A Curse

“I’m so sorry,” you say as the green jasper buttons on the coat won’t quite close. “My agent keeps buying me Cherry Cokes and vanilla lattes.”

The costume designer, mid-forties with box-dye red hair, laughs. She ceases the tugging she’s been doing, ultimately in vain. “The wardrobe is supposed to fit you, sweetheart, not the other way around.” She sweeps the coat off your shoulders and hangs it back on the rack full of Gilded Age-style garments, some faux, some genuine. “We’ll take it in here and let it out there and get everything sorted out.”

“Thank you,” you tell her sheepishly.

“For what? It’s my job.” Then she gestures to the rack. “Which one was your favorite?”

You scan the assortment: chemises, corsets, hoopskirts, stockings, dresses, tea gowns, evening gowns, nightgowns, hats, gloves, fans, shoes, seemingly endless bejeweled ropes of necklaces and bracelets. “The yellow tea gown,” you say, beaming. “I love the ruffles and how flowy it is. And the buttons down the front.”

“Oh, it’s exceptional, isn’t it?” the costume designer agrees. “I found that at an estate sale a few years back, it had been squirreled away in a collector’s attic. It’s authentic, probably made in the 1890s.”

“You told me not to touch the buttons when you put it on. And you wore latex gloves.”

She nods. “They’re brass gilded with gold and mercury, which was common back then. People didn’t know better. But mercury can be absorbed through the skin. We can’t be careless and end up with heavy metal poisoning, now can we?” She grins at you. “But you don’t mind a little danger.”

“Everything worthwhile is a risk.”

“How long have you been in Los Angeles?”

You do some quick math in your head. “Almost six months.”

“Planning to stay long?”

“Forever, hopefully.”

The costume designer smiles warmly. “Good. We need more people like you here.” And as she pulls the rack of clothing out into the hallway on its four small wheels, the director strolls into the room. He is in his thirties, bald, black rectangular glasses, always wearing a suit jacket over a graphic tee. Today’s shirt features the Jurassic Park logo.

“Hey!” he says excitedly, clapping his hands together. “How’d it go?”

“Hi, Dusty!” His name is Dustin, but everyone calls him Dusty. “It was amazing. I love all the weird vintage clothes, they’re so modest but also very sensual, you know?”

“Yeah, it’s fascinating, I feel like with those restrictive modesty standards people really had to get creative to evoke ideas of playfulness, flirtatiousness, power, vulnerability, seduction...and of course, we’ll be experimenting with all of that in this film. You felt okay in everything?”

“Yeah!”

“Because...I mean...I know some of the chamises and nightgowns are a little sheer, but we’ll do a closed set on those days. I won’t even be there, Camille can handle it.” Camille is the assistant director, young and quiet but very sharp. “So it’ll just be her and the camera operator, also a woman. And if you want anyone else there to be your advocate, that’s open for discussion.”

“Can my agent be there?”

Dusty looks a little surprised. The grumpy middle-aged dude? his face says. “Aegon? Yeah, sure, he can be in the room. If you want that.”

“He’s gotten me out of some uncomfortable situations before, so I trust him.”

“Oh yeah, well in that case, I get it,” Dusty says. “Totally. And things with Santi have been fine?”

“Santi is wonderful. Always completely professional, but very inspiring to work with.”

“You guys have great chemistry. Platonically, I mean.”

You laugh. “I know what you meant.”

“And I’ll keep checking in with both of you, to make sure that’s going well and you’re happy and comfortable. I want you to start seeing a personal trainer, by the way. It’s not to lose weight or get toned or anything, it’s for injury prevention. He’ll help you get flexible and teach you tricks for how to move without hurting yourself when we do some of the more physically taxing stuff, like that scene where you and Santi are chasing each other all over the house and slamming into the walls and stuff.”

“That makes sense. Who’s the trainer?”

“His name is Roy, he’s in his sixties and a former Marine. I’ve worked with him before and he’s really chill, I’ve only ever heard good things. But if you end up not liking him, just let me know and I can find somebody else.”

