“Joel,” Harper called sharply, appearing a few feet away and closing the distance quickly to take her husband’s hand. She didn’t even look at me, and that took me aback more than his words did. Like he might be more noteworthy to her than I was.
She pulled him away hurriedly and still didn’t so much as glance at me—and Anton, who had watched this unfurl, suddenly seemed to realize action might be needed from him, so he stepped forward, hand reaching protectively for the small of my back.
I glanced around, but with everyone milling and a few hours into the free-flowing champagne and not-nearly-enough canapés, the room was chaotic enough that our interaction seemed to have escaped the notice of the roaming press and photographers.
But when I excused myself a few moments later, Harper followed me to the bathroom, a shadow of my every step.Iwas the disease?Shewas the recurrent nightmare, the illness I couldn’t shake.
“So who is he?” she asked.
“What?”
“The man clinging onto you.”
The bathroom was wide, with solid oak doors separating the individual stalls and a marble countertop with basins resting upon it like upturned hats. I took a step farther, like I needed space between us, though I masked it with the pretense of ensuring every stall was empty.
Once I had, I let myself look at her.
Properly and just the two of us, with no one else to perform for. She wore silk, bitter and red. It dipped low, an assertive V as enticing as anything, almost vampiric in its lace-edged trim. That fire that burned when I knelt before her flared now, as I looked at her, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to see her again without wanting to bite and tear and taste blood.
“What’s it to you?” I asked. My tongue felt swollen in my mouth, like it was already coated in the acrid tang of her.
“Is this it?” she hissed instead of answering. “Dear lord, how the mighty fall, the great Nadine Heywood hanging on the arm of some second-rate actor at Cannes because no one is booking her for her own films?”
I clutched the edge of the counter, the cool marble, letting my fingers curl like if I broke every nail it would satisfy my urge to break her. It was not that every day was a struggle in the face of my addiction, and more that when the struggle came it obliterated everything in its path, had me grasping at coping mechanisms and turning over conversations from rehab like their echo might save me. And she …
I thought of my shins pressed into the rug.
The scissors cold against my neck.
Her fingers tilting my chin to meet her heartless eyes.
“Going to lick the boots of every director here? Maybe I should have made you do that, when you were on your knees for me.”
I hated her. I hated her. I hated her.
I leaned against the counter unable to stand with the weight of it.
“Is this how you stage your comeback?”
I looked up into the mirror, saw my own turmoil staring back, and marveled that this was her prize: my distress for her pleasure. But she didn’t look pleased at all, just cold and hateful, glaring at me like she might keep going, like I was a wreckage for her to plunder. I met her gaze and the disdain burning a home there.
“No, Harper, this is.”
And then I brought my head down hard into the marble countertop, heard her startled scream like it had come from my own mouth. I felt my nose break but what did it matter? The pain burst like an overripe fruit, unpalatable but edged with satisfaction.
And it was my own blood I could taste, in the end, hot and thick and nowhere near as sweet.
———
Victor put me in touch with the agency lawyers who helped me file the restraining order against her. Enough. Enough ofher finding me whenever she wanted, of coming to my house and tormenting me, of feeling her touch in everything I did.
At Cannes, help had come running, as I cried and wailed about Harper attacking me, grabbing me by the hair and forcing me into that counter.
Harper had protested that she hadn’t, of course, but no one believed that when my blood was splattered across the tiles.
She shot me the most beautiful glare as Joel rushed in and hurried her out, like she was a little awed and a little impressed, like she had no idea I was willing to do something like that for her.
Feud Turns Fiery as Moore Attacks Heywood at Penultimate Night of Cannes
