“I never miss a closing dinner. They’re always the most entertaining.”
At some point in the meal, when Cecilia was working on her second margarita and trying to avoid the heaping plates of beans and rice and roasted corn and grilled fish and tortillas that graced the table, Sarah leaned forward around Anouk to check in with her.
“Did Jaya bring the eye cream for you today on set?”
“No. But it’s okay, you don’t have to—”
“Jaya, do you have the eye cream for Cecilia?”
“The what? Oh, bollocks. No. It’s back in my room. I’ll go and fetch it after dessert.”
“Please don’t forget, pet. I promised her.”
“Yes, of course.” Jaya smiled faintly across at Cecilia, and then turned back to Santiago, her hand hiding her face.
The entire exchange made Cecilia uneasy. She did not want to be the one to inconvenience Jaya Clark or disrupt the social hierarchy.
Not that anyone else was paying attention. Rafaella was laughing at another of Elliot’s jokes. And Didier had stopped near the opposite end of the table en route from the bathroom. He’d leaned in to whisper something in Maren’s ear, and Cecilia watched as Maren’s face reddened and she fanned him away.
Something cool brushed up against Cecilia’s knee then, and she flinched.
“You okay?” Anouk’s fingers were near the hem of her skirt. “You went like… somewhere else.”
Cecilia nodded, slow. It was not enough that the model had touched her, but the heady blend of her fragrance was distracting, dizzying even.
“I’m okay.”
Maybe Marc was right. Maybe Anoukwashitting on her. Cecilia had never been interested in women before. Not even at Yale, when in her freshman year there was a fallout over aWall Street Journalopinion piece that posited 25 percent of the student body was gay, resulting in numerous posters and table tents throughout campus declaringONE IN FOUR. And as the only one of her roommates without a boyfriend, Cecilia began to wonder if she was “superpicky,” as she had always claimed, or if she was avoiding something more profound.
And not two summers prior, when Andrew had come out to her and made her promise not to tell their parents “just yet… because Jamaicans are notoriously the worst homophobes. But keeping secrets from you, like, literally hurts my heart.”
“I think they already know, Drew,” she had said to him gently, that afternoon when they were strolling in Chinatown on a hunt forli hing mui, the salty dried-plum candies their grandfather used to bring them from Kingston. “And I think they still love you.”
He’d stared at her for a minute, his amber eyes brimming. The sun beating down on his curly head. “Don’t get all mushy on me.”
“You started.”
But by then she was in the throes of first love with Lorry, and any questions she might have had about her sexuality had ceased to surface.
Models were different, though. Models appealed to an aesthetic side of her. Angles and lines and the play of light. Models were like art, Cecilia thought. An amalgamation of math and design and whimsy. A random yet symmetrical array of features and hues and proportions that somehow divinely aligned. Like what Cecilia would have liked to be if God had waved a wand in her direction. She wasn’t unattractive. But models, the best of them, were otherworldly. And Cecilia was very much of this world.
She thought that now, staring at Anouk’s profile. The razor-sharpjawline and protrusion of her upper lip, the elegance of her straight nose, the length of her neck. How arbitrary the composition of a face. How much value could be placed on something one did not control. She wondered if Anouk felt burdened by it.
The waitstaff had cleared the main course and were handing out dessert menus when Jean-Luc clinked a fork against his margarita glass. “A toast!” He stood, all six foot two and two hundred pounds of him, in a lavender linen shirt and dark jeans. Without looking beneath the table, Cecilia knew he’d be wearing velvet Albert slippers to complete the ensemble.
“To this talented team,” he continued. “We shot some beautiful images today. Really special. Huge thank-you to Didier.”
“Cin cin!” Rafaella said. “So provocative, but tasteful, exactly what we wanted. Andgrazie milleto these incredible models who made it so sexy.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Bas said, winking. “We bring the sexy.”
“Is true,” Didier responded from the head of the table. “This is why I always say ‘no virgins on my set.’ You can look young, but you can’t be innocent,hein? This doesn’t interest me.”
Cecilia cringed. She had started working for Didier ten months before she’d met Lorry. And while she was technically not a virgin then, her experience with the guy from the band had done little to boost her sexual confidence. The memory of it now—the darkened suite at the Rihga Royal, the smell of Eternity on his T-shirt, the mixtape he played that started with Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones,” which she thought an odd choice for a hookup playlist, the shamrock tattoo near his hip—made her shudder. Would that she’d done things differently.
“You never told me this,” Maren said.
“I tell you, ‘Don’t bring me fifteen-year-olds,’ unless they’re really really special. Or I’m shooting something where the model is supposed to be young. It’s hard enough to ask young girls to pretend to be women. To expect them to be sexy when they don’t understand their own bodies and they’ve never had an orgasm and they don’tknow the difference between fucking and making love, is like…pffft.” He threw up his hands. “C’est fou.”