“Dusty?” you say.

“Yes?”

“Thank you for caring about what I think.”

He chuckles uneasily, like he’s not sure if you’re serious. “You’re welcome...?”

Aegon walks in—hair gelled back, wrinkled black suit on—carrying two Starbucks beverages; he left fifteen minutes ago to fetch them. He keeps the Frappuccino topped with whipped cream and chocolate syrup for himself and hands you the iced latte. You take a sip and are startled. “Cinnamon Dolce?”

“Isn’t that what you like?” Aegon asks.

And before you let yourself think poisonous thoughts—he doesn’t care, he doesn’t remember—you consider a different explanation. He might be sick. He might be dying. You give him a radiant smile. “Absolutely. And it’s delicious.”

“She must think very highly of you,” Dusty tells Aegon. “She wants you there on the closed set days.”

Aegon raises his eyebrows at you. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” you admit, a little shyly.

“I’ll send out the filming schedule as soon as we get it finalized,” Dusty says. “Like I said earlier, we’ll start sometime in mid-September. Some soundstage stuff here in L.A., some on-location work in Ontario—that’s where they did Crimson Peak, there’s fantastic Gilded Age architecture—and maybe a trip to London if we can scrape the budget together.”

“Huh,” Aegon mutters to himself, like he suspects Dusty will soon be receiving a sizeable and anonymous donation for the project. He pulls out his iPhone and texts someone.

Dusty shakes your hand. “Thanks for being here today and suffering through approximately one thousand costume changes. I really appreciate you being such a good sport about everything.”

“I told you she had the right temperament,” Aegon says.

“She does.” Dusty smiles at you. “She really does.”

You and Aegon leave Dusty’s suite, office space rented in Downtown, and take the elevator from the tenth floor to the ground level. It’s Wednesday, August 13th, and it’s almost a hundred degrees outside, the sunlight drenching you like a downpour. Fortunately, it’s a short walk to your Honda. Aegon was serious about not driving when you’re in the car anymore; you picked him up in Elysian Park before your appointment with the costume designer. Now you walk together across a pavilion and towards a concrete staircase that will lead you down to the street with the parking garage. You’re wearing a pink floral sundress, matching TOMS wedges, and a pinkish-gold sheen across your eyelids: Fathom by NARS, Phenomena by Natasha Denona. You slurp on your Cinnamon Dolce latte, sweet and warm and blameless like a treat you deserve.

“You know I won’t be there for filming,” Aegon says. “That’s going to be after my wedding. I’ll be long gone, I’ll be in Houston.”

“Maybe not.”

“Uh, I definitely will be.”

“Maybe you’ll fly back to be here for certain things because you know they’re important to me.”

Aegon stops and whirls to you, his voice low but cutting. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” you ask, bewildered.

“You know I wish I could be here. Don’t guilt me for something I’m already torn up about.”

“Nothing is stopping you from flying back to L.A. for a few days. Houston isn’t a prison, you can come and go as much as you want to.”

Now he’s somber, quiet, repentant. “I just can’t. I’m really sorry.”

“But who’s going to look out for me?” How could I even begin to forget you?

“I found you a new agent. Her name is Kristen, and she’s great.”

“I don’t want her,” you say immediately.

Aegon sighs. You begin to descend the staircase together. “Look, I know this isn’t easy for either of us, but I need you to—”

“Oh my God, it’s the girl from the Maroon 5 music video!” a young man shrieks, and then he sprints up the concrete steps. You smile when he shoves his phone in your face, recording for TikTok or Instagram or wherever he’s planning to post this...or maybe he’s even streaming live. “Hi!” he bellows at you as Aegon glares. “I love that video, you did an amazing job!”

“Thank you so much,” you say, and you mean it down to your bones. You’re beaming without reminding yourself to; you’re focused on him as you continue to descend the staircase. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Jonathan!”

Aegon snaps at him: “Back up.”

