One Last Shot, page 17
Rather than have Emerson and Harry stand in front of a classic Cinque Terre overlook, I pose her on a corner where three streets intersect. The warm tones of the colorful houses frame her, and it looks likes she could be basically anywhere in Europe. Most importantly, she’s subtly backlit, instead of in direct sun or full shade, and a stream of light shines between the houses onto her back, creating a halo around her head and a great lens flare on camera.
Since she was just on lunch she’s in jean shorts and a white tank top, which is all too reminiscent of the Emerson I used to know. After seeing her be vulnerable yesterday, laughing together over gelato, feeling how intensely she supports me, it’s harder to keep my feelings in check. And when I snap the shutter, the image is incredible. It’s the kind of shot I wanted to take of her when we were eighteen, but I didn’t yet have the tools or the skills to. It might be my favorite shot I’ve ever taken.
And then Harry ambles into frame and plants a huge kiss on her cheek. I recoil from my viewfinder.
Harry’s voice is flippant and completely overconfident. And the way his hand casually dropped to Emerson’s back was far too territorial for my taste. “Marissa? Mandy? Maria? That crazed woman with the clothes has your outfit. I can stand in for…”
“Theo,” I mutter.
“This is Theo,” Emerson fills in. She’s shooting daggers at him, and her jaw is clenched. What is the deal here?
“Right. Thanks for doing this, man, hope it builds your book or whatever. My right side is my good one.” Then he turns to Emerson. My Emerson. “And every side is your good one, babe. You look stunning. Doesn’t she?”
That might have been directed at me, but I pointedly ignore him, and Emerson runs off to change. I’m left staring at Harry, who looks all too amused by my obvious annoyance. But who is he to call Emerson “babe”? “Hello? Did you get that?” He waves a hand at me and overexaggerates turning his right cheek toward me. Pompous prick.
“Right side, got it,” I confirm. “Anything else?”
“Can you make me look taller than her?” Harry looks around and his eyes light up when he spots the apple box Kevin is carrying over. “Won’t look right to the fans if we’re the same height.”
“But you are the same height.” I keep my tone even, professional. But inside I’m gloating, because I both am genuinely taller than Emerson, and man enough not to be emasculated when she’s stood next to me in heels and we’re the same height.
Harry looks at me like he’s concerned I might be a bit slow, then directs his attention toward Kevin. “Let’s put that here.”
Kevin hides a smirk and drops the apple box at Harry’s feet. We stand in a tense silence, the only sound the chatter of fans and a few stray paparazzi who are watching from the wings, until Emerson rushes back over and we all come back to life. She eyes the apple box skeptically, but ultimately ignores it as Harry steps onto it and gains a solid six inches.
I adjust my frame to hide the box and start snapping away without saying anything to them. If I was shooting any other celebrity couple, real or not, I would be directing them to lean in close, stare into each other’s eyes, be romantic. But I just can’t make myself ask them to do those things, even for GQ. Because watching them, I can’t help but admit to myself that I wish I was in Harry’s place, fitting into Em’s world so effortlessly that everyone with a pulse is rooting for them to make it official.
Fortunately for the cover, they’re both pros and need no direction. They wordlessly launch into a series of poses. He places a hand on her lower back and brings his forehead to hers, and my stomach churns. She stands on tiptoes and nestles her head into his neck, and my pulse races. He wraps a hand around her neck and she pushes through a flinch, and I stop shooting, my blood pounding.
“Emerson, are you okay?” For a moment she looked uncomfortable, I’m sure of it. Although I’m automatically adjusting my stance, aperture, framing, my focus is trained on her.
“Yes. Great.” Her words are obviously clipped, but no one else seems to notice. I’m reluctant to raise the camera until I know that she wants to keep going. “Theo. We only have an hour.”
Message received. I continue snapping photos of them, getting a range of shots. I can’t help but notice that when Emerson stares into Harry’s eyes, she looks almost bored. Nothing compared with what I captured of her on the rocks our first day.
