fic: spiderwebs (rpf)
spiderwebs (gwen stefani wrote a song about this)
rpf. the superhero always gets the girl - on and off the set. andrew garfield/emma stone, with surprise carey mulligan, jesse eisenberg, jamie dornan, eddie redmayne and felicity jones. rated pg-13. 5366 words.
notes:
. . . I think that about sums it up. Look at my life, look at my choices. The usual suspects are most likely to blame, lol.
you think that we connect, that the chemistry’s correct -
(NO DOUBT)
They met at a party.
Judd Apatow threw a party and they went (no, they met there) and she can drink a lot, even though she told him, a little too smugly mind you, that she was only twenty-one, and he’s got some years on her, don’t you, gramps? and Michael Cera was there for some reason, and does anyone actually like Michael Cera? but she didn’t seem to mind when he (Andrew, not Michael Cera) found a dark corner for her, the dark fill of his mouth and -
No. They met an audition. She was nervous and so was he so he laughed and when he had to kiss her a push of nervous breath entered her mouth, and after, she asked, in that absurdly sultry movie-stars-of-yore voice, if he had thought they were in that much trouble and that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would be their saving grace. He had laughed again, because that’s what he does, or that’s what he’d say he does when he’s nervous, and offered they test their technique out again. She shrugged him off, because they’re professionals after all, and later he’ll think that a different term should be coined for when two actors press their mouths together in pantomime of the actual act, because to call it a kiss feels to grant it more reverence than he wants to allow it, because they are professionals, despite any and all further evidence to the contrary, and -
Scratch that. They met on the street outside of a Starbucks and he had just ordered a “venti pumpkin thing,” and she wasn’t planning on ordering anything there at all, and their mouths did not touch, not even once.
That sounds about right.
The first day on-set is more awkward than he anticipated. He guesses that’s to be expected - rehearsals always carry with them that weird air of nervousness, but this is just kind of weird. From what Jesse had mentioned of her, he expected her to be more loquacious (Jesse’s word, not his) and bubbly (his impression; he may have YouTubed her a little/a lot). Instead they’re just sort of doing a good job of not looking at each other at the craft services table.
“So,” he says at her elbow, breaking the silence. She bites her lip.
“So . . . “ she echoes.
“Are you really friends with Taylor Swift?” he asks her, bluntly. She looks up from her multiple spilled packets of Splenda and her face lights up.
“Are you really friends with Edward Cullen?”
“He has a name, you know. And, no, it’s not Cedric Diggory.” Emma scrunches her lips up and nods, judgment written across her face. “How about I don’t mock your friends so long as you don’t mock mine, eh?” he says.
She leans in, and what he’ll never know is if she simply misjudged the amount of space between them she meant to close or if a more nefarious purpose was at play, because she leans in, and her lips brush against the whorl of his ear as she says, “Nah, I’m still gonna mock yours.” She starts to walk away and Andrew scratches at the back of his neck.
“Justin Timberlake!” he shouts after her. She turns around and shakes her head, her face twisted in an overly dramatic confused expression. “That’s one friend cooler than yours!”
Emma braces her hands on her hips. “Paul McCartney,” she shouts back. “Boom!”
“Lies! Legend, yes. Looks like an elderly woman, also yes. Did he bring sexy back? Negative.”
Emma groans, a portrait of mock defeat, and gives him two thumbs-down.
The weekend before filming is to commence, they go to dinner together.
(“This isn’t a date thing, is it?” she teases beforehand, her script rolled and she idly bats at his arm with it. He knows she’s totally kidding, that at this point they are totally friends, and they’ve already run a trial on the whole “kissing in front of the cameras” thing and nothing horrific happened - i.e., coming in his pants or, like, mauling her face - but it’s awful because there is a beat where he doesn’t really react, which makes it look like he thought this was a date even though HE TOTALLY DIDN’T, but she just beats him with her script a little more and he laughs it off and accuses her of thinking she’s hot shit or something.
“Oh, but I am,” she says, and the sharp, knowing look to her face is the same one she had before he fake-kissed (except a fake kiss is still a real kiss because regardless the intent and motivation behind it, lips are still touching and that’s still a really, really intimate thing, okay), and that does things to him, things he’s trying really, really hard to repress).
It’s a nice restaurant, and they’re both planning to put this on the studio’s card, so that makes this mischievous. That makes this fun and stupid and so-not-a-date.
They kill the better part of a bottle of wine before their first course even arrives.
“You think old Spidey ever used his little web goo stuff as lube? Because, I mean, man, talk about the substance at hand, right? Can’t help but imagine that’d come in handy, so to speak,” he says. The look on her face is enough for him to start laughing.
“You can’t help but imagine?” she balks.
Andrew shrugs. “I can’t help it. I’m spending an awful lot of time shooting the equivalent of oily silly string out of my wrist, and you have to admit there is something rather ejaculatory about the whole thing.”
“Dude, that’s where you’re wrong: I don’t have to admit shit. Least of all about your . . . ejaculate.”
“It’s not my ejaculate.” He says it too loud and the couple next to them casts them a judgmental sneer. “It’s not anyone’s ejaculate,” he says, quieter this time, and he leans in toward her. “It’s a . . . web. I was just postulating about Spiderman’s possible masturbatory tendencies.”
“I think the biggest question I have at the moment, and believe me, I have many, is why are you thinking about Peter Parker jacking it?”
“Well, I am Peter Parker. Or I’m playing Peter Parker, and maybe I’m rather method. Maybe you don’t know that about me - that I’m a hybrid of, of, Christian Bale and DeNiro and Daniel Day-Lewis when he’s not cobbling shoes in Italy.”
“I didn’t know that,” she interrupts. She takes a ladylike bite of her salad and then cocks her head to the left. “Am I supposed to be imagining you pumping the sausage while Spiderman’s webslinger runs interference?” she asks, her mouth full, Andrew can see the crunched sprig of arugula back by her molars. “Because I totally am.”
He blushes, his cheeks pink with it, and he averts his gaze for a moment, but he asks it anyway. “Yeah? How’s that imagery working for you then?”
She looks surprised, like she had not expected him to ask that, so casually, and so not a gentleman’s question. Her cheeks are pink too, and he doesn’t know if it’s from the wine or him. He misses her red hair.
Her face is serious when she tells him, “Yeah, I think I do.”
(And holy fucking shit, he has never been so thankful for slow restaurant service or so thankful that they’re only on the salad course of what he hopes is a long, long meal, because, whoa, he’s already half-hard under the napkin in his lap and that is not good, that’s not good at all, and neither is the barrage of totally inappropriate imagery he has shuffling through his head.
