Epilogue Two Years Later
ASHER
Paris in early spring seduces you slowly, until resistance becomes pointless.
On the Avenue Montaigne, the trees are stitched with gold, and the saints in the shop windows conspire to make you want what you cannot possibly keep.
It is the kind of city that expects you to fuck up your own life beautifully, and for once, I am spectacularly equipped for the task.
Tonight, I stand at the edge of it all, watching the black river of guests push along the red carpet of the Cinémathèque.
Floodlights, camera flashes, the chaos of fifty international crews.
Paparazzi bark at us from behind the velvet.
The studio’s hired handlers swarm like anxious bees, their headsets glinting under the lights.
“Three steps forward. No—chin up. Now kiss her.
Gentle. Less tongue, Dixon." I’ve been through this dance so many times I could direct it myself. Same circus, different tent.
But Emma is beside me, and with her comes the rarest thing of all: a sense that I might actually belong in the world.
She’s wearing slate-grey satin, slit up the thigh, hung so tight it’s practically a second skin.
She glows like a spotlight beneath the marquee.
Her hair is swept up, and lips painted a red so vivid it seemed to exist outside of time—the kind that turned black-and-white starlets immortal.
She surveys the press line, her smile erupting like molten earth, and presses against me with the precise calculation of someone who knows precisely how many lenses are capturing the moment. The message is unmistakable: this is no publicity stunt—this is fusion.
The auditorium swallows us into its grandeur—black marble veined with gold, like a temple to cinema itself.
Between the silk gowns and midnight tuxedos, the air hangs heavy with designer scents and the dust of artistic legacies.
I find my palm settling against the warm curve of her exposed spine.
She melts into my touch, a slight tremor running through her that I’ve learned to read like braille: exhaustion masked by the electric current of performance.
There is a new and unavoidable fact about Emma: tonight, five months and counting, she is slightly, but gloriously, pregnant. Not that you’d notice unless you’d spent months mapping every curve and contour of her. This is what I do in the dark, in the downtime, when all the glitz is peeled away.
We take our seats in the orchestra. I lean in, try to keep my voice from getting lost in the boom of the house. “Can I tell you a secret?”
She arches a brow, lips an inch from my ear. “Only if you promise to top the one from last night.”
“I could spend the rest of my life watching you break every room you walk into.”
She laughs, low and dangerous. “You always say that like it’s a threat.”
“Maybe it is. You ever think about how we got here?”
“Every day,” she murmurs, gripping my hand. “But mostly I think about what comes next.”
They dim the house lights and there's a hush, like before the plunge on a rollercoaster.
Up on screen, the film opens with her alone on a windswept cliff, shot in sickly green-grey, the sea boiling beneath. It’s Bressard’s signature—make even the beautiful seem haunted. Emma’s hair is wild, face bare. She looks nothing like the woman beside me now.
There is an out-of-body sensation to watching someone you love become someone else entirely in front of the world.
I want to reach through the screen, shield her from it, but at the same time, I’m so fucking proud my skin can’t contain it.
I sit there, pulse climbing, as she dissolves into the role, as the crowd around us watches her with an appetite I could never match.
I press her hand whenever the camera holds on her face. Three times, she answers with pressure of her own.
Halfway through the film, she leans close, lips brushing my shoulder. “You haven’t blinked in twenty minutes."
“I’m not watching,” I whisper. “I’m memorizing every inch of you."
“Pervert,” she breathes, but her eyes are glinting. “Tonight you can have any scene you want.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“Oh, you will.” She shifts, and I feel her shiver again–this time with anticipation.
After the last fade-out, the crowd detonates. She stands for the ovation, eyes watering, and I do too, because it’s the only way to match her in this one small thing. For a moment, I want to capture this for her. Bottle it for later, for nights when the world feels sad or wants to devour her whole.
There are speeches, handshakes, and an endless parade of people I should remember from the credits. Emma smiles, signs cards, lets herself be photographed, but her gaze keeps returning to me as if to say, “Don’t let go, not even now.”
We escape through a side entrance, with the help of a startled intern who will probably be fired by midnight. Into the Paris air, ankle-deep in a puddle of starlight, sprinting with laughter down an empty side street. Our driver’s nowhere in sight.
“Fuck it,” she says, hitching up her dress. “Let’s walk.”
“You sure?”
She lifts her chin. “I’m not made of glass.”
“No,” I say, “but let me pretend you are, just until we get back to the hotel.”
“If you carried me,” she dares, “we’d be on the front page by breakfast.”
There’s a dare in those eyes I can’t ignore. So I scoop her up, wedding-night style, and she whoops, arms around my neck, as I barrel down the cobbles. By the time we hit the corner, both of us are panting with laughter and exhaustion.
She nuzzles my jaw as I set her down, then palms my chest like she’s testing to see if I’m real. “Tell me,” she says, “do you actually want any of this?”
She means the circus, the constant scrutiny, and the life where nothing is ever just ours.
I touch her cheek, careful. “I want you. I want us. The rest is just noise.”
She closes her eyes and rests her forehead against mine. “You mean it.”
“Every day.”
We climb the stairs to the suite. No crowd now, just the hush you only get in the hour between midnight and whatever comes after.
She locks the door behind us, and instead of turning on the lights, she walks to the window and opens it wide.
The city sighs below. For a while, she just stands there, silhouetted, arms folded over her chest—no audience, no script.
After a few minutes, she turns, a new look in her eyes. She strides over, grabs my lapel, and pulls me into her orbit.
She kisses me, hard, then says, “You know what I realized?”
I shake my head, dizzy from the contact.
“That this could have ended horribly,” she answers.
“But it didn’t,” I say, which is true, and terrifying.
She leans in, bites my lip, brushes her knuckles along my jaw. “I’m going to keep you, Dixon. Against all better judgment.”
I smile, drink her in. “That’s the plan, Rowan. Remember?”
She slides her hands under my shirt, up my ribs, like she’s testing the weak points. “Lie down,” she orders, and I oblige, stripping off the jacket, sprawling onto the bed.
She follows, straddling my hips, dress riding up to bare her thighs. Her skin is warm, alive, the pulse in her neck fluttering like a trapped bird. She pins my wrists to the mattress, knits her fingers through mine, and lowers her lips to my ear.
“Repeat after me,” she says. “I am the luckiest bastard alive.”
I grin and say it, louder than I mean to. “I am the luckiest bastard alive.”
She shifts, grinds her pelvis into mine, and the gasp that escapes me is completely undignified.
“You know what else?” she says, voice a trembling whisper.
“What?”
“Three days ago, Bressard told me the French audiences can be brutal. He cautioned me that Paris may chew me up and spit me out.”
I study her face, the abrupt shadow behind her bravado.
“He’s wrong,” I say. “You’re a fucking force. I’d put you up against every city on this planet."
She looks down, lashes flickering, and for a moment, I am sure she’s going to cry. Instead, she just slumps onto my chest, letting the silence spool out between us. We lie there, tangled together, as the world goes on shrieking beneath our window.
There is a shift, microscopic but seismic, in how she holds me.
“I want to keep doing this,” she says at last. “All of it. Movies. Chaos. Us. Even when it’s impossible.”
“Then we will,” I say, as if it’s an oath. “We’ll do it our way.”
She snorts. “Asher Dixon, world’s biggest lovesick fool.”
“But I’m your fool,” I say, threading her hair between my fingers.
She grins into my collarbone. “Only if you keep making me crazy.”
“Oh, I’m just getting started.”
THE END