A second wave of implication crashes over me.
Eclipse Run is a hit, and Asher and I are not just in the machine; we are the machine.
Our romance, real or engineered, is all anyone wants to talk about.
Every move I make is a data point. The next few weeks of my life have already been plotted by invisible hands.
Jessie leans toward me. “How does that land, Em?”
I blink. It lands like acid through a paper cup, but I say, “We can pace it. Play coy.”
Asher laughs. “We’re both naturally elusive. I have trouble responding to texts from my own mother.”
Quincy beams. “That’s gold. And Emma, your press reel is almost as viral as the actual trailer. You’re trending right now with the male demo, which is”—his face contorts in chef's-kiss—“historic.”
Somewhere in that room, I lose the boundary between my body and the image of myself being cultivated, magnified, redrawn. I wonder if the me from six months ago would even recognize this brand of Emma.
The meeting lasts less than an hour, but by its end, the next six months of my life have been mapped out: controlled leaks, a calculated “distance,” just enough public appearance to stay memorable but never so much as to break the echo chamber. My job is to keep breathing—and not fuck anything up.
When we’re finally dismissed, Asher and I walk out through the lobby side by side, saying nothing. The air outside is damp with brine and possibility. Under the sodium glare, he takes my hand and tugs me toward the esplanade.
“That was not, strictly speaking, a meeting,” he says. “That was a coronation.”
I give a bleak little laugh. “All the king’s horses, just for a splash on Page Six.”
He squeezes my hand. “You never used to take yourself so seriously.”
“I never used to take anything seriously.”
He stops and drops his voice below the lamps’ thrum. “Do you want it? The rest of this? Is it worth the price?”
The way he asks, with that rare sharpness, pulls the answer straight from my lungs. “I don’t know anymore,” I admit, the confession heavy with truth. “I wanted the work, the parts. I didn’t know it got this… crowded.”
He searches my face, eyes nearly black in the half-light. “I’m in this with you if you want. If you don’t—I’ll walk away with you tomorrow.”
He would. I know that now, with strange certainty.
I want to say yes and walk away, but I don’t. I like the big, impossible future, even if it scares me so much I want to crawl into a shell and never come out.
“We finish the waltz,” I say—meaning both the metaphor and the month—“and then we find out how to be people again.”
He smiles—the genuine smile, crooked and full of longing. “It’s a date.”
We walk home barefoot. The calluses we earn tonight will last us all year.
The next morning arrives as a hangover in four languages.
I wake to a blur of light through gauzy curtains and the sound of water running in the bathroom.
A text from my mother says, “You made us all so proud,” and my phone erupts with notifications from every app I’ve ever downloaded.
Asher is in the shower, whistling our film’s score, and I want to jump forward in time just to reclaim a few hours of peace.
My phone rings before I’ve even had coffee. It’s Holcomb, the director—no preamble. “Em, they want you for Bressard. Top of the list: you and one other.”
I sit up so fast I spill water on the sheets. “Really?”
He makes a grunting sound that’s almost a laugh. “He wants a screen test next Friday. He’ll be in Paris for a week. I’ll send you the script sides.”
I nearly drop the phone.
“Look, Emma, you can say no if you’re not ready. No one would blame you. The press will be rabid, but—”
“No, that’s—I’ll do it. Of course I’ll do it.”
He pauses, as if that answer surprises him. “You good?”
No. Maybe. “Yeah,” I say, and in some vertiginous way, it’s true. “Thank you, Holcomb.”
“Don’t thank me yet. This is the big leagues.”
He hangs up, and I’m left with the silence and the click of something tectonic shifting under my feet.
Asher emerges from the bathroom in a towel, hair dripping, cheap hotel conditioner still clinging to his jawline. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stare at him—the bright alien presence in the suite’s faded luxury. “Bressard wants me in Paris next month.”
He blinks, then grins. “I am in love with a superstar.”
“Well, don’t propose yet. Apparently, my romantic availability is a marketing asset.” I say it as a joke, but it lands differently, between us.
He shrugs. “That’s always been true. We just admit it now.”
I throw a pillow at him and immediately regret it—he’s faster and taller, and the tussle ends with us in a pile on the unmade bed, laughing like idiots, suddenly unarmored. I want to stay here—just here, nowhere else—until the world forgets us.