Namely of her. Namely of her watching him, which, alright, he had no idea he had such an exhibitionist kink in him, but apparently? Because the thought of just, like, whipping it out, right here (okay, maybe not right here; the couple next to them appears scandalized enough as it is), and having her watch? Definitely appealing. More than appealing).
Andrew clears his throat and breaks eye contact with her.
“Hey, oye, waiter,” he calls. “We’ll have another bottle, yeah?”
Just as soon as shooting begins, they adjourn, and Andrew departs to London for the holidays.
Eddie is the first to call him, so he goes to meet him. What he finds is that he is not alone, and his company surprises Andrew. Felicity is sprawled inelegantly in an armchair, her short velvet skirt riding up her thighs and an almost comically large glass of red wine in hand.
“Ah, so the prodigal has returned then,” she says, a goofy smile on her face. She leans forward and offers him a one-armed hug and a kiss on both his cheeks.
“The ex-pat,” Eddie corrects from the armchair next to hers and she scowls at him.
“Always with the one-upping, that one,” she says to Andrew. He offers his sympathy and she offers him a drink. He sits with them, the overstuffed armchairs, the fancy den they are seated in, like they are relics in some old hunting lodge, all old wood-paneling and animal heads mounted on the wall.
“When did this become our scene?” he asks the two of them; his eyes keep returning to the moose over Eddie’s head. Eddie shrugs.
“Jamie brought me here the other weekend.” His smile is near sheepish. “I liked it.”
“So you brought her?” Andrew asks, nods towards Felicity as she grumbles, “I’m sitting right here, you prick.”
“She likes grand showings of masculinity,” Eddie says casually and Felicity rolls her eyes.
“You got a girl out there?” Felicity pries. “Oh, I know! One of those California Girls, yeah?” Eddie looks at her curiously. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Katy Perry as of late,” she says smugly, and Andrew doesn’t really think that’s something to be proud of, but he doesn’t comment on it.
“Fucking Katy Perry,” Eddie grouses to himself. He turns to Andrew and says, “She really has,” as though Andrew might have been doubting this trivial fact; the more questionable aspect of this all, Andrew thinks, is the apparently abundant time Eddie has been spending with Felicity. He doesn’t comment on that either. It strikes him as too obvious and maybe even too cruel.
“I heard that Carey broke up with her little Transformer,” Felicity says then, her eyes trained on Andrew’s face, so watchful he could laugh, but instead he just nods solemnly, tells her that he heard that too, and at her visible disappointment and Eddie’s triumph he gathers that there had been a bet between the two of them, a bet that he was sleeping with Carey, and, fuck, man, he can’t wait to tell her that one.
Andrew shakes the drink in his hand, the cubes of ice rattling off the glass. “What’d you two bet then?” he asks, and Felicity has the manners to at least look offended, but Eddie only laughs. He looks at Felicity, a little too much heat in his gaze for it to be innocent and he smirks. Felicity’s shoulders fall and she shakes her head, her cheeks flushed: “Believe me, you don’t even want to know, dear Andrew,” she says.
Later he tells them that, no, there is no girl and Felicity tells him that the saddest thing she has ever heard.
Wait.
We’ve changed our minds.
To do this from his point of view would be wildly uninteresting. We will cut to the chase and grant you the least surprising spoiler alert in the history of ruined endings:
Andrew was crazy about Emma the moment he met her.
Emma’s side of the story varies. Wildly.
“Woody told me once never to hook up with co-stars. It never, ever, ever ends well. Or so he said.”
The bar is crowded and her fingers smell like both beer and peanuts, but the three of them - Emma and Jesse and Andrew - managed to snag a corner booth. Jesse had called her a stranger when he met the two of them at the bar - “All that blonde,” he had said, “you’re like another person.”
Andrew does this funny thing where he opens his mouth as though he’s about to say something and then thinks better of it, and his head sort of swivels on that long neck of his. He purses his lips and then finally says, “Were you considering endeavoring upon an ill-advised affair with Woody and he cautioned you against it?”
Emma sticks her tongue out. “Noooo. He was imparting wise words of advice. It was very Karate Kid of us - the master and the young grasshopper.”
“Yeah, you calling him “master” is really not helping your cause.”
“You’re,” she starts, and then sort of sputters, “you’re an old pervert, that’s what you are. A pervert.”
“Yeah. Odds are you’ve hit upon a real truth there, Emily Jean.” Emily Jean, Jesse mouths; Emma ignores him.
“Ah, come on. I told you that in confidence. Andrew Russell.”
“No shame here,” he says, his arm thrown over the back of the booth, his pint empty.
Jesse rolls his eyes.
“I leave you two alone,” he says, “and this is what happens.”
Before the shoot even began, they made a big deal about her hair. There was literally an entire day where the only thing discussed was a seemingly simple binary: wig vs. dye.
“I was born a blonde,” she grumbled, fingers picking at a stale croissant. “This really doesn’t need to be that difficult.”
“You’re not a natural redhead?” he said. Andrew waggled his eyebrows, a pointed look at her lap; Emma’s posture slumped a little more, her mouth partly open, her entire expression screaming, come on. He whistled low then and leaned back on the two legs of his chair.
“Oh my god. What is it with dudes and the lure of the fire-crotch?”
Andrew downed the dregs of his coffee and his mouth twisted, as though contemplating what she just said.
“Actually it’s more just the lure of the crotch, generally speaking.”
“Shocker!”
“You two are real cute together,” her make-up artist tells her, and it bothers Emma more than she thinks it should. It’s just, cute? Cute is such an awful word, unless the object referenced as cute is a puppy or a kitten or a sneezing panda. They aren’t any of these things.
They shouldn’t even be considered in the same sentence.
Right?
“Sit still,” the woman says.
They go out for drinks a lot after they wrap for the day. Andrew likes to talk like Los Angeles is the scourge of the earth, and to that Emma can only roll her eyes.
“You’re from L.A.,” she points out. Andrew concedes, a shrug of his shoulders and he takes another pull from his beer.
“True, but my parents had the good sense to abscond to London with me in tow at a very, very early age. The riff-raff, the graft of L.A. - it never affected my innocent soul.”
“You act like London’s the Vatican, dude. I saw Trainspotting. You Brits, you’re a rowdy lot yourself.”
