Chapter 18: What You Actually Want

Two weeks in. Dani had mostly stopped checking her email. She'd cleared the rental apartment, paid out the lease, moved her things into a guest house on Sloane's property—a small cottage about a hundred yards from the main residence, with its own entrance and its own kitchen and a specific quality of privacy that allowed both of them the fiction of maintaining separate lives while living entirely together.

She was reading in the guest house when Sloane arrived at the door with something between amusement and exasperation.

"You haven't left the property in six days," Sloane said.

"I left yesterday. I went to get coffee."

"You drove down to the gate and came back. That's not leaving the property, that's existing in a smaller version of the property."

Dani closed her book. Sloane was wearing that expression she got when she'd been thinking about something hard and had decided to say it instead of keep thinking. Which meant this was about to become the conversation neither of them had had yet.

"Come inside," Dani said.

Sloane came inside. She didn't sit. She walked to the kitchen window, which looked out at the main house in the distance, and just stood there for a moment like she was gathering language from the view.

"I'm happy," Sloane said. "This—with you, here, in the mornings when you're asleep and your face isn't performing anymore—I love it. I'm genuinely happy. But I'm also watching you disappear into this property like you're testing whether you can survive without the outside world, and I'm wondering if I'm the problem."

Dani wanted to argue. Wanted to say that she was happy too, that she was just taking time to recalibrate, that the outside world would still be there when she was ready.

"You're not the problem," Dani said. "But I am a little bit in a cocoon phase. I'll come out of it."

"When?"

"I don't know yet."

Sloane turned to face her. "Dani. This is me asking directly: are you hiding? Are you hiding from your career, or are you hiding from the fact that if you stay with me, you have to actually be public about it at some point?"

Dani didn't answer immediately. She was thinking about what Sloane was really asking, which wasn't just about leaving the property. It was about the fact that dating someone who lived in a glass house meant you were on display, that every choice became a statement, that privacy was a luxury neither of them could actually afford.

"What do you want?" Dani asked. "Do you want to be public?"

"I don't know," Sloane said. "That's not actually the question I'm trying to ask. I'm trying to ask: what are we doing here? Are you staying because this is what you want or because you're afraid of what happens if you leave?"

"Those might be the same thing."

"They're not. One means you've chosen me. The other means you're just hiding in me until it becomes impossible to hide anymore."

Dani stood. She walked to the kitchen counter and started making coffee because she needed something to do with her hands that wasn't reaching for Sloane or reaching away from her.

"I love you," Dani said. "That part is not a cocoon thing. That's real."

"I know."

"But I'm also terrified," Dani continued. "I'm terrified that if we go public, I become a footnote in your story. That instead of being a journalist, I'm the woman who wrote the profile and then fell in love with her subject. And I'm terrified that I don't actually know how to be in a relationship with someone I love because I've spent my entire professional life maintaining distance from the people I care about."

The coffee was brewing. The kitchen was quiet except for the small sound of the machine working.

"I also don't know if I can stay hidden," Sloane said. "I'm famous in a way that means people watch me. People recognize me. There's a point where me having someone stay in a guest house on my property becomes a story whether we want it to be or not."

"So what are you saying? That this has a timer on it?"

"No," Sloane said. "I'm saying there's a version of this where we figure out how to be together publicly, and a version of this where we figure out how to be together privately, and those two things require very different choices. And right now you're choosing to be in neither version—you're just existing in this liminal space and hoping it becomes obvious which one you want."

Dani poured two cups of coffee. She handed one to Sloane without adding anything because she'd learned, over the past two weeks, exactly how Sloane took her coffee—black, no sugar, just the thing itself.

"I don't want to share you," Dani said.

"With who? My publicist? The internet?"

"With anyone. I don't want you to become a story I'm part of. I don't want our relationship to be a thing that people know about and talk about and speculate on. I want this to just be ours."

