Hollywood
Time machine, walls like glass, the dial turned back to 2009. It’s Viserys’ funeral, and no one can even pretend they’re sad. They stopped being sad years ago, and only relief is left. No more long nocturnal hours of the deathwatch, no more hushed sympathetic updates from the hospice nurses, no more unrecognizable white-haired organic matter contorted in his hospital bed. The chains are broken and they are free, all except one of them, the nineteen-year-old son who believes—without proof, without logic—that the curse is not lifted but only transferred, living on in him like an echo down a long hall.
It’s 2005, and Viserys has turned mean: paranoid, volatile, lashing out with fury at his increasing limitations as his brain is hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin, like a cored apple. He roars and he throws things. He forgets his family are not torturers. Alicent could shut him away somewhere, but she doesn’t, the guilt would eat her alive; and so while nurses are present at the Malibu mansion around the clock, the Targaryens are not spared his wrath. One night Viserys breaks a window and wields a shard of glass like a dagger, and when the nurses flee screaming, Aemond stops Alicent from entering the room and goes in himself to clean up the mess. Someone has to.
It’s 1999, and after years of anomalies that nobody knew were symptoms—mood swings, muscle weakness, difficulty making decisions, balance problems, memory lapses—Viserys has been diagnosed with a disease that must have been lurking in his forebearers for generations, unbeknownst to them without the longevity or genetic tests of modern medicine. And like so many absent husbands and fathers who experience a revelation of their impending doom, he is determined to make up for lost time. He bakes with Alicent in the kitchen. He walks with Helaena in the garden. He stops condemning nine-year-old Aegon for long hours spent with his favorite toy, a charcoal gray Nintendo 64, first edition; the Fire Orange console won’t be released until the following year, part of the Funtastic Colors series. And now that it’s too late, Viserys’ children learn to love him.
Viserys takes Aegon’s hand and asks the boy to show him how to play Nintendo 64, here at the very start like a mirage, already beginning to disintegrate around the edges.
~~~~~~~~~~
It’s Thursday, August 7th. You don’t have an appointment to see Aegon, but you’re here in Elysian Park anyway. You park on the curb and sweep out into the gilded morning glow, already mid-80s and rising, wrinkled goldenrod-yellow sundress that you left in the drier too long, flip-flops, bare-faced. You barely slept and ran out the door as soon as you clawed your way out of brief, fitful dreams, autumn leaves and endless corridors through apple orchards, distant stars and deep water.
At his desk, Brandon is on the phone and making notes with his flower pen. He gives you a smile; you can only manage a quick wave. You continue into Aegon’s office, where he is engrossed in Mario’s expedition into an ice world where snow falls in unhurried, harmless white spheres. The music is pleasant, but the pools of frozen water are so cold they burn. Mario is making his way towards a block of ice in which a star has been hidden, accessible by navigation through narrow tunnels. Aegon, his green Nike Killshots propped up on his cluttered desk as usual, is surprised but not disappointed to see you.
“Hey, sunshine!” he says, still clicking the buttons on his transluscent orange controller, still swiveling the joystick. “What are you doing here so—?”
“Your dad died of Huntington’s disease.”
He freezes, and on the television screen, so does Mario; a malevolent snowman entity appears and hurls snowballs at the abandoned avatar until he is dead. You wait for Aegon to say something—no, that’s not true, no, you’re wrong, no, that would be a death sentence—but he only sits there, jaw fallen open, eyes filling up his face…and then he jolts to his feet and goes for the door.
You whirl around to watch him leave. “Aegon…?”
He stops in the doorway to the lobby and calls out: “Brando, you’re done for the day. Bye.”
“Oh for cute!” Brandon replies. “Let me just send an email to that moving company and then—”
“No, now. You’re done right now.”
Brandon sounds perplexed. “Okay, literally right now, you got it.” You can hear him gathering up his things, the jangling of car keys, the snapping shut of a laptop, and you remember all the hours you’ve spent gazing into a small rectangular blue-light screen as you combed through Aegon’s filmography, inspired potential that came to a collision of a stop in his mid-twenties. From the threshold, as he waits for Brandon to leave, Aegon watches you with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes thrashing with dark choppy waves like the riptides of the Pacific. You stare back thunderstruck, and only now do you realize how desperately you were hoping you were mistaken.
