Page 42 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
Tess nodded. “Exactly. And to leave the hotel… he has to pass through here. The building has no side exits, no secret tunnels, no teleportation, no back doors. Sooner or later, he’ll step right into our line of sight.”
“Him and his bodyguards…” I said.
“Who cares about his bodyguards?” Tess scoffed. “It’s not like I’m planning to mace him. The plan is simple: capture his attention.”
“With what?” I asked. “A dramatic performance of Baudelaire poetry standing on this table?”
Tess shook her head, laughing, sunglasses sliding down to the tip of her nose.
“Wrong. Though you weren’t far off… I’ll talk about something close to his heart. His idol. The washed-up jazz bum from the sixties who killed himself at thirty-two… Lev Mirov.”
“Who?!”
“Exactly.”
She leaned forward just slightly, lowering her voice like she was revealing the Pentagon’s launch codes. “A Russian-born saxophonist who became an American citizen. Brilliant, disturbed, practically unknown. Countess Éloïse always says: Artists are predictable. They all have one hidden idol. Someone nobody knows. A lighthouse they sail toward their whole lives. Ryder is no exception. After digging through interviews, articles, obscure posts on dead forums, I found out Lev Mirov is his god. His personal deity. A name you’ll almost never hear in a music school, let alone in a bar. That’s why it’ll work. The second he hears me say it—in the most unlikely place possible: the lobby bar of the Vellum Hotel, New York City—he won’t be able to ignore me.”
The cocktails arrived.
The same waiter—still gorgeous, still visibly tense—set them down with a trembling hand. Maybe he was afraid Tess was about to smack his ass, because he flinched ever so slightly when she gave him that killer half-smile.
“Cheers,” he said with a stiff bow. Then bolted like a bomb tech who’d accidentally started the countdown.
Tess and I clinked glasses. Her toast was sharp, decisive. “To the art of war.”
The Comet’s Tongue was an ominous shade of purple with an aftertaste somewhere between cactus blossom and eraser shavings. My Narcissus Protocol, on the other hand, tasted vaguely like gardenia cream with a splash of wrong choice.
“But I don’t know anything about Lev Mirov,” I protested.
“You don’t need to. I’ll do all the talking. The moment Ryder steps out of that elevator, I’ll start singing Mirov’s praises. You… just smile and nod. This isn’t rocket science.”
“So… what do we do now? Just sit here and wait?”
Tess crossed her legs, lifted her chin, and, without even glancing my way, said: “Precisely. We sit here… and we wait.”
19
We didn’t eat lunch that day.
Unless you count the potato chips and peanuts that came with our cocktails, which—on my personal survival scale—definitely qualified as “entrée and side dish.”
We nursed our first drink with monastic slowness.
The second we finished, a waiter—not the same one but another with the same chiseled jaw and bodyguard-in-a-tux energy—swooped in and cleared the glasses with ruthless efficiency.
“Anything else?” he asked in that polite tone that really meantorder something or get out.
Tess flashed him a smile hot enough to melt the silverware. “Maybe later… darling.”
But by the time the lounge playlist looped for the fourth time, the staff’s glances had shifted from discreet to openly hostile.
Translation: Two cocktails in three hours does not buy you squatting rights at the mostInstagrammable table in the bar.
So, with royal composure, Tess ordered a second round.
We drank that one even slower. Like, one sip per climate change.
The second basket of chips and peanuts, however, we inhaled with borderline offensive enthusiasm.
