Page 64 of White Lights
Dez wants to know more about the origins of all these scenes, how they got into Acheron’s Vault, and for what purpose. But she also knows what Rafe means. She already wants to use everything she’s seen in the Vault in her film about her brother.
“Are you really set on making this film?” Rafe asks.
“Yes,” she breathes.
“If you do it, Dez,” Rafe says, “you won’t have help from a Scribe writing the script.”
“That’s fine. I can do it on my own.”
“Only do it because you can’tnotdo it. You’re still going to have to make the O’Rourke film as well. It’s going to mean double the work.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“You say that now because you have no idea how challenging this is going to be.”
“I’ll make it work.”
“I’m going to regret this,” Rafe says.
“I can do it, Rafe. I need to do it.”
He nods. “Don’t tell anyone you’re working on a film about your brother.”
“Why?”
“Because your peers are all following their assignments. And when anyone finds out you’re only using that assignment as a cover story for what you ‘really want to do,’ I can’t protect you.”
His eyes graze her lips, and she remembers last night.
“Fine,” she says. “But can you do me one favor?”
“What?”
“If I keep up with my other assignment, when I finish this film, can you help me get it to my brother? So he can see it? So he knows I didn’t just abandon him?”
Rafe thinks for a moment, then nods. “I’ll make sure your brother sees this film.”
“Thank you,” she whispers. “I know you probably think I’m being foolish or sentimental. That wasting my time—”
“Actually, no,” he says, and Dez looks at him, feeling her heart lift. Then Rafe clears his throat and looks away. “I try to think about you as little as possible.”
Gone is the intimacy—but not the heat—from last night. She can’t tell what Rafe wants. One minute, it seems like he’s supporting her; the next, it’s like he’s belittling her. The only thing she knows is she can’t trust him farther than she can throw him onto a bed.
Which she learned last night isn’t very far at all.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Dez rises in darkness, cooks breakfast with Simon and Dr. Lebevre, suffers through Zarlengo’s lectures, and devotes the rest of her time and energy to the Vault. She doesn’t get used to Acheron’s eternal night, or watching intimate scenes from Mo’s life, or the hovering threat of Rafe’s mouth every morning when he graces her with his presence.
Truth be told, she wastes a twisted, delicious amount of time in bringing herself to orgasm, imagining Rafe hard and hot and pulsing within her.
But she also learns how to use her Lens.
By her second Friday at Acheron, she can isolate clips she wants to use from Mo’s Lifeline. She learns to slide a scene from the right side of her Lens with her fingertips. She discovers that if she turns a hundred and eighty degrees, she can drag an individual scene over to the left side of her Lens, where she can edit and arrange it into the rough cut of scenes making up her film. She works chronologically sometimes, thematically others, intuitively always—and the Lens meets her wherever her mood is at on any given day.
Dez devotes nine to noon on her assignment about Lexa O’Rourke. Each day, when new script pages come in from the corresponding Scribe on the project, Paul Rowan, Dez is surprised and fascinated by his understanding of the poet’s inner world.
Like:
All these nights, all these beers in bars with my male writer friends, listening to them praise their own work, they seem to believe they actually can become Lord Byron or John Dunne. Does becoming a man require imagining you are another man altogether, your favorite man, your idol? To worship him so ardently you begin to think he’s you?