Out in the lobby, the front door of the half-duplex opens and closes, and now you and Aegon are alone. He walks back to his desk—loose papers, manila folders, framed photographs, that ever-present bowl of Honeycrisp apples—and drops into his chair, drags his fingers through his slicked-back hair, gazes vacantly at the mint green wall and sighs deeply.
“Who told you?” he asks, like hardly anyone knows, like the few who do wouldn’t have said anything.
“Nobody,” you say, startled. “I just kept guessing different diseases, and I didn’t think it was cancer, and…and…Aegon, Huntington’s is genetic.”
He looks up at you. “Yeah. Yeah it is.”
“Have you been tested? Because if one of your parents had it then you have a fifty percent chance of inheriting the gene.”
“No, I haven’t been tested.”
“Why not?!”
“Because I just haven’t, okay?”
“Have your siblings?”
“Yeah, and they’re all negative. But I didn’t take the test.”
“I think you should take the test, Aegon.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because you should know!” you burst out, and your hands are trembling like his do sometimes, dire adrenaline in your bloodstream and your voice frayed like someone has taken a razor blade to it. “Because if you’re negative then you’ll be relieved, and if you’re positive then you can…you can plan for it, you know? And there are treatments that can help manage the symptoms! I looked it up, I spent like four hours last night on Wikipedia—”
“But no one can stop it,” Aegon says. “They can’t even slow it down.”
“You think you have the gene,” you realize, horrified. “You forget things. Your hands shake. And that’s why you’re leaving Los Angeles and avoiding your family, and that’s why you’re marrying Becca—”
“Stay the fuck out of my head,” Aegon says, the first time he’s ever spat his venom at you, and his knuckles are unbruised and yet it feels like he’s hit you, a crack in a wall, bones that split and arteries that hemorrhage.
“Aegon, you can’t run away like that when you don’t even know for sure if you’re sick!”
“It’s actually really common for people in my situation to not want to take a test.”
You speak without any awareness of what you’re going to say. “I would take care of you.”
“You think I want to hear that?!” Aegon shouts. “You think I want to imagine you being there when I lose the ability to walk, and speak, and feed myself, and remember who the fuck I am?”
“I would do it,” you insist. “You believed in me. You helped me. I would help you.”
He shakes his head and glares at you, his eyes going slick and glassy. “You have no idea what you’re offering.”
“Your family has money, they can afford the best doctors and nurses. You wouldn’t be a burden on any of us, but we’d still get to be with you—”
“I saw what my dad dying did to my mom,” Aegon says bitterly, hatefully. “First he was himself, mostly. And then he was depressed, and then he was angry, and then he became a monster. He’s the reason my mother still has nightmares. He’s the reason Aemond lost his eye. You don’t do that to people you care about. You don’t inflict that on someone you love.”
“But what if you move to Texas and you’re fine, and you don’t have Huntington’s, and you don’t die and nothing terrible happens to you?!”
“Then it will be a relief,” Aegon says softly. “And I can always come back.”
“What about me?” you ask, your voice splintering. “If you’re sick, you’re just never going to see me again?”
Aegon smiles faintly, sad, resigned. “I would rather you remember me the way I am now.”
“Afraid? Avoidant? In denial?”
“Just get out,” he snaps, rubbing his face with his palms, wincing like he’s in pain.
“Aegon—”
“No, you don’t know what it’s like to watch someone die of this!” he roars, slamming his fist on the desk. Documents rustle; photographs fall over. “And if I don’t want a diagnosis, if I don’t want to live staring down the barrel of a gun, then that’s my fucking right and you don’t get to say I’m a coward for it!”
“You’re already living like you know you’re dying,” you moan, you plead. There are tears flowing down your cheeks and turning to salt on your lips; your face is hot with blood. “You don’t have anything to lose.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“But you’re making all these choices for the wrong reasons, and you deserve to know the truth, and if you take a test then you can make an informed decision about what you want your life to look like—”
“I would never pick you,” Aegon says, flat, direct, gutting. “So get that out of your head, because it’s not happening.”
