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Things weren't for keeps in this world. In this city. Nothing was for keeps. No-one knew that better than Jack. Here in this so-called City of Angels, under the glittering lights of Tinseltown and through the shadows they cast, he lived in a world where smiles slipped and slid like water from faces clinging to beauty with desperate determination, even the most dazzling of them only fleeting, even the most beautiful only temporary. There for the flash of a lightbulb, gone again the moment the camera looked away. Not for keeps, not ever for keeps. He knew that better than anyone, his own smile brighter, more fluid, and more temporary than any.
She baffled him a little, therefore. All the flash-and-dazzle he's used to, all the shadows into which smooth hands slipped pilfered gains, decadent, exotic and damned, just like all of them. She's something he felt he should understand, something he felt he should know. Something that will smile for him for a day, and a diamond, and disappear again afterwards, slip through his fingers, never for keeps. She should have been that. She was that.
But there was something ... different about Amanda. Something that seemed ... older, and timeless, and untouchable in a way nothing else he'd ever known was. Something that seemed eternal. Something that seemed real.
And for some reason, for those few days she's his, for those few days she smiled at him in the shadows, away from the flashbulbs ... his own smile, for the first time in years, felt a little more real. A little more permanent. A little bubble of inexplicable happiness, tugged in the wake of her sly laughing, that maybe, just maybe, might be for keeps, even if she never was.
For those few days, for maybe longer, it's enough. And more.