We haven’t talked about Paris. Not about the parts that matter, anyway. There wasn’t time; we were shuttled from one city to the next so fast it was like being shot from a series of increasingly expensive cannons. Interviews, photo ops, parties, then the necessary blackouts of sleep where I grabbed her hand under the hotel duvet and tried to remember what I was supposed to be so scared of. Whenever we surfaced—at the airport, on another junket—there would already be a newheadline, a fresh batch of photos of us walking together, smiling together, trying (and failing) not to look like two people who’d done unspeakably filthy things to each other behind the velvet ropes.
The thing is, I want people to know. I want to claim her, public-flag style. I want to do something so unsubtle it stains the pages of Us Weekly forever. But every time the cameras get close, I feel her hand slip away, see her stand a little apart, that tiny seam of distance between us like a zipper she wants to keep closed. Emma’s not faking the affection; if anything, she’s too present with it. But she has a private core to her that I haven’t cracked. I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t know if she’d let me even if I asked.
Now, she sees me, gives that crooked half-smile, and wraps up with the reporters. She glides over like she’s floating, then tugs gently at my lanyard. “You forgot to put this on,” she murmurs and helps me slip it over my head, letting her fingers trace the back of my neck. It’s such an unapologetically intimate gesture that I hear Jamie groan from five feet away.
“What’s the schedule?” I ask, fighting the urge to pin her wrist in place.
She glances at her phone. “Joint interview at ten, then solo TV spots. Press lunch at two, then the art gallery thing.” She scrolls through, lips pursed. “They want us to do a walk on the pier for some lifestyle magazine. You up for that?”
“With you? Sure.”
She arches a brow—seriously, how does she do that without ever practicing in the mirror?—but doesn’t comment. Instead, she turns, looks out at the beach, and drops her sunglasses into place. “Let’s give them something pretty, at least.”
Barcelona’s air is heavy with salt and possibility. Every surface is sun-bleached, overexposed, like the lighting guy cranked the wattage past the legal limit. We walk together, armin arm, along the hotel’s infinity pool. The studio handlers follow at a “discreet” but completely obvious ten paces. Behind them, the actual fans: clusters of girls and bored-looking men, phones up, waiting for the next meme-able moment.
She leans in and whispers, “Kiss on three?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
We stop at the terrace railing, and she angles herself perfectly into the light, tucking her hair behind one ear. Her hand finds my cheek, her thumb drawing a line from my temple to my jaw. I kiss her, light but greedy for the contact, and she lets herself be tipped backwards a little, her nails catching at my collar. The phones go wild—shutter-snap, gasp, nervous giggle. I know how it looks. I want it to look that way.
After, we both linger in the moment, like neither of us is in a hurry to let go. Then she steps back, sighs, and says in a tone so low only I can hear: “You’re getting too good at that, Dixon.”
But she’s smiling as we walk back inside, like she can taste the victory.
We’re ushered into a soundstage-sized conference room, the kind with enough bottled water to hydrate a desert. The roundtables are set up with color-coded name placards: Emma, me, a director, two producers, and a parade of journalists, all with their assigned questions and 12-minute windows. We spend the morning rotating between tables, running through the same script: the chemistry, the improvisation, the “instant bond” we developed around Day Three of filming. She’s so much better at this than I am, answering questions with complete sentences and on-message warmth. I mostly try to look at her, smile at the correct times, and not say anything that will get me viral-clipped for the wrong reasons.
The adrenaline of it surprises me. I like the performative aspect, but what I crave is the off-camera shit: the way Emma’ll squeeze my knee under the table, or the text she sends me, mid-interview, that just says, “You’re killing it, babe. Party in the green room after?” I text back something filthy, and she nearly snorts into her coffee.
At lunch, we’re shuffled into a glass box with a view of the harbor. It’s a “casual networking opportunity”—code for two-dozen strangers pretending not to stare at your every move. Emma is magnificent, decorum and diplomacy incarnate, joking with the Spanish team and the art house crowd imported from Cannes. I try to keep up, but my brain is scrambling to remember whether or not I’m supposed to know the names of the people at our table. I settle for being charming and laughing at Emma’s stories, even the ones I know verbatim by now.
After, we escape to the suite so Emma can change for the gallery event. I watch her pull on a dress that looks like it was cut from wet steel and tailored to her body on a live feed. She does her lipstick in the bathroom mirror, tongue poking out in concentration, and I get flashbacks of her mouth around my cock, the way she looked up at me with mascara streaked down her cheekbones.
She catches me staring.
“What?” she asks, dabbing gloss at the corner of her mouth.
“You’re going to destroy civilizations in that dress.”
Her laughter echoes off the tile. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” She comes out, turns a slow pirouette. “Zip me?”
I do, brushing my lips against the nape of her neck as I finish. For a second, her body melts back into mine, just a little, and I hear her exhale through her teeth.
“Careful,” she says quietly, as if I’m the one who needs warning.
We arrive at the gallery on a tiled plaza overlooking the sea. The space is white, bright, and so minimalist that even the security guards look like modernist sculptures. The crowd is a mix of art-world goths and Euro celebs. Photographers swarmus, but Emma leads the way, never losing her cool for an instant. I trail in her wake, amazed that I’m allowed to touch her at all.
It’s during the second lap around the gallery, while I’m listening to Emma critique a massive Alexander Calder mobile with one hand on my wrist, that a shadow falls over us. I turn, and a man steps into our space, all shoulders and cheekbones and what has to be at least a thousand dollars’ worth of casual Italian tailoring. His hair is deliberately messy, and he has the cocky, effortless confidence of someone who’s had a Wikipedia page since puberty.
“Asher Dixon,” he says, the accent rounding my name into something exotic. “Good to meet you at last, man. I’m Antonio.”
Emma stiffens. The hand on my wrist goes cold, then relaxes, a new kind of grip. She plasters on a smile, but I can see the faint flicker of anxiety in her eye.
Antonio. I recognize him now from the emails, the press clippings—the reigning prince of Spain’s indie scene, and Emma’s former co-star on some critically-adored series from late last year. I recall that, in the polite language of Interview Magazine, they were “linked,” in the way beautiful people always get linked when they share an on-screen kiss. Until recently, I’d thought nothing of it. Now, standing across from him, I feel a primitive urge to piss on something.
Emma does the introductions with brisk efficiency, as if she’d rather not linger on any of it. Antonio, for his part, is all grins and easy charm, including me just enough in the conversation to make it clear he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“You’re killing it in the States, my man,” he says, and if there’s a trace of sarcasm, I can’t quite catch it. Then he addresses Emma, wagging a finger. “And you stood me up at last year’s premiere, little girl.”
