EMMA
The hangover begins,not in the morning, but halfway through the next day, in the form of a migraine that builds on the pigment layer behind my eyes. I bolt awake at six, convinced I’ve missed five interviews, only to find Asher already upright, scrolling his phone with the intensity of a hacker in a techno-thriller. There’s a line between his eyebrows I’ve never noticed before.
“Say it,” he says as I trudge over in a bathrobe, still scraping sleep out of my face.
“Say what?”
“I told you we’d be everywhere by morning.”
I peer at his screen. Twitter trending, hashtags crawling up and down the columns. Screen-grab memes of my arms, his hands, the way we looked at each other on the carpet. The best of them is a split-screen: my face, glaring into the lens, with the caption “LOOKS THAT COULD KILL.” Underneath, Asher’s face, mid-wink, “AND THE MAN WHO DIES FOR IT.”
I snort. “People are insane.”
“They love you,” he says, and I know he means it, but there’s a thinness in his voice that didn’t exist last night.
A knock on the door, then Chantal storms in on a cloud of perfume and crisis. “They moved up the boat interview,” she says, and tears open my closet. “You will not wear this.” She chucks a dress across the room. “You will wear nothing black, nothing sad. We are going for ‘sunlit, carefree, slightly in love but never needy.’”
I look at Asher. “I didn’t realize I had a mood board in my bloodstream.”
He raises a hand. “Don’t ask me. My only job is to show up and be decorative.”
Down on the marina, the crew is already swarming. They’ve got cameras bolted to the boat’s deck rails, drone pilots checking battery life, interns in matching linen. The director—not ours, but the one running the “intimate couple interview”—greets us with icy calm. “Today, you are not actors. You are yourselves. You are new, and very much in love.”
I want to barf, but instead I nod and climb aboard, grateful for the prescription sunglasses that make everything seem about ten percent less real.
Asher leans over and murmurs, “Let’s give them a show.”
We do. For the next ninety minutes, we hold hands and sip bottled water and look out to sea, answering questions so soft they barely register as questions.
What was your first impression of each other?
I'm better at impressions. He was late for the first table read.
What’s your favorite thing about working together?
He says my laugh. I say his professionalism, and he tries to look wounded, which makes me laugh again.
There is nothing scandalous, nothing real. Still, I catch myself watching the way he arranges his body around mine, protective and careful, as if he’s afraid the world might break me if he looks away.
The boat bobs in the wake of a passing yacht. I lose my balance and fall against him, which is precisely what they hope for and exactly what I hate, but Asher catches my elbow and whispers so quietly I almost miss it, “If we ever get tired of this, let’s just run.”
Fooled by the sun and the boat and the warm pressure at my back, I say, “Where would we go?”
He thinks for half a second. “I’d want to see you in Paris again–– when it rains.”
This should make me laugh, but instead it lodges in a soft, secret part of me, the one that still believes in things like places and seasons and time that’s not measured in press cycles. I squeeze his hand, and immediately, we both realize the camera is pointed straight at us.
By mid-afternoon, the world has absorbed our boat interview and spat it out as clips, edits, GIFs. The studio hosts a lunch at a private villa in the hills above the city, a place so Mediterranean it feels like a simulation: lavender hedges, white stone, an infinity pool that seems to pour directly into the sky. The cast and crew line up for photos, and every four minutes a new PR person sidles over to remind me to “just be natural.” Which means: don’t eat anything complicated to pronounce, don’t drink too much,and say yes to every selfie.
Myrna, the rarely seen studio exec who orchestrated this stunt, arrives late, her sunglasses glossier than my future, and pulls me aside so fast I think I’ve done something wrong. In the shadow of a cypress tree, she hands me a chilled Diet Coke and lowers her voice.
“Walk-and-talk?”
If I say no, she’ll do it anyway. So I follow her up the gravel path, and we leave the villa’s sounds behind. From here, the bay is a strip of silver, the mountains crowding in behind it.
“You’re doing so well,” she says, phone in her hand but not looking at it. “But they want more.”
“Who’s they?”
