I clutched her wrist. “I want you awful.”
I didn’t want pure from either of us. I wanted messy, tainted,interesting.From Harper, I dreamed of consuming, debilitating, virulent love. She was too fascinating for anything less.
She looked up, our faces still so close, those thick fans of lashes her only defense. “You deserve so much better than this. I’m not sure I even regret all the things we did to each other. It’s not healthy.”
“No. But who cares? Healthy would bore you and break me. We were always going to consume one another; let’s at least enjoy it.”
I was, if anything, relieved that she felt it too. I didn’t want to dial my emotions back for her, but if hatred had tilted so completely to adoration then I could not expect those other facets of it to fade. The possessiveness. The need to be all the other cared to see.
This was never going to be a tranquil sort of happiness—quiet, peaceful, a contented sigh at the end of a tiring day.It was going to be as passionate and destructive as ever. But thatwas what I yearned for, just so long as it was the two of us bound together and afloat in the churning currents.
When our lips met, that’s how it felt: like the tide of the world was crashing down and she was the last safe shore.
———
In summer, Harper began crying in interviews.
Having held her while she sobbed in earnest—all bright red eyes and choking snot—I knew the tender glistening tears were a performance. But still I worried there was something real to it—that she was breaking down in public and covering it up with this false concern: that as the months passed, it was harder to believe Joel had truly run away. That a man so famous might have successfully gone into hiding to dodge his wife or his mistresses or loan sharks or gangs or whatever he might have got himself mixed up in now.
“Joel, if you’re out there, please come home. Please,” she begged.
Because she was a romantic—or because she needed the distraction or perhaps to compensate for every time she uttered his name—she devoted herself to me.
Harper filled my house with flowers. She sent bouquets weekly: calla lilies, camellia, clover, gardenia, irises, salvia.Beauty. Longing. I am thinking of you. I yearn for you.
When I was on set—no projects I was particularly excited by, but god, I needed something to stave off the boredom, so here I was—Harper sent flowers there instead, from differentflorists each time so that the press were driving themselves in circles to delve out my secret admirer.
I dried the bouquets and sent them back, so both our houses always smelled of fresh cut flowers and drying earthy stems.
Harper brought me breakfast in bed—lopsided waffles and half-blended smoothies. She braided my hair at night. She climbed into the shower with me so she could scrub my back before running her hands elsewhere.
She pouted about not being able to take me on a date, so I ordered in wine from a local vineyard and we held our own tasting until the taste of it blurred on our tongues.
For our next, she spoke to a gallery owner she was friendly with—she booked out the whole place for the evening, and we drove in separate cars before wandering round, admiring the art. There was one—a woman strung from the rafters, angel wings in the shadow cast against the wall, and when I turned Harper was looking at me like I might be a similar sort of sacrifice. She pressed me against the wall beside it and sealed her lips against mine like it was every bit as holy.
It was relentless, her determination to pretend things were normal.
Slowly, I began to believe it.
———
By September, Harper was sleeping through the night, and I’d been cast inGentle Hour, an adaptation of the new De Vries book, and the two of us were dominating every late-nightnews bulletin after I’d thrown a drink over her at Stephanie Cameron’s birthday party.
Caleb had invited me and how was I to know Harper would be there. “You should have seen her face,” Harper cackled on the phone. I had my own phone pressed so hard to my cheek I feared the screen might flip all the way back, but something about Harper made me long for a coiled landline so I might twirl it around my finger. “She was so excited to reveal her relationship with Leyton Madders, and there we were upstaging her.”
“Isn’t she supposed to be your best friend?”
“She’s been leaking stories about me to the press for years.”
“Oh? What about Kayla?”
“She doesn’t actually like me—I heard her talking to her boyfriend. She’s just using me for the publicity. Which, to be fair, is exactly what I’ve been doing too.”
A retort rolled to the tip of my tongue. But instead I found myself saying: “It must be exhausting, pretending not to be lonely.”
“I’m not,” she said quickly and sounded just as startled. “Not anymore.”
I sighed and leant against my headboard, the wicker pressing into my back, and I tried to picture her doing the same in her bed overlooking the ocean. I wondered if my handprint was still pressed into the suede.
