Then I turn my head and see Arthur in the other bed, still asleep, one arm flung over his face, his spectacles folded neatly on the nightstand between us. He snores softly, a small, unguarded sound. Without the glasses, without the nervous energy that animates him when he's awake, he looks younger. Softer. The kind of face that hasn't yet learned to arrange itself for an audience.
I lie there and watch him breathe. I know I shouldn't. It's the sort of thing that would sound creepy if I described it aloud, but there's something about watching another person sleep that strips away all the performance. He isn't trying to impress me. He isn't angling for content. He's just a man, breathing in a cheap motel room in the middle of Nevada, because yesterday I asked a stranger to drive me across America and he said yes.
Yesterday. The memory of the party at the Fairmont feels distant already, the clink of champagne flutes and the weight of Marcus's hand on my elbow replaced by the hum of this rattling air conditioner and the vast, quiet dark I remember through the Mustang's windows. I made a decision. I chose this. The realisation settles in my stomach like a stone and a balloon at once.
Arthur stirs. His arm slides off his face, and he blinks at the ceiling with the same disorientation I felt minutes ago. His hand pats the nightstand, finds his glasses, and the world comes into focus for both of us.
'Morning,' I say.
He startles, sitting up too fast. 'Beatrice. Right. Nevada. Yes.' He runs a hand through his hair, which only makes it stand up more. 'I didn't dream that, then.'
'If you did, we're having the same dream, and that's a different genre of film entirely.'
He laughs, a surprised, slightly strangled sound, and I feel something loosen in my chest. I made him laugh. It wasn't scripted. It wasn't for a camera. It was just for me.
* * *
Breakfast is a diner attached to the motel, the kind of place where the coffee tastes like it's been on the burner since the previous administration and the eggs arrive glistening with more butter than any cardiologist would sanction. I love it immediately. No one looks at me twice. The waitress calls me 'hon' and refills Arthur's mug without asking, and the man in the corner booth is too absorbed in his newspaper to glance up when we slide into the cracked vinyl seat by the window.
Arthur pokes at his scrambled eggs with the air of a man who is trying very hard to act normal and succeeding only in looking like he's defusing a bomb. 'So,' he says. 'Nevada.'
'Nevada,' I agree.
'I've never been to Nevada.'
'Neither have I. Not properly. Press tours don't count. You see the inside of a hotel ballroom and the inside of a car to the airport and that's it.' I take a sip of the terrible coffee and savour it. 'I've been to twenty-seven countries and I couldn't tell you what any of them smell like.'
He looks at me then, really looks, and I see something shift behind his spectacles. The YouTuber calculation, maybe, the part of him that's always framing shots and thinking about thumbnails. But it fades, replaced by something gentler. 'What does Nevada smell like so far?'
I consider the question. 'Dust. Creosote. The coffee in this diner. Freedom, I think. If freedom has a smell.'
'Freedom smells like burnt coffee and shrubbery,' he says. 'Noted.'
We finish breakfast and climb back into the Mustang. The morning has warmed enough that the steering wheel is hot to the touch, and Arthur cranks the window down before he starts the engine. The air that pours in is dry and clean and carries the faint, green scent of sagebrush from somewhere out beyond the parking lot. He pulls onto the highway, and the desert opens around us like a yawn.
* * *
The miles unspool. The landscape shifts from scrub-dotted flats to low, rust-coloured hills and back again, the road a black ribbon stitched across a land that seems indifferent to our passage. Arthur drives with both hands on the wheel, his posture still that of someone who learned on the other side of the road and hasn't quite internalised the swap. I watch the speedometer climb and feel the vibration of the engine through the floorboards, a steady, mechanical heartbeat.
At some point, he reaches into the centre console and pulls out his camera. A small, handheld thing, the kind vloggers use. I've seen a hundred of them. I've been filmed by a hundred of them. The sight of it triggers something in me before I can stop it, a tightening in my shoulders, a straightening of my spine. My chin lifts. My expression smooths. I feel my face arrange itself into the expression I've worn on a thousand red carpets, the one that says I am delighted to be here, I am grateful for this opportunity, I am whatever you need me to be.
Arthur notices. His thumb hovers over the record button, and then his eyes flick to my face, and I watch him register the change. The slight widening of his pupils. The way his mouth opens and closes.
'You don't have to,' I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I intended. 'Film, I mean. If you were going to.'