I position myself slightly behind Harry, to his right, as requested, and line up a tighter shot of Emerson with her hands wrapped around the back of his neck. I have a three-quarter shot of him and his frustratingly strong jaw and classic profile, and Emerson almost in full. If she could just look the tiniest bit toward me, and get an ounce of passion into her gaze, this will be the shot.
“Em,” I say, my voice low. “You look incredible.”
When she looks toward me, her face having broken from her on-camera mask to reveal a soft smile and wistful eyes, I snap the shot and immediately pull back to look in the viewfinder. “This is it,” I declare. Since she looked at me, not at the lens, you can’t tell that she’s looking at me rather than Harry in the shot, and she looks both gorgeous and expressive.
I turn the camera toward them and catch Harry watching Emerson’s expression fall as she realizes I complimented her to get a shot. He looks surprised that she cares. I hope she isn’t hurt by it, but I love the shot and secretly like that my compliments are what gets her to feel something real.
Emerson texts a photo of the shot to her agent, and after a moment she nods in approval. I hand off the card to Kevin so he can run it to the digi-tech to be retouched and send out the images. “When will this come out?”
Emerson freezes midtext, and then looks up at me and grins. “In twelve hours.”
I whistle and gesture toward Harry, who walked away the second the shot was approved, after giving Emerson a brief hug. “This is moving fast.”
Emerson rolls her eyes. “I told you, that’s show business. And the original cover got axed because the starlet posted a video she shouldn’t have and is basically canceled. Harry and I are a surefire viral moment. Who knows, maybe they’ll even print it, and you can get your mom one.”
I wonder if Emerson has to worry about getting canceled. If she’s afraid all of this will be taken away. But I don’t ask. “Well, thanks for thinking of me.”
“Of course you’re who I thought of.”
We walk in silence toward the trailer. I don’t know if she’s annoyed by how I got the shot, concerned over Harry practically blowing her off, or just not looking forward to shooting more looks. But whatever has her down, I want to bring her back up.
When we split, her to change and touch up, and me to shoot Jillian, I call after her. “Hey, Em?” She turns back toward me, pauses. “You do look incredible. Just so you know.”
The smile she gives me makes my knees go wobbly.
CHAPTER TWENTY
—Junior Year—
Emerson
At promptly five thirty, after leading the team in a rousing chant and sweating for two hours straight, Theo jogged directly off the field and over to me, ignoring the shouts of guys on the team, or any halfhearted calls from girls in the bleachers. Everyone knew that when I was in front of him, I had his full attention. I lay on the turf and daydreamed, read, wrote stories, generally occupied myself with solitary activities since the girlfriends who watched the weekly scrimmage from the bleachers wanted nothing to do with me. I couldn’t hack it in the honors classes, where the girls might actually have appreciated my book recommendations and dry humor, and I didn’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of mascara brands and clothes necessary to have a successful chat with the girls in my classes. They just thought I was weird, so when a few months after that dismal day at orientation my friendship prospects didn’t become more promising, I gave up on girlfriends and convinced myself that all I needed was Theo.
A good example of humor that was clearly only funny to me was how, while the popular girls typically yelled things like, “You’ve got it, Chad!” and “Kill him, Josh!” and “Go, Tommy!” I offered up more creative praise. “Theo, if you get that goal, I’ll flash the team!” This, I learned, was too rousing, so today I went with, “If you get a point, we can watch Legally Blonde for the twentieth time! I know it’s your favorite!” Theo responded well when he was slightly embarrassed, his irritation propelling the ball into the net with more force than he’d demonstrated five minutes earlier.
“Em, you know, you really don’t need to keep cheering for me.” Theo lugged his tremendous gear bag over one shoulder, and like the gentleman he was, hoisted my backpack over his other shoulder, where it dangled, laughably small in comparison. “Your cheers aren’t especially motivational.”
