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“Not yet,” Harry said.
“Then how do you—”
“I got a call from Mitchell.”
Graham looked at him blankly.
“That PA who’s always hanging around with the photographers,” he explained. “It’s go
The phone in Harry’s hand rang, and he glanced at the number, then set it aside. In the hallway, they could hear the family next door returning to their room. They’d checked in a few nights ago, and when Graham had passed them in the hall for the first time, they’d all stopped without exactly meaning to. The father was the first to come to his senses, hurrying them along as one of his young daughters cupped a hand over her mouth, the words escaping between her fingers, giddy and disbelieving: “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” Even after they’d piled onto the elevator at the end of the hall and the doors had closed behind them, Graham could still hear high-pitched squeals of the two girls, and he hadn’t been able to keep from smiling.
Now he tried not to imagine what they might think when they saw his picture on the front page of one of the local papers that were always scattered around the lobby. If it didn’t happen tomorrow, it would undoubtedly happen the next day, the photo sure to be dark and grainy, set beneath some kind of silly and melodramatic headline like Lights Out, Thanks to Larkin.
“It wasn’t bad enough that you broke his camera?” Harry was saying, and Graham tipped his head back with a groan. “You had to punch the guy too?”
“I know,” he said. “But he was in my face. They all were. They were basically stalking us.”
Harry glanced up at the last word. “Us?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Let me guess…”
“You don’t need to,” Graham said, meeting his gaze.
Harry’s face was grim, and he reached up to ruffle the back of his hair. Graham could almost see him trying to swallow the words he so desperately wanted to say: I told you so. But it was there anyway, in his eyes, and Graham knew he was right. He should have stayed away from Ellie. But he wasn’t sorry for the same reasons. He didn’t care about bad publicity. He couldn’t even muster up any worry over Mick’s reaction to all this. All he could think about was Ellie. All he wanted was to make this okay for her.
“So what do we do now?” he asked, sitting forward. “Can we keep this under wraps? Or spin it somehow?”
“I’m trying,” Harry said. “If it were only the photos…”
Graham didn’t have to ask what that meant. “You mean if I hadn’t punched him.”
Harry’s phone began to ring again, and this time, he brought it to his ear. “Yeah,” he said, and then fell silent as he listened. Graham rose to his feet and walked into the bathroom, where he turned on the faucet, splashing cold water on his face, trying to shock away the events of the evening.
He placed a hand on each side of the sink and rocked forward, angry at himself for going down to the beach at all. But when he’d noticed his drawing framed in the window of her mother’s shop, there amid all the poems, something about the sight of it had seemed to carry him right down to the cove. And he couldn’t for a second regret what had happened there, could still feel it like a stamp across his chest, the place where Ellie had been curled against him.
Under the lights of the bathroom, he examined his hand where his knuckles had come into contact with the photographer’s cheekbone as he listened to Harry’s voice grow increasingly angry in the next room.
“It’s already out,” he said a moment later, appearing in the doorway of the bathroom. “Everyone’s ru
Graham looked up from the stream of water as it coursed over his sore hand. “What about her?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level. “Did they get a clear shot? A name?”
“Unidentified female,” he said. “For now, anyway.”
He breathed out. “Good,” he said. “Can we keep it that way?”
“I’ll try my best.”
“I know you will,” Graham said, turning off the faucet and grabbing a towel. “And I know I shouldn’t have done that. It’s completely my fault.”
“That’s true,” Harry said, but there was an uncharacteristic softness in his eyes as he leaned against the doorway. He should have been furious. Graham had seen him lose his temper over so much less: a parking ticket, an unhelpful publicist, a greedy producer, and even once, a child actor with a fondness for practical jokes.
Until tonight, Graham had managed to avoid any significant scandals, and Harry had every reason to be livid right now. He would be the one to have to deal with the lawyers, to try to plead with the photographer not to sue. For the next few days, he’d be coordinating with publicists and sweet-talking reporters. He’d be convincing Mick that Graham was still focused on the movie. He’d be trying to keep Ellie’s secrets from spilling out, trying to tamp down every bit of information he could, as if it weren’t as slippery as water.
And some of it was there, in the set of his jaw and the twitch of his eyelid, an anger that was simmering just below the surface. But there was also an unfamiliar sense of restraint in him too, and for this, Graham was grateful.
“Just tell me what you need me to do,” he said, feeling for the first time in a while that this wasn’t just business, that they were a team.
“Go get some ice on that,” Harry said, nodding at Graham’s already bruised knuckles. “And let me do my job.”
In his hand, the phone began to ring again, and he winked before bringing it to his ear, already listening intently as he walked back into the other room. With nothing else to do, Graham grabbed the ice bucket from a table near the closet and stepped out into the hallway, standing for a moment with his back against the door.
He knew there were actors who did this kind of thing all the time, and it would never occur to them to feel bad about the mess they’d made or the manager who would have to clean it up, much less worry about the guy they hit. But even though there was no other way the scene could have played out, Graham had never punched anyone before, and the sound of it—an audible crunch of bone on bone—rang in his head even now.
He held the empty ice bucket under his arm like a football as he lumbered down the hall. At the bank of machines, he watched the cubes of ice tumble down in a rush of noise and frozen air, and then he shoved his entire fist inside, wincing at the cold.
When he stepped back into the room, Harry was hunched over the computer. The phone at his side was on speaker, and Graham could hear the familiar voice of Rachel, his publicist, rattling off a list of news sources.
“All of them?” Harry asked, his voice strained.
“Within the hour,” Rachel said. “The broken camera didn’t help things either.”
“Sorry,” Graham said, slumping down on one of the beds, and he could almost hear her whole demeanor change, a shift like a tuning fork, sudden and vibrating.
“Hi, hon,” she said. “Didn’t know you were there.”
“Yeah,” Graham said. “I’m here.”
“What happened?” she asked with forced lightness. “You’re usually my easiest client.”
Graham must have looked ill equipped to answer this, because Harry stepped in before he could speak. “We’ll call you back, Rach, okay?” he said. “Just keep us posted.”
“Okay,” she said, just before hanging up. “But try to stay out of trouble.”
When she was gone, Harry glanced over at Graham. “You look awful,” he said. “Why don’t you grab a shower? It’s go
Afterward, Graham pulled on the same sandy shorts from the beach and the same striped polo, which still smelled of salt from the ocean. When he emerged from the bathroom, Harry was on another call, and Graham fell back on the bed, his eyes heavy as he listened to one half of the conversation. In spite of all the noise—the rise and fall of Harry’s voice, the intermittent buzzing of the phone on the table, the relentless churning hum of the computer—it didn’t take long for him to fall into a dreamless sleep.