Siren Queen(71)

The growl, unmistakably Jacko’s, rose up like a gathering thunderstorm, but after a long minute when no one burst around the corner, we let out deep breaths of relief.

“Button your shirt all the way up,” I whispered to Tara. “I bit you too hard.”

While she hurried to tend to her clothes, I crept out of the canvas rolls to see Emmaline striding away. Olivia wore white until the final confrontation with the siren. She held her long skirts out of the dust of the studio floor, her white kid boots making a brisk tapping sound as she went.

“Emmaline, wait…”

She paused but instead of turning, she just kept walking. I cursed under my breath and picked up my pace. We hadn’t talked since that Friday. I hadn’t been back, didn’t know whether I could find her fire there or not.

“Dammit, wait…”

Finally, close to the rear exit at the back of the sound stage, I hooked my hand around her elbow, pulling her back. She spun fast enough that I nearly stumbled, and she shook my hand off of her viciously.

“What?” she asked. “What the hell could you possibly want from me?”

“I wanted to say thank you,” I said unsteadily, and her eyes narrowed.

“You can thank me by learning just a little discretion! Goddamnit, Luli, why can’t you just take her home and do it with the blinds shut?”

“Because I don’t want to,” I said sullenly. “Because it’s fun. What do you care, anyway?”

There was still a farm girl somewhere inside all that gleaming white cotton. She grabbed my fishnet and dragged me forward, so strong that I couldn’t do anything but follow.

“Do you think I want to watch after you on set like you’re a baby I can’t leave alone? If I wanted a baby, I would have stayed in fucking Waverly.”

I knocked her hand away and stepped back, glaring at her. “No one asked you to look after me like that. You made it clear at the fires that we were done, so let’s be done, Emmaline. What were you even doing following me back there? What the hell did you want?”

Emmaline looked as if she wanted to take great handfuls of her hair or maybe mine and rip it out. She was red and blotchy and angry, furious like she only ever seemed to get with me.

She doesn’t get like this with Cassidy Dutch, I thought, and that still pleased me a little.

“Be careful! Just that. We’re all in this together, why don’t you understand that? You, me, all the ones who came before us and will come after. We survive because we’re not seen, and you … you go to the Pipeline. You go dancing with the girl from makeup, and you kiss the screenwriter who don’t know enough not to wear pants!”

I narrowed my eyes, because I heard something in her voice that wasn’t worried about safety. Oh, she was worried that I would bring the whole world down on us, but I knew that. There was something else there too.

“Are you jealous?”

Her eyes flashed, and if she could have struck me down in that moment, she might have done it.

“Of course I am,” she said bitterly. “You go dancing, and I sit at home kissing Cassidy Dutch. What do you think?”

“But—”

She slapped her hand down over my mouth like I imagined her slapping the lid on a pot boiling over.

“I can’t come with you. Maybe you’re so foreign and strange that you can get away with it, but not me.”

I saw it then, or rather I saw Emmaline Sauvignon. Emmaline Sauvignon was the woman all the little girls should want to be, the one all the boys should want to fuck. She got top billing, and she earned it by being their perfect, untouchable dream. I got to be the monster, and I earned it by being a monster: foreign, foreboding, and poisonous.

Emmaline took a deep breath, the red fading from her cheeks slowly.

“There’s no amount of strange or foreign or valuable either that will cover up them finding you with your knickers down for Lester Moore,” she said coldly. “You think it hasn’t happened before? It has, and Helen Martel told me their names, because you can’t even type them anymore, not in any place Oberlin Wolfe can reach. Every one that went took another two or three with them, and by God, Luli, I have worked too hard to suffer for your shipwreck.”

In the silence between us, I heard someone on set shouting for some more sand to cover the concrete.

“I won’t let that happen to you,” I said, and Emmaline stepped closer to me.

“Why? Because you’ll protect me?” she asked.

I could tell she meant to say it scornfully, but there was something deep inside her that was still soft for me too. She was a star, and for just a moment, I would have promised her the whole world just to make her shine a little brighter.

She was so close to me, and it awoke every memory of kissing her throat, of touching her skin and feeling our arms and legs twist together until there was nothing in the world that could tear us apart …

“Hey, what the hell is going on here?”

Jacko’s voice was like a hammer bludgeoning the scene to pieces. Emmaline let go of me as if I had burned her. We didn’t have the leisure of freezing. Jacko stomped in, an assistant and of course Tara on his heels.

Absently, I noticed that Tara looked as if she had scrubbed in cold water. She looked clean and patently virtuous, her collar buttoned all the way up in the heat. I avoided meeting her eyes because that was all we needed, and I turned to Jacko instead.