He waves a hand at her, dismissing what she said. “But you, you don’t seem so rotten apple yourself. Pray tell, how did you escape the corrupting influence of Los Angeles?” Despite being born there, he says the Angeles part of the city all British, like Hugh Grant or Colin Firth would, she thinks - Ang-ell-ease. She catches his eye and he’s smirking, unexpectedly smug. She’s heard him talk about L.A. before, she’s heard him say Los Angeles, and he doesn’t normally say it like that. He’s putting her on, and she can’t decided exactly why.
Emma shrugs and feigns innocence. “Catholic school,” she confesses.
Andrew groans, “I love Catholic school girls.”
She accuses him of being a cliche, and to that, he has no argument. Later, as they walk instead of cab, he tells her that he used to be a gymnast.
“Is that supposed to play into some fantasy of mine?”
“I don’t know. But double round-offs are pretty fucking sexy if I do say so myself.”
“And I think you just did.”
He spends more time in her trailer than he does in his own.
“You think I’ll wind up like Tobey Maguire?” he asks her one morning.
“What?” she asks, distracted, her laptop open and her body hunched around it, fingers moving furiously across the keys. She misses the amused look on his face, the lopsided smile and the way he leans forward to her a bit.
“Are you writing a novel?” he asks, amused.
“Sure,” she says, slow, fingers still racing over the keys until she strikes the enter key and looks up. “What about Tobey Maguire?”
“You think I’ll wind up like him?”
“What? BFFs with Leo and hanging front row at Laker games?” He has such an open face; she thinks this, watching how his features glaze over into something contemplative, his eyes trained on a calendar from 2008 hanging on the wall behind her.
“Hadn’t thought of that. I could do with a friend like that.”
Emma holds a hand over her heart. “You wound me, good sir.”
He laughs, falls back into his chair. “You wanna go sit front row at a Laker game with me then?”
She slurps at her iced coffee. “Yeah, man. I’ll even bang some models to complete the Leo imagery. What’s Gisele up to these days?”
Andrew groans, loud and dramatic, pumps his fist in the air. “I take it back!” he shouts. “You are the best friend ever!”
“Damn straight,” she mutters, and resumes typing on her laptop.
Nothing happens until the film is wrapped.
Nothing happens until they’re in Berlin. And unfortunately for the both of them, “what happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin” has never been nor ever will be a catchy phrase (I mean, ask the Nazis. Or the Soviets! Andrew says when she tests it out on him, and she groans, shouts, nerds! at the top of her lungs).
The strangest part of it all is that there is no real catalyst. Nothing major or earth-shattering occurs. At this point in time, they had already been through a handful of cities and a handful of hotels and had sat there, side-by-side talking to reporters and using words like chemistry and respect and probably meaning them, but then there is Berlin.
He stands there in her doorway, a wide stance, hands buried in his pockets, his suit jacket still on but his tie undone. And he stands there, backlit by the light from the hall, her hotel room door open, and she stands there too - the other side of the room and the other side of the bed, her hands limp at her side, barefoot and in a cocktail dress.
“Shut the door,” she hears herself say, her voice that much lower than usual, and she watches the way her words register on his face, the way he holds himself that much stiffer, how his lips part and his chest swells on a heavy inhale.
Andrew shuts the door.
(Before this, they drank a lot. They drank a lot and he told her he had to walk her home, because that’s what gentlemen do, and he is a gentleman, in case you didn’t know, so he had walked her to her hotel room, she had swiped her keycard, and when she stepped in she looked over her shoulder.
He took a step across the threshold and then he stood there, in her doorway).
He’s really nervous, which she totally didn’t expect. He keeps pushing her back away from his body, perched on the end of the bed, this twisted, pathetic look on his face as he bites his bottom lip, head tilted back, all of that throat exposed
“Oh god,” he finally groans, “Please tell me this is what you want. Please, puh-lease tell me.”
“I totally knew you’d be the begging type,” she hisses along his jaw, and he makes this noise, like a grunt and a swallow and a whimper all that once, and she tries hard not to giggle.
She rears back, all that red falling across her face and she looks down at him. His hair is a mess (her doing), and his lips are swollen ( . . . also her doing) and his eyes are so wide, the look on his face sex-stupid, and she wants to laugh again.
“Dude. I am all up on your business. My legs are literally spread. Message should be received, loud and clear.”
He smiles a little, looks kind of shy, but his eyes aren’t as wide and if he was a different man, she’d maybe call him dangerous.
“I want you to say it,” he says, the stain of his accent strong, his hands on her hips strong, and she doesn’t so much as frown as her smile merely tucks away, out of sight. She feels suddenly shy - the top of her dress pulled down, breasts bare, and the hem pushed up around her hips.
“I want you,” she says quietly, and she can feel him both relax and tense under her, it’s the strangest thing. He smiles, and then he kisses her. He reaches under her dress and he kisses her.
“You told people you were excited about working with me,” he says into her arm. She shifts a little, the sheets moving with her, and his hips are bared.
“Who did I tell?” she asks, her voice sleep scratchy.
“Before,” he says, “before we were working together and all, you said that you were excited about working with me.”
“I didn’t mean I was planning on banging you,” she grumbles, but there’s a small smile on her face. His hand drifts down her cheek and over the corner of her mouth and he can feel it, rather than see it.
“Nah, I didn’t say that, did I?”
“I told reporters that,” she says suddenly. He perches his chin on her naked shoulder and looks up into her face. “They’re not people,” she teases.
“Yeah, well, hey,” he says softly. “Isn’t this nice?”
In the elevator he wound a strand of red hair around his finger and leaned in close.
“I missed this, you know,” he said to her.
“Yeah?” she breathed, and, “Yeah,” he said.
She turned away from him and said, “I know.”
“You’re hitting it with Garfield, aren’t you.” Jesse says. Emma pulls a sour face.
“Ew. Don’t - don’t say that. It makes it sound like I’m fucking a cartoon cat who has a hankering for lasagna. That’s awkward.”
“And getting it on with my bro - that’s not awkward?”
“You did not just say bro. Tell me that did not just happen. I had no idea people outside of SoCal or the set of How I Met Your Mother used that term unironically.”
“Unironically isn’t a word.”
“Well, neither should be bro.”
“You haven’t denied it yet.”
“Astute observational skills, Einstein.”
“Eisenberg.”
“AKA, not as smart.”
“Ohhh,” he says, waves his hands in the air a little, “burn.”
Emma tilts her head and hums under her breath. “Hmm,” she says, “clearly you have been hanging out with socially superior beings as your slang has improved. I think you have some spilling of your own to do.”
“Deflecting attention off of one’s self - a clear sign of guilt.”
