Page 13 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
“Bea, picture it: he wakes up, opens Instagram, and BAM! Photo-scoops everywhere: Zane Ryder and me kissing on the beach, on a yacht, under the blazing stage lights. His brain would explode like amicrowave with a spoon inside. His eyes would spin like slot machines, smoke pouring from his ears, and before he could even say ‘wait a sec,’ they’d strap him into a straightjacket and wheel him away.”
“Who cares what Chad feels? He can take his ego and book it a one-way vacation to Mars!”
“No, no, no. He has to pay. He has tosuffer.And what punishment could be more divine than seeing me—me!—on the arm of the sexiest, richest, most virile rockstar on the hemisphere? As Frank Sinatra said:the best revenge is massive success.”
“Yeah, but I doubt Frank Sinatra was picturing himself naked with a guitarist in snakeskin pants… And besides—how do you evenplanon getting close to someone like Zane Ryder?” I asked, spreading my arms as if I were physically trying to embrace the entire concept of absurdity.
“I don’t know yet, Bea. Yesterday I was just a humble librarian with the self-esteem of a broken cookie at the bottom of the box. But after reading the Countess’s precious teachings… I’ll know exactly what to do.”
“And the fact that no one has ever checked that book out doesn’t raise… oh, I don’t know, a couple of red flags?”
“Of course not. That’s the ultimate proof! Proof that none of our library patrons ever had the guts to go after a poet of Ryder’s caliber. And you knowwhy? Because they never dared. None of them got their hands on Jim Morrison, John Lennon, or Kurt Cobain. But maybe—just maybe—if they’d read this book instead of letting it gather dust… they would have.”
She stepped closer, eyes shining, brandishing the tome like it was the Holy Grail.
“Don’t you see, Bea? The secret knowledge of one of history’s greatest seductresses has been sitting there all along, graciously provided by the New York Department of Education, and not a single woman had the guts to claim it. Too busy reading historical romances with dukes and damsels! Too fenced in by their own mental cages. But not me. I’m the first who dared. And tonight… the Contessa and I… we’ve officially teamed up.”
Part of my brain still believed—or maybe just desperately hoped—that she was joking. That maybe she’d read the book, laugh at it, daydream a little about seducing a celebrity just to spite her idiot ex… but deep down, she’d know it was all laughably impossible. Therapeutic fantasy, really. A hallucinatory coping mechanism. A weird but harmless distraction—until something else came along. A stray puppy to rescue, an unexpected promotion, or—more likely—a new fling with a sexy bartender.
“Fine, do what you want,” I said, throwing up my hands in surrender. “But let me remind you: thebest revenge is indifference.”
She fixed me with a glint of megalomaniac genius in her eyes. “No. The best revenge is indifference while I’m seated on the throne, next to the King, as the entire kingdom cheers my name.That’sreal indifference.”
With a sweeping gesture of the book—like she was wielding some ancient scepter passed down through generations of drama queens—she marched out of the room with imperial strides, leaving me alone to reflect on two things: first, my roommate was officially losing her mind; second… her madness was starting to feel disturbingly contagious.
6
The next morning I woke up late—something that hadn’t happened in years. Me, the woman who, even while unemployed, kept a work ethic worthy of a Tibetan monk. Normally I was up with the sun, brewing coffee—the only life coach I could afford—and then parking myself at the desk to hammer out sentences that, in my head, were destined to change the course of literary history. Morning is golden, they said, and I tried to scrape up every ounce of it with the keys of my typewriter.
It was a strict routine: writing during the sacred hours of morning and early afternoon, then reading—because for me, reading counted as professional training. I read everything: the good novels, to learn; the bad ones, to understand whatnotto do. Basically, my entire day was a nonstop literary workshop… minus the paycheck.
That day, though, I stayed in bed. No alarm, no coffee, no world-changing sentences destined to rewrite contemporary literature. It wasn’t that Ilacked ideas—quite the opposite. Every time I wrote a novel, ten more popped into my head. The real problem was actually finishing one before my brain—like an overwhelmed mom with too many kids—forgot which one really needed the attention.
I finally dragged myself out of bed at ten-thirty—a time I’d always associated with retired millionaires and lazy cats—and found Tess perched on the kitchen counter, nose buried in her brand-new gospel:How to Seduce a Doomed Artist.
“What are you doing home from work?” I asked, but she dismissed me with a regal flick of her hand.
I shrugged and turned to my breakfast, silently wondering if the coffee would be strong enough not only to wake up my body, but also my self-esteem.
I collapsed onto the couch with all the grace of a hibernating sloth and decided this would be my natural habitat for the rest of the day. The TV was on some random channel—a first for me. Normally, the only shows I allowed myself were a couple of hours at night, and only if the plot was so tightly constructed it made me forget I hadn’t yet written the Great American Novel. But today? Today I was reclaiming all the laziness I’d denied myself for years.
What a waste, I thought. All that hard work and not a single cent in return. If I’d poured the same dedication into literallyanythingelse, by now I’d probably be running a Fortune 500 company,competing at the Olympics, or floating around in space in a silver NASA jumpsuit. Instead, I was here—in pajamas—counting down the days until my financial blackout: three weeks and then goodbye to Mom and Dad’s wire transfers.
And no, I had zero intention of spending those days sending résumés, filling out motivational forms, or pretending to love teamwork. Those three weeks would be devoted to honoring a decade of repressed laziness. So I dove headfirst into an uneducational binge-watch of old ’80s TV shows:The A-Team, Magnum P.I., MacGyver.A parade of improbable schemes, giant hair, and work ethics that made mine look stellar in comparison.
At some point Tess must have gotten tired of sitting, because she started pacing the room with her nose buried in the book, like a nun on a hardcore spiritual retreat. She read with fierce concentration, as if the Countess’s words were carved into stone.
I watched her, baffled. “Don’t tell me you actually called in sick just to read that ridiculous book?”
Nothing. Not even the usual dismissive hand-wave. She was totally immersed—probably at some crucial chapter, something likeAppendix: How to Seduce the Doomed Artist While He Performs Shakespeare Naked Under the Full Moon.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about the Countess… what was her name again? Éloïse de la Croix? Whatever. Sounded like a brand of fancy chocolates. I wondered if she’d struggled to get published. How many copies had she even sold in her lifetime? Probably just enough to land an English translation. Unless, of course, the whole thing was an elaborate scam cooked up by some shady Cincinnati printer in 1912, who’d spotted the self-help craze and commissioned a ghostwriter—probably a man—who’d never held more than a three-minute conversation with a woman, but knew exactly how to hit her ego by the second paragraph. Maybe his name was Earl, he wore suspenders, lived with his mother, but could wield the wordardorlike no one else.
Every so often Tess would stop dead in her tracks, like the book had just revealed the meaning of life. Her lips moved silently, reading some line that was no doubt “life-changing.” The kind you sigh over, underline with a heart, and later copy into your secret diary in glitter pen.
After my marathon of ’80s TV shows—an experience both formative and utterly pointless—I decided it was time for lunch. As I sliced tomatoes onto a mountain of lettuce (the kind only I had the nerve to call a “big salad”), Tess relocated to the windowsill, her new reading perch. She looked like she was in mystical contemplation.
I tried to break through with another one of mybrilliant theories: “If you ask me, that book was written by a career con artist. The kind of guy who sells ‘authentic’ Napoleon love letters written in ballpoint pen.”
