How to Sleep with a Movie Star Page 3

  I paused.

  “Unless . . .” I sighed. “You don’t think I’ve put on a lot of weight recently, do you?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Wendy asked, rolling her eyes at me and grinning. “You look gorgeous, as usual.”

  “I don’t feel very gorgeous,” I mumbled, looking down at my stomach, which wasn’t nearly as flat as I remembered it. I shuddered and tried not to picture Tom raptly staring at the television while I tried to gyrate sexily against the doorframe.

  “Jeffrey thinks you look just like Christina Aguilera,” Wendy said triumphantly. I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t quite know how to take the comparison from Mod’s art director.

  “Pre- or post-‘Dirty’?” I asked skeptically.

  “Pre-,” Wendy reassured me. “Like from her Mickey Mouse Club days. You know, when she was cute and thin, and had all that long blond hair.”

  “So you’re saying I look like a sixteen-year-old Mickey Mouse Club kid?” Hmm, this was not so good for the whole sex appeal thing.

  “First of all, Jeffrey’s saying it. Not me.”

  “But you agree?”

  Wendy paused.

  “I think you look like Christina from the ‘Lady Marmalade’ video.”

  Hmm, this was a bit better. But not totally.

  “Just because I have a bit of a frizz problem with my hair?”

  “No,” Wendy said with a laugh.

  “Is it because I wore those slutty boots last time we went out?”

  “No.” Wendy giggled. “But that was kinda funny.”

  “Glad you were amused.” Actually, my one public attempt at sexy in the last few months had ended in disaster, when I got my heel stuck in a subway grate and smashed face-first into the sidewalk.

  “Whatever it is with Tom, it’s not you,” Wendy said firmly. She hesitated for a moment, then added, “Maybe you’re right, and it is just bad timing.”

  I shook my head and sighed.

  “I bet Christina Aguilera never has this much trouble getting laid,” I muttered.

  Note to self: Learn to dance like in that “Dirty” video. And if there’s time, start a public feud with Britney Spears.

  *

  Having a live-in boyfriend was a bit like high-stakes poker, I figured. The similarities had begun to dawn on me one insomniac night as I blearily watched three hours of a six-hour Celebrity Poker Championship marathon on Bravo.

  See, that was the great thing about my job. As Mod’s celebrity editor, I was supposed to keep up with what was going on in the kingdom of celebrity, at least to some extent. And I figured that if I couldn’t sleep, watching Ben Affleck, Matthew Perry, and Rosario Dawson battle it out in a Vegas casino was sort of like working. At least that’s what I told myself the next morning, when I hit the snooze button six times in a row and rolled into work an hour late.

  Of course, no one noticed. That was the other great thing about my job. People are always late. No one ever notices. If only I didn’t guilt-trip myself into arriving at the crack of dawn most mornings.

  Anyhow, I figure in high-stakes poker, you’re supposed to put everything on the line, do your best, and hope that you win. It’s kind of the same situation when you take your relationship to the next level and agree to live with a person. You’re giving up your independence and your solitude, putting all of your effort into making it work, and hoping for the best. Also, if you’re not dealt exactly the hand you expect, you’re not allowed to just get up and move to another table.

  So I figured I was in it for the long haul with Tom, even if it wasn’t going so well now. I mean, sure, I was being dealt a hand full of low cards at the moment—but in gambling, your luck changes all the time, doesn’t it? And sure, I was betting everything I had—my heart, my future—but it had worked out so far. I mean, it had been a great year.

  Tom had swept me off my feet (full house!), sent me roses every week (straight!), told me he loved me after just a month and a half of dating (three-of-a-kind!), and moved in a month after that (straight flush!). He was a good guy. He loved me. So what if the sex had dropped off? It was only temporary, I was sure. And any day now, I was sure he’d come up with the royal straight flush: the engagement ring he had hinted at a few times.

  Come to think of it, maybe that’s why he was acting so strange lately. Maybe he was planning to propose. Maybe he was just nervous, trying to find the right time.

  That would explain a lot.

