Page 118 of The Hollywood Switch-up

She washed her face and watched the makeup swirl down the drain—the contouring that made her look more like Anneliese, the concealer over the shadows Martin’s schedule had put under her eyes. She pulled on the robe. Looked at herself in the mirror. Bare-faced, hair wrecked from the helicopter. She looked thinner than she’d realized. Hollowed out.

Once she was on the deck, the night opened up. Stars everywhere. Stefan stood at the rail, sleeves rolled, and he turned at her approach. His face shifted—not a smile, exactly. A man setting down something heavy.

“There you are.”

“Here I am.” She drew the robe tighter.

His eyes moved over her face—the bare skin, the freckles, the wet hair she hadn’t bothered to fix. “There she is.”

At the table—wine, plates of lemon-butter trout and charred asparagus, risotto that smelled like hours of cooking, and a candle that kept guttering in the breeze so that Stefan had to relight it twice with a lighter he’d borrowed from the chef—she sat and took the first bite. The hunger hit her—real hunger, not nerves—and she realized she hadn’t tasted food in days.

“Good?” he asked.

“I forgot what being hungry felt like.” She said it without thinking, and then heard it, and Stefan’s fork paused for a half-second before he kept eating.

They talked. Not about Martin, not about the set, not about any of the things pressing against her teeth. He told her about his father’s sailboat. A rinky-dink thing his dad had saved for years to buy.

“My Tita says la fama no vale nada—tráete a casa sano y salvo,” he said. “Fame means nothing. Bring yourself home safe. I spent ten years chasing the thing she told me didn’t matter, and she—” He stopped. Took a breath. “Anyway. She was right.”

Erika thought about her own mother.

“My mother would have framed that. Put it right next to Anneliese’s first headshot.”

Stefan laughed—not the polite kind, the real kind—and she realized she’d told the truth without it costing her, and the freedom of that was startling.

He reached across the table. His fingers brushed her wrist. She flinched—fast, involuntary, the reflex Martin had trained into her. Stefan’s hand went still.

“Erika.”

“I’m fine.” She heard herself say it and hated the sound of it. “I’m fine. It’s just been a long week.”

He held her gaze for a moment that lasted too long. She watched him decide whether to believe her, watched him choose to let it go, not because he believed her but because he’d promised not to push. She thought, this is what I’m doing to him. I’m turning his kindness into a cage. I’m using his patience against him. The guilt of that landed in her stomach.

“Can I tell you something?” His voice settled, serious.

She looked at him, this man who’d stood on a dock not knowing if she’d come and relit a candle twice and hadn’t asked a single question he knew she couldn’t answer. She nodded.

“Every time I’ve told you how I feel, there was always something in the way. Martin. The cameras. Your sister. The whole goddamn production.” He turned his glass slowly. “Right now, there’s nothing. Just us and open water. And I keep waiting for the catch, but it’s not coming.” He looked at her. “This is what it’s supposed to feel like. I didn’t know that until you.”

And there it was, what she’d been running from. Not his anger or his rejection but this. His openness. The way he handed her his whole chest.

Stefan’s thumb brushed her cheek. He was seeing her—not pushing, not asking, just seeing. She crossed the distance between them, because she closed it, not him. Their lips met. His hands cradled her face.

He breathed against her mouth, “Stay with me this weekend.”

“Just the weekend.” Her whisper barely carried over the water against the hull.

The yacht rocked beneath them. Stefan’s arm circled her waist. She let herself have this one night where nobody was watching, nothing was required, and the truth could wait until morning.

STEFAN

They stayed on the deck until the wine was gone and the candle had finally guttered out for good, talking about nothing and everything—her terrible college roommate, his first audition where he’d forgotten his own name, the time Lily had accidentally set a craft services tent on fire—and it was easy in a way that made Stefan uneasy because he kept waiting for her to pull away and she didn’t. She laughed and leaned into him and stole the last of his wine and the stars wheeled overhead and the yacht carried them further from the island, and he thought, this is what she’s like when no one is watching her.

It was past midnight when she stood and took his hand and led him down the companionway to the cabin—her choice, her pace, her hand pulling his—and Stefan’s heart was hammering before they reached the door.

She was standing in a borrowed robe in a dim hallway, looking at him in a way that scared him.

The latch clicked. The cabin was the same—amber light, dark ocean through the glass—except now she was here and so was he and the door was shut and Martin was a hundred miles of ocean away.