You gaze at him helplessly. “Then what are we doing?”
He shrugs, like this is an idiotic question. “I’m your agent. I’m helping you get jobs.”
“That’s not what this is!” you sob. “It’s always been more than that, it’s been more than that from the very first day! Why did you sign me when no one else would? Why were you feeding me boneless spare ribs off your fork? Why did you throw me that apple?!”
Aegon is incredulous. “Why did I fuck you in this office, why did I fly to Minnesota to have dinner with your awful parents? Because I wanted to. Because I really like you, and I think I’ve been honest about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s serious.”
Never serious, you remember miserably. That’s how Aegon had described his affairs. “Does Becca know you could have Huntington’s?”
“No,” Aegon says. “But if she did, it wouldn’t change anything. She would still want to get married.”
“She would want to take care of you.”
“Yes, exactly. She would be upset for a while, yeah, but she…she needs someone to need her. Her parents were doctors, and they weren’t abusive or anything but they were gone all the time, and the house was like a museum, and now she’s…I don’t know, I guess she’s obsessed with creating warmth, and for Becca warmth means homemade bread and bento boxes and dogs and getting my suits tailored for me, and me being her full-time project…I think a part of her would enjoy that. Having me to herself, finally being the center of my universe. And when I get really bad, when I’m…” Aegon swallows noisily. “When I’m dead, she can move on. She can find someone else to marry and she can have kids, and she’ll always have that trophy on her shelf: I was a Targaryen, I was the perfect long-suffering wife. And Aegon loved me more than any of the others.”
More than me, you think. And then a ricochet of Aegon’s words: I would never pick you. “She’s not mad at you? Because of what we’ve done?”
Aegon chuckles uneasily. “I mean, I’m sure she’s not thrilled about you still being around. She’s been a little temperamental, she’s been suspicious. Right before we left for Minnesota, I woke up from a nap and she was swabbing my cheek for an STD test, can you believe that? But she knows this is temporary.”
What had Becca said the day she pushed you just outside this office? And if he was going to leave me, he has better options than you. You nod like any of this makes sense.
“Can we just be us again?” Aegon asks, and now he’s calm, gentle, exhausted. “We have a month left together. I don’t want to waste it.”
“Okay,” you say numbly.
“Don’t forget about the music video premiere tomorrow night. And I haven’t heard anything from the vampire movie people yet.” Then he adds: “That doesn’t mean you didn’t get it.”
“But it’s not a good sign.”
Aegon tries to soften the blow. “They might just be thinking it over. They might still be scheduling the callback for the other actress.”
You—unsteady, dazed, despondent—stare down at the scuffed wood floor and try in vain to smooth the wrinkles out of your sundress. “Sounds like we’ll both be leaving Los Angeles soon,” you tell Aegon; and then you walk until the walls disappear and only the city is left, sun glare, humming air conditioners, dogs barking, children laughing, engines revving, the immense metallic shadow of Downtown on the horizon.
At home in your apartment building, just as you are about to scan your keycard to unlock the front door, you hear Baela and Jace talking inside. The television is on and the microwave is purring—maybe Jace is making one of his favorite snacks, corn dogs or pizza rolls—and their voices are just barely distinguishable.
“What am I supposed to say to her?” Baela asks, sounding distressed. “That I’m officially too rich and famous to need a roommate? I can’t just kick her out. It would break her heart. She’s so sweet, and I know she’s trying really hard but it’s just…well…”
“No, I get it,” Jace replies. “She’s chill.”
“It sounds like her parents are going to make her move home soon anyway, unless she lands a big part, and…you know…I don’t really see that happening.”
“Yeah.” The microwave beeps and someone pops open the door to retrieve the contents.
“So just please don’t say anything, okay? And when she’s gone in a few months we’ll start looking at apartments in Venice or Santa Monica…”
You put your back to the hallway wall and wait long enough that they won’t think you’ve overheard anything, listening to the sounds of cars whooshing by outside, people coming and going from the places where they belong in the world, and you wonder what that feels like.
