“You’re a fucking weirdo.”
She glared at me, and then Summer turned her eyes away from mine. I watched her chin quiver—emotions coming back like a boomerang. She shook her head, tears falling down with ease. Suddenly, Summer turned around toward me and tugged my body into hers, holding on tighter than she ever had.
Success doesn’t come easily for women who dare to be themselves. It’s a painful road, and Summer and I had already let down a few people along our chosen paths, and we’d let down more. But if we were lucky, at the end of our roads, we’d look back and smile, realizing that we’d made ourselves proud.
42
THIRTY-FIVE
AFTER I PACKED SUMMER’S LIFE up into a few suitcases and got her off to the airport, I came back to Asher’s loft with a hurried realization: I had just thirty minutes to get ready. Normally, I could go from a braless mess to “not so bad” in twenty minutes, but tonight, Asher and I were venturing out into the real world for the first time since our photo had been snapped at Marea. I needed to go from a braless mess to “fucking hot” in thirty minutes. It was a stretch, but I had spent my entire life preparing for this moment. Or at least I had spent the last few years YouTubing too many beauty tutorials to prepare for this moment.
Asher and I had made a deal to keep our relationship—or whatever we were—under wraps until I could turn in every track on the movie. I had stayed in a few nights when Asher went out over the last few weeks, not because I didn’t want to be by his side, but because I wanted to give the utmost respect to the thing I’d nearly killed myself for: my career. My manager had her point of view—she didn’t want to see us together until my work was finished. It was a bad idea to piss off my representation at the start of my career. I wanted her to trust me. Meanwhile, Asher wasn’t the type to flaunt a relationship, so he didn’t push it.
Asher was already in the shower when I got home, a sudsy mohawk on his head, and I disrobed as I opened the steam shower doors, the cool outside elements barreling in and completely disrupting the entire steam situation going on.
He turned to me with raised eyebrows as I grabbed the bottle of Le Labo mandarin shower gel.
“Well hello there,” Asher said.
He pulled me in to his wet, naked body, and I could feel him harden against me.
“I will totally make this up to you later, but I only have thirty minutes to become a person.”
“I pushed the dinner to eight thirty.”
I put my hand on my chest and batted my eyes at him.
“For me?”
He tugged me back to him with his wet hand on my waist, the hot rain shower now pouring over us both. He leaned in and kissed a slow, warm, wet trail from my neck, down to my clavicle, in between words.
“You texted me saying you might be cutting it close…and that you wanted to stay to get your friend into a car…and that you wouldn’t be back until seven.” My heart beat faster as he turned his head, kissing the other side of my neck. “What’s the use of having fame if I can’t use it to secure a later table at Carbone?”
He stepped back and raised his eyebrows at me as the steam clouded my vision of a perfect, beautiful man. I wrapped my arms around his neck. The thick body wash on his chest sent the smell of crisp geranium into my lungs, and he lifted me with one strong hand, pressing my back against the cool Carrara marble tiles with my legs wrapped around him. I clung onto his shoulder blades, arching my neck to the sky as he guided himself inside me.
I clenched my hands behind his head.
“Touch me,” I whispered into his ear.
He kissed me hard, water raining down on us both, his fingertips moving from my ear, tracing a line down my throat, encircling my wet breasts—one by one—achingly slowly, as I breathlessly exhaled his name to the flowing showerhead.
An hour later, with dewy, flushed faces, we sat inside Asher’s town car, in dead-stopped traffic on Thompson Street. Asher curved his head out the window, surveying the traffic.
“We’re going to get out here, Joey,” he said to his driver.
“You sure?” Joey asked, with eyes raised.
“We’re already a couple minutes late, it’s right there.” Asher looked at me. “C’mon.” He nodded as he opened his door.
He held my hand as I expertly folded my body to the side, so as to not show my vagina off to any passersby. Exiting a vehicle in a minidress should be an Olympic sport. Men could never. I exhaled as my heels hit the pavement, tugged my dress back down, and Asher wrapped his hand in mine. Like clockwork, he put his chin down, walking forward toward the red neon CARBONE sign as if he were a bull. Suddenly, I understood why he walked that way, as huge camera flashes lit up my face. Asher’s arm instinctively went over his own face, and he shielded me behind his body, leading me into Carbone as the flashes disappeared.
He tugged me far past the front doors and pulled me close to his chest as we approached the hostess stand. The restaurant was dimly lit, and all I could see were flashes behind my eyes. Asher held me against his body, his hand on my cheek as he took me in with concern. I knew he could feel my chest racing against his.
“You okay?” he whispered.
He studied me like no one else was watching, even though I knew that everyone else was watching. I could get used to the way he was looking at me. Which I guess meant that I would have to get used to strange men shoving their lenses in my eyes.
“I’m fine, I promise.”
A hostess tapped her hand on Asher’s arm, with a bright, red-lipped smile. “Mr. Reyes, can I show you to your table?”
Asher nodded, and he locked his fingers into mine as we made our way through the old red-and-black square-tiled room. Carbone was a New York institution. Red-and-brown brick walls, dark woods—the kind of restaurant that the Mob would lust after. I could smell the red sauce and garlic pouring out from each dish as we passed the tables, and we entered into a private corner, with a packed long table taking up the entire alcove.
I saw Raini immediately, and hugged her tightly, thankful to have a friend at the table. Asher introduced me to three different producers. I recognized one of them as Amos. Then, he introduced me to the film’s first AD （assistant director）， the DP （director of photography）， the PM （production manager）， and person after person who had acronym after acronym—people who were going to make Asher’s movie something beautiful. The phrase “it takes a village” absolutely applied to filmmaking.
Around the first course, Amos leaned back in his chair across from me and Asher, with his indifference slightly waning now that it was buried under a second glass of red. Asher was engaged in conversation with Raini about the movie’s sex scene—him assuring her they’d hired an intimacy coordinator, and that the crew assembled that day would be minimal. Asher’s hand was casually around my shoulder, and in between their conversation, he looked back at me and kissed my cheek. I watched Amos stare at Asher and then myself. He grinned like a little kid.
“So, when did this happen?” Amos asked, not so subtly and not so quietly.
I swallowed my forkful of eggplant-and-zucchini scapece with a large sip of a terrifyingly expensive glass of Barbaresco, wide-eyed. Each head at the rectangular table quieted and shifted in my direction. I looked to Asher, seeing his hard jawline soften into a slight smile.