Chapter 3 —Something Different About Her

• Julian's POV
• Dominic, my manager told me not to do it.
• He said it with the flat rehearsed calm of a man who had managed my life for four years and watched me make every kind of bad decision.
• He sat across from me on the tour bus, phone in hand, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and said, "Julian, she is a reporter. Think about what you are doing before you do it."
• "She is not that kind of reporter," I said.
• "They are all that kind of reporter."
• "You have not even met her."
• "I do not need to meet her," he said, and went back to his phone. That was his way of ending the conversation.
• But I could not stop thinking about her. I tried for a full week after the signing session to file her as a nice moment that did not need to go anywhere. It did not work.
• I kept returning to the portrait, the care she put into every detail, the hours she spent on something she would hand to a stranger, and then the way she looked at me when she slipped her number into my palm. Not starstruck. Not performing. Just honest. That honesty stayed with me longer than anything had in a while.
• So I texted her. Then I heard her voice on FaceTime and Dominic's whole speech vanished like smoke.
• ****
• I booked the restaurant myself, which I never do. Something about letting my assistant handle this felt wrong, like it would cheapen what it was supposed to be. Aurelie's had the best table in Starlight Bay, quiet enough to actually talk, discreet enough to get through dinner without cameras finding us before the appetisers arrived.
• She walked in and my chest did something inconvenient.
• She wore a deep green dress, simple and nothing forced, her hair down, looking around the room with an expression that sat somewhere between impressed and determined not to show it. I stood up, watched her spot me, watched her smile. I thought, Dominic is going to be furious, and I did not care at all.
• "You actually came," I said when she reached the table.
• "Did you think I would not?" She slid into the seat across from me.
• "I thought you might talk yourself out of it."
• She laughed, the exact sound I had replayed in my head for a week, unguarded and completely real. "I almost did," she admitted. "I changed outfits four times."
• "For the record," I said, "you picked the right one."
• She looked at me across the table with those eyes and said, "flattery already and we have not even ordered yet."
• Dinner lasted two hours and felt like twenty minutes. She talked about her job with real passion, the kind most people save for things they chose entirely on their own terms.
• She listened too, really listened, asking questions that proved she had been paying attention, laughing at the right moments, pushing back at others. By the time the plates were cleared I was leaning toward her without having decided to.
• Paparazzi were waiting outside when we left. I saw the cameras before she did, felt her tense beside me, and put my hand on the small of her back. "Just keep walking," I said quietly. "Do not look at them." She did, chin up, not breaking stride once. I thought, she is going to be fine in this world.
• We went out twice more before I asked her properly. I did not want to rush it. I wanted her to be sure and I needed to be sure too, sure that this was not just the novelty of someone who felt different from everything I was used to.
• But every time I spent time with her I came away more certain, not less, and so one evening over dinner I looked at her and said, "I want you to be my girlfriend. Officially. No more grey area."
• She looked back at me with that smile and said she needed a few days to think about it, which drove me quietly out of my mind, and then she called me on a Thursday evening and said yes, and something settled in my chest that I had not realised was unsettled.
• The night she said yes I took her back to my place.
• We sat on the roof terrace with the city lights spread out below us and talked until the sky began to lighten at the edges. There was something about the way the night sat between us, easy and unhurried, that I was not entirely used to. Usually silence made me reach for something to fill it. With her I did not feel that pull at all.
• In the middle of a sentence she stopped. I stopped. The space between us went very still.
• I kissed her slowly, one hand against her jaw. She made a soft sound against my mouth and when I pulled back just enough to look at her, her lips were parted, eyes wide, and she said, "okay, that was not nothing."
• "No," I said. "It was not nothing."
• I kissed her again and neither of us pulled away.
• I walked her inside, her hand in mine. In the low light of the room she looked up at me and something in the way she held my gaze, open and certain, made something tight inside me finally come undone.
• I reached up and slid one strap of her dress off her shoulder slowly, watching her face, checking. She held my gaze and slid the other strap down herself.
• What followed was unhurried and honest in a way I had not expected, nothing performed, nothing calculated, just the two of us figuring each other out in the quiet dark of a room with the city glowing somewhere below us.
• She was warm and unguarded and she said my name like it meant something, and I found myself paying attention in a way I had not paid attention to another person in longer than I wanted to admit.
• Afterward she curled against my chest and I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to our breathing slow, a smile finding its way onto my face before I even noticed it.
• "What are you smiling at?" she asked, without lifting her head. She always knew.
• "Nothing," I said.
• She made a skeptical little sound. I tightened my arm around her and she settled closer and went quiet.
• I lay there in the dark feeling something I did not have a clean word for. Not the rush of a stage. Not the noise of a crowd. Something quieter than any of that, something that sat still in the centre of my chest without demanding anything from me.
• I had met a lot of people in this life. A lot of women. Most of them wanted something from the version of me that existed on stage or in headlines.
• Emily had walked into that signing session with a portrait she spent weeks painting and handed it to me like a gift with no strings attached, and then walked away without looking back, and I had not stopped thinking about her since.
• I did not know what this was yet. It was too early to know. But lying there in the dark with the weight of her against me, I was in no hurry to figure it out.
• Emily had spent weeks painting my face on a canvas and handed it to me like it was simply something she wanted to do, no angle, no agenda and for the first time in a long time I was not performing anything. No stage, no crowd, no version of myself I had to maintain for anyone watching.
• I had forgotten what that felt like, someone being real with me just because that was who they were. Honest and warm and completely uncalculated, and I found myself thinking that there was something quietly beautiful about a person who did not even know how rare they were.