Instead, I sneak back up to the suite, let myself in as quietly as possible. The bathroom door is ajar. Emma’s in the oversized tub, knees drawn to her chest, hair floating around her head like she’s underwater at a shoot. I sit on the cold tile beside the tub, back against the wall.
She doesn’t look at me.
“I’m not good at this,” I say. The words echo off the bathroom’s marble angles. “You know that, right?”
She huffs softly, not quite a laugh. “You’re fine. You just think you’re not.”
“No, I mean—” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I’ve never actually had to care what someone else thought. Not really. So when I start to, I turn into kind of a dick. That’s not an excuse. I’m just saying I don’t know where the guardrails are yet.”
“Maybe just back off when I say something’s not a big deal,” she murmurs. “You don’t have to push.”
I nod, then realize she can’t see me. “Okay. I can do that.”
We sit in silence, the only sound the hum of the hotel’s central air and the occasional ripple of water as Emma shifts. After a few minutes, she says, “I’m sorry, too, for earlier. I hate that Antonio gets under my skin, and I should have made you feel more comfortable. He’s a dick.”
“He’d get under anyone’s skin,” I say.
She turns her head, finally meeting my eyes. I consider telling her what Craig said, but it feels cheap—like outsourcing my self-awareness to a third party. Instead, I just say, “I’m only jealous because you’re that good and I don’t want to lose you.”
She shrugs, then beckons for me to come closer. I kneel at the edge of the tub, careful not to drip cufflinks in the water.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” she says softly.
“You won’t,” I promise, and mean it.
She leans forward, and I kiss her, tasting a hint of floral bath oil and, weirdly, vodka. We make out like teenagers, which gets me entirely soaked, which makes her giggle. The moment is so light, so easy, it borders on mythic.
Later, when we’re wrapped in towels and sprawled on the bed, I braid my fingers through hers. There’s a faint bruise on her forearm, thumbprint-shaped, and for a wild second, I want to smash Antonio’s face in.
But Emma follows my eyes and says, “I did that. Too much Pilates.”
I believe her, but I also don’t. I let it go.
She falls asleep before me, hair damp on the pillow, mouth slightly open. I stay awake a long time, listening to the city outside, and try to convince myself that this is actually what I want. That whatever’s under the velvet surface—jealousy, insecurity, all the ancient shit I thought I’d left behind—will disappear in the morning.
It doesn’t, but I get better at pretending.
CHAPTER 15
EMMA
Cannes doesn’t look real,even now, even when the car finally breaks the wall of traffic and crests the headland so that the bay opens up below us in a fresco of blue, silver, and perfect, impossible light. I fixate on the light. I’d heard about the Côte d’Azur haze all my life, but no one got it right. There’s nothing gentle about it. The light here cuts like a scalpel, carving every boat hull, red-tiled roof, and palm tree shadow into something too vivid to be natural. Even the festival’s white marquees seem to throb with desperation, as if the entire landscape is auditioning for a role it will never get.
Our driver is the kind of man who doesn’t need a surname, just a single syllable. I think it’s “Serge,” but I am not positive and am too tired to ask. In the last thirty-six hours, I have: changed time zones twice, done two live broadcasts, faked a non-hangover for the American morning shows, almost had a panic attack in the Nice airport lounge, and broken a two-year streak of not crying in public in the departure lounge at Madrid. I’m so exhausted, the inside of my head feels sandblasted and fragile.
Asher places his hand on my thigh, his thumb tracing lazy circles against my skin. “Nice looked good on you,” I say, and the words come out goofy and flat.
He turns and smiles. The sunglasses hide his eyes, but I can tell by the set of his mouth that last night’s weirdness is at least thirty percent mended. “Not half as good as you,” he says, then adds, “Should we practice sounding surprised when they tell us we’re the only interesting couple at Cannes?”
I groan and lean my forehead against the window. “You are such a shit.”
“True,” he agrees, squeezing my leg in punctuation.
The W Hotel in Barcelona felt like an overfunded fortress. Here, the InterContinental is a circus midway. Paparazzi have staked out every curb, and even the interns look airbrushed. My stylist, Chantal, is waiting in the lobby with a binder full of mayhem and a pale blue pot of “deep focus” eye patches that she slaps under my eyes before I’ve put down my bag. “You’re not tired,” she tells me. “You’re radiant.”
“Thank you, mama,” I say, but she’s already rearranging my bones.
The next four hours descend into the kind of ritual I find both comforting and degrading: hair tamed and lacquered, skin shellacked with serums, a dress zipped up in stages until it fits me like a rebuke. My phone chimes with reminders every half hour. The schedule is so tight that if Asher and I had a fight in the elevator, Tabloid Logic says it would cinematically reappear in our body language for the rest of the evening.