“Hi, Jonathan,” you say, wobbling on a step. “It’s so nice to meet you. Where are you from?”

“I’m from a town in Iowa that you definitely haven’t heard of.”

“That’s okay, I’m from a town in Minnesota that you definitely haven’t heard of.”

“Hey, back up,” Aegon says again.

Jonathan either doesn’t hear him or doesn’t listen. “What was it like working with Adam Levine? I’m kind of obsessed with him. He was my first crush.”

With those tattoos? you think but blessedly don’t say out loud. You have barely ever interacted with Adam Levine, and certainly not in a meaningful way. But of course you don’t say this either. Jonathan’s phone is only inches from your face; it’s practically all you can see. “Oh, it was an incredible experience. He’s so talented and kind—”

Your wedge slips off a step, and you go sprawling; one knee hits the concrete, is scraped raw, begins bleeding down your shin. Your latte flies out of your grasp and spills down the staircase. You clutch for the metal railing, find it, and haul yourself upright. And even through the searing pain you’re already laughing, embarrassed, relieved.

Jonathan is saying as he reaches for you, though he’s still filming with the phone in his other hand: “Oh no, are you okay?!”

“I’m fine, I’m totally fine—”

But Jonathan isn’t, because Aegon’s knuckles connect with his face, draw back, hit him again, and blood is gushing from Jonathan’s nostrils, and Aegon’s hand is stained red. “I told you to back the fuck up!” Aegon is roaring, and he goes to punch Jonathan again as he’s staggering down the steps, blood drops splattering to freckle the concrete.

“Aegon, don’t!” you scream, grabbing his arm. People on the sidewalk below are staring and pointing. “He didn’t do anything!”

“If you get hurt, you can’t act—”

“Aegon, I’m alright!”

And when Aegon turns to you, wayward flecks of blood on his cheeks and in his sand-colored hair, he’s not just furious but afraid: I couldn’t stop. You remember when he put a dent in the wall of the Beverly Hills mansion where Dan had planned to film you practically naked, and you wonder if that was a symptom, volatility, rage, a transient blindness to consequences. Is everything he does a symptom? Is what he’s done with you?

“Aegon...?” Jonathan says from several steps down the staircase. “Aegon Targaryen?!” He’s wiping the blood off his face with the back of one hand but still holding his phone with the other. Now he’s filming himself. “Holy shit, I just got punched by a Targaryen! This is going to go viral! I’m going to be rich!” He dashes off, still dripping blood.

Aegon looks at you, dazed. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

You’re trying to catch your breath; your knee burns. Pedestrians on the sidewalk are still gawking. “No, you shouldn’t have.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to fuck up anything related to your career. I’ll fix this, I’ll get Aemond to make it go away.”

“I’m not mad, Aegon.” I’m worried about you. I’m scared for you.

“Are you okay?” He’s scrutinizing the thin tendrils of blood snaking down your leg, the crimson stains on your pink sundress.

“Yeah,” you say gamely.

“No you’re not.” Aegon takes your hand, leads you swiftly to the parking garage, doesn’t stop to talk to any of the people who are staring and pointing and taking out their phones to record him.

You drive your Honda back to Elysian Park—just a quick jaunt northeast on the 110—where Aegon scrubs his hands clean and then plays doctor with equipment supplied by the first aid kit in Brandon’s desk. On the scuffed wood floor of Aegon’s office—mint green walls, cluttered haphazard desk, photographs of him and Becca together sneering down at you—he disinfects the raw patch on your knee and gingerly wipes away flecks of dirt, then slathers it with gooey transluscent Neosporin, the kind that dulls pain. As he is trying to peel the backing off a large rectangular Band-Aid, his hands begin to shake.

