Page 76 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
I read the captions out loud, unable to stop myself:
“I want to be honest with my fans.”
“I’ve never been with a woman in my life.”
My eyes dropped to a corner headline, almost an afterthought—but sharp as a blade. A grainy, mid-gesture shot of Tess. Not the goddess in a white sheet. No. A blurred snap of her mid-sentence, eyes wild, mouth twisted. The caption:
“That’s not my girlfriend. She’s a stalker desperatefor attention. A crazy fangirl.”
Each word landed like a stone. Each syllable erased another sleepless night, another brilliant scheme, another carefully staged pose.
The whispers in the diner shifted—no longer whispers. Laughter. Quiet, contained, but clear. Chad and Medusa weren’t smirking with joy. They were smirking at her.
Tess lifted her eyes to mine. They were hollow. Shocked. Wounded in a way I’d never seen.
And in that instant, I knew our “mission” had never been a comedy. It had always been a tragedy—just waiting for the curtain to fall.
47
We walked through the Brooklyn streets in silence. The afternoon sun stroked the red-brick buildings with the softness of a caress, and yet each step felt heavier than the last.
Tess had lowered her sunglasses—not to hide from paparazzi (they’d evaporated along with her dream of revenge)—but to hide her eyes. I kept my hands in my pockets and stared at the sidewalk, as if concrete had suddenly acquired a fascinating texture.
Around us, Brooklyn kept doing its thing: kids chasing a half-flat soccer ball, a hot dog vendor sighing behind his cart, a pack of skateboarders zooming down the street. Too busy with their lives to notice that beside them walked the woman who, for one brief day, had been the supposed “flame of Zane Ryder.”
The air was thick with smells: gasoline, warm pretzels, the damp trace of last night’s rain. I felt like we were in an indie film that had run out ofbudget for action scenes and was now betting everything on silence.
Every so often I glanced at Tess. She walked tall, chin up, as if still strutting down an invisible runway. But her stride was slower than usual. Not defeated—Tess never truly surrenders—but not victorious either. Suspended, somewhere in between. And me, beside her, all I could do was keep her company in that silence, waiting for her to speak first.
“Bea…” Tess finally said, after a whole block of silence. Her voice was hoarse, but carried that touch of theatricality that made it unmistakably hers. “Tell me. I held on to a shred of dignity, didn’t I?”
I burst out laughing so hard a homeless guy pushing a cart turned to stare. “Tess, you spilled two glasses of water, yelled at a broken jukebox, and cursed out a tray of pancakes. If that’s dignity, then I’m the new First Lady.”
She dipped her head, then laughed too. “Okay, maybe I got carried away. But I had a plan, Bea. And plans must be defended to the last drop of blood.”
“Defended?” I shook my head. “You looked like the female version of Al Pacino inScarface,just with more hand gestures.”
“Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”
“Not that bad? It was the perfect sequel to theday Chad dumped you:Tess 2, The Revenge.”
She sighed, then smiled, her eyes glinting with the same ironic spark that had carried me through weeks of madness. “Then it’s fate. I never lose my dignity quietly. I lose it in surround sound.”
“With full echo,” I added, and we shared another laugh that finally cracked the wall of gloom trailing us since the diner.
We kept walking, our laughter spilling out like little shards of light in all that gray. Then I lowered my voice, more serious, though still with my usual cynical edge.
“You know what, Tess? At least you tried. I would never have had the guts to stand in front of a packed diner and shout my truth to the world. I’d have stayed home, hiding under blankets with Netflix and a pint of ice cream. You, though… you always fight. Even when you lose.”
She looked at me from behind her sunglasses. A slow smile spread across her lips. “That’s why I keep you by my side, Bea. You’re the only one who can say that without making me sound like a heroine. Just a stubborn lunatic.”
“A stubborn lunatic who, for a second, made Ryder sweat,” I added.
Tess chuckled, shaking her head. “Oh, I definitely won him over. If only he’d been a little less gay…” She paused, then raised her hands in mock surrender. “Okay, a lot less gay. But the energy was there, Bea. I know it was there.”
I shook my head, unable to stop smiling. “Sure, Tess. The spark was there. Too bad it was between him and Bernie.”
She laughed again, and that laugh held everything: bitterness, madness, and also a strange, inexplicable freedom.