But the world never forgets. By noon, we’re in a black town car with tinted windows, whisked down the half-miraculous blue of the coast. The schedule unfurls like an endless horizon: photo calls, roundtables, meetings with financiers who reschedule entire days with a text.
Jessie meets us at every stop with new “updates”: talk of an American Oscar push, whispers of a sequel, chatter about me as a one-woman franchise, and Asher as my witty, world-weary co-captain. We’re not people. We’re themes.
At the Nice waterfront, a French magazine photoshoot wants us in “natural light”—wind-tousled hair, bare feet on stone, skin clear and unmade.
Relief should follow, but the photographer—a tiny, severe woman in snakeskin boots—positions us with the intensity of a chess master.
At one point, she makes us wrap our arms around each other and lean, foreheads touching.
I feel Asher’s warmth and the thrum of his pulse.
For a second, I want to bolt, but he leans in and mutters, “Just us chickens,” and I nearly break the shot with a snort of laughter.
Lunch is a swirl of interviews and amuse-bouches I can’t pronounce.
Jessie slides me her phone to show the trades—Variety’s headline reads, “Rowan and Dixon Storm Cannes; Industry Abuzz Over Off-Screen Power Couple.” They’ve chosen the least flattering photo of me—over-exposed, bug-eyed—but Asher looks like a fallen angel, so I can’t be too mad.
I duck into the bathroom for two minutes of solitude, staring at my face in the marble-framed mirror. My reflection splits: one part child, one part someone I don’t recognize. I try on different smiles; none fit.
Do I want it? Asher had asked me. The answer is yes and no, and also: what else was I going to do?
I splash cold water on my wrists and return feeling a little more like a person and a little less like an artifact.
Our next appearances await in a private villa rented by one of the studios—a place so white and spare it could double as a monastery or a fashion crime scene.
Executives unroll the next steps of the “campaign” around the pool.
Every phrase comes coated in jargon: keeping the narrative alive, aligning with the fan base, leveraging the unexpected heat of our ‘chemistry.’ I nod and smile, playing my part, but I’m watching through a golden tunnel, as if none of this is real.
At some point, Asher grabs my hand under the table and draws a little circle on my palm with his fingertip—a secret code that means “here, now, with you.”
We slip away as soon as Jessie gives the signal. “You have the next hour free,” she says, and for her, that’s a lifetime.
We drive up the coast with windows down, letting wind and sea scrub the taste of artificiality from us. He has no idea where we’re headed, and that’s part of the freedom. We end up at a half-deserted cliff over the water, where the light is so bright it softens the edges of everything.
He sits beside me on the stone wall, silent at first. Then: “What did you want before all of this?”
I try to remember. “I wanted to escape. I wanted to become everybody else. Sometimes I wanted to be invisible.” I imagine telling that version of myself—the one in sweatpants a year ago—that I’d be in gold at Cannes now.
“And now?” he asks.
I don’t know how to answer, so I ask him, “You?”
He gazes at the sea, eyes nearly transparent in daylight. “I wanted to last. I didn’t expect to meet someone who made me want anything else.” He drops the mask. “This is the first time I don’t know what I want next.”
I lay my head on his shoulder, and we watch sailboats tack and shudder in the wind, both of us hollowed out and tender.
The sun sinks lower, and when I check my phone, there’s another message from Holcomb: “Script’s on your email. Don’t stress. Bressard is famously… odd. They’ll love you or hate you.”
We drive back in the blue hour—windows up, hair wild, skin warmed by the air. Inside the car, it’s quiet, womb-like. Asher dozes, head tipped back like a child’s, and I study his profile, the lines softened by sleep. I wonder if we’ll make it, or if the world will flatten us first.
By the time we reach the hotel, dusk has painted the promenade pink and orange. The party has already started—the crowd out front is flashbulbs, velvet ropes, people chanting our names as if we’re not only real, but theirs.
Handlers try to shepherd us inside, but Asher stops outside the doors, turns to me, and says, “We can always leave. You know that, right?”
I nod, and—maybe for the first time—I almost believe it.
The party is chaos, but I find myself drifting, hand in his hand, wondering whether I want the spotlight or whether I’m already paying too high a price.