  *

  I turned back to the computer and tried to focus. Already, the office was buzzing with activity. Telephones were ringing, editorial assistants were running copy back and forth between editors, and Maite Taveras, the managing editor, was moving from office to office, chatting with senior and assistant editors about the September issue. I’d already told her that we’d have to put off our conversation until Monday.

  “You have to turn your full focus to one-night stands, hmm?” she had asked with a laugh, pushing her shining black hair over her shoulder. I knew she shared my low opinion of Margaret and her inexplicable whims.

  “Ugh,” I’d moaned, rolling my eyes as she winked at me.

  Maite held the third-highest editorial position at the magazine, after Margaret and the executive editor, Donna Foley. Fortysomething and beautiful, Maite had ascended the ranks of women’s magazines by being a creative editor, a stickler for detail who always stuck with her writers’ original tones. I’d liked her from the day we first met, and since then we’d had a comfortable rapport.

  I turned back to the computer and tried to concentrate, but I was having trouble shutting out the rest of the office. Two of the copy desk assistants, both clad in Earl Jeans and black Bebe tops so similar I could hardly tell them apart, swapped dating stories over the desk in the office they shared, emitting high-pitched sonar giggles every few moments. Anne Amster, the wiry-haired senior features editor, argued with someone on the phone, and a group of senior editors clustered around a bulletin board, one of them jabbing her finger pointedly at a blown-up mock-up of the August cover, saying something insistent in an annoyed squeaky voice.

  Then of course there was Chloe Michael, the television and music editor, who was always blasting the latest in pop music from inside the walls of her cubicle. At least she claimed it was the latest in pop music. I swore I’d caught her sneakily listening to New Kids on the Block when she thought she’d turned her stereo down low enough to get away with it.

  In fact, come to think of it, a song that sounded suspiciously like “Hangin’ Tough” was currently wafting down through Mod’s halls. Yes, I know, I should be ashamed that I even know the name. But hey, I was eleven once too. And I may have had more than one Donnie Wahlberg poster on the walls of my sixth-grade bedroom. I may have taken up playing the drums in middle school simply because Donnie played the drums. And I may have been to two NKOTB concerts where I sat in the nosebleed section, miles from the stage, convinced that Donnie was looking at me—and only me. But that’s beside the point.

  Jeffrey Zevon, the magazine’s art director and the sole male on the editorial staff, had been pacing the hallway for the last fifteen minutes, and his nervousness was starting to rub off on me. As always, he was impeccably dressed—a tight black Kenneth Cole ribbed tee with gray Armani slacks that fit his perfect curves like they’d been made for him. “‘Buns of Steel,’ girl,” he’d confided to me once. “I swear by those DVDs.” He looked like he belonged at a fashion shoot for GQ. His dark hair was speckled with gray, but on him it was salt-and-pepper that said distinguished and sexy.

  Unable to concentrate on the silly one-night-stand article, I watched him as his eyes followed Marla, the fashion department’s summer intern. She shuffled down the corridor toward the fashion closet with her eyes downcast and her shoulders slumped. Marla looked like she wanted to disappear. She twirled a finger through her stringy brown curls, her slightly heavy frame covered in a balloon of fabric.

  “Poor girl,” Jeffrey murmured mid-stride, finally ending his
impatient pacing at the entrance to my cubicle. He shook his head from side to side. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Those princesses in fashion do it every time, don’t they?”

  “Do what?” I asked, my eyes following the self-conscious Marla, then settling back on Jeffrey. I tried to stop imagining the diamond ring that Tom might be picking out at this very moment. Princess cut? Channel set? One carat, or two?

  “Torture those poor young girls,” Jeffrey answered, placing a hand on my cubicle wall and leaning forward, apparently oblivious to the admittedly unrealistic visions of Tiffany rings dancing through my head. “They all come to Mod with big dreams of being fashion editors and leave thinking they have to weigh ninety pounds and be six feet tall to succeed.”

  “I know,” I said with a sigh. But at Mod, they actually did have to weigh ninety pounds to make it under Sidra. So poor Marla was completely correct. I wondered if she knew about the last-season designer rule (“Those who recycle last season’s fashions aren’t worthy to walk the streets of New York,” Sidra had once sniffed). Or how to hold her nose to mimic Sidra’s nasal tone.