“Okay, Judge Judy, but to be fair you seem to be employing the tactic yourself.”
“I asked you first,” he says, and he fulfills the image of a petulant child by folding his arms over his chest, a cherry coke with a straw in front of him and he leans forward to take a sip.
Emma drums her fingers on the red and white checkered table cloth.
“The defense rests, huh?” She looks around for her waitress (by extension: their pizza), but she’s nowhere to be seen. Jesse just sits there, staring at her, eyebrows raised as though to say, I’m waiting.
“You really don’t want to hear about this . . .” she says slowly. “That’s, like, hearing about your brother sleeping with your sister.”
“Ah, so you do see how incestuous this is for me then?”
Emma groans. “I didn’t mean it like that. Gross, man. You been watching French films again?” He shrugs, noncommittal.
What’s really stupid about this whole situation is that they’re both kinda sorta totally seeing other people. For Emma, at least, she’s still operating under the assumption that fidelity is a looser concept when you’re only twenty-one and when your co-star has this head of hair that’s basically impossible not to want to touch or grab hard, blunt fingernails digging into his scalp hard -
(not that she knows) (except that she totally knows, that while this dude never shuts up, his mouth is totally good for other things, especially things between her legs, which holy shit, half the time he’s a total nerd and the other half he’s, like, trying to get inside her with his tongue and his mouth and his fingers and it should really, really not be as hot as it is, because yeah).
What’s extraordinarily stupid about everything is that they were both kinda sorta totally seeing other people, and then they weren’t.
Then they were just seeing each other.
A cut from the Emma Stone narrative:
Andrew calls Carey. They chat a lot, mostly about mindless things, but as he likes to tell anyone who will listen, “he found a real comrade” in Carey, so he calls her. He calls her a lot.
“I am ninety-nine percent sure,” he hears himself telling her, “that I am basically over the moon in love with this girl, and isn’t that the dumbest thing you have ever heard?”
“Yeah,” she says, after a beat, “pretty much.”
There is silence on his end and on her end he can hear the small ding as an elevator arrives, a sudden uptick in background noise and unidentifiable chatter.
“I’m not going to see you lot in the Daily Mail, now am I?” she asks.
“Cheeky,” he chides. “‘sides, we’re not in it already, hmm?”
Carey laughs, and then he finally asks her. “Where are you, anyway?”
She pauses, and Andrew can just picture her: standing alone in an elevator, her phone held to her ear, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
“Australia,” she says, then, “Sydney. And please do not ask. I will not tell you.”
He respects that.
Once the media circus dies down and people stop asking her about Spiderman and her untimely death, they find themselves alone (or as alone as two people who just experienced major overnight success and recognition can) in Los Angeles.
She wonders about it sometimes though. She wonders if they’re serious enough - about each other and as separate people - to ever have those awful, knock-down, drag-out fights, or if instead they’ll just lose themselves in the mindless banter they seem to be so good at. If they were to stay together, and God, at this age that is basically the biggest if you could possibly present, what exactly would they even become. Maybe they’d get married, if they stayed together long enough: it would be a logical conclusion, but she knows herself, and things like logic and predictability leave her restless (which in a way, makes her predictable, and ugh, she knows that, let’s not go there), so maybe they’d break up. They’d break up, and she can’t imagine it as anything but amicable, a sort of, sorry dude, I met someone else, let’s still be friends, ‘kay?
But then, she thinks, are they even together?
Because what will happen is this: they’ve finished that Spiderman movie and they’ve finished the promotional leg of it and they’ve killed her character off and she’ll leave, she’ll go on to different projects, and so will he, but he’ll return, there will be a sequel, and they’ll haul in, like, a Glee reject or something and he’ll be making out with her instead of making out with Emma and she doesn’t like that, she doesn’t like that at all and they’re not even really sort of together right now, but even if they were, and even if they weren’t by then (that’s, like, 2012 or some shit, so far away, and who knows, Sarah Palin might get elected president or aliens will invade or the Mayans will be right after all and this entire issue will be moot), she doesn’t think she’ll ever like the idea of Andrew kissing a girl who isn’t her, where she is supposed to be.
Maybe that means they will throw lamps at each other in the future. Maybe she will scream at him and he’ll scream back, and he’ll break her heart and she’ll hope she has broken his, because the unavoidable fact of the matter is that she’s invested. Oh fuck, she’s invested, and it’s just like that scene in Clueless when Cher failed her driver’s test and she went shopping and then paused in front of that fountain or whatever and realized she was totally butt crazy in love with her stepbrother.
So. Maybe she’s not just talking about a movie role but something huger and infinitely scarier.
This is the point when she drops her head in her hands and wishes someone other than Taylor fucking Swift and her fucking guitar and songs about tiaras and princesses and boys that hold hands and that’s all they do with their hands wasn’t the only person in town at the moment.
“You worry a lot,” he tells her one night, his mouth full of pizza.
“Yeah,” she concedes. She leaps over the couch for another beer, but she pauses at the open refrigerator. “You want another beer?” she calls, distracted, and he grunts something that sounds like a yes.
She stops in front of him, Die Hard or something on the television and she’s just stepped between Andrew and John McClane. He looks at her, all weird and expectant.
“I really like you. Okay. Just though you should know.”
He takes the beer from her and just laughs.
They met outside a Starbucks. He was on the phone with Jamie, who had interrupted his story about a fashion show or something gay (Andrew’s term for it, not Jamie’s) to tell Andrew that speaking of gay things, ordering a pumpkin spice latte is probably the gayest of the gay and no woman will ever want to fuck his poncy little pumpkin-spiced arse (verbatim).
Emma was with Jesse. He had conned her into lunch with him, despite her claims she was mad at him (though it was beyond her why exactly; she thinks it had something to do with a party and a girl and important things like honor and cell phones and answering them when they ring, but because it had been a party, the reasons were difficult to remember).
Jesse saw Andrew first. It was spring, The Social Network had wrapped, and outside of a very select group of people (either nerds or studio executives), no one was talking about Spiderman.
“Andrew,” Jesse said, “this is Emma.” He smiled and so did she; he reached across and shook her hand, his hand warmed from the coffee he had been holding. He had told Jamie, “Hey, man, I’m going to call you back,” and then hung up the phone. It was spring, the California weather unseasonably warm and just that morning he had been thinking how little he cared for this city, this weather, for a lot of things.
Emma’s hand was small in his own and she squeezed when she shook his.
“Heard a lot about you,” she said. “It’s good to meet you. Finally.”
He laughed. “Consider it mutual,” he said.