~~~~~~~~~~
You stay up too late watching YouTube videos of people with Huntington’s disease, and so the next morning at Cold Stone Creamery you are in a haze, dull throbbing headache, eyes bloodshot from crying, and the frat bro you’re making a Gotta Have It-sized Cookie Mintster for probably thinks you’re high but it’s the opposite: you’ve never felt lower, you’ve never been adrift like this, and you don’t know what to do next. You can’t unknot the threads fate has tied to Aegon. You can’t imagine a life for yourself back home. You can’t remember why you ever thought you’d be able to build something here in the City of Angels, glittering and golden and ever-rushing towards perfection, those who fall behind drug under the wheels.
“Can I get some gummy bears on that?” the frat boy is saying, but your gaze catches on someone behind him. The little metal bells on the glass door jingle and Aegon scrolls inside, khaki cargo shorts and a wrinkled short-sleeve white Oxford thrown over a pink tank top, and he’s traded in his Nikes for flip-flops, and his hair is gelled back from his face so you can see him clearly, vividly, and he leans against the window with daylight flooding in all around him and grins at you.
Why…?
“Can I please get some gummy bears?” the frat boy asks again.
Your manager Josh is blending up a strawberry banana smoothie and glowering at you. “Yo, what is wrong with you today?!”
But you don’t care what he’s saying, because Aegon pulls his black aviator sunglasses out of the pocket of his cargo shorts and slides them on and beams at you, and you hear the words as if he’s spoken them aloud: You are so bright, sunshine.
“I got the part?” you say from behind the counter.
Aegon nods. “You got the part.”
You scream and sprint to him, and when you throw your arms around Aegon he catches you, laughing and warm, and right now his hands are perfectly fine, steady and strong as they cradle the small of your back, the arc of your neck.
“Where the hell are you going?” Josh snaps from the blender. The frat boy, still waiting for his Cookie Mintster, is glaring at you impatiently. “I didn’t say you could take your break yet!”
“Hey,” Aegon says, taking a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet and waving it around so Josh can see before dunking it in the tip jar. “She’s quitting. Call someone else.” And then he pulls you, grinning and exhilarated, out of the Cold Stone Creamery and into the August air, moving swiftly beneath a cerulean sky full of cumulus clouds, 90-degrees and diesel fumes.
“Aegon, I can’t quit yet, I still have to pay my rent—”
“I’ll pay your rent,” Aegon says. He stops when you are under the shade of a palm tree and stands there with you in the oasis. His Sebring is parked illegally in a fire lane; it is adorned with a new malady, a massive dent in the bumper. “You’re going to have costume fittings and table-reads, and you have to learn the script, and you’ll have appointments with hair and makeup, and you’ll have a personal trainer, and promo obligations…you won’t have time to work.”
“You didn’t force them to hire me, did you?” you ask, the effervescent high dissolving away. “You didn’t threaten to blacklist them with your whole family or anything, right? Because I don’t want this if it’s not real.”
“What?” Aegon says, mystified. “No. No, I swear, I wouldn’t do that. And I don’t think it would have worked even if I’d tried. First billing is a huge deal. Not even Taylor Swift has managed to buy herself a starring role in a movie yet. They liked you. They wanted you.”
The hope quivers in your voice. “I’m going to be an actress?”
Aegon smiles. “You already are one.” He takes off your red apron and your grey hat and stuffs both in a nearby trashcan. “Are you parked around here?”
You point to your Honda Accord, 2003, Desert Mist Metallic paint that gleams under the sun. “I’m just across the street.”
“You aren’t bringing Jace to the Maroon 5 thing tonight, right? Because it’s in your best interests to appear unattached.”
You raise an eyebrow, teasing. “Unattached?”
“Yeah. Being ostensibly single makes you confident and alluring and mysterious. Dragging along your mop-haired boyfriend makes you look like a high school kid at prom.”
“And how does dragging along my sulky, disillusioned Targaryen agent make me look?”
