He must really like her.
Giddy, she lost the beat, bumping into the people around her.
“Two left feet?” he teased, showing off his own skills with a fluid hip swivel. The man knew how to move.
Zia refocused. She may not have experience flirting with mysterious movie stars who showed up at tiny Brooklyn clubs. But she could dance. She leaned in close to his ear, one hand on his bicep. Still as warm and hard as she left it. “¡Vamos, chacho!”
Once again, Zia was back inside the music, snaking her hips and shaking her shoulders. But this time, she wasn’t alone.
* * *
It was well into the witching hour when they decided to call it a night. “Can I give you a ride home?” Clay asked.
Zia wiped off her forehead, sweaty and spent. Almost postcoital. “I’m staying with a friend ten minutes away. You can walk with me, if you want.”
Clay nodded, pursing his lips. “Let me talk to my security.”
He conferred with a serious, swarthy man, both of them huddled in the shadows. A glimpse of Clay’s larger world, the one that required him to have a bodyguard, edged into Zia’s consciousness. It was like glimpsing the ocean for the first time: something vast and thrilling with an undercurrent of danger.
Clay reappeared, smiling as he shrugged on a leather jacket. But when she moved toward the front entrance, Clay turned her around. “Cameras just arrived.” Then, off her look of confusion: “Paparazzi.”
Clay’s security guard, Angus, led the pair into a back office. Clay handed Angus his hat and sunglasses. Angus was the same height and build as Clay, and was wearing the same outfit. He would be the decoy, and the paparazzi would follow him back to Clay’s apartment in SoHo, allowing them to leave via the service entrance at the back of the club.
They snuck into the empty, quiet alleyway, walking quickly up to the street, turning onto Wythe Avenue. Clay was alert, but there was no one around except tipsy locals. Above them, a subway train rattled over the Williamsburg Bridge. It felt like they’d just robbed a bank. She couldn’t parse out her feelings about it. Or him. Who was this person walking her home? She’d been in sync with Clay on the dance floor, but it was clear they were from completely different worlds. The sight of his perfectly proportioned face, a face that belonged on magazine covers and fifty-foot billboards, both relaxed her and made her more tense.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She almost laughed. “I’m just… I mean, this is a little bit…”
“Look, ask me anything, Zia. Seriously, I’m an open book.”
Zia wrapped her arms around herself. “Okay. What’s it like being Clay Russo?”
He mulled it over for a moment. “Mostly, it’s good, and sometimes it’s complicated. What’s it like being Zia…?”
“Ruiz,” she supplied, and he repeated it, like he was rolling a sweet around in his mouth. She considered his question. “I guess, ditto.”
“See,” he said. “We’re not so different.”
They talked all the way back to Darlene’s apartment, an easy back-and-forth that moved fluidly between banter and scattered bits of biography. She told him about the time she’d spent abroad—Haiti, Cambodia, Bangladesh. He shared his work as cofounder of Radical Water, a clean-water initiative that’d taken him to Uganda three times in the past two years. When he wasn’t on location for a film, he divided his time between New York and LA. Zia had met wealthy people in her travels—many of the donors who funded Global Care projects were part of the 1 percent. But celebrity wealth was different, tied to the value of one specific person. Her sister always said, “The only people who say money doesn’t matter are people who have a lot of it.” Zia put this out of her mind. Money didn’t define a person: it was usually the least interesting thing about them. Their heart was what mattered.
She stopped outside Darlene’s building. “Well. This is me.”
“Okay. This is you.” Clay smiled at her, almost shyly, his hands in his pockets.
He hadn’t touched her since they left the club. He didn’t assume she was his.
She said, “There’s a roof deck…?”
* * *
Zia handed Clay a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as they took in the sprawling mess of Brooklyn, the restless East River, and behind it, the most unmistakable skyline in the world. Manhattan. There was something about being up here, part of the cityscape and far from the ordinary reality of the street below, that seemed permissive. Intimate.
“So, when you say your life is complicated,” she said, “what does that mean?”
He eyed her. “You promise you’re not, like, a journalist or anything? I spill my guts, it ends up on the internet?”
“No! God, no! No, I was just… totally prying, and you definitely do not have to answer.” She held his gaze. “But you can trust me. I promise.”
He tapped his foot against the concrete balcony that separated them from the drop to the street below. “Well, first, let’s be clear: I’m lucky. I’m not the best actor in the world; every single critic will tell you that. But through a series of coincidences and persistence and dumb luck, I ended up in this pretty incredible job that gives me the kind of life I honestly never even dreamed of.” Clay shook his head. “People talk a lot about privilege these days, and man, I got privilege coming out the wazoo. I got my health. I can help good people do good things. I got a lot, Zia, more than I deserve, for sure.”
“But?” Zia asked.
He took a sip of beer. Stalling. “But everything comes with strings attached.”
“Like?”
Clay let out an uneasy laugh. “I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful, because I’m not.”
“Clay,” Zia protested. “I asked.”
Clay sighed. “In a nutshell… everyone feels like I owe them more than I’m giving. More than I’m able to give.”
Zia didn’t say anything, giving Clay room to continue.
“I got a big family and I’m from a small town. And so when I was starting out in LA, nobody really gave a crap about me when I went home for Christmas. And that was fine; we all just ate turkey and watched the game and tried to stop Uncle Enzo drinking too much grappa.”
Zia chuckled.
Clay smiled too. “Anyway, so after I did my first big movie, people who I hadn’t heard from in years started coming out of the woodwork, inviting me over, asking me to invest in their business, wanting me to be their kid’s godfather.” He rubbed his eyes. “I am so many people’s godfather, it’s crazy. And when I started to say no, because I said yes way too many times, people got pissed. Like, really pissed. And it’s not just family shit.” He ticked off his fingers. “Directors want more time. Press want more interviews. Fans want more of me. Even my friends want more. Next week I have to fly to Tokyo to do some kind of energy drink sponsorship, which I’m only doing because… I don’t even know why. I hate energy drinks!” He ran his hand through his hair, looking slightly bewildered. “Sometimes, I don’t even feel like a person. I feel like a gateway to something else: money, influence, power. I owe a million emails and phone calls and tweets and favors and introductions. I constantly feel like I’m letting everyone down because there’s not enough of me to go around. I’m just one guy. One guy whose ex-girlfriend wrote a book full of way too much personal information, who has no privacy, no downtime, but can never complain about it because…”