She kisses me in public, mouth open, and the tabloid vultures circle.
“Are you ready for England?” I whisper after, low in her ear.
She leans in, nipping the lobe. “You have no idea.”
For all the sound and fury, the rest of the night is a slow fade. We end up in her kitchen, eating cold pasta with our fingers and drinking from the bottle. I read her bits from the Bressard script, doing the voices until she nearly chokes on penne laughing. She dares me to climb onto the roof for the sunrise; I dare her back. Within ten minutes, we’re standing on the tiles, wrapped in robes, looking out at smudge-blue dawn over the city.
She shoves me, and I nearly lose my footing. “You’re going to be the death of me.”
“Only you could die of happiness,” she says.
“That’s the plan, Rowan. That’s the fucking plan.”
EPILOGUE: TWO YEARS LATER
ASHER
Parisin early spring seduces you slowly, until resistance becomes pointless. On the Avenue Montaigne, the trees are stitched with gold, and the saints in the shop windows conspire to make you want what you cannot possibly keep. It is the kind of city that expects you to fuck up your own life beautifully, and for once, I am spectacularly equipped for the task.
Tonight, I stand at the edge of it all, watching the black river of guests push along the red carpet of the Cinémathèque. Floodlights, camera flashes, the chaos of fifty international crews. Paparazzi bark at us from behind the velvet. The studio’s hired handlers swarm like anxious bees, their headsets glinting under the lights. “Three steps forward. No—chin up. Now kiss her. Gentle. Less tongue, Dixon." I’ve been through this dance so many times I could direct it myself. Same circus, different tent.
But Emma is beside me, and with her comes the rarest thing of all: a sense that I might actually belong in the world. She’s wearing slate-grey satin, slit up the thigh, hung so tight it’s practically a second skin. She glows like a spotlight beneath the marquee. Her hair is swept up, and lips painted a red so vivid itseemed to exist outside of time—the kind that turned black-and-white starlets immortal.
She surveys the press line, her smile erupting like molten earth, and presses against me with the precise calculation of someone who knows precisely how many lenses are capturing the moment. The message is unmistakable: this is no publicity stunt—this is fusion.
The auditorium swallows us into its grandeur—black marble veined with gold, like a temple to cinema itself. Between the silk gowns and midnight tuxedos, the air hangs heavy with designer scents and the dust of artistic legacies. I find my palm settling against the warm curve of her exposed spine. She melts into my touch, a slight tremor running through her that I’ve learned to read like braille: exhaustion masked by the electric current of performance.
There is a new and unavoidable fact about Emma: tonight, five months and counting, she is slightly, but gloriously, pregnant. Not that you’d notice unless you’d spent months mapping every curve and contour of her. This is what I do in the dark, in the downtime, when all the glitz is peeled away.
We take our seats in the orchestra. I lean in, try to keep my voice from getting lost in the boom of the house. “Can I tell you a secret?”
She arches a brow, lips an inch from my ear. “Only if you promise to top the one from last night.”
“I could spend the rest of my life watching you break every room you walk into.”
She laughs, low and dangerous. “You always say that like it’s a threat.”
“Maybe it is. You ever think about how we got here?”
“Every day,” she murmurs, gripping my hand. “But mostly I think about what comes next.”
They dim the house lights and there's a hush, like before the plunge on a rollercoaster.
Up on screen, the film opens with her alone on a windswept cliff, shot in sickly green-grey, the sea boiling beneath. It’s Bressard’s signature—make even the beautiful seem haunted. Emma’s hair is wild, face bare. She looks nothing like the woman beside me now.
There is an out-of-body sensation to watching someone you love become someone else entirely in front of the world. I want to reach through the screen, shield her from it, but at the same time, I’m so fucking proud my skin can’t contain it. I sit there, pulse climbing, as she dissolves into the role, as the crowd around us watches her with an appetite I could never match.
I press her hand whenever the camera holds on her face. Three times, she answers with pressure of her own.
Halfway through the film, she leans close, lips brushing my shoulder. “You haven’t blinked in twenty minutes."
“I’m not watching,” I whisper. “I’m memorizing every inch of you."
“Pervert,” she breathes, but her eyes are glinting. “Tonight you can have any scene you want.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“Oh, you will.” She shifts, and I feel her shiver again–this time with anticipation.