“Like a star,” Aegon replies simply.
“I’m not bringing Jace. Or anyone else besides you.”
“Great.”
“Can we drive to the premiere together?” You don’t want to be away from Aegon; you are a little petrified of the fanfare that awaits you in Downtown tonight. You have no idea what to expect.
“Yeah,” Aegon says, outwardly casual, unmistakably pleased. “I have a driver booked. We’ll swing by your apartment in the limousine around 7 p.m.”
“Why aren’t we taking the Sebring?”
“Because people don’t drive themselves to premieres, sunshine,” he says, like he’s explaining to a child an obvious and fundamental truth: the sky is blue, the Earth is round. Then he gestures to his white convertible and its sizeable new dent. “And also I keep running into things and I don’t want you in the car when I’m driving.”
Because his hands shake? Because his reflexes are slowing until they inevitably stop? “Maybe you’re just stressed because of the wedding,” you say softly.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Or it’s psychosomatic. You expect to see symptoms, so you do. But really you’re fine.”
Aegon sighs as wind blows eastward from the Pacific Ocean. He wants to change the subject. You can’t stop yourself from talking. “It’s possible.”
“Maybe whatever’s wrong with you isn’t Huntington’s. Maybe it’s something else, like a vitamin deficiency or a thyroid disorder or lupus or fibromyalgia, or diabetes from all the super unhealthy food you eat. Maybe it’s something a doctor can fix.”
“I’ll see you tonight, okay?” Aegon says; and he kisses your cheek and climbs into his Sebring and speeds off towards the interchange of the 110.
~~~~~~~~~~
You told your parents you needed a dress for Clara’s bachelorette party so they wouldn’t yell at you when they saw the charge on the credit card. You will have to devise a new strategy for future purchases; you are running out of wedding-related excuses. The gown is electric yellow and less formal than the one you wore to the charity gala, sufficiently frivolous for a music video premiere, a V-neck and a high-low hemline. Your hair is down and your eyeshadow warm and smokey: Gilded Ganache and Semi-Sweet by Too Faced, Night Star by NARS. You drench yourself with sugary Shimmer Mist from Bath and Body Works, then realize that was probably a stupid idea. But there’s no time to try to scrub it off; Aegon has texted you that he’s five minutes away.
You click out into the kitchen in the yellow heels you found at T.J. Maxx. Jace is sprawled on the couch and bobbing his head as he sings along to a Charli XCX song pulsing out of his iPhone:
“You wanna guess the color of my underwear,
You wanna know what I got goin’ on down there…”
Baela, who had been getting a can of La Croix from the refrigerator, turns and is startled when she sees you. “You’re glittering. And that looks like a prom dress.”
You scrutinize yourself, suddenly self-conscious. “Is it bad?”
“No!” Baela cries, overcorrecting, not wanting to hurt your feelings. “No, it’s so cute. Jace, isn’t it so cute?”
“Totally,” he says from the couch, not looking at you.
“No contrast, huh?” Baela muses, glancing at your shoes and clutch purse.
“Doesn’t yellow go with yellow…?”
“Of course it does.” She beams, too broadly. “Have fun tonight! Walk really slowly on the red carpet. It will feel ridiculous, but that’s how they get good photos. And cycle through four or five different poses. Count to ten in your head and then switch to the next one. And don’t smile too much! You’ll look creepy and your cheeks will get tired and go numb and you’ll start twitching. Do a small smile and then laugh a lot when the interviewers make their dumbass jokes. It’s good television and they’ll like you and give you more airtime.”
You try to commit this to memory. “Okay.”
“Here.” She gifts you an ice-cold can of La Croix, coconut flavored. “Drink this on the ride over, then make sure you have a lot of water at the premiere. Stay hydrated. Keeps you peppy and glowing.”
“Okay,” you say again, a good little foot soldier.