'I was,' he admits. 'Reflex. Sorry.' He lowers the camera. 'I was going to do a bit about the desert. The adventure. Very cinematic, all that.' He pauses. 'You went somewhere else just now. When you saw the lens.'
I don't answer immediately. The desert scrolls past my window, and I watch a hawk describe a slow circle against the bleached sky. 'I've been doing that since I was sixteen,' I say finally. 'The switch. Camera on, Beatrice on. Camera off, Beatrice off. Except the camera's never really off anymore, is it? There's always a phone. Always someone watching.'
Arthur is quiet for a long moment. Then he does something I don't expect. He fumbles with the camera, navigating menus with the slightly clumsy intensity of someone who isn't entirely comfortable with the technology despite his aspirations. I hear the soft click of buttons, and then he holds the screen up so I can see it.
DELETE FILE? the display reads. Underneath, a timestamp from the night of the party. The Fairmont. The audio file.
'That's the recording,' I say. 'From the terrace.'
'Yes.'
'You kept it.'
'I was going to use it,' he says, and the words come out in a rush, as if he's confessing something shameful. 'For a video. For the channel. It would have been huge, Beatrice. A global star, vulnerable, asking a stranger for help. The algorithm would have eaten it alive. I would have gotten thousands of views. Maybe hundreds of thousands.' He swallows. 'That's what I was thinking. When I recorded it. That's what I was thinking the whole time.'
I should be angry. A week ago, I would have been furious. But I hear the past tense in his voice, the distance he's already putting between himself and that version of himself, and instead I feel something closer to curiosity. 'And now?'
He presses the button. The screen flashes. FILE DELETED.
'Now I'm thinking that would have been a shit thing to do,' he says. 'To someone who trusted me.'
The hawk outside the window banks and vanishes. The Mustang hums. I feel something in my chest that I don't have a name for, a warmth that has nothing to do with the desert sun beating through the glass. I reach over and place my hand on his arm, just for a second, just enough to feel the muscle tense and then relax under my fingers.
'Thank you,' I say.
He doesn't answer. He doesn't need to.
* * *
The afternoon stretches on. We stop for petrol at a station that seems to have materialised out of the heat haze, a single pump and a handwritten sign advertising live bait. Arthur goes inside to pay, and I lean against the Mustang's bonnet, feeling the warmth of the metal through my jeans. The sky is enormous here, bigger than it ever is in Los Angeles, where the smog and the buildings and the constant press of ambition shrink everything down to manageable proportions. Here, there's nothing to shrink it. Just space, and light, and the distant blue silhouette of mountains that might be fifty miles away or might be a hundred.
When Arthur returns, he's carrying two bottles of water and a bag of something that claims to be beef jerky but looks more like desiccated shoe leather. 'Provisions,' he announces. 'The woman behind the counter said there's a diner about forty miles up the road. She also said the meatloaf is "an experience," which I'm choosing to interpret as a warning.'
We drive. We eat the jerky, which is exactly as terrible as it looks. We argue about music—he wants classic rock, I want silence, we compromise on a classical station that fades in and out of static as the Mustang climbs through a range of low hills. And somewhere in the middle of all that ordinariness, I start talking.
I don't plan to. The words simply rise up, the way water rises in a well after a long drought, and I find myself telling him about Marcus. About the years of being managed, scheduled, positioned, packaged. About the diet plans and the media training and the way every outfit I've worn since I was nineteen was chosen by someone else. About the flat in Beverly Hills that I own but have never really lived in, because living implies a life and I've been too busy performing one.
'He decides who I date,' I say. 'Did you know that? He decides who I'm seen with, what restaurants I go to, which charities I support. It's all strategy. All optics. I'm not a person to him. I'm a portfolio.'
Arthur doesn't interrupt. He drives, his eyes on the road, his expression unreadable. But I can tell he's listening by the way his hands have loosened on the wheel, the way his breathing has slowed.
'I used to think it was worth it,' I continue. 'The fame. The attention. When you're young and someone tells you you're special, you believe them. You don't realise you're signing away everything until it's already gone. And by then, you're so deep in it that you can't imagine another way to live.' I pause. The classical station dissolves into static, and Arthur reaches over to switch it off. 'I'm tired,' I say. 'I'm so bloody tired of being Beatrice the Actress. I don't even know who Beatrice the Person is anymore. I'm not sure I ever did.'