Sloane drank the coffee. She looked at Dani over the rim of the cup with an expression that was equal parts understanding and sadness.

"Privacy is luxury I haven't had since I was twenty-two years old," Sloane said. "I've learned to live with the performance, with the constant sense of being seen. But that's not what I want. That's what I've had to accept. What I want is exactly what you want—for this to be ours. But I'm not sure it can be, not completely. Not if I keep working, not if we stay in LA, not if either of us has a public life."

"So what do we do?"

"We choose," Sloane said. "We choose how much of this we're willing to compromise. We choose whether being together is worth being watched while we're together. And we choose that clearly, not just by default."

Dani set down her coffee. She walked over to Sloane and took the cup out of her hand and set it on the counter. She took Sloane's face in her hands and looked at her—really looked at her, the way she'd looked at her in the profile, seeing the full complexity and the specific vulnerability of this woman.

"I choose you," Dani said. "Whatever version of you—public or private, performing or not performing. I choose you."

Sloane's eyes were bright. She reached for Dani's hands and held them in place like Dani might disappear if she didn't.

"Even if choosing me means the world knows about it?" Sloane asked.

"Even then."

"Even if it becomes a story instead of just a relationship?"

"Even then."

Sloane pulled Dani closer. She kissed her forehead, her eyes, the corner of her mouth. It was tender in a way that was almost unbearable—the kiss of someone who had just gotten confirmation that she was allowed to keep this.

"We don't have to figure out the publicity right now," Sloane said. "But we should figure out what we're actually choosing. We should know, when it becomes public, that we decided together that being seen was worth it."

"Okay," Dani said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. I'm tired of hiding anyway. From the world or from you or from myself. I want to just exist in this and know that I'm choosing it."

Sloane's smile was something Dani had never seen before—the smile of someone who had finally gotten to have what they actually wanted.

"How long do you want before it gets out?" Sloane asked.

"I don't know. How long before you think someone finds out anyway?"

"Days. Maybe a week. My publicist already suspects something because I cancelled a potential commercial gig in New York that I was supposed to do next month."

"Because you didn't want to leave."

"Because I didn't want to leave you," Sloane said. "And I should have just said that in a business meeting instead of inventing a reason about scheduling conflicts."

They stood in the kitchen of the guest house as the afternoon light changed. Outside, the main property was visible through the window—the house, the terrace, the view of the city. All of it about to become not just Sloane's backdrop anymore but the place where the two of them were actually building something.

"I'm going to tell Clea," Sloane said. "My publicist. I'm going to tell her that I'm in a relationship and that we're going to do it our way, not hers. And then I'm going to tell you that there's going to be noise and questions and the internet doing what the internet does. But we're going to face that together, and that matters more than whether the story is what people expect."

"Okay," Dani said.

Sloane kissed her again. This time it wasn't tender. This time it was the kiss of someone who had just made a decision and was committing to every consequence of it.

When they pulled apart, the light was still changing, was still reaching that point where afternoon becomes evening and everything softens just before the dark comes.

"I'm going to take a shower," Sloane said. "Then I'm going to call Clea and tell her something's coming. And then I'm going to take you to dinner somewhere in the city where we're going to be seen, and we're going to not care about it."

"Tonight?"

"Why not tonight? We've already decided. We might as well commit to it."

Dani watched Sloane leave the cottage. She finished the coffee that had gone cold. She thought about the last six weeks—about coming to Los Angeles to write a profile and instead building a life that made the profile seem like it was just research for something far more important.

She picked up her phone. It had been off for days. She turned it on.

Twenty-three messages. Three from her mother. Five from Meg. The rest from people asking about the next story, the next angle, the next thing Dani was going to publish about.

She didn't respond to any of them.

Instead, she changed into something nicer than her usual uniform of Sloane's old clothes, and she waited for Sloane to come back for her.

Whatever came next—the noise, the questions, the story that was going to be made from this—she was ready.

She was ready because she'd chosen it.