“Yeah. I promise.”
She peels herself away from my arm and crawls backward onto the bed, then points at me. “Your move, Dixon.”
I strip out of the jacket and tie, crawl onto the sheets, and lie beside her, face to face. She smells like salt and citrus shampoo and something floral I can’t identify.
For a long time, we just stare at each other, not touching, until the tension is feverish.
She traces my jaw, then my mouth. “You’re letting your stubble win.”
“I’m trying to look menacing for Cannes.”
She laughs, and it’s a full-body sound, like she’s rediscovering how to be happy. Then she leans forward and kisses me, slow and deep, with a hunger that says she’s not hiding from any part of herself right now.
My hands find her waist, her hips, her spine. We tumble sideways, lips and arms and legs tangled, and for the first time in days it’s not about who’s watching, or what angle will make it onto the trades. I want her with a heat that’s pure and ancient.
She bites my shoulder, leaves a crescent, and whispers, “Keep it. I want to see it tomorrow.”
I roll her under me, pressing her wrists to the pillow. “You’re not making it out of here without more bruises than that,” I say, and she shivers.
She parts her knees, anchoring me in place. “Then do something about it.”
I do. I kiss every inch of her, her collarbone, the hard line of her clavicle, the small hollow at her throat. She tastes like sunshine, sweat, and sugar. She digs her fingers into the back ofmy neck, pulling me closer, and I want to be so close I could graft myself into her skin.
She says my name, once, harshly. I answer by letting my hands roam where they will, learning her topography, mapping the places that make her arch and keen.
She pulls the shirt over my head and stares at my chest, running her palm down the line of muscle and scar. “You ever get tired of being beautiful?” she asks, tipsy and almost angry.
“Constantly,” I say, mouth moving down to her breast, kissing the soft. She groans, writhes, and it eggs me on.
We collide like animals, her legs spread wide as I thrust into her slick heat with bruising force. She claws red trails down my back, drawing blood as I pound into her relentlessly. “Harder,” she demands, voice raw, and I obey, driving deeper until she’s crying out with each stroke. She yanks my hair so hard tears spring to my eyes, then bites my earlobe until I taste copper on her tongue. When she comes, her body convulses violently around my cock, her wetness flooding between us as she screams my name. I follow seconds later, emptying myself inside her with such intensity my vision blurs at the edges.
After, she buries her face in my neck and says, “I wish this was what they put on the front page.”
I laugh into her hair: “This is what makes the rest endurable.”
We lay there, tangled and sticky, breathing the same air.
“I love you,” I say, because the moment is right, and I want her to have it. “I do. I never thought I would, but I do. If you told me tomorrow to fuck off and never come back, I’d buy a ticket to wherever you sent me.”
She looks at me, and it’s like being seen for the first time. “You’re such an idiot,” she says, but her smile is shaky, and her eyes fill again.
“But you love me anyway?” I prompt.
“Yeah,” she says, soft as a bruise. “I fucking do.”
We fall asleep without closing the blinds, letting whatever starlight the Riviera has left fall over us like tinsel.
It should feel like an ending, but it doesn’t. It feels like a beginning—one that might be messy, or short, or end in disaster, but still a beginning.
The following week is a blitzkrieg of commitments, but I can feel her moving through the chaos with a new gravity, a little more solid in her own skin. She teases me when fans ask for a couple of selfies, leans in, and kisses my cheek just out of frame during a live interview. When the studio suits try to stage-manage us—“stand together, laugh here, touch her elbow, now walk away slow”—she upends the choreography with improv: dips me instead, or whispers a joke so obscene the publicist has to turn away. The whole world is baiting us to slip, to become the melodrama they can mine for hashtags, and instead we keep tripping each other up, refusing to be anyone’s script but our own.
Night falls and the red carpet beckons. I escort her down it like it’s a gangplank, arms linked, and for once I don’t feel exposed—I think invulnerable, shielded by the simple act of holding her hand.
At the world premiere party in Los Angeles, she disappears for a while, swarmed by foreign press. I can hear her laugh across the patio, the signature cackle I’ve learned to chase through crowds. I watch her for a while, at ease now, fielding questions, deflecting them with a grace and slyness I’d never possess. She catches me staring and raises an eyebrow, beckoning me over.
I snake through the party, and when I reach her, she grabs my lapel and yanks me into her orbit. “They like you better than me,” she says, but her eyes say she enjoys it.
“Impossible,” I say. “I’m barely housebroken.”