“Aegon, here, let me help you—”

“I can do it,” he insists; and it takes him a while, but he does.

~~~~~~~~~~

Baela is back in Paris; Jace is eating a Chipotle burrito on the velvet orange couch and spilling leafy shreds of lettuce everywhere. You are arranging the dried sunflowers in a yellow vase you found at T.J. Maxx. You are careful not to dislodge any of the fragile preserved leaves, curled and brittle. When you are done, you position the vase on the kitchen counter near the refrigerator. The calendar there, affixed with pineapple-shaped magnets, is filled with red-ink appointments related to your indie film, the one you still sometimes can’t believe is real: workouts with your personal trainer, table reads, costume fittings, meetings with the dialect coach, lunches and drinks with your new coworker Chloe. She has third billing, and she’s from Maine, and she loves hiking and flannel and granola and the lobster rolls at Saltie Girl in West Hollywood. You teach her about makeup and dresses; Chloe teaches you about nature and hiking boots. You might even let her talk you into horseback riding lessons on the beach one day.

Jace asks from the couch as he scrolls through his phone with his non-burrito-occupied hand: “Hey, random question, but did your agent beat up a kid?”

You sigh deeply. “He wasn’t a kid. I don’t know why people keep saying that.”

“The TMZ article says he’s a teenager.”

“He’s nineteen years old. He’s legally an adult.”

“Oh.” Jace keeps reading. “But your agent did beat him up.”

“Aegon punched him twice, does that count as beating someone up?”

Jace looks up from his phone. “Yes. Yes it does.”

You sigh again.

“You’re lucky he’s not suing,” Jace says as he resumes reading the article. “Damn, he’s gotten 200,000 views on the video so far. He called it STORYTIME: Targaryen Terror!! I almost died!! The thumbnail is a close-up of his bloody nose. Let’s see what derangement we can find in the comments.” Then Jace recoils, squinting at the screen. “Whoa, the whole article just disappeared.”

Thanks Aemond, you think. “I’ll be back around dinnertime if you want to order Thai food and watch True Blood or something.”

“Cool,” Jace says, and chomps on his burrito. A glob of guacamole drops onto the couch.

In Elysian Park, you park on the curb and step out into sweltering mid-August humidity, the humming of air conditioning window units, ambient dog barks and car radios. You’re wearing flip-flops, a purple maxi skirt, and a black tank top; on your eyelids shimmers Natasha Denona’s silver-and-violet Bolt.

You can hear the shouting before you open the front door, heavy footsteps, chairs screeching as they are pushed out. You run inside to find Brandon standing beside his desk. He looks at you wide-eyed, as if he doesn’t know what to do. From within his office, Aegon is yelling something you don’t understand—“I don’t want it! No, get rid of it, get out of here!”—and then Becca appears through the doorway, backing away from him, fleeing from him, confused and heartbroken. She’s dressed like a bride, white lace and long beachy waves. She is crying and holding two sealed envelopes in her hands that gleam with rings.

“What’s going on?” you ask her.

Becca freezes when she sees you. She’s too stunned to be angry. “I don’t know, it was supposed to be a surprise, we were going to open them together and it would be fun, but now he’s...he’s...he’s freaking out, he’s completely lost his mind!”

You peek into Aegon’s office; his chair is knocked over, and there are papers and photographs and Honeycrisp apples on the floor. He’s slumped against the wall with his knees to his chest, gazing out at you with vast, glassy eyes, tears painting rivers down his flushed cheeks. “Open what?” you ask Becca. And then you read the artful black lettering on the envelopes: Legacea: Discover All the Wonders of Your Heritage!

“Becca,” you say softly. He’s been caught. He can’t hide it anymore. “Aegon’s dad died of Huntington’s disease.”

“Okay,” she replies, puzzled, not understanding.

“And it’s genetic, and he doesn’t want to know if he has the gene.”

She stares at him, thunderstruck. He hides his face in his hands. And you feel a compulsion—an instinct, a gravity, a predestination—to go to Aegon and hold him, comfort him as much as you can, ward off all the world’s curses here in this undistinguished alcove of Los Angeles where you first met him.

“Here,” Becca hisses, grabbing your hand and pressing one of the envelopes into it too quickly for you to resist. “You’re the person he always wants to talk to anyway.” Then she shoves you so hard your back hits the doorframe, storms across the lobby, slams the front door as she leaves.

“I’m sorry,” Aegon says hoarsely from the floor. “I’m sorry she did that, I...I...” And then he swallows with effort and shakes his head and covers his face again. In the lobby, Brandon sinks into the chair behind his desk and tries to disappear.

You step into Aegon’s office and close the door behind you. You cross the scuffed hardwood floor until you are right in front of him, and then you sit down amidst the bruised apples and splintered glass panes of photographs, close enough to reach out and take his hands if you tried. You look down at the sealed envelope and skim your thumbprint across the black ink. You don’t say anything. You wait for Aegon to realize the inevitable: If Becca paid for these tests, she can access the results anytime she wants to. He’s going to find out one way or the other. He can’t keep running. The answer is right here. Maybe it’s even good.

“You can open it,” Aegon says, barely a whisper.

“Are you sure?”

He nods and wipes his face with his sleeve, the same wrinkled tan sport coat jacket he was wearing for your very first appointment. Beneath that he wears a t-shirt the color of the ocean, a placid royal blue. Then he watches as you carefully rip open the envelope, unfold the stack of four papers, and scan the results. He tries to read the lines and color of your face; he waits for you to say something.

For a long still moment, you don’t say anything. And then at last you look up at him. “Your family can afford the best doctors, you’ll have access to the most advanced treatments—”

"No!" Aegon wails, a mourning, a surrender, and he collapses across the floor, and decades of fear and grief and fury come hemorrhaging out, and you expect that when you try to hold him he’ll push you away, but he doesn’t. He claws for you and his fingernails leave half-moon indentations in your skin, but you don’t mind because soon he’ll be gone: he’ll be flying to Turks and Caicos to marry Becca, he’ll be moving to Houston, Texas, he’ll be dying there of something horrible and painful and inglorious and unfair, he’ll be a secret and then a myth.

“I’m sorry,” you say over and over again, his head in your lap, your fingers in his hair, your voice fracturing and your throat burned to ashes. “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this. I wish I could change it. I would do anything to change it.”

And after a while, Aegon goes quiet and pulls away, and he sits on the floor as he absorbs it, staring vacantly at the photographs and the apples and the walls, dragging his hands through his disheveled hair to slick it back again. Then he turns to you and asks: “Do you want to go to the beach?”