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable. It's the kind of silence that makes space for what's been said, that holds it gently instead of rushing to fill it with platitudes. Arthur lets it breathe. Then he says, 'I had forty-seven subscribers.'
I turn to look at him. 'What?'
'On YouTube. Forty-seven subscribers. My last video got eighty-three views. My last Instagram post got twenty-three likes. I quit my job and flew to America because I thought if I could just get the right footage, the right story, the right viral moment, everything would change. I'd be someone. People would see me.' He glances at me, and his smile is crooked and self-deprecating. 'I've been performing too. Just for a much smaller audience.'
I laugh. I can't help it. It's not a cruel laugh—it's the laugh of recognition, the sound of someone seeing their own absurdity reflected back at them. 'We're quite a pair,' I say.
'The actress who wants to stop acting and the YouTuber who can't get anyone to watch,' he agrees. 'Driving through the desert in a car that's haemorrhaging oil.'
'Is it really?'
'The mechanic in California said the rear main seal is gone. He gave it three or four days before it becomes a serious problem.'
'And we're on day two.'
'We're on day two,' he confirms.
We look at each other. The absurdity of it all—the broken car, the deleted evidence, the manager who is almost certainly tracking us right now, the complete and total uncertainty of what comes next—hits us at the same moment. We start laughing, and once we start, we can't stop. Arthur has to pull over because he's laughing so hard he can barely see the road, and I'm doubled over in the passenger seat, tears streaming down my face, and I can't remember the last time I laughed like this. I can't remember if I ever have.
* * *
The questionable diner materialises around four o'clock, a squat building with a neon sign that flickers COFFEE—PIES—GAS in erratic, buzzing letters. The meatloaf is, as promised, an experience. Arthur takes one bite and his face goes through a series of expressions that I wish I'd filmed, purely for posterity. 'It tastes like regret,' he says, and I nearly choke on my water.
'Regret and ketchup,' I manage.
'Regret and ketchup and possibly cinnamon? Why is there cinnamon in meatloaf?'
The waitress, a woman in her sixties with hair the colour of steel wool, refills our coffees without being asked. 'You two on a road trip?'
'Something like that,' I say.
'Honeymoon?'
Arthur turns a shade of red that clashes badly with the vinyl upholstery. 'No. No, we're just—friends. Travelling.'
The waitress nods sagely, as if she's heard that one before and doesn't believe it for a second. 'Well, you drive safe. There's a storm coming in tonight. Nothing serious, but the roads get slick.'
We finish our meal—or rather, we finish the parts of it that are edible—and climb back into the Mustang. The sun is sinking now, painting the desert in shades of orange and violet and a deep, bruised purple that I've never seen anywhere except in photographs. The air cools rapidly, the way it does in places where there's nothing to hold the heat once the sun drops below the horizon.
I'm watching the sky when I say it. 'My grandmother had a cabin in Maine.'
Arthur glances at me. 'Maine?'
'On a lake. I don't remember the name of it. I was seven the last time I was there. But I remember the way the water looked in the morning, all still and silver, and the way the pine trees smelled. It was the only place I ever felt like I could breathe.' I pull my knees up onto the seat, wrapping my arms around them. 'I used to dream about going back. Just disappearing. No cameras, no schedules, no Marcus. Just me and the lake and the quiet.'
'Why didn't you?'
I consider the question. 'Because I was afraid. Because I didn't know who I'd be without all of it. Because Marcus told me that if I stepped away for even a month, the industry would forget me, and I believed him.' I watch the last sliver of sun disappear behind a distant ridge. 'I still believe him, a little. That's the worst part. I know he's wrong, but I believe him anyway.'
Arthur is quiet for a moment. Then he says, 'There's a town called Beatty. It's about an hour from here. We could stop there for the night.'
'Beatty,' I repeat. 'Like Beatrice.'
'Like Beatrice,' he agrees. 'I thought that might be a good sign.'
I turn to look at him. The dashboard lights cast his face in pale green and amber, and his spectacles reflect the road ahead, twin rectangles of gathering dusk. He's not performing. He's not calculating. He's just a man, driving a car, suggesting a town because it shares my name.
'Beatty sounds perfect,' I say.
The Mustang rolls on into the deepening night, the desert stretching around us like a promise, like a question, like a life I haven't lived yet but might, if I'm brave enough to keep driving.
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