———
I got home just before midnight. Harper was already there, leaning against her car door in the pouring rain. The cape was plastered against her shoulders, her hair clinging to every bit of skin it touched.
I felt the rain hit me too, as my umbrella slipped. I barely heard it clatter to the ground; I flicked my gaze to it, and when I looked back Harper had covered the feet between us. She was standing before me.
I thought of the last time she was in front of me drenched like this.
And now—alight and feverish.
“Why? Why did you do that?” A half-beat as she swallowed and then: “Why did you do all of this?”
The question I still didn’t have an answer for—only maybe with Harper so close, her rain-slick skin, her trembling lips … maybe that was my answer.
The hatred was vivid and consuming, but it was also our construction, every slight another brick. But something else bound it together, something else its foundation. A moment we looked at each other and crafted our worlds accordingly. Her and no one else at CADS, and it was her blinding smile and her thigh against mine and her laugh, ringing and ringing. It was the way she fell into the roles I coveted. The way every single eye turned to her.
A jealousy. An obsession. A tension.
(One I’d been misreading for a very long time.)
Harper pressed her lips together in response to my silence, hesitated over her next words and then spoke them like a plea, the samewhy,a different appeal: “You just obliterated any chance of the Academy giving you another award.”
“Mutually assured destruction,” I managed. “It’s very us.”
“But,” she could barely parse the words, was staring at me like she might find the answer there in the raindrops clinging to my lashes. “That’s all you care about.”
If the obsession wasn’t only hatred then …
I felt the rain sliding down my lips.
Her eyes met mine in the dark, wretched and desperate. “It used to be.”
Her fingers closed in the ruffles of my dress just as mine threaded through her hair.
I grasped her as I had everything I’d ever wanted—viciously and with both hands clutching tight. She drew me to her like I would have to be pried away, her body pressed against mine. Both of us clawing and desperate.
Both determined to arise victorious.
We kissed like it might absolve us.
A FATAL FEUD
Drinks are thrown. Insults are hurled. And then that bar again, that vicious fight and Harper being led away in handcuffs.
Jasmine McKenna:It’s understandable that things escalated for Harper at that time. She’d either just lost her husband or just murdered him. She’d found out he was cheating on her. He’d got another girl pregnant. But I never was sure why things escalated for Nadine.
Stephanie Cameron:Harper was devastated—of course she was. All these secrets were coming out about her husband—the sort of thing that had already led to his death, we just didn’t know it yet.
Ivan Drozdov:Nadine was trying to rebuild her career, and she was on the right path. But then she threw away her victory at the Oscars for her vendetta against Harper instead. And when she should havebeen galvanizing on the success of that, she was operating a smear campaign against her instead. The Nadine I’d befriended at CADS would have been appalled, but I couldn’t blame Nadine—Harper was as she’d always been: a thing to runtoso she didn’t have to admit what she was runningfrom.
Nadine Heywood:Acting was my first love. But my heart was broken, and I didn’t know how to treat it right anymore. That’s all this is—a story of two hurting people too immature to deal with their grief, turning to distraction and spotlights instead. Murder? Please, we could barely find our way home from the strip. Couldn’t bury a rumor, let alone a body.
Jasmine McKenna:Maybe itwasfueled by guilt. Maybe it was more petty drama from two provenly petty actresses. Whatever it was, it was entertaining as hell.
March 2003
WE LEFT A TRAIL OF SCATTERED CLOTHES BEHIND US, buttons ripped and hooks broken. Harper drew me across the threshold of my bedroom to push me against the wall, the sharp nail of her thumb brushing the pulse point of my neck, her breath hot against my ear as she told me to take the rest off. And then, finally, I was bare before her.
She drew her lips along my skin like she was marking territory—every skimming beat a press of her teeth, her tongue. I guided her onto the bed and crawled on top of her.
