Page 58 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
“Jesus, Tess. That’s evil. You don’t even sound like yourself.”
Her face hardened in an instant. “Every seduction is a siege: it’s not enough to get inside—you raze everything to the ground.”
Days of waiting.
Days of tinkering with the opening chapters of my novel: a trim here, a merge there. Add a comma, delete a comma. Then I stopped, afraid I was sanding down too much of the first draft’s heat. Okay, maybe it wouldn’t be perfect—but at least it would be alive, with a heartbeat pulsing betweenthe lines. Better a messy, beating novel than a flawless little assignment, a cold exercise in style.
Of course I wrote a whole chapter about those waiting days: Tess gearing up for her little Florida trip, coming home with sunscreen, wide-brimmed hats, and sarongs—though naturally, all of it in some kind of gothic-Victorian palette.
One night she shut herself in her room. I stationed myself outside, notebook in hand, ear pressed to the door so I could jot down the lines from the manual she was reciting aloud, intoning each one like she had a secretary in there taking dictation.
“Smile rarely. And when you do, make him doubt whether he’s earned it.”
“Don’t seek love. Seek unrest.”
“Ask a profound question. Then leave the room before the answer.”
“Genius fears the ordinary. Show yourself as prophecy, not routine.”
“Read poetry out loud. Even if you don’t understand it. Especially if you don’t understand it.”
Days of waiting.
Days of red X’s marking the countdown on the calendar.
Less than two weeks left before rent was due, and I already knew the deposit from my parents wasn’t coming this time. Poor things—they’d beenmore than patient. They’d given me two whole years of breathing room to “get established in the city,” find a real job, build an actual adult life.
But I’d used that time for something else entirely: escaping my little provincial town and throwing myself headfirst into the big city, convinced it would welcome me like a favorite daughter, ready to feed me stories—stories of triumphs and failures. Two years! That had seemed more than enough for someone with my supposed potential.
Instead, the stories slipped through my fingers like oily fish, leaving me empty-handed. Worse, I was unwittingly contributing to the city’s growing archive of failures. My provisional biography, if I’d had to write it right then, would’ve had more tragicomic chapters than triumphant ones—a collection of botched attempts and half-baked endings. The kind of thing the city loves to watch… but never rewards.
One afternoon, while I was hunting for a halfway decent synonym for “manipulation,” Tess burst into my room like a lieutenant colonel doing a surprise inspection of hopeless recruits’ bunks.
“Okay!” she announced, no preamble. “This has officially become a matter of life and death!”
I swiveled slowly in my chair. “Ryder finally wrote back?”
“No. Ryder’s got nothing to do with it.”
“And what else could possibly matter right now?”
“Chad.”
“Oh, right… the whole reason behind this circus.”
“I went out looking for Lev Mirov’s old house in Queens. But it wasn’t like—like the Louis Armstrong House Museum or anything. Nope. Just regular people living there. Nobody’s even heard of Lev Mirov. Anyway, that’s not the point. On the way back, I remembered the banana milkshake I never got to drink the day Chad dumped me. Remember?”
“How could I forget?”
“So I told myself,Fine, I’ll have that milkshake on my own.Because last time I didn’t even get a sip. And who cares if I’d made a scene—this diner makes the best banana milkshake in New York. They probably wouldn’t even recognize me now, not with my new style. You remember the bit about ninety percent of a person’s recognizability…”
“…comes from body language. Yeah.”
“Exactly. So I walked in. And who was sitting there with a strawberry milkshake?”
“Chad.”
“No—Chad doesn’t drink milkshakes. He drinks Pepsi. But yeah, he was there. With her. Andshewas drinking the milkshake. Strawberry.”
