Chapter 18
ASHER
They say you only ever see yourself clearly by wanting something, or someone, with your entire body. In the mirrors above Cannes, in the lens of every camera, through all the smoke and theater, I’ve watched myself chase Emma until my cells vibrate with the effort to catch up.
But the closest I get to real is always back in the hotel room, after the fans and handlers and champagne. The door clicks shut, and it’s just us. Just her, kicking off her shoes and pirouetting out of her press smile. The gold slip she’s wearing puddles on the tiles like a dare.
I stand in the foyer in my suit, watching her stalk to the minibar and root around for gummy bears.
She finds them and tosses me the bag, then sits on the edge of the bed, cross-legged.
Her hair’s wild, full of wind and mousse, and the smudge of mascara under her eyes says the day has finally gotten to her.
The impulse is to hold her, to undress her with worshipful hands, but for once I don’t move. I want to keep her in this quiet, animal moment. I want to memorize her as she is, legs tucked up, chewing candy, looking at me like she’s somewhere halfway between punch drunk and cosmic terror.
“You all right?” I say, and my voice comes out too loud in the cocooned quiet.
She nods, and then: “No. And yes. But mostly no.”
I sit with that, then peel open the bag of gummies and eat a green one. Emma takes a red and then a yellow, and we pass the bag back and forth in silence until only the rejects are left—grape, which we both hate.
“I didn’t think I’d ever get this far,” she says, voice barely above a hush. “Even when I wanted it. Especially not with you.”
I don’t trust myself to answer, so I just watch her, calibrating the weight of every word.
“There’s a point,” she says, “where what they want from you and what you want from yourself splits, and you have to choose a side. And I don’t even know what side I’m on anymore.” She laughs, and it’s harsh, but honest. “You probably think I’m melodramatic—”
“Not even close,” I say, and it’s true. I think she’s one of the bravest people I’ve ever met.
She looks up, meets my eyes, and whatever she finds there makes her exhale.
“I just… I want to keep making things. I want to keep being this person, even if I don’t know who she is yet.
” She makes a fist and drags it over her heart, then lets her hand fall.
“But it can’t ever be mine, can it? The more they look at you, the less you belong to yourself. ”
We’re both quiet. There’s no good response to that, other than to keep showing up. Fighting to give her a place where she’s not consumable, not a brand, just Emma and skin and laughter.
I sit on the bed beside her, close enough to feel her body heat, but not touching. “You know, you’re not alone, right?”
She rolls her eyes, but it’s a cover. “I mean it,” I say. “You’re not a product. Or a narrative. You’re the only actual surprise left in my life.”
That makes her bite her lip, and when she looks at me again, her eyes are watery. “You’re such a liar,” she says, softly.
Only this time I don’t argue. “I’ll never lie to you.”
She blinks and, for a second, I see the girl she must have been, before all the glitter and anatomy of fame. She leans her head against my shoulder, and I don’t move. I just sit, letting the clock run, until her breathing slows and she’s calm.
Eventually, she says, “Did you mean it? Back at the cliff, about walking away?”
The panic shudders through me, but I don’t let it show.
I’ve thought about it, of course. I’ve fantasized whole alternate timelines where we’re nobodies in an ugly flat in London, eating knockoff Frosted Flakes for dinner and watching old movies on a busted TV, loving each other in the wreckage of ambition.
But I know, and she knows, that’s not us.
So I say: “If you’d asked, I’d have done it already. But I also know you, and I know you’d hate me, just a little, for keeping you small when you could be so fucking huge.”
Now she’s smiling—really smiling—and there’s a current in the room. “Maybe. I’d probably hate you a lot.”
“Fair.”
She coils her arms around my bicep, hugging it in an almost comic way. “I don’t want to go home. Not to the people who just want autographs and interviews. I want to go somewhere else. Just us.”
A mad idea flashes through my mind, and that’s how I know it’s the right one.
The words tumble out before I can stop them.
“After this circus, the premieres and bullshit, come to England with me. I start the Netflix thing in two weeks—six episodes in London. Just stay. I’ll show you the ugly bits, the grey and the real.
” I watch her face for any hesitation. “Then when you’re ready, we’ll go to Paris together, and you can terrorize Bressard and the entire continent.
” I squeeze her hand. “We don’t have to live in their fishbowl; we can build our own—just for a while. ”
She closes her eyes and, for the first time in hours, looks truly at rest. “Promise?”
“Yeah. I promise.”
She peels herself away from my arm and crawls backward onto the bed, then points at me. “Your move, Dixon.”
I strip out of the jacket and tie, crawl onto the sheets, and lie beside her, face to face. She smells like salt and citrus shampoo and something floral I can’t identify.
For a long time, we just stare at each other, not touching, until the tension is feverish.
She traces my jaw, then my mouth. “You’re letting your stubble win.”