~~~~~~~~~~

You’ve already been to Venice, and Baela and Jace once took you along with them to Santa Monica to walk the pier at dusk; and so today Aegon tells you to follow the 110 south, the 10 west, and finally the 1 north—and if you stayed on it you’d eventually hit Malibu, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Point Reyes, Eureka, the Oregon border—to Pacific Palisades, where the water is calm and endless and the beach quiet, a few families picnicking on loose golden sand, a few amateur surfers bobbing on docile waves. Gulls flap and caw in a cerulean sky. From a boombox drifts Under the Bridge.

“I always felt like I had it,” Aegon says. His skin glows with the sunscreen you insisted on buying from a surf shop on the way here, SPF 50, but there is nothing in the world that can stop the poison his cells are already making, copying the defective gene’s lethal instructions again and again and again. You look at the crinkles that spring out from the corners of his eyes, the lines around his mouth, and you can see that he is aging—lack of sleep, lack of care—and you have the instinct to pull him back from the ledge of mortality. But for all the wonders of humanity, pyramids and chapels, submarines and satellites, for some reason the most essential magic eludes you.

“But you hoped you didn’t.” You hold the Legacea papers, still creased from where they were folded into thirds inside the envelope, as you and Aegon sit together on the sand. You keep reading the results: cystic fibrosis—variant not detected, hereditary thrombophilia—variant not detected, Parkinson’s disease—variant not detected, he’d be perfect if it wasn’t for one tiny thing, and that seems so unfair.

