Page 33 of Paparazzi

Meanwhile, behind me, Thomas laughs, and I don’t dare look him in the face, at least until he encircles my waist with his arms and kisses me on the cheek.

“So, you like to masturbate to my photos. Do you use the ones you find online or the posters they sell on the record company’s website?” he teases me as Albert looks at us disgusted and goes to put the drinks in the fridge.

“I don’t do that!” I say more embarrassed than indignant.

“Look, there’s nothing wrong with it.” Emily sides with him, laughing.

“I’m going now before I discover any more secrets that might shock me.” He kisses me on the nose.

“You have no idea how many there are,” mumbles Albert, annoyed while Emily punches his side and he grunts. Thomas doesn’t seem to notice his comment, but my heart jumps in my throat.

“Hey, you can stay for dinner,” Emily proposes with a smile from ear to ear.

“Thank you, but I leave you to the evening you have planned. I’ve already had the pleasure of her company all afternoon.” He turns to me and says softly, “Look...I know it didn’t go very well with the dinner invitation, but there is this Christmas event at the Met...I don’t need you to give me an answer now...I mean, but I’d love it if you came with me.”

I’m staring at him like he’s a mirage. Did he really just invite me to the most famous event of the winter season? This is a surprise of epic proportions. I open and close my mouth a couple of times without being able to formulate a coherent answer.

“Think about it?” He turns around to leave—smart move to drop the bomb when he’s already on his way out. He opens the front door, turns around with a smile, and gently kisses my lips. Before he goes out and closes it behind him, he winks, and I smile like a sixteen-year-old on cloud nine.

“Look at the two lovebirds.” Emily’s voice is a mixture of teasing and dreamy sighs.

“Not lovebirds. And do you think it’s a good call to embarrass me like that in front of him?”

“I swear, I had no idea he was here. Otherwise, I would have said worse!” She bursts out laughing as I throw a pillow at her in response.

“Are you fucking him? Christ, you’ve stooped low,” Albert says bluntly.

Emily rolls her eyes, exasperated, and I don’t know what to say. Albert asked me out once and I said no. Since then, he’s become a plague every time I have a guy interested in me, whether or not I actually date him. We all go out together, we have fun at concerts, and he often helps me with extensive research and systems I don’t have access to. He works for a newspaper; he verifies that facts and sources are accurate and reliable on behalf of the journalists who then put the paper’s signature on their articles. He has access to means and sources, sometimes legal, much more often illegal, that I’ll never have. Every now and then, I feel guilty for taking advantage of him, but he always offers to help, and sometimes I give in to temptation.

“What do you want me to tell you? It’s not true?” I snap, annoyed. I don’t like to answer him so meanly, but sometimes frustration outweighs my determination to respond nicely.

Albert gives me the side-eye and offers me a piece of pizza without answering my questions. Luckily, it’s Emily who comes to my rescue, breaking the tense silence between us. “Do you realize that Thomas had the arrogance to come and ask me for a caramel macchiato today? To me, who works in a place that doesn’t serve that junk.”

She’s outraged. I laugh, amused. “I know, he told me. You terrified him.”

“I wanted him to learn his lesson. You have to train them, or they’ll keep ordering caramel macchiatos!”

Emily jumps into her invective against the chains that transform people into robots, and Albert and I are forced to grab the alcohol out of the fridge to turn the evening into a more cheerful one. A pizza, a bottle of wine, and six cans of beer later, we’re sprawled on the bed with my laptop on Albert’s legs googling stupid things like what penguins smell like while Emily opens the bottle of tequila.

“Do you realize that you slept with the rock star you’ve had a crush on since you were sixteen?” she asks me in a tone that is a mixture of conspiratorial and dreamy.

We’re all a bit tipsy, and maybe more than that. Unfortunately, when Emily is drunk, she tends to focus obsessively on a topic, and this time she chooses Thomas.

“Don’t talk about it. It seems absurd.” I cover my face with my hands, a little ashamed. I don’t know if I’m blushing about the turmoil of emotions that affect me or because I’m drunk.

“Really absurd if you consider you’ve slept with someone you don’t know anything about,” says Albert.

“Can you explain what your problem is?” Emily glares daggers at him.

Albert blushes but doesn’t give up. “It’s true! If he was any other guy, you’d never have ended up in bed without knowing anything about him. Doesn’t it seem odd that there’s no information out there about that band’s past? They seem to have materialized out of nowhere,” he says, agitated.

“He’s right. They have that halo of mystery that makes them to-die-for sexy, but, if you think about it, zero personal information,” Emily admits.

Not that I didn’t think about it. It’s true what she says, and maybe Albert is also slightly right: if he was any other guy I met at a club, I’d never be having sex with him without knowing anything about him. When you look at famous people, at the glossy life their press offices put out, you feel like you know them like friends, but that’s not true. We only know what they want the public to know about them, superficial things that satisfy the curiosity of their readers, but not what really matters. I know Thomas’s shoe size because I read it in a fashion magazine, but not where he’s lived his whole life.

“It’s not true that I don’t know him. Today he opened up a lot with me!” The need to justify my actions mingles with the guilt that’s been gripping me for days, making my voice sound shrill like a whiney little girl.

“If it’s true that he opened up so much with you, prove it,” Albert challenges me as Emily passes me the bottle.

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