“Everyone.” She stops, turns to face me. “Emma, you are what’s working this week. The fan base is shifting. Girls want to be you, guys want to date you, and the studio wants to make you the next big whatever. You could do anything right now.”
I can’t tell if this is a threat or a blessing.
“Okay,” I say. “So?”
“So, I think the Bressard thing is real. The part is yours if you keep playing it the way you are. But there’s a wrinkle: the campaign for Eclipse Run is still building. If you jump franchises too soon, you dampen both. If you stagger, you spike both.”
I feel my scalp tingle. I’m not sure if it’s the sun or the realization that I am already a commodity, a product to be cross-marketed.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You want me to hold off.”
“Only for a month or two. Ride the high. Then pivot.”
I nod, but my stomach is hollow. “Will that make them happy or make me happy?”
She grins, but I know it’s a deflection. “Emma, you’re not a hostage. You’re a star. It’s just smart business.”
She says the last bit in French, and for a moment, I imagine gouging her eyes out with the vintage sunglasses perched on top of her head. Instead, I smile and promise to “think about it.”
We walk back to the villa, and I see Asher across the patio, standing at the edge of the pool, talking to some Euro-producer in the world’s tightest khakis. He’s not looking at me, but the effect is like a slow drift of gravity. I want to be beside him, and I hate that I wish that more than Bressard, more than the next script, more than the headline.
I wonder if this is what Chantal meant by “slightly in love, but never needy.” I don’t know how to do one without the other.
The day unspools. There is another screening, another round of applause, a champagne toast in a private cinema that smells like catacombs and roses. At midnight, I find myself in a cabana with Jessie and Asher, both of them tipsy, both sniping at each other in a kind of affectionate code I can only halfway decrypt.
Jessie tells a story about how she once lost her shoes on a red carpet and had to be carried out by bodyguards. “Everyone thought I was some kind of fragile debutante,” she says, her voice metallic with bitterness. “They didn’t see the blisters.” She looks at me with a sudden frankness. “Let them underestimate you, Emma. It’s the only angle you can trust.”
Later, Asher and I end up back on the balcony of our suite, drinking from the minibar and passing my phone back and forth to read the latest “news.”
One headline, in glossy black bold:
ECLIPSE RUN COUPLE UPENDS CANNES – REAL OR RUSE?
Asher reads it aloud, drawing on the last word. “Ruse.” He sets the phone down and looks at me, suddenly more serious. “Are you worried?”
My first instinct is bravado. I’m about to say, “Of course not,” but then the migraine spikes behind my left ear, and I think, why not? Why not admit it, for once, to him?
I say, “I’m terrified.”
He leans in, elbows on knees, blue eyes over the rim of a stolen coffee mug. “Of what?”
I want to say"of them." Of the internet, the studios, the people whose job it is to convert my face into a currency. But that’s not the truth, not all of it.
“I don’t know who I am when I’m not working,” I say, and I don’t mean for it to sound so bleak. “You ever get that? Like the only way to exist is on camera, or as someone else?”
His mouth quirks. “I know exactly what you mean.”
We sit in silence, the night leaning in, the Mediterranean glittering like the set of a music video I’ll never star in.
“Do you want to run?” he asks. “For real?”
Yes. No. Maybe. I want the question in my mouth, held and turned over, tasted. Instead, I say, “We have thirty-six hours left before the awards. If we run, we damn well make it count.”
He raises his mug to mine, as if toasting to the idea, the possibility, the whole forty-eight-frames-per-second hallucination of the last seventy-two hours.
The next day begins with a press breakfast. The croissants are frozen in the middle, and the juice tastes like a fluorescent light. Asher’s agent, a minor British arsonist with the face of a choirboy, corners us near the buffet and whispers, “You’re to keep it low-key, yes? No lambada, no pier jumps, you savvy?”
I say, “Define low-key.”
