I set my glass down on the table before I could break it.
Noting the rigid set of my limbs, Harper added: “Relax, Heywood. I have standards and outing people falls well below them. Besides, I just told you I’m the same, so you’re armed for retaliation.”
“You mean you—”
“Have dated girls before? Sure.” She took a sip of her drink then snorted. “Do you remember at CADS how all my books were secondhand and my clothes had, like, a dozen patches?”
I nodded. Poverty was very fashionable in the early ’90s for girls like Harper.
“Right, well, my father discovered I’d been hooking up with Alison Yardley at the tennis club. He said he’d cut me off if it didn’t stop. Actually his exact words were ‘that sort of thing needs to be left behind at boarding school.’” Harper laughed a little, like this all wasn’t incredibly traumatic. “So I began putting nearly everything away just in case. Tried to hide that fact, of course—you’re welcome for that copy ofBlood Wedding, by the way. But I know what I’m like when I’m blinded by love—I’ll do anything. I’d give it all up in an instant. So I figured it was better to have some savings in place.”
“Harper, that’s dreadful.”
“Yes,” she said cheerily. “It is. Fathers, eh? Ironically my mother was perfectly fine with the fact that Alison was a girl; she just didn’t like that she had a nose ring. So, let’s agree not to out each other and do let me know if you want access to the sewing circle.”
“What?” I startled. As obsessive as I was about film, Dietrich and Nazimova’s Golden Age network of sapphics hadn’t escaped my notice, but I certainly hadn’t anticipated such a thing continuing in Hollywoodnow. “There’s a sewing circle?”
Harper leaned forward, over her glass, toying with her straw again. It was distracting, the way she rolled it between her long, elegant fingers. “There’s a sewing circle,” she said, her voice warm and low. “You’d bequitewelcome. Especially in that jumpsuit.”
My breath caught—unsure if she was teasing me or, hideously,flirting. I looked up, that teasing smirk—and the vicious glint, the one that said she knew just how much that jumpsuit irked me. Mocking and smug: the Harper default.
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll pass.”
“Too loved up with this one? Sasha, right?”
I didn’t like her name on Harper’s tongue. “I don’t recall the press leaking anything about the two of us.”
Harper shook her head, tossing the frayed choppy strands into the sort of mussed tresses that evoked thoughts of curling fingers and clutched bed sheets. “I had you followed.”
“What were you saying about standards?”
“That they’re low but not subterranean.”
I took up my glass again, quirking a brow at her as I raised it to my lips. “Imagine if you put this effort into your performances.”
“Oh, I thought we had this conversation a long time ago, Nadine. My performances are effortless—and that’s how I’m going to beat you: without much effort at all.”
“You might want to try harder. You’re too aware of the camera. You milk the shots.”
Harper made a soft hum somewhere deep in her throat.“Noted. So you’ve been watching the show. And not, I assume, because you can relate to being a broke, aimless girl in the city?”
I did not rise to the bait—the hook and lure of her. Sometimes she acted as though any response from me at all was a win, any reaction something gained. And sometimes she behaved like she was so desperate for my approval she would lay the ground out for me in the hope I might wander upon it.
“Any notes for me?” I asked.
“No. I can’t say I’ve managed to catch any of your recent films. I’ve been so busy of late.”
———
Ruchi didn’t know how to react, pacing around my living room like I often did hers. I’d been about to call a ride given Harper had been drinking, but Ruchi was already outside, ranting about Harper’s “bastard publicist” letting her know about “this little affair” far too late.
“She used you,” she said. “She owns that bar.”
I sighed, leaning back against the firm cushions of a sofa that ought to be more comfortable and less stylistically appropriate. The room swayed with the movement. I’d credit Harper that—her establishment didn’t water down the liquor.
“What does it matter? If anything isn’t that embarrassing for her? She needs to branch out because she can’t hack it well enough in acting?”
“She doesn’t care about being a better actress than you, Nadine. I suspect she knows she’s lost that one. She caresabout beingbiggerthan you. And she cares about making you give a damn about that. Frankly, I give a damn about that. She’s trying to make herself a brand, and I’m not sure that we shouldn’t be doing the same.”
