JOSH
It was only a couple of years ago but feels like ancient fucking history by now.
I stepped onto the red carpet for the premiere of the last movie, Wonderwick Woods: Into the Shadow Realm, and there Emily was.
She looked . . . different. I mean, I’m no fashion critic, but the looks she had chosen for the first couple of premieres were interesting to say the least. Strange combinations of dresses and shoes, bags in the shape of watering cans or the addition of a huge necklace or her naturally straight hair forced into curls.
This time, everything was just simple. Just right.
Just perfectly her. A black dress with a square neck, tight on the top and then flaring out at the waist. Hair sleek, tied back in a low ponytail.
No crazy necklace, not even something small and dainty, instead the neckline of the dress framed her collarbones and the soft skin of her chest like a work of art. She looked, in a word, amazing.
The problem was that I felt something and I didn’t like it. Any time I felt these somethings towards Emily, I tried to crush them down, like a garbage compactor, because really that’s what these feelings had to be: garbage, because I was a garbage person with garbage feelings.
My date for the evening was some model I was seeing for about ten minutes – that’s what you’re meant to do when you’re nineteen years old and a big deal in Hollywood, right?
But Emily went alone, and the whole evening I wondered what it would be like if I told her how amazing she looked.
No, not amazing. After careful consideration I decided that wasn’t the word I wanted to use.
The word I wanted to use was beautiful. Did I tell her how beautiful she looked?
No. Did I make some stupid crack about how she couldn’t get a date for the premiere? Yeah, yeah I did.
Because that was who I was, and that was who Emily was.
We had our roles and we stuck to them. She was a good person, serious and dedicated to her work.
She held herself and everyone else to a high standard, and what did I do?
Fuck around and only occasionally find out, because I was so often insulated from the finding out part by my parents’ position.
So even though when I saw Emily that night I felt this pull towards her, this unsettling sense that I found her beautiful, captivating, enchanting, whatever the hell you wanted to call it, I knew the place for me was right next to some girl I barely knew who spent the whole movie checking Instagram.
No, that’s not quite right, what she was actually doing was scrolling back through her own Instagram.
That was what I deserved, and that was the person Emily saw when she looked at me.
An unserious, spoiled Hollywood brat who had made it his business to wind her up, troll her, prank her, make fun of her.
How could I stop being that person? That was what I wanted to know.
Was it even possible, or was this just who I was destined to be, forever?
Tonight as we left the club, I got a little taste of what it would feel like to have my arms around her, and I wanted more.