Everyone's But Hers

The Playbook

By the third session, Kai Voss had run out of moves, and Kai Voss did not run out of moves. Running out of moves was not something that happened to him. It was, in the most literal sense, his entire profession.

He had a playbook. No one in his orbit ever said the word out loud, but they all knew it the way sailors know a change in the wind. The look held half a second too long, the one that made a person feel like the only lit window on a long dark street. The confession was handed over like a gift, something soft, something a little broken, rehearsed enough to land and raw enough to pass for unrehearsed. The smile aimed at one face in a crowded room so that one face felt chosen out of thousands.

It worked on executives who had seen every trick the business had. It worked on journalists who had promised their editors a takedown. It worked on women who had sworn to their friends, hands on hearts, that they were the exception. It worked on everyone, every time, because the entire machine of his life had been built for fifteen years to make sure it did.

It did not work for Elena Reyes. It did not appear to reach her at all.

“Eyes to me,” she said from behind the lens. “Not at me. To me. There’s a difference, and you used to know it.”

He gave her the look. The chosen one. The look that had ended a marriage in Milan and started a bidding war in Paris.

“You’re doing the thing with your jaw,” she said, flat as a shut door. “Unclench it.”

Cold lightning went straight down his spine. Because she had said that to him once before, a lifetime ago, on a mattress on a floor, in a room with a half-erased heart on the wall outside the window. She had said it then like he was the only man alive. She said it now like he was a light stand that had drifted out of position.

“Elena.”

“Mr. Voss.” Click. “Chin down. You’re hiding the better side of your own face, and I don’t get paid enough to let you.”

So he tried sincerity, which was harder, because his sincerity had grown a callus from years of going unused. Between setups, he started telling her true things, almost against his own will, the way you keep pressing a bruise to confirm it still hurts. That the album was about getting older and pretending you weren’t. That he had not slept a whole night in two years. That fame was the loneliest room he had ever stood in, and he had grown up in some lonely rooms.

She changed his memory card and said, “Lower the water bottle, you’re bouncing light into the lens.”

The crew noticed. Of course, they noticed. They had all watched him dissolve into perfect strangers with a glance, and now they watched him work for forty unbroken minutes and get back nothing but instructions and f-stops. A grip caught a gaffer’s eye. Someone’s mouth twitched and got swallowed. The whole room tilted into that rare, delicious, dangerous weather, the electricity of watching a powerful man fail at the one thing he has never once failed at.

Sloane noticed first. Sloane always noticed first. Noticing was the entirety of her function, the way noticing is the entire function of a hawk above a field.

She drifted towards him at the coffee station, bloodless and elegant in head-to-toe charcoal, and she did not bother to make it a question.

“What is happening?”

“Nothing’s happening.”

“You have reshot the same setup four times. You shot a magazine cover last spring in eleven minutes.” Her eyes moved towards Elena and stayed a beat too long, the way a person stares at a face they are certain they have filed somewhere dangerous. “Do you know her?”

“No.” Too fast. A whole second too fast.

Sloane’s expression did not change, which was how he knew she had caught it. She filed it away in that cold cabinet behind her eyes, cross-referenced, labeled, waiting.

“Because the budget has no line for a vanity photographer,” she said pleasantly, “and you have no room this quarter for a story. Any story. You are one bad headline away from the kind of year we do not come back from. Do we understand each other?”

“She’s good,” he said. “That’s all. She’s the best I’ve ever stood in front of.”

“Mm.” Sloane sipped her coffee and watched Elena over the rim of the cup. “She’s certainly something.”

By the end of the day, he had a hundred and ninety frames of his own face and not one square inch of hers, and somewhere in the middle of all that fluorescent failure he understood something about himself that frightened him more than any headline ever had.

He would do almost anything to keep her in a room with him a little longer.

Not to win her. He was not even sure he believed he could. Only to push back the moment she walked out the door, because she had been walking out the door of his life for three years, and he had felt every inch of all three years, and he was so tired of watching her leave.

So he did the reckless thing. The thing with no plan under it, only need.

He waited until she was packing. Caps on the lenses. Cards counted. Bag on her shoulder. Already angled toward the exit the way she had been angled toward the exit since the first gray morning. And he raised his voice, loud enough for Sloane to hear, loud enough for the whole crew to hear, loud enough that saying it would make it true the instant it left his mouth and could never again be unsaid.

“I want her for the entire campaign.” He did not look away from Elena. “The album. The tour. All of it. Exclusive. No other shooter touches this era. Whatever it costs, double it, and lock it down tonight, before she finds a reason to say no.”

The room went dead. Sloane set her coffee down with terrible care.

Elena turned around slowly. And for the first time in three sessions, something moved behind her eyes. It was not warmth. It was the look of an animal in a quiet wood that had just heard, somewhere very close in the dark, the soft and final click of a trap closing.

“No,” she said.

Kai smiled. And for one terrible second, inside the smile, he was the boy in the photograph again.

“You haven’t heard the number yet,” he said.