No. Maybe. “Yeah,” I say, and in some vertiginous way, it’s true. “Thank you, Holcomb.”
“Don’t thank me yet. This is the big leagues.”
He hangs up, and I’m left with the silence and the click of something tectonic shifting under my feet.
Asher emerges from the bathroom in a towel, hair dripping, cheap hotel conditioner still clinging to his jawline. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stare at him—the bright alien presence in the suite’s faded luxury. “Bressard wants me in Paris next month.”
He blinks, then grins. “I am in love with a superstar.”
“Well, don’t propose yet. Apparently, my romantic availability is a marketing asset.” I say it as a joke, but it lands differently, between us.
He shrugs. “That’s always been true. We just admit it now.”
I throw a pillow at him and immediately regret it—he’s faster and taller, and the tussle ends with us in a pile on the unmade bed, laughing like idiots, suddenly unarmored. I want to stay here—just here, nowhere else—until the world forgets us.
But the world never forgets. By noon, we’re in a black town car with tinted windows, whisked down the half-miraculous blue of the coast. The schedule unfurls like an endless horizon: photo calls, roundtables, meetings with financiers who reschedule entire days with a text. Jessie meets us at every stop with new “updates”: talk of an American Oscar push, whispers of a sequel, chatter about me as a one-woman franchise, and Asher as my witty, world-weary co-captain. We’re not people. We’re themes.
At the Nice waterfront, a French magazine photoshoot wants us in “natural light”—wind-tousled hair, bare feet on stone, skin clear and unmade. Relief should follow, but the photographer—a tiny, severe woman in snakeskin boots—positions us with the intensity of a chess master. At one point, she makes us wrap our arms around each other and lean, foreheads touching. I feel Asher’s warmth and the thrum of his pulse. For a second, I want to bolt, but he leans in and mutters, “Just us chickens,” and I nearly break the shot with a snort of laughter.
Lunch is a swirl of interviews and amuse-bouches I can’t pronounce. Jessie slides me her phone to show the trades—Variety’s headline reads, “Rowan and Dixon Storm Cannes; Industry Abuzz Over Off-Screen Power Couple.” They’ve chosen the least flattering photo of me—over-exposed, bug-eyed—but Asher looks like a fallen angel, so I can’t be too mad.
I duck into the bathroom for two minutes of solitude, staring at my face in the marble-framed mirror. My reflection splits: one part child, one part someone I don’t recognize. I try on different smiles; none fit.
Do I want it? Asher had asked me. The answer is yes and no, and also: what else was I going to do?
I splash cold water on my wrists and return feeling a little more like a person and a little less like an artifact.
Our next appearances await in a private villa rented by one of the studios—a place so white and spare it could double as a monastery or a fashion crime scene. Executives unroll the next steps of the “campaign” around the pool. Every phrase comes coated in jargon: keeping the narrative alive, aligning with the fan base, leveraging the unexpected heat of our ‘chemistry.’ I nod and smile, playing my part, but I’m watching through a golden tunnel, as if none of this is real.
At some point, Asher grabs my hand under the table and draws a little circle on my palm with his fingertip—a secret code that means “here, now, with you.”
We slip away as soon as Jessie gives the signal. “You have the next hour free,” she says, and for her, that’s a lifetime.
We drive up the coast with windows down, letting wind and sea scrub the taste of artificiality from us. He has no idea where we’re headed, and that’s part of the freedom. We end up at a half-deserted cliff over the water, where the light is so bright it softens the edges of everything.
He sits beside me on the stone wall, silent at first. Then: “What did you want before all of this?”
I try to remember. “I wanted to escape. I wanted to become everybody else. Sometimes I wanted to be invisible.” I imagine telling that version of myself—the one in sweatpants a year ago—that I’d be in gold at Cannes now.
“And now?” he asks.
I don’t know how to answer, so I ask him, “You?”
He gazes at the sea, eyes nearly transparent in daylight. “I wanted to last. I didn’t expect to meet someone who made me want anything else.” He drops the mask. “This is the first time I don’t know what I want next.”
I lay my head on his shoulder, and we watch sailboats tack and shudder in the wind, both of us hollowed out and tender.
The sun sinks lower, and when I check my phone, there’s another message from Holcomb: “Script’s on your email. Don’t stress. Bressard is famously… odd. They’ll love you or hate you.”
We drive back in the blue hour—windows up, hair wild, skin warmed by the air. Inside the car, it’s quiet, womb-like. Asher dozes, head tipped back like a child’s, and I study his profile, the lines softened by sleep. I wonder if we’ll make it, or if the world will flatten us first.
By the time we reach the hotel, dusk has painted the promenade pink and orange. The party has already started—the crowd out front is flashbulbs, velvet ropes, people chanting our names as if we’re not only real, but theirs.
Handlers try to shepherd us inside, but Asher stops outside the doors, turns to me, and says, “We can always leave. You know that, right?”
I nod, and—maybe for the first time—I almost believe it.