That sounds about right.
fin.
rpf. the superhero always gets the girl - on and off the set. andrew garfield/emma stone, with surprise carey mulligan, jesse eisenberg, jamie dornan, eddie redmayne and felicity jones. rated pg-13. 5366 words.
notes:
. . . I think that about sums it up. Look at my life, look at my choices. The usual suspects are most likely to blame, lol.
you think that we connect, that the chemistry’s correct -
(NO DOUBT)
They met at a party.
Judd Apatow threw a party and they went (no, they met there) and she can drink a lot, even though she told him, a little too smugly mind you, that she was only twenty-one, and he’s got some years on her, don’t you, gramps? and Michael Cera was there for some reason, and does anyone actually like Michael Cera? but she didn’t seem to mind when he (Andrew, not Michael Cera) found a dark corner for her, the dark fill of his mouth and -
No. They met an audition. She was nervous and so was he so he laughed and when he had to kiss her a push of nervous breath entered her mouth, and after, she asked, in that absurdly sultry movie-stars-of-yore voice, if he had thought they were in that much trouble and that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would be their saving grace. He had laughed again, because that’s what he does, or that’s what he’d say he does when he’s nervous, and offered they test their technique out again. She shrugged him off, because they’re professionals after all, and later he’ll think that a different term should be coined for when two actors press their mouths together in pantomime of the actual act, because to call it a kiss feels to grant it more reverence than he wants to allow it, because they are professionals, despite any and all further evidence to the contrary, and -
Scratch that. They met on the street outside of a Starbucks and he had just ordered a “venti pumpkin thing,” and she wasn’t planning on ordering anything there at all, and their mouths did not touch, not even once.
That sounds about right.
The first day on-set is more awkward than he anticipated. He guesses that’s to be expected - rehearsals always carry with them that weird air of nervousness, but this is just kind of weird. From what Jesse had mentioned of her, he expected her to be more loquacious (Jesse’s word, not his) and bubbly (his impression; he may have YouTubed her a little/a lot). Instead they’re just sort of doing a good job of not looking at each other at the craft services table.
“So,” he says at her elbow, breaking the silence. She bites her lip.
“So . . . “ she echoes.
“Are you really friends with Taylor Swift?” he asks her, bluntly. She looks up from her multiple spilled packets of Splenda and her face lights up.
“Are you really friends with Edward Cullen?”
“He has a name, you know. And, no, it’s not Cedric Diggory.” Emma scrunches her lips up and nods, judgment written across her face. “How about I don’t mock your friends so long as you don’t mock mine, eh?” he says.
She leans in, and what he’ll never know is if she simply misjudged the amount of space between them she meant to close or if a more nefarious purpose was at play, because she leans in, and her lips brush against the whorl of his ear as she says, “Nah, I’m still gonna mock yours.” She starts to walk away and Andrew scratches at the back of his neck.
“Justin Timberlake!” he shouts after her. She turns around and shakes her head, her face twisted in an overly dramatic confused expression. “That’s one friend cooler than yours!”
Emma braces her hands on her hips. “Paul McCartney,” she shouts back. “Boom!”
“Lies! Legend, yes. Looks like an elderly woman, also yes. Did he bring sexy back? Negative.”
Emma groans, a portrait of mock defeat, and gives him two thumbs-down.
The weekend before filming is to commence, they go to dinner together.
(“This isn’t a date thing, is it?” she teases beforehand, her script rolled and she idly bats at his arm with it. He knows she’s totally kidding, that at this point they are totally friends, and they’ve already run a trial on the whole “kissing in front of the cameras” thing and nothing horrific happened - i.e., coming in his pants or, like, mauling her face - but it’s awful because there is a beat where he doesn’t really react, which makes it look like he thought this was a date even though HE TOTALLY DIDN’T, but she just beats him with her script a little more and he laughs it off and accuses her of thinking she’s hot shit or something.
“Oh, but I am,” she says, and the sharp, knowing look to her face is the same one she had before he fake-kissed (except a fake kiss is still a real kiss because regardless the intent and motivation behind it, lips are still touching and that’s still a really, really intimate thing, okay), and that does things to him, things he’s trying really, really hard to repress).
It’s a nice restaurant, and they’re both planning to put this on the studio’s card, so that makes this mischievous. That makes this fun and stupid and so-not-a-date.
They kill the better part of a bottle of wine before their first course even arrives.
“You think old Spidey ever used his little web goo stuff as lube? Because, I mean, man, talk about the substance at hand, right? Can’t help but imagine that’d come in handy, so to speak,” he says. The look on her face is enough for him to start laughing.
“You can’t help but imagine?” she balks.
Andrew shrugs. “I can’t help it. I’m spending an awful lot of time shooting the equivalent of oily silly string out of my wrist, and you have to admit there is something rather ejaculatory about the whole thing.”
“Dude, that’s where you’re wrong: I don’t have to admit shit. Least of all about your . . . ejaculate.”
“It’s not my ejaculate.” He says it too loud and the couple next to them casts them a judgmental sneer. “It’s not anyone’s ejaculate,” he says, quieter this time, and he leans in toward her. “It’s a . . . web. I was just postulating about Spiderman’s possible masturbatory tendencies.”
“I think the biggest question I have at the moment, and believe me, I have many, is why are you thinking about Peter Parker jacking it?”
“Well, I am Peter Parker. Or I’m playing Peter Parker, and maybe I’m rather method. Maybe you don’t know that about me - that I’m a hybrid of, of, Christian Bale and DeNiro and Daniel Day-Lewis when he’s not cobbling shoes in Italy.”
“I didn’t know that,” she interrupts. She takes a ladylike bite of her salad and then cocks her head to the left. “Am I supposed to be imagining you pumping the sausage while Spiderman’s webslinger runs interference?” she asks, her mouth full, Andrew can see the crunched sprig of arugula back by her molars. “Because I totally am.”
He blushes, his cheeks pink with it, and he averts his gaze for a moment, but he asks it anyway. “Yeah? How’s that imagery working for you then?”
She looks surprised, like she had not expected him to ask that, so casually, and so not a gentleman’s question. Her cheeks are pink too, and he doesn’t know if it’s from the wine or him. He misses her red hair.
Her face is serious when she tells him, “Yeah, I think I do.”
(And holy fucking shit, he has never been so thankful for slow restaurant service or so thankful that they’re only on the salad course of what he hopes is a long, long meal, because, whoa, he’s already half-hard under the napkin in his lap and that is not good, that’s not good at all, and neither is the barrage of totally inappropriate imagery he has shuffling through his head.