Baela gives you a quick hug goodbye; but you catch the way she frowns at your carefree hair, the deep but not-so-revealing V of your neckline. Maybe she’ll reconsider the implants thing, Baela’s face reads. You can feel cold beads of sweat bleeding from your ribs, your spine. Then you are out the door, descending in the elevator, trotting onto the sidewalk to find the limo already waiting there, black and sleek under a sky that is slowly sickening from midday blue to dusk embers. The windows are tinted so dark you can’t see anything from outside.
“Hey, sunshine,” Aegon says as you slide into the back where he is waiting in the suit he wears to auditions and film shoots and, apparently, premieres: skinny black tie, slightly rumpled and untucked white shirt. He sees the La Croix. “Don’t you not like that?”
“My roommate gave it to me.” You set the can, wet with condensation, in a cupholder. Aegon hands you an iced vanilla latte to replace it. And as you buckle your seatbelt and the limo driver coasts east to hook into the 110 and then heads dead north towards Downtown, Aegon pulls a tiny spiral notebook out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and reads off names to you: people who were involved in the production of the music video you filmed over a month ago, people to praise, people to thank. You’re trying to listen to him, but your thoughts are fuzzy and your heart is racing.
“What’s wrong?” Aegon asks, and you return to him and smirk guiltily.
“I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.”
“Why? You’re not nervous when you’re acting.”
“Because I’ve acted a million times, but I’ve never done a red carpet before. Not even a mini one like this. What if they ask me something I’m not expecting and I freeze up? What if I accidentally offend someone? I’m always saying things that make people think I’m stupid.”
Aegon laughs lazily, peering through the window as the freeway takes you through Vermont Vista, Broadway-Manchester, Florence, blurs of houses and palm trees and graffitied concrete barriers. “Yeah, you are always saying ridiculous things. But that’s who you are, and it’s charming.”
“You think it’s charming.”
Aegon smiles at you. “I do.”
You stir your latte so the ice cubes clink together and you make a jittery little sound, half-sigh, half-whimper. Aegon puts a palm on your bare thigh, pushing the hem of your dress just above your knee; his hand is warm, and gentle, and heavy enough to ground you.
“You’re shaking,” he says, alarmed.
“Yeah,” you admit. “I’m fine. I think it’ll stop once we get there.”
Aegon lifts his hand away—no! you think, pathetically—and then unbuckles his seatbelt and crawls over to the window just behind the driver’s seat, which is all the way down. The limo driver is in his fifties, salt-and-pepper hair and a full beard, classic rock radio station. The opening notes of Dani California pump out of the speakers, the bass reverberating through the leather seats. “Hey,” Aegon says to the driver, thumping his fist on the window slot. “Roll that up.”
“Yes sir,” the driver assents immediately.
“Don’t park or unlock the doors until I tell you to.”
“Yes sir.”
The dark opaque window closes, the driver disappears, and Aegon comes back to you. He takes your half-finished latte out of your hand and places it safely in a cupholder.
You’re smiling as you ask: “What are you going to—?”
He reaches beneath your dress—tulle ruffles the color of unclouded daylight, or lemons, or butter, or sunflowers—and his fingertips know where to go, their corporeal memory is perfect, and they apply divine spiraling pressure over your panties, silk to leave no lines beneath your dress; that’s a trick Baela taught you. You gasp and clutch for the back of the seat, sweated skin on black leather, your spine arching, your blood cascading south as the freeway runs northbound.
“Are you nervous now?” Aegon whispers; and his words are taunting but his voice is hushed, and he’s in front of you, leaning in so close your lungs are filled with him, Juicy Fruit and sunlight and the heat and the city, and his other hand turns your face away from him so he won’t ruin your makeup. Instead of your lips, his mouth finds your throat and collarbones, and he kisses you there as his fingertips press down more forcefully beneath your dress, so insistent, so hungry, and you are blinded by the realization of how much you have craved him, how desperately you miss him each time you’re apart, and only being with him feels like this, you don’t belong anywhere else, and your chances to touch him are vanishing like sandcastles turned to ruins by the surf.
He’s getting married in a month.
But he’s here now, and you want him.
He’s choosing Becca.
But his hands are choosing you, and his lips, and the outline of his hardness that you can feel when he leans against your thigh, nudging your legs further apart, and surely even through the silk he can feel how wet you are.
