She sends a laughing emoji, then:
I know a spot.
I want to ask her what’s real, but I can’t. Not tonight.
I let the bottles drift from the nightstand, one by one, until the room’s littered with their brown glass carcasses. Eventually, I pass out, horizontal, still in my jeans. In the last moments before sleep, I see her again: not on the screen, not in the shimmer of flashbulbs, but in the dim warmth of a hotel bar, telling me the worst joke I’ve ever heard.
And for a minute, I feel twenty-one again, with my whole life ahead of me.
I wake to a pounding in my skull, the kind that makes you swear off everything. My phone’s dead, so I plug it in and check the time on the bedside clock: 11:40AM. Junket starts in twenty minutes. I brush my teeth wearing nothing but boxers and a towel, and my mouth tastes like death. My blazer is wrinkled beyond rescue, but I wear it anyway. I’m still in last night’s t-shirt, now aromatic with regret.
Downstairs, the press is already thick. The ballroom has been reconfigured into a warren of glass tables and cheap velvet ropes, each station labeled with the name of a magazine or a blog. I see Emma immediately, her five-inch Louboutins making her tower over the press pool, draped in a midnight Valentino suit with a silk Dior blouse that probably cost more than my firstcar. The studio stylists have transformed her into something untouchable. Her hair is up—elegant and brutal. She makes it look effortless. She laughs at something the guy from GQ says, and for a second, I’m actually annoyed.
When it’s my turn, I’m ushered to her table like an unwilling contestant on a game show. She doesn’t stand, but her eyes flick up and down as if taking inventory.
“Rough night?” she whispers, smiling wide for the camera.
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Oh, I would.”
I want to tell her I’m sorry. Sorry for last night, sorry for asking her out, sorry for not being able to keep it at the level she wants. But there’s a handler watching, and a camera, and three microphones, so I say, “You look like you slept.”
She says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I nearly laugh, but rein it in. We slip into the press routine: easy, patter-heavy, borderline flirtatious. She talks about the chemistry between us—the word “chemistry” gets used a lot in this context, which is both funny and humiliating. I say she’s the hardest-working costar I’ve ever had, and she blushes exactly the right amount, which I don’t know how she does on command. I wonder if she even means to.
After the sixth or seventh interview, we get five minutes off. We wander into a service hallway lined with storage crates and hotel staff. Emma leans against the wall and unbuttons the top of the suit. I avert my eyes, like that matters.
“Did you mean it?” she says, not looking at me. “About tonight?”
“Yeah. If you want.”
“I do.”
There’s a pause. She tugs the hair tie from her bun, shakes her head. “I’ll be honest, I can’t do this unless we’re at least a little bit real.”
She says it low, like a confession.
“I’m not great at real,” I say.
She smirks. “You’re better at it than you think. Besides, I don’t mean getting engaged. I just mean becoming friends.”
We stand there until someone calls us back. For a minute, neither of us moves.
Back at the table, I’m lighter. Even the questions feel less loaded, more like a game I’m in on. I see her at the other end of the ballroom, watching me. I make a face, and she almost cracks up. The handlers take notes, whisper to each other behind clipboards. I start to see the scripts, the marks where the real stuff leaks out: the sudden shift in her tone when she talks about her family, the way her foot bounces under the table until a question lands too close.
By late afternoon, my voice is sandpaper, and my head throbs, but I don’t care.
When the last interview wraps, Emma bolts toward the doors. She doesn’t wait for me. She leaves the hotel, cutting through the crowd with her head forward in almost a sprint. I lose her in the lobby, but when I step outside, she’s two paces ahead, hands in pockets, hair wild in the wind.
“Hey!” I call, jogging to catch up.
She doesn’t turn, but I can see the smile in her posture.
We walk together, neither speaking at first. A block down, she veers into an unmarked door that leads into a dark ramen bar, the kind with only five tables and no music. We order, still silent, and when the sake arrives, she pours for both of us.
“How long are we supposed to keep this up?” she says, raising her thimble cup.