Namely of her. Namely of her watching him, which, alright, he had no idea he had such an exhibitionist kink in him, but apparently? Because the thought of just, like, whipping it out, right here (okay, maybe not right here; the couple next to them appears scandalized enough as it is), and having her watch? Definitely appealing. More than appealing).
Andrew clears his throat and breaks eye contact with her.
“Hey, oye, waiter,” he calls. “We’ll have another bottle, yeah?”
Just as soon as shooting begins, they adjourn, and Andrew departs to London for the holidays.
Eddie is the first to call him, so he goes to meet him. What he finds is that he is not alone, and his company surprises Andrew. Felicity is sprawled inelegantly in an armchair, her short velvet skirt riding up her thighs and an almost comically large glass of red wine in hand.
“Ah, so the prodigal has returned then,” she says, a goofy smile on her face. She leans forward and offers him a one-armed hug and a kiss on both his cheeks.
“The ex-pat,” Eddie corrects from the armchair next to hers and she scowls at him.
“Always with the one-upping, that one,” she says to Andrew. He offers his sympathy and she offers him a drink. He sits with them, the overstuffed armchairs, the fancy den they are seated in, like they are relics in some old hunting lodge, all old wood-paneling and animal heads mounted on the wall.
“When did this become our scene?” he asks the two of them; his eyes keep returning to the moose over Eddie’s head. Eddie shrugs.
“Jamie brought me here the other weekend.” His smile is near sheepish. “I liked it.”
“So you brought her?” Andrew asks, nods towards Felicity as she grumbles, “I’m sitting right here, you prick.”
“She likes grand showings of masculinity,” Eddie says casually and Felicity rolls her eyes.
“You got a girl out there?” Felicity pries. “Oh, I know! One of those California Girls, yeah?” Eddie looks at her curiously. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Katy Perry as of late,” she says smugly, and Andrew doesn’t really think that’s something to be proud of, but he doesn’t comment on it.
“Fucking Katy Perry,” Eddie grouses to himself. He turns to Andrew and says, “She really has,” as though Andrew might have been doubting this trivial fact; the more questionable aspect of this all, Andrew thinks, is the apparently abundant time Eddie has been spending with Felicity. He doesn’t comment on that either. It strikes him as too obvious and maybe even too cruel.
“I heard that Carey broke up with her little Transformer,” Felicity says then, her eyes trained on Andrew’s face, so watchful he could laugh, but instead he just nods solemnly, tells her that he heard that too, and at her visible disappointment and Eddie’s triumph he gathers that there had been a bet between the two of them, a bet that he was sleeping with Carey, and, fuck, man, he can’t wait to tell her that one.
Andrew shakes the drink in his hand, the cubes of ice rattling off the glass. “What’d you two bet then?” he asks, and Felicity has the manners to at least look offended, but Eddie only laughs. He looks at Felicity, a little too much heat in his gaze for it to be innocent and he smirks. Felicity’s shoulders fall and she shakes her head, her cheeks flushed: “Believe me, you don’t even want to know, dear Andrew,” she says.
Later he tells them that, no, there is no girl and Felicity tells him that the saddest thing she has ever heard.
Wait.
We’ve changed our minds.
To do this from his point of view would be wildly uninteresting. We will cut to the chase and grant you the least surprising spoiler alert in the history of ruined endings:
Andrew was crazy about Emma the moment he met her.
Emma’s side of the story varies. Wildly.
“Woody told me once never to hook up with co-stars. It never, ever, ever ends well. Or so he said.”
The bar is crowded and her fingers smell like both beer and peanuts, but the three of them - Emma and Jesse and Andrew - managed to snag a corner booth. Jesse had called her a stranger when he met the two of them at the bar - “All that blonde,” he had said, “you’re like another person.”
Andrew does this funny thing where he opens his mouth as though he’s about to say something and then thinks better of it, and his head sort of swivels on that long neck of his. He purses his lips and then finally says, “Were you considering endeavoring upon an ill-advised affair with Woody and he cautioned you against it?”
Emma sticks her tongue out. “Noooo. He was imparting wise words of advice. It was very Karate Kid of us - the master and the young grasshopper.”
“Yeah, you calling him “master” is really not helping your cause.”
“You’re,” she starts, and then sort of sputters, “you’re an old pervert, that’s what you are. A pervert.”
“Yeah. Odds are you’ve hit upon a real truth there, Emily Jean.” Emily Jean, Jesse mouths; Emma ignores him.
“Ah, come on. I told you that in confidence. Andrew Russell.”
“No shame here,” he says, his arm thrown over the back of the booth, his pint empty.
Jesse rolls his eyes.
“I leave you two alone,” he says, “and this is what happens.”
Before the shoot even began, they made a big deal about her hair. There was literally an entire day where the only thing discussed was a seemingly simple binary: wig vs. dye.
“I was born a blonde,” she grumbled, fingers picking at a stale croissant. “This really doesn’t need to be that difficult.”
“You’re not a natural redhead?” he said. Andrew waggled his eyebrows, a pointed look at her lap; Emma’s posture slumped a little more, her mouth partly open, her entire expression screaming, come on. He whistled low then and leaned back on the two legs of his chair.
“Oh my god. What is it with dudes and the lure of the fire-crotch?”
Andrew downed the dregs of his coffee and his mouth twisted, as though contemplating what she just said.
“Actually it’s more just the lure of the crotch, generally speaking.”
“Shocker!”
“You two are real cute together,” her make-up artist tells her, and it bothers Emma more than she thinks it should. It’s just, cute? Cute is such an awful word, unless the object referenced as cute is a puppy or a kitten or a sneezing panda. They aren’t any of these things.
They shouldn’t even be considered in the same sentence.
Right?
“Sit still,” the woman says.
They go out for drinks a lot after they wrap for the day. Andrew likes to talk like Los Angeles is the scourge of the earth, and to that Emma can only roll her eyes.
“You’re from L.A.,” she points out. Andrew concedes, a shrug of his shoulders and he takes another pull from his beer.
“True, but my parents had the good sense to abscond to London with me in tow at a very, very early age. The riff-raff, the graft of L.A. - it never affected my innocent soul.”
“You act like London’s the Vatican, dude. I saw Trainspotting. You Brits, you’re a rowdy lot yourself.”