“I’m trying to look menacing for Cannes.”
She laughs, and it’s a full-body sound, like she’s rediscovering how to be happy. Then she leans forward and kisses me, slow and deep, with a hunger that says she’s not hiding from any part of herself right now.
My hands find her waist, her hips, her spine. We tumble sideways, lips and arms and legs tangled, and for the first time in days it’s not about who’s watching, or what angle will make it onto the trades. I want her with a heat that’s pure and ancient.
She bites my shoulder, leaves a crescent, and whispers, “Keep it. I want to see it tomorrow.”
I roll her under me, pressing her wrists to the pillow. “You’re not making it out of here without more bruises than that,” I say, and she shivers.
She parts her knees, anchoring me in place. “Then do something about it.”
I do. I kiss every inch of her, her collarbone, the hard line of her clavicle, the small hollow at her throat. She tastes like sunshine, sweat, and sugar. She digs her fingers into the back of my neck, pulling me closer, and I want to be so close I could graft myself into her skin.
She says my name, once, harshly. I answer by letting my hands roam where they will, learning her topography, mapping the places that make her arch and keen.
She pulls the shirt over my head and stares at my chest, running her palm down the line of muscle and scar. “You ever get tired of being beautiful?” she asks, tipsy and almost angry.
“Constantly,” I say, mouth moving down to her breast, kissing the soft. She groans, writhes, and it eggs me on.
We collide like animals, her legs spread wide as I thrust into her slick heat with bruising force.
She claws red trails down my back, drawing blood as I pound into her relentlessly.
“Harder,” she demands, voice raw, and I obey, driving deeper until she’s crying out with each stroke.
She yanks my hair so hard tears spring to my eyes, then bites my earlobe until I taste copper on her tongue.
When she comes, her body convulses violently around my cock, her wetness flooding between us as she screams my name.
I follow seconds later, emptying myself inside her with such intensity my vision blurs at the edges.
After, she buries her face in my neck and says, “I wish this was what they put on the front page.”
I laugh into her hair: “This is what makes the rest endurable.”
We lay there, tangled and sticky, breathing the same air.
“I love you,” I say, because the moment is right, and I want her to have it. “I do. I never thought I would, but I do. If you told me tomorrow to fuck off and never come back, I’d buy a ticket to wherever you sent me.”
She looks at me, and it’s like being seen for the first time. “You’re such an idiot,” she says, but her smile is shaky, and her eyes fill again.
“But you love me anyway?” I prompt.
“Yeah,” she says, soft as a bruise. “I fucking do.”
We fall asleep without closing the blinds, letting whatever starlight the Riviera has left fall over us like tinsel.
It should feel like an ending, but it doesn’t. It feels like a beginning—one that might be messy, or short, or end in disaster, but still a beginning.
The following week is a blitzkrieg of commitments, but I can feel her moving through the chaos with a new gravity, a little more solid in her own skin.
She teases me when fans ask for a couple of selfies, leans in, and kisses my cheek just out of frame during a live interview.
When the studio suits try to stage-manage us—“stand together, laugh here, touch her elbow, now walk away slow”—she upends the choreography with improv: dips me instead, or whispers a joke so obscene the publicist has to turn away.
The whole world is baiting us to slip, to become the melodrama they can mine for hashtags, and instead we keep tripping each other up, refusing to be anyone’s script but our own.
Night falls and the red carpet beckons. I escort her down it like it’s a gangplank, arms linked, and for once I don’t feel exposed—I think invulnerable, shielded by the simple act of holding her hand.
At the world premiere party in Los Angeles, she disappears for a while, swarmed by foreign press.
I can hear her laugh across the patio, the signature cackle I’ve learned to chase through crowds.
I watch her for a while, at ease now, fielding questions, deflecting them with a grace and slyness I’d never possess.
She catches me staring and raises an eyebrow, beckoning me over.
I snake through the party, and when I reach her, she grabs my lapel and yanks me into her orbit. “They like you better than me,” she says, but her eyes say she enjoys it.
“Impossible,” I say. “I’m barely housebroken.”
She kisses me in public, mouth open, and the tabloid vultures circle.
“Are you ready for England?” I whisper after, low in her ear.
She leans in, nipping the lobe. “You have no idea.”
For all the sound and fury, the rest of the night is a slow fade.
We end up in her kitchen, eating cold pasta with our fingers and drinking from the bottle.
I read her bits from the Bressard script, doing the voices until she nearly chokes on penne laughing.
She dares me to climb onto the roof for the sunrise; I dare her back.
Within ten minutes, we’re standing on the tiles, wrapped in robes, looking out at smudge-blue dawn over the city.
She shoves me, and I nearly lose my footing. “You’re going to be the death of me.”
“Only you could die of happiness,” she says.
“That’s the plan, Rowan. That’s the fucking plan.”