you—” she said, but he shushed her as the song began.
He clicked through, being rough on the trackpad, and Orla read in silence: three-bulleted ideas of his for jewelry and clothing and unbreakable athletic water bottles, all of them branded with Floss’s name. On the slide detailing cosmetics, mascara was spelled with twice as many s’s and r’s as it needed. There was choppy clip art of lipstick that made her heart sink into her legs.
“I know the music isn’t synced up,” Danny said, “but you’re just practice. I’ll have it perfect before I show Floss.”
Orla sat up, tugging the sheet around herself, and looked at him. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t what?” The song continued to play, though the presentation was stuck on its final slide, which read: AND MUCH MORE IN THE FUTURE! “I worked really hard on this,” he said, darkening. “Floss needs to be licensing. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table here.” He reached into his beat-up backpack, which sagged on the floor, and pulled out a book. Make Your Name Make You Rich: A Primer on Branding & Licensing, the title read. The cover pictured the author: a Lebanese man in a pin-striped suit and neat magenta pocket square. “It’s all here,” Danny said, tossing the book at her stomach—a little hard, she thought. “You should read this. It’s a business-category bestseller on Amazon.”
Orla picked up the book. “I’ve met this guy,” she said. She couldn’t look at him. “He handles Floss’s licensing personally. They’re starting with a skin care line. Face by Floss.”
Danny leaned forward and hooked his arms around his drawn-up knees. “Well,” he said after a moment. “She still needs someone on the ground.”
Orla put a hand on his back. “It’s a huge undertaking,” she said. “You couldn’t do it with another job.”
He looked back at her, harshly. “Maybe I won’t have that job much longer,” he said. “I’m starting to think about my next move.”
Being with him had been perfect, eerily similar to what she imagined, until now. But now she realized that the strange thing about having a life she had built in a dream was that she had only dreamed so far. She had thought hundreds of times about the first time she would see him again, had thought thousands of times about their first kiss. Now she had run out of fantasy. But maybe, she thought, Danny’s plans went further than hers. Maybe she wasn’t the only one in the bed who knew what it was like to scheme toward something better. Who needed to hear they deserved it.
“That’s cool,” she said limply.
They didn’t talk about the PowerPoint again, but after that day, something tightened between them. Orla saw the way Danny ground his jaw when the crew bustled through the apartment, skirting him like he was furniture. One day, when he casually stayed next to Orla on the couch as the crew got set to roll, Mason looked up, annoyed, and said, “Hey, Orla, your boyfriend’s in the shot. Can we put him somewhere?”
Danny shrugged afterward, wounded, and said, “It’s just that I want to be with you all the time.”
She looked at the flannel shirt pulling apart at his chest, wearing thin at the elbows, and said, “Okay. I’ll fix it.”
They went shopping, Amadou shuttling them at Orla’s direction. She nodded as the women she knew at each boutique, the ones who let her in the side doors, draped Danny in shawl-collar sweaters, blazers that curved snug around his shoulders, fitted jeans that fell on his scuffed Reeboks all wrong but on the buttery desert boots from the other side of the store just right. Danny hesitantly touched a pale gray cashmere sweater, and Orla nodded emphatically. Then she took him to the man who cut Aston’s waves. Danny watched with naked wonder as the stylist whipped his thinning spikes into a head of hair. The man tucked pomade and thickening treatments into a small white bag and handed it to Danny with a smile. “Much better,” he said. Orla paid with her credit card. She had had it out all day.
After, they met the others at a restaurant on Downing Street. Orla led Danny down a narrow set of stairs to the basement, where the rest of them were already seated in a private, warm room off the kitchen, walled in with colonial brick and walnut. Orla could tell instantly that Floss and Aston were fighting. Floss had her elbow propped