He waves a hand at her, dismissing what she said. “But you, you don’t seem so rotten apple yourself. Pray tell, how did you escape the corrupting influence of Los Angeles?” Despite being born there, he says the Angeles part of the city all British, like Hugh Grant or Colin Firth would, she thinks - Ang-ell-ease. She catches his eye and he’s smirking, unexpectedly smug. She’s heard him talk about L.A. before, she’s heard him say Los Angeles, and he doesn’t normally say it like that. He’s putting her on, and she can’t decided exactly why.
Emma shrugs and feigns innocence. “Catholic school,” she confesses.
Andrew groans, “I love Catholic school girls.”
She accuses him of being a cliche, and to that, he has no argument. Later, as they walk instead of cab, he tells her that he used to be a gymnast.
“Is that supposed to play into some fantasy of mine?”
“I don’t know. But double round-offs are pretty fucking sexy if I do say so myself.”
“And I think you just did.”
He spends more time in her trailer than he does in his own.
“You think I’ll wind up like Tobey Maguire?” he asks her one morning.
“What?” she asks, distracted, her laptop open and her body hunched around it, fingers moving furiously across the keys. She misses the amused look on his face, the lopsided smile and the way he leans forward to her a bit.
“Are you writing a novel?” he asks, amused.
“Sure,” she says, slow, fingers still racing over the keys until she strikes the enter key and looks up. “What about Tobey Maguire?”
“You think I’ll wind up like him?”
“What? BFFs with Leo and hanging front row at Laker games?” He has such an open face; she thinks this, watching how his features glaze over into something contemplative, his eyes trained on a calendar from 2008 hanging on the wall behind her.
“Hadn’t thought of that. I could do with a friend like that.”
Emma holds a hand over her heart. “You wound me, good sir.”
He laughs, falls back into his chair. “You wanna go sit front row at a Laker game with me then?”
She slurps at her iced coffee. “Yeah, man. I’ll even bang some models to complete the Leo imagery. What’s Gisele up to these days?”
Andrew groans, loud and dramatic, pumps his fist in the air. “I take it back!” he shouts. “You are the best friend ever!”
“Damn straight,” she mutters, and resumes typing on her laptop.
Nothing happens until the film is wrapped.
Nothing happens until they’re in Berlin. And unfortunately for the both of them, “what happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin” has never been nor ever will be a catchy phrase (I mean, ask the Nazis. Or the Soviets! Andrew says when she tests it out on him, and she groans, shouts, nerds! at the top of her lungs).
The strangest part of it all is that there is no real catalyst. Nothing major or earth-shattering occurs. At this point in time, they had already been through a handful of cities and a handful of hotels and had sat there, side-by-side talking to reporters and using words like chemistry and respect and probably meaning them, but then there is Berlin.
He stands there in her doorway, a wide stance, hands buried in his pockets, his suit jacket still on but his tie undone. And he stands there, backlit by the light from the hall, her hotel room door open, and she stands there too - the other side of the room and the other side of the bed, her hands limp at her side, barefoot and in a cocktail dress.
“Shut the door,” she hears herself say, her voice that much lower than usual, and she watches the way her words register on his face, the way he holds himself that much stiffer, how his lips part and his chest swells on a heavy inhale.
Andrew shuts the door.
(Before this, they drank a lot. They drank a lot and he told her he had to walk her home, because that’s what gentlemen do, and he is a gentleman, in case you didn’t know, so he had walked her to her hotel room, she had swiped her keycard, and when she stepped in she looked over her shoulder.
He took a step across the threshold and then he stood there, in her doorway).
He’s really nervous, which she totally didn’t expect. He keeps pushing her back away from his body, perched on the end of the bed, this twisted, pathetic look on his face as he bites his bottom lip, head tilted back, all of that throat exposed
“Oh god,” he finally groans, “Please tell me this is what you want. Please, puh-lease tell me.”
“I totally knew you’d be the begging type,” she hisses along his jaw, and he makes this noise, like a grunt and a swallow and a whimper all that once, and she tries hard not to giggle.
She rears back, all that red falling across her face and she looks down at him. His hair is a mess (her doing), and his lips are swollen ( . . . also her doing) and his eyes are so wide, the look on his face sex-stupid, and she wants to laugh again.
“Dude. I am all up on your business. My legs are literally spread. Message should be received, loud and clear.”
He smiles a little, looks kind of shy, but his eyes aren’t as wide and if he was a different man, she’d maybe call him dangerous.
“I want you to say it,” he says, the stain of his accent strong, his hands on her hips strong, and she doesn’t so much as frown as her smile merely tucks away, out of sight. She feels suddenly shy - the top of her dress pulled down, breasts bare, and the hem pushed up around her hips.
“I want you,” she says quietly, and she can feel him both relax and tense under her, it’s the strangest thing. He smiles, and then he kisses her. He reaches under her dress and he kisses her.
“You told people you were excited about working with me,” he says into her arm. She shifts a little, the sheets moving with her, and his hips are bared.
“Who did I tell?” she asks, her voice sleep scratchy.
“Before,” he says, “before we were working together and all, you said that you were excited about working with me.”
“I didn’t mean I was planning on banging you,” she grumbles, but there’s a small smile on her face. His hand drifts down her cheek and over the corner of her mouth and he can feel it, rather than see it.
“Nah, I didn’t say that, did I?”
“I told reporters that,” she says suddenly. He perches his chin on her naked shoulder and looks up into her face. “They’re not people,” she teases.
“Yeah, well, hey,” he says softly. “Isn’t this nice?”
In the elevator he wound a strand of red hair around his finger and leaned in close.
“I missed this, you know,” he said to her.
“Yeah?” she breathed, and, “Yeah,” he said.
She turned away from him and said, “I know.”
“You’re hitting it with Garfield, aren’t you.” Jesse says. Emma pulls a sour face.
“Ew. Don’t - don’t say that. It makes it sound like I’m fucking a cartoon cat who has a hankering for lasagna. That’s awkward.”
“And getting it on with my bro - that’s not awkward?”
“You did not just say bro. Tell me that did not just happen. I had no idea people outside of SoCal or the set of How I Met Your Mother used that term unironically.”
“Unironically isn’t a word.”
“Well, neither should be bro.”
“You haven’t denied it yet.”
“Astute observational skills, Einstein.”
“Eisenberg.”
“AKA, not as smart.”
“Ohhh,” he says, waves his hands in the air a little, “burn.”
Emma tilts her head and hums under her breath. “Hmm,” she says, “clearly you have been hanging out with socially superior beings as your slang has improved. I think you have some spilling of your own to do.”
“Deflecting attention off of one’s self - a clear sign of guilt.”
“Okay, Judge Judy, but to be fair you seem to be employing the tactic yourself.”