“That’s why I never told people. That’s why even though I was pretty sure I’d never have kids, I didn’t do anything permanent. Never got a vasectomy, even though I should have. Never saw a specialist. Never joined any support groups. I always thought...you know, maybe. Maybe I was wrong, and I was fine. And I wanted to have that to fall back on, so whenever I started thinking about it and got freaked out, I could say: You don’t know for sure. You might not have it. Aemond got tested because he felt it was the responsible thing to do, and Helaena and Daeron followed his lead because they trust him. I was the only one who didn’t want to know. And I’m the only one who has it.” He shakes his head; his blonde hair blows in the wind. “They had to deal with what happened to my dad. I can’t put them through that again.”

You re-read the results, the only one that matters: Huntington’s disease—variant detected, mutation of the HTT gene. “You’re so young, Aegon. Aren’t you too young to have symptoms? When I was researching, it sounded like it usually starts around forty, and then people can live into their fifties or even their sixties.” That’s almost a normal lifespan! you have to stop yourself from blurting out. That’s thirty more years we could have together!

“A lot of the time, that’s how it goes,” he says. “But there’s this thing in genetics called anticipation.” And then you remember what you overheard Aemond saying when you found him in Aegon’s office a few days after the charity gala: Because you’re still pretty young, but with anticipation...

“Aegon, what’s anticipation?”

“It means that in each generation, the disease shows up earlier and gets more severe. In Huntington’s, that’s especially true when it’s inherited from the father. My dad had visible signs in his late-thirties, got diagnosed at forty-five, and died at fifty-five. I’ve had symptoms since my twenties.”

So how many years does he have left? you think with horror. Five? Ten? And most of them will be bad. “Is that why you left acting?”

Aegon nods, looking out over the waves. “Every time I forgot a line or tripped over a step or something, I’d think it was proof that I had the gene, and it would send me into a spiral. And then because I was so nervous...fuck it, because I was so scared...I would make more mistakes, and get more panicked, and I just couldn’t deal with the...the emotional rollercoaster, I guess. So I got an office in Elysian Park far away from my family and all their industry friends, and I found an assistant I liked, and I met Becca...and I got everything lined up so if...” He shakes his head. “So when the time came, I could slip away without any drama or unnecessary pain for my family.”

“But you’re still mostly okay. You don’t have to leave Los Angeles yet.” You don’t have to abandon me yet. “I can drive you places. I can remember things for you. I don’t mind.”

Aegon gives you a sad, patient smile. “By the time people with this disease get really bad, they stop being able to tell how far-gone they are. And they aren’t competent to make decisions, and they hurt the people who are trying to help them, and it’s not so easy to disappear anymore. I can’t wait around for my brain to get hollowed out enough that I have no good days left. I can’t wait around until you’re finally convinced it’s the right time. You’re always going to be looking for excuses to keep me here. You’ll always see glasses as half-full.”

You think of the countless YouTube videos you’ve watched of Huntington’s patients since that night in Silver Lake when you learned what killed Woody Guthrie—people struggling to walk, to speak, to swallow, to recognize their loved ones—and you break down in sobs, covering your face with your hands as tears flood down your cheeks, the rivulets turning cold as the ocean breeze skates over them. “I don’t want that to happen to you.”

“None of us get a choice, sunshine,” Aegon says gently, laying a palm on your shoulder.

“Am I a symptom?”

“What are you talking about?”

You take a tissue out of your purse and sniffle into it, too mortified to meet his eyes. “Impulsive decisions, poor judgment, erratic emotions. Those are all symptoms of Huntington’s. So is this thing between us...is what you have with me, is it just...just...?” Just your brain dying, just a mistake like punching a fan or wrecking a car or forgetting that I was born in the Year of the Dragon?

“No,” Aegon says. “No, this is real. And the way I feel about you isn’t how I feel about anybody else.”

“But all those other women—”

“I fucked around because life is short and I didn’t want to miss out on things. And I felt like...you know...there will be a day when I’m never going to be able to have sex again. Just like there will be a day when I can never drive again, or help a client get a job, or make it through a barbeque at my family’s beach house without acting insane, or collect stars in Super Mario 64. But you’re not some maladaptive coping mechanism. I don’t sleep with clients. I genuinely really, really like you, and you make me feel better about the world, and I want to be around you all the time. But I can’t do that without ruining your life, you know? So what the fuck am I supposed to do with everything I feel for you?”