“You shouldn’t have taken your seatbelt off,” you say breathlessly. “That’s not safe.”
Aegon laughs as if this is a ludicrous concern, and maybe he doesn’t think that dying in a car accident of a fractured skull or an aortic dissection would be the worst thing in the world. “Don’t worry about me.” He breezes the fingers of his left hand through your hair, nuzzling you, inhaling you, saccharine sweetness and young frenetic nerves, endorphins pouring from your bloodstream.
He’s good, he’s very good; but for you it can take a while, and how far is the limo from the premiere venue? “I’m not going to be able to finish—”
“Yeah you are,” Aegon says, drawing back to look at you, his eyes locked with yours; and you moan as his fingers move the strip of silk aside and sink into you, and you are filled with him as his palm keeps up the euphoric friction, and then it collides with you—knuckles, gravity, riptides, fate—and it takes everything left in you, worn wrung-out scraps, not to cry out, because you’re not alone now, and you’ve never truly been alone with him when this happens, and you know you never will be. The sweetness and the bitterness are coiled up together like threads of fabric, like the lines of a family tree.
You are still panting as Aegon sweeps his left thumbprint just beneath your eyes, clearing away the eyeliner and mascara that has begun to run as your eyes water.
“Don’t cry, sunshine,” he murmurs, concerned.
You chuckle shakily. “I’m sorry. You know I get like this.” When it’s good. When it’s with you.
“Are you still nervous?”
“No,” you answer truthfully.
“You’re going to do great.”
“What should I say?”
“Whatever you want,” Aegon tells you. “Be yourself. Be real.” Then he kisses you on your lips only once: feather-light, immaterial enough to not mar you. “Oh, we have to clean up,” he realizes, panicked, and he hasn’t thought this through.
“It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
You open the can of coconut La Croix that Baela gifted you and soak a handful of napkins that Aegon gets from the driver. You erase the evidence between your legs as best you can; Aegon cleans his hands and gives himself a generous squeeze of hand sanitizer from a tiny travel bottle in your clutch. Then he uses the corner of a napkin to dab away stray flecks of mascara on your cheeks. You check your face in the mirror of your makeup compact: dewy, but acceptable. Natural. Lived-in. Aegon rearranges a few wayward strands of your hair. You slurp down the rest of your vanilla latte. The limo is rolling to halt. You reach for the door handle.
“No,” Aegon says, stopping you. And he gets out first and then waits for you, hand open, until you emerge from the limousine and into a new world: flashbulbs, video cameras, microphones, assistants dressed in black, screaming Maroon 5 fans. Aegon fluffs the train of your electric yellow gown and then leads you into the chaos.
The music video premiere is being held at the historic Broadway Theater. The red carpet rolled out for the occasion, in a nod to the name of the band, is not a bright bloody red but a deep maroon. People are shouting and waving at you, and you have no idea what’s going on; and yet in your ribcage your heartbeat is slow and measured and strong. Aegon has a hand on the small of your back, and you think: I want it to be like this all the time. I want it to be like this forever.
Now a young man in a teal suit is rushing up to you and Aegon has disappeared to the sidelines, and the man is telling you that he is from E! News, and although he says his name you immediately forget it. You don’t panic; you smile softly and try to listen through the noise of the crowd. Now Maroon 5 has arrived and is posing for photographs as the fans screech and beg for autographs.
“So how’s your day going?” the man from E! News asks, a microphone held to your lips.
“It’s been so exciting, this morning I got to quit my job!”
The man laughs hysterically. “What? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’ve been working at an ice cream place for months, but not anymore!”
“And do you have a passion for ice cream?”
“Not really, I just had to pay rent, you know?”
“Girl, do I ever!” the man says, still laughing. “What’s your favorite kind of ice cream?”
You smile sheepishly. “Vanilla.”
“Oh, so you’re a vanilla girl, huh?”
“I am, I really am, and I know the joke. But vanilla can be great! It’s a classic, and it’s sweet and uncomplicated, and it’s not trying to be anything it’s not. It’s pure. It’s innocent.”