“Theo, I have to entertain myself for two hours straight. I’ve got to keep things lively.” I slid my hand through the crook of his arm, which was slick with sweat and had small black pieces of turf plastered to it.
“You don’t have to come! I could get dropped off at your house after.” He subtly flexed his bicep under my hand, which I refused to acknowledge, although a thrill traced its way down my spine.
“Maybe I like watching you sweat.” I got into my passenger seat and threw the keys on the driver’s seat. Theo had his license but had another few months until he inherited Owen’s car.
Theo slid into the car, as comfortable as if it were his own, and headed toward my house. Thursday evenings were our longstanding movie night. Back when my dad was around, he handled Thursdays while my mom went out with friends. He would pick up pizza on his way home from work, and we’d eat it in bed, without my mom there to scold us, and I’d stay up too late, then rush to pretend to be asleep when she came home. It only lasted until I was ten, when he went to work one morning and never returned, and our house began accumulating things as though my mom might one day be able to trade fifty shoeboxes of random crap for her husband.
When I’d told Theo Thursday was my favorite weekday, due to a now-defunct tradition, he took it upon himself to reinvigorate the magic of Thursday nights. I typically kept him as far away from my chaotic household as possible, but on Thursdays I made an exception, and we holed ourselves away in my room, watching movies and eating junk. After doing this for two years, he’d run into my mom fewer than five times.
This was his week to pick the movie, but first I had agreed to let him read my short story, after months of him asking to and me insisting it wasn’t good enough to be read. I opened the file on my computer and curled up in the corner of my headboard and the wall while he sat a charged two inches away from me and read it. It was the first time someone besides the Salem High creative writing teacher had read my work, and it was terrifying. Theo’s opinion mattered more to me than anyone else’s.
Suddenly he chuckled quietly. I strained to look at the page. I tried to remain silent and let him keep reading, but I couldn’t do it. “What’s so funny? What part are you reading?”
Theo glanced up. “Em, you said not to say anything until I finish it.”
“I know, I know. But just tell me what part.”
“She’s dressing down the guy at the end of their first date. It’s hilarious.”
I exhaled a sigh of relief and smiled. “I’m glad you think it’s funny.”
“Of course I do.” Theo jostled my knee with his own. “Why don’t you go fill your water or something? It’s hard to read with you watching over my shoulder like this.”
I was watching every tiny movement of his face, desperate to hear that he liked what he was reading. He wasn’t even a reader, so I shouldn’t have judged based on his opinion anyway, but I was greedy for feedback. “Come on,” he added. “I’ll tell you everything afterwards, I swear.”
“Fine,” I relented. I spent ten minutes on my phone in the kitchen, watching the minutes tick away, and then Theo called my name and I raced back up the stairs. “So what did you think?”
He looked up at me from the bed while I tapped my foot impatiently and picked at my cuticles, too nervous to meet his gaze in case he hated it. “You can tell me if you hate it.” There was silence for all of two seconds before I changed my mind. “Actually don’t. I don’t want to know. Don’t say anything.” I climbed over Theo, back onto my place on the bed. “Let’s just watch the movie.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes! Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. I know it needs work.”
“Em, I loved it. I know it’s an early draft, but it’s funny, and smart, and I think it’s really good. The characters felt real, and I liked the Salem details. And I don’t know how you came up with the flashback stuff, and then made it jump back to the present and all that … impressive, honestly.” Theo moved closer to me, so that our shoulders were touching. “It’s good, Emerson. I swear. I want to read everything you write.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced myself to look at Theo. To confirm he was genuine, even though I knew he wouldn’t lie to me. “You’re biased, though.”
“It’s good. Take a compliment for once.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll read it again tomorrow and leave notes in the margin for you.”
“Thank you,” I repeated. “Really. I’m glad you don’t hate it.”
“Don’t be silly.”