His hand is still on your shoulder, warm and safe and steady, and his oceanic blue eyes are resigned. You’re too late to change his mind. You’ve been too late since he watched Viserys crawl towards the grave over the span of a decade. “I would take care of you,” you tell Aegon, something you’ve offered before, and you mean this no matter how irrational he believes it to be.

“You’ll be sad for a while,” he says. “But then you’ll get busy with more roles and the promo tour for your movie, and you’ll have a nice normal boyfriend—maybe that Jace guy—and you’ll forget about me. And you can be an actress and have healthy kids and stay here in Los Angeles forever. You’ll have everything you ever wanted.”

Not everything, you think. Not you. “Why did you invited me to your wedding? It’s actually a really messed up thing to do. I’m supposed to celebrate you marrying Becca? Toast champagne and dance on the beach and eat hors d’oeuvres and then fly back here like nothing’s wrong?”

Aegon sighs and lies flat on the sand, lets the hot midday sun beat down on him, takes his black aviator sunglasses out of his jeans pocket and slides them on. “I invited you because my wedding is supposed to be the happiest day of my life, and I want all my favorite people there. And you are definitely one of my favorite people.”

You frown at the wave crests, glittering with daylight. “I can’t go to Turks and Caicos.”

“Why not?”

“Because Becca threatened to break my leg.”

Aegon bursts out laughing. “She what?!”

“She said she would push me down the stairs so I’d break my leg and wouldn’t be able to do any acting for months until it healed.”

He’s cackling. Circumstances aside, it’s nice to see him smile again. “Ignore her. She’s not serious. She tells everyone that.”

“She threatens all your mistresses with bodily harm?”

Aegon shrugs. “Her playbook is limited.”

You debate whether to tell him something, then decide this isn’t the day for secrets. “She pushed me outside your office one time. I fell over. That’s how I sprained my ankle.”

“Fuck, really?” Aegon says, peering up at you from the sand. Deep troubled grooves appear in his forehead, glistening with Coppertone Sport. “I’m so sorry. That should never have happened. I’ll talk to her.”

“I’m sure that’ll go well.”

“She’ll listen to me,” Aegon insists. “She’ll cave. She always does.”

You look at him, accusing, certain. “You don’t love her.”

“I couldn’t marry her if I did,” he says casually. “But she chose this. She could call it off anytime she wanted, but she won’t. I’ll go home tonight and find out she’s bought twenty books on nursing from Amazon. And it’s not forever. I’m a curse, not a life sentence. My clock is ticking down a lot faster than everyone else’s.”

What if I want that time with you? you think helplessly. What if I love you?

Aegon pushes his sunglasses up into his hair so he can study you with no obstructions, so there’s nowhere to hide. “The wedding might be your last chance to see me, you know?”

“Right,” you say, listening to the shrieks of circling California gulls and the dull primordial rumble of the ocean, a beast that swallows sunlight, a titan with no lifespan.

As you take the 1 southeast back towards Downtown, Elysian Park, Harbor Gateway, Aegon tells you to stop at the Getty Villa Museum. You don’t argue; you don’t want to go home yet either. You don’t want to lose a second of the time you have left with him.

There is an extensive collection of ancient Greek and Roman art, gods, goddesses, heroes, monsters, coins, weapons, magic. Here is an altar carved with the myth of Adonis, here is a horse made of oxidized bronze, here is a Breccia marble fertility goddess whose name no one remembers, here is a bust of Caligula, the emperor who went mad. You pause to admire a statue of Medusa, snakes instead of hair and a face twisted with wrath.

“Don’t look, she’ll turn you to stone,” Aegon whispers as he covers your eyes with gentle, feather-light hands. “That’s the last thing you need. Another curse.”