“Oh my God, that was poetry! I might have to give vanilla another shot. You’ve convinced me.”
“Cool,” you say. Aegon is watching you from behind the video camera that you’ve just noticed; he is nodding, he gives you a little thumbs-up.
The man from E! News asks next: “So, ice cream expert, if I was an ice cream flavor, which one would I be?”
You ponder this. “Well someone once told me that interesting adults like strawberry, and you seem really interesting, so I’d say you’re strawberry ice cream.”
“Adorable,” the man sighs, marveling at you. “What are you going to be up to now that you aren’t working at the ice cream shop anymore?”
“Well according to my agent—and I have the best agent in the world, he’s absolute magic—I just got my first starring role in a movie.” The E! News man shrieks in excitement. “And I can’t really tell you anything more about it just yet, because I don’t know what I’m allowed to say publicly, but I’m so so so excited and so grateful, and Los Angeles is an incredible place. I’m in heaven and I’m thrilled to be here with you tonight.”
Another E! News correspondent, a woman in a salmon-colored dress, dashes in to join the conversation. She has blindingly white veneers and so much Botox she can’t move her forehead. “Could you tell us what it was like working on this music video?”
“It was an amazing experience,” you say; and in this moment you believe that, and Dan doesn’t exist, and neither does the bathtub scene that almost happened, and neither does the terror that threatened to consume you before Aegon smothered the flames. Now, Aegon is watching closely as Dan navigates the red carpet. They make split-second eye contact, Aegon glares fiercely, Dan keeps a wide swath of space between you and him as if you are radioactive, a silent poison that cooks malignancies into blood and bones. “We filmed in this gorgeous mansion in Beverly Hills, and everyone involved in the production was so imaginative and professional. I got to wear outfits designed by Schiaparelli and Rodarte, oh, and Phoebe Philo, and the actor playing my awful ex-boyfriend was fantastic, and there were these weird exotic cats that kept trying to bite me…”
You keep talking and interviewers keep descending, appearing out of nowhere, and then you are posing on the red carpet—you even take a few awkward photos with Maroon 5, none of whom remember who you are—and to your surprise, several fans even ask you for an autograph. Without thinking, you add a tiny sun after you sign your name each time.
“There, a little bit of sunshine,” you say to a preteen girl who beams up at you. “Not that you need it, look how brightly you’re shining!”
As you are about to enter the theater, you glance back to see where Aegon has gone. An interviewer has entrapped him, although Aegon clearly resents being caught on camera. He’s a good sport though; he forces a smile and answers the questions. He’s being asked about you.
Aegon says: “She has a great attitude about work, and about life in general. She’s very talented. And obviously she’s beautiful, so…yeah. I feel really lucky to have found her. She’s usually the best part of my day.”
“And are we going to see you in any upcoming films?” the woman from Entertainment Tonight asks flirtatiously. “We all know you have the chops!”
Aegon throws his head back and cackles. “No. You wish. Okay, thank you very much for your time, I’ll talk to you afterwards.”
“Thank you, Aegon!” the interviewer calls out, waving, and you think: He really could have been a star if he never left acting.
You and Aegon sit together at the screening, and he keeps feeding you pieces of popcorn—your lips brushing his fingertips, salt stinging on your tongue—and you have to resist the urge, no, the gravity, the effortless instinct to rest your head on his shoulder. Maroon 5 do a panel after the music video and take questions from the audience. They manage a few comprehensible responses.
Afterwards, Aegon doesn’t take you straight home to Harbor Gateway. He doesn’t take you to his office in Elysian Park either. Instead, he tells the limo driver to follow the 101 northwest to Hollywood, and he drags you out into the cool indigo night—veined with florescence and neon—and onto the intersection of Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard at the genesis of the Walk of Fame, a trail of 2,800 stars carved into the sidewalk, into eternity.
Aegon stands on a star of this earthbound constellation and says: “You’re going to have one of these someday.”
And here under the aisle of a streetlight with Aegon smiling like that, kind and radiant, you could almost believe him.