I pressed my shoulder into Theo’s slightly, then leaned forward to grab the computer he’d set down. “Movie time?” When I leaned back, he grabbed the pizza box from the floor and moved back to his original position, and the two inches of space was separating us again. Like every other night we sat in bed. It’s amazing how small a few inches feel when you’re hyperconscious of it for several hours straight every week for a year.
“How about The Departed? I know you love a guy with a Boston accent.” Theo folded a slice of pizza in half and took a gulping bite, causing half of it to disappear in one go. He always insisted on getting an extra-large pie, even though I only ate two slices, and the amount he put down nauseated me.
I eyed the laptop apprehensively. I hated gory movies. “Fine, but only if you’ll talk in a Boston accent to me.”
“Will ya watch The Depahted with me?” I could feel the hot air of his pizza-laden breath on my face.
“Fine,” I agreed. We spent the first half hour of the movie talking over it, imitating their accents, and finishing our food. At the first truly violent scene I jumped, and instead of laughing at me like he might have any other week, Theo raised his arm from where it was pressed tight to his side, preserving the crucial two inches, and wrapped it around me. I was so shocked that I forgot to breathe for a moment, and my exhale sounded ragged and violent when I finally let it out and leaned in to him.
The heat of his palm on my arm was sensual. We’d probably watched over a hundred movies together and had never cuddled. Not once. I didn’t want to move. I never wanted to stop, his broad chest holding me close, my heart pounding in my chest, so loud I couldn’t stop to listen and try to decipher how fast his own was beating.
Theo didn’t say a word, so I didn’t either.
“So, what did you think?” Theo asked at the end of the movie. His voice rumbled against my back and I felt the baritone in my chest. His finger absentmindedly stroked my arm.
“I have to admit, it was good.” I didn’t move. Could we really not mention how momentous this was?
After sitting silently for a moment, wrapped up in each other while I tried to memorize every inch of him that was touching me in case I never had another moment like this again, he extricated himself and began to gather up his things and the trash we’d left on the floor. He always cleaned up for me on Thursdays and let himself out, saying it was so I didn’t have to get up out of bed, even though as soon as he left, I would get up anyway to brush my teeth.
He was acting the same as any other week. The only thing that betrayed him was a slight flush that was stuck on his cheeks. Otherwise, I might have thought I imagined the past two hours. “Call me when you get home?” I said, the same words I said every week.
He flushed even deeper as he ducked out. “Of course.”
Twenty minutes later his disembodied voice was back in my bed. “Em, I’m sorry if I made things weird. You’re, uh … my best friend.”
“You didn’t,” I assured him. I squeezed my eyes shut, grateful that he couldn’t see me, because I couldn’t keep pinpricks of tears from overflowing out of them. Letting him read my story was the most vulnerable I’d been in years. I thought his arm around me might actually have meant something after that.
“Okay, good,” he replied finally.
I put my line on mute and tried desperately to get my voice back under control. I had been completely fine for two years, but now that I had let hope break through for one night, I was racked with disappointment. We were just friends. I knew that. And couldn’t let myself think otherwise.
“Goodnight, Em.”
“Goodnight, Theo.” I hung up the line without waiting to hear if he might say anything else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Emerson
I’m never more shocked than when an early wrap time actually happens as scheduled. The call sheet had us arriving at four a.m. for hair and makeup, but wrapping at three p.m., which sounded way too good to be true, especially considering we took a late lunch and had to squeeze in GQ. But the sun is still high in the sky at three fifteen when Stacey calls it. “That’s a wrap!”
It takes a lot for me to keep things remotely professional with Theo. I need more time with him off set when we can act like friends, not coworkers. I think I made it clear that the shoot with Harry is just press, so hopefully it’s not too much of a wrench in my “Win Theo Over” plan.
“Should we go shopping or something?” Rachel asks as we sit in the trailer, wiping makeup off our faces.
“The hotel has a great hot tub,” Evonique offers. “I went in for like five minutes last night because all the underwater work left me so cold.”
