The Vanity Fair house, Friday night, 11:42 p.m.
I am standing under a courtyard heater holding a champagne flute and pretending to laugh at something a producer just said. Caspian is two steps to my left, half-listening, his hand resting in the small of my back. His thumb has been tracing one slow horizontal inch on my spine for the last ten minutes. I am, professionally, an automaton. Internally I am being microwaved.
A woman in a scarlet Versace is moving through the crowd toward us.
I know her. Everyone knows her. She has been on three magazine covers this year and on the arm of four different leading men, and her perfume — Tom Ford Black Orchid, recognizable from across a courtyard — arrives twelve seconds before she does.
"Caspian." She angles in. Her hand comes up to land on his lapel as if his lapel is a piece of property she holds keys to. "It's been ages."
Oh, absolutely not.
Hand. Off. The lapel. The lapel is mine. The lapel and what is under the lapel are mine. Move the hand or I will move the hand for you in a way that ends up on Deuxmoi by morning.
Caspian inclines his head a precise quarter-inch. He does not smile. He does not retreat. What he does, smoothly, with the hand at my back, is draw me half a step closer into him so that the line of my hip is flush against his thigh, and at the same time he says:
"Forgive me. My wife is sensitive to perfume."
The smile dies on her face one muscle at a time. I watch it. I watch it the way I would watch the climactic shot of an A24 film. Her hand comes off the lapel. She murmurs something with too many vowels and turns, and the scarlet dress moves away from us through the crowd.
Caspian's thumb resumes its inch on my spine.
Holy shit.
Holy shit. Did you see that. Did you SEE that. He just — clinically — he just dispatched her. With a single sentence. I am. I am swooning. I am a Jane Austen heroine. I am pre-feminist. I do not care.
He bends his head. His mouth grazes the curve of my ear.
"Mrs. Vale satisfied?"
His breath is warm. The hairs along my arm rise.
Yes. God. Yes. More than satisfied. I am dangerously satisfied. We are going to have to have a long talk later about how satisfied I am.
I keep my face composed. I sip my champagne. He straightens, returns his eyes to the producer, and the producer keeps talking about a streaming deal as though nothing has happened.
The rest of the night is —
The rest of the night is the strangest performance of my life. I am Mrs. Vale on the outside, smiling on cue, accepting compliments on the dress, deflecting questions about whether Caspian will do the Tarantino. I am the wife the publicist briefed. And under the wife, secretly, in italics, I am running a parallel commentary which Caspian-the-eavesdropper-Vale is meeting in real time with a series of small, uncanny accommodations.
I think the canapés are sad. A waiter materializes with a small plate of pistachio macarons from somewhere I did not know macarons were being served.
I admire the necklace on a producer's wife. The next morning, a Cartier rep emails my assistant about previewing the new Étincelle line "at Mr. Vale's request."
I watch him tilt back the last of a glass of bourbon. The line of his throat moves. The tendon — that tendon — flexes.
Okay. Listen. I do not know who designed his neck but they should be in jail.
He turns his head, mid-conversation, and looks at me. Just looks. One beat, two. His eyes ask, very politely, yes? — and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
I am oscillating between mortified and unsalvageable on a five-second loop. I am also, possibly, having the best night of my life.
In the car on the way home I lean my head against the cool window. The driver knows the way. Caspian does not look at his phone. He looks at me. The streetlights slide across his face in stripes.
Maybe, I think, very quietly, like setting something down in case it shatters, maybe being heard isn't the worst thing.
He does not answer. But the corner of his mouth moves, micrometers, and his hand finds mine on the leather seat.
The house is dark when we come in. I kick my heels off in the foyer and they thud away across the hardwood. My hair is coming down. My back hurts in the specific way only Oscar de la Renta makes a back hurt.
"I'm taking the first shower," he says.
"Hey —"
He is already moving. He cuts past me into our bedroom and the door of the en-suite closes. The water starts.
I roll my eyes and pad to the dressing room. Pull off the gown like peeling fruit. I get into a sleep set, twist my hair off my neck, walk back into the bedroom rubbing the back of my own knuckles against my jaw —
— and stop.
The bathroom door is not closed. It is open three inches. Steam is rolling out in a soft wedge through the gap. Through the gap I can see, dimly, the edge of the marble shower, the line of an arm, the suggestion of motion. He is humming. Caspian Vale, of all the people I have ever met, is humming, low and slightly off-key, in our shower.
I freeze in the middle of our bedroom.
He did that on purpose.
He absolutely did that on purpose.
That door does not just casually drift three inches open. Doors don't do that. He is — he is leaving the door — for me — to —
The water stops.
"Wren."
His voice comes through the gap, low, water-roughened, perfectly conversational.
"Could you grab me a towel? I think I forgot one."
I stare at the ceiling. I ask the ceiling for strength. The ceiling does not give it.
This is the worst pretext I have ever heard. There has not been a thinner pretext in the history of pretexts. He has linen closets. He has a stylist on retainer. He once won a BAFTA. He did not "forget" a towel.
Caspian Vale, you absolute menace.
I walk, slowly, to the linen closet. I pull out one large white towel. I hold it like a shield. I cross the bedroom. I knock on the open door.
"Towel."
The door pulls open another four inches. An arm comes out. Water is running down the line of his forearm, rolling off the elbow, pooling for a second in the dip of his wrist before falling. The veins on the underside of his arm. The width of his hand. I have, professionally, lost the ability to swallow.
I hold out the towel. He takes it. My eyes — my eyes are not under management — flick past the doorway.
The bathroom is full of steam. He is shirtless. Of course he is shirtless. There is a second towel slung low at his hips, not quite where towels are normally slung. Above it, the cut of his obliques is — I cannot describe this in a way that doesn't make me a person who deserves to be in jail. Water on the line of his sternum. The hair at his temples is dark and wet, falling over his forehead, and his eyes — his eyes are watching mine watching him, with an expression that is nine-tenths amusement and one-tenth something I am not going to name out loud.
I am seeing it. I am actually seeing it. This is happening. The body is — the body is BETTER than I —
He laughs. A low laugh, almost soundless, that I have never in three years heard him make. He takes the towel.
"Mrs. Vale," he says, "you're drooling."
He shuts the door.
I stand in the middle of our bedroom with my hand pressed flat over my own mouth. My pulse is in my ears. The fan in the bathroom kicks on. Inside it I can hear him, faintly, still laughing.
Caspian Vale, you absolute, comprehensive menace.