“I asked you first,” he says, and he fulfills the image of a petulant child by folding his arms over his chest, a cherry coke with a straw in front of him and he leans forward to take a sip.
Emma drums her fingers on the red and white checkered table cloth.
“The defense rests, huh?” She looks around for her waitress (by extension: their pizza), but she’s nowhere to be seen. Jesse just sits there, staring at her, eyebrows raised as though to say, I’m waiting.
“You really don’t want to hear about this . . .” she says slowly. “That’s, like, hearing about your brother sleeping with your sister.”
“Ah, so you do see how incestuous this is for me then?”
Emma groans. “I didn’t mean it like that. Gross, man. You been watching French films again?” He shrugs, noncommittal.
What’s really stupid about this whole situation is that they’re both kinda sorta totally seeing other people. For Emma, at least, she’s still operating under the assumption that fidelity is a looser concept when you’re only twenty-one and when your co-star has this head of hair that’s basically impossible not to want to touch or grab hard, blunt fingernails digging into his scalp hard -
(not that she knows) (except that she totally knows, that while this dude never shuts up, his mouth is totally good for other things, especially things between her legs, which holy shit, half the time he’s a total nerd and the other half he’s, like, trying to get inside her with his tongue and his mouth and his fingers and it should really, really not be as hot as it is, because yeah).
What’s extraordinarily stupid about everything is that they were both kinda sorta totally seeing other people, and then they weren’t.
Then they were just seeing each other.
A cut from the Emma Stone narrative:
Andrew calls Carey. They chat a lot, mostly about mindless things, but as he likes to tell anyone who will listen, “he found a real comrade” in Carey, so he calls her. He calls her a lot.
“I am ninety-nine percent sure,” he hears himself telling her, “that I am basically over the moon in love with this girl, and isn’t that the dumbest thing you have ever heard?”
“Yeah,” she says, after a beat, “pretty much.”
There is silence on his end and on her end he can hear the small ding as an elevator arrives, a sudden uptick in background noise and unidentifiable chatter.
“I’m not going to see you lot in the Daily Mail, now am I?” she asks.
“Cheeky,” he chides. “‘sides, we’re not in it already, hmm?”
Carey laughs, and then he finally asks her. “Where are you, anyway?”
She pauses, and Andrew can just picture her: standing alone in an elevator, her phone held to her ear, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
“Australia,” she says, then, “Sydney. And please do not ask. I will not tell you.”
He respects that.
Once the media circus dies down and people stop asking her about Spiderman and her untimely death, they find themselves alone (or as alone as two people who just experienced major overnight success and recognition can) in Los Angeles.
She wonders about it sometimes though. She wonders if they’re serious enough - about each other and as separate people - to ever have those awful, knock-down, drag-out fights, or if instead they’ll just lose themselves in the mindless banter they seem to be so good at. If they were to stay together, and God, at this age that is basically the biggest if you could possibly present, what exactly would they even become. Maybe they’d get married, if they stayed together long enough: it would be a logical conclusion, but she knows herself, and things like logic and predictability leave her restless (which in a way, makes her predictable, and ugh, she knows that, let’s not go there), so maybe they’d break up. They’d break up, and she can’t imagine it as anything but amicable, a sort of, sorry dude, I met someone else, let’s still be friends, ‘kay?
But then, she thinks, are they even together?
Because what will happen is this: they’ve finished that Spiderman movie and they’ve finished the promotional leg of it and they’ve killed her character off and she’ll leave, she’ll go on to different projects, and so will he, but he’ll return, there will be a sequel, and they’ll haul in, like, a Glee reject or something and he’ll be making out with her instead of making out with Emma and she doesn’t like that, she doesn’t like that at all and they’re not even really sort of together right now, but even if they were, and even if they weren’t by then (that’s, like, 2012 or some shit, so far away, and who knows, Sarah Palin might get elected president or aliens will invade or the Mayans will be right after all and this entire issue will be moot), she doesn’t think she’ll ever like the idea of Andrew kissing a girl who isn’t her, where she is supposed to be.
Maybe that means they will throw lamps at each other in the future. Maybe she will scream at him and he’ll scream back, and he’ll break her heart and she’ll hope she has broken his, because the unavoidable fact of the matter is that she’s invested. Oh fuck, she’s invested, and it’s just like that scene in Clueless when Cher failed her driver’s test and she went shopping and then paused in front of that fountain or whatever and realized she was totally butt crazy in love with her stepbrother.
So. Maybe she’s not just talking about a movie role but something huger and infinitely scarier.
This is the point when she drops her head in her hands and wishes someone other than Taylor fucking Swift and her fucking guitar and songs about tiaras and princesses and boys that hold hands and that’s all they do with their hands wasn’t the only person in town at the moment.
“You worry a lot,” he tells her one night, his mouth full of pizza.
“Yeah,” she concedes. She leaps over the couch for another beer, but she pauses at the open refrigerator. “You want another beer?” she calls, distracted, and he grunts something that sounds like a yes.
She stops in front of him, Die Hard or something on the television and she’s just stepped between Andrew and John McClane. He looks at her, all weird and expectant.
“I really like you. Okay. Just though you should know.”
He takes the beer from her and just laughs.
They met outside a Starbucks. He was on the phone with Jamie, who had interrupted his story about a fashion show or something gay (Andrew’s term for it, not Jamie’s) to tell Andrew that speaking of gay things, ordering a pumpkin spice latte is probably the gayest of the gay and no woman will ever want to fuck his poncy little pumpkin-spiced arse (verbatim).
Emma was with Jesse. He had conned her into lunch with him, despite her claims she was mad at him (though it was beyond her why exactly; she thinks it had something to do with a party and a girl and important things like honor and cell phones and answering them when they ring, but because it had been a party, the reasons were difficult to remember).
Jesse saw Andrew first. It was spring, The Social Network had wrapped, and outside of a very select group of people (either nerds or studio executives), no one was talking about Spiderman.
“Andrew,” Jesse said, “this is Emma.” He smiled and so did she; he reached across and shook her hand, his hand warmed from the coffee he had been holding. He had told Jamie, “Hey, man, I’m going to call you back,” and then hung up the phone. It was spring, the California weather unseasonably warm and just that morning he had been thinking how little he cared for this city, this weather, for a lot of things.
Emma’s hand was small in his own and she squeezed when she shook his.
“Heard a lot about you,” she said. “It’s good to meet you. Finally.”
He laughed. “Consider it mutual,” he said.
That sounds about right.
fin.