  “They’re getting worse,” Jeffrey said in a stage whisper. “You should see the way Sidra talks to her. And the others, Sally and Samantha. They’re just like Sidra. Something’s up with them, girl.”

  “Something’s up?” I repeated skeptically. Jeffrey tended to go just a bit overboard sometimes.

  “I don’t know what it is, but something’s not right in their little designer world,” Jeffrey said. He leaned forward again and grinned mischievously. “Maybe Sidra finally realized that all the collagen, chemical peels, and silicone in Manhattan can’t make her look twenty-five anymore.” I laughed.

  “About time she realized,” I muttered. It had been a long time since Sidra had looked twenty-five, but I had a feeling she didn’t know that.

  “You know that’s why you piss her off so much, don’t you?” Jeffrey asked, an eyebrow arched. He grinned at me. “You’re everything she wants to be. She’s just fifteen years too late.”

  I laughed and shook my head.

  “Nah,” I said. “She just hates me because I’m beautiful.” I winked.

  Jeffrey laughed—a little too heartily, I might add—then wrinkled his brow in concern and looked somberly at me.

  “Really, doll, I’d watch your back,” he said, suddenly dead serious. “With the executive editor position opening up, she’s getting antsy and is bound to start backstabbing anyone she feels threatened by.”

  I stared at Jeffrey for a moment, sure I had heard him wrong.

  “What?” I asked. “The executive editor position?”

  “You haven’t heard?” Jeffrey asked, his eyes sparkling again. He loved being the one to deliver gossip. “Donna Foley just announced that she’s retiring on August fifteenth. The word is that Smith-Baker has decided to let Margaret hand-pick a successor in-house.”

  I felt my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. More often than not, magazines hired from the outside to fill major vacated positions. Then again, most magazines didn’t have a woman like Margaret, with virtually no editorial skills, at the helm. I suppose that put Mod into a different category altogether. It was no wonder we were still struggling at sub-Cosmo circulation levels.

  “Apparently, Margaret has said she’s narrowed it down to two people,” Jeffrey said, flicking his eyes around again and arching an eyebrow. “It’s between Maite and Sidra, and they have the summer to prove themselves to her before she makes a final decision.”

  I stared at him for a moment, speechless.

  “Sidra?” I finally asked, my voice hoarse. It made no sense. Maite Taveras was our managing editor. She’d been in the business for twenty years and was infinitely more qualified for the position. Granted, Sidra had been working in magazines for over a decade, but her experience was all on the fashion side. I wasn’t entirely sure she was capable of stringing together an entire sentence that didn’t include a condescending fashion reference.

  I could just see it now. She’d probably require all Mod staffers to get breast implants and liposuction so that we’d weigh in at under a hundred pounds and match her two protégées in the fashion department. I resisted the urge to cast a suspicious gaze down at my own less-than-generous, decidedly A-cup bosom. Then again, I’d probably be out on the street, anyhow. My five-foot frame wouldn’t fit with Sidra’s supermodel ideal.

  On top of that, of course, was Sidra’s one-sided feud with me. I was no stranger to people snubbing me out of professional jealousy. It came with the territory of being the youngest senior editor in the competitive and often catty world of women’s magazines. But Sidra took it to the extreme. She and the other Triplets were always snickering at my fashion choices, and Sidra had even been quoted on Page Six once saying that a “certain extremely young celebrity editor” at a “certain women’s magazine” had a habit of coming into work “drunk as a skunk.” I’d confronted her, of course, and she had innocently batted her eyes at me and claimed that she obviously wasn’t talking about me.

  “Sidra,” Jeffrey confirmed with an astonished nod, bringing me back to the present. “I know. I couldn’t believe it either. But apparently Margaret is thinking about taking Mod in a more fashion-oriented direction. You know, more Vogue-ish. It’s her latest plan to compete with Cosmo.”

  “Unbelievable,” I muttered.

  “And can you imagine?” Jeffrey continued, leaning in closer. “Can you just imagine how drunk with power Sidra would be? She would basically be running the whole magazine. It would be a complete nightmare.”

  “I guess it would be,” I murmured, suddenly feeling very uneasy about my job.

  “Stranger things have happened,” he said. “Get ready for some catfights, doll. Sidra can be vicious when she’s after something she really wants.”

  *

  I finished the one-night-stand piece by 4 p.m., and to be honest, I was pretty proud of it. Not proud of its content, of course—how could I be?—but proud that I’d managed to make it coherent and that I’d managed to come up with a list of ten reasons why one-night stands were actually a pretty good idea. (Hey, you actually got laid in a one-night stand, right? More than I could say for the current state of my relationship.) Wendy, the die-hard food aficionado, had insisted upon including reason number nine: “Because it’s a good excuse to order breakfast in.” (Mangia, the favorite gourmet breakfast delivery restaurant in Manhattan, probably had her number on speed-dial. It was only a matter of time before she ran out of Manhattan waiters and had to switch to Mangia’s delivery boys.)

  My personal favorite was reason number three: “Because you might really hit it off with the guy and begin to develop a relationship.” (Wendy snorted, stifled a laugh, and said something about me living in Never-Neverland.) We’d both agreed that reason number ten was a good kicker: “Because we all know that getting laid feels pretty damned good.” (Well, I had foggy memories of it feeling good, anyhow. And Wendy helpfully vouched for the statement’s veracity.)

  I didn’t exactly feel good about myself for writing several pages in support of sleeping around, but the article could have been worse in someone else’s hands. Heck, who was I kidding? Maybe I should have taken a stand and refused to do it on moral grounds. But I had better battles to fight.

  Or more accurately, better battles to avoid, which seemed to be my latest combat plan.

  Besides, our readers were going to go out and have sex whether I told them to or not. Hooray for them. Maybe I should write Tom an article: “Ten Reasons You Should Have Sex with Your Girlfriend Who Sleeps Beside You Every Night.”

  I knocked lightly on Margaret’s door, which was ajar, and let myself into her office.

  “Here it is,” I announced grandly, plunking a printed-out, pared-down final draft of the article on her desk. She looked up, surprised, her over-tweaked dark brows arching upward. She lifted a corner of the draft with two perfectly manicured fingernails, looked at it from over the top of her perfect diamond-studded gl
asses, and reached up to brush a speck of invisible lint from the collar of her perfect Chloe shirt.

  “Claire, darling,” she said with that sappy formality and hint of a British accent she’d somehow adopted after a recent trip to Paris. She’d forgotten, apparently, that we all knew she was born and raised in Ohio. “I must have forgotten to tell you,” she said.

  “Forgotten to tell me what?” I asked suspiciously. I held my breath as she did what appeared to be a little pirouette behind her desk. Rarely a meeting went by when she didn’t remind the Mod staff that her mother, Anabella, had been a prima ballerina. Those of us who valued our jobs refrained from adding that Anabella had peaked with the Dayton City Ballet. Nothing to be ashamed of, but it wasn’t like she had performed arabesques and pliés around the world with Baryshnikov.

  “I won’t be needing this for August after all,” she said casually, finishing her ballerina turn. My jaw dropped as I contemplated two lost and wasted days of my life. “We’ll use it for September, of course, darling. I’m sure it’s a great piece.” She took the article from me and tossed it into a stack of papers on the corner of her immense desk.

  “Um, okay,” I said, my eyes following the article to her slush pile and returning to rest uneasily on her.

  “But not to worry,” she said brightly. “We’ll be using the space for a feature on Cole Brannon.”

  I looked at her in confusion.

  “But I haven’t done a story on Cole Brannon,” I said blankly. He was the hottest young actor in Hollywood at the moment, and had been for the past few months. He had shared the screen with Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, and Gwyneth Paltrow in the last year, and his movies drew millions of excited women—many of them Mod readers—like moths to the light. His tall, muscular frame, eternally tousled brown hair, and sparkling blue eyes had launched many a fantasy.

  On top of that, he seemed to have quite the social life, too. He was always being linked in the tabloids—not that you could always believe them—to various A-list actresses. And a certain blond pop princess had been overheard by a Page Six reporter telling a friend over lunch how spectacular he was in bed. Accordingly, People magazine had just named him their Most Eligible Bachelor for the year.