How to Sleep with a Movie Star (21 page)

“But I know it will take some time,” Tom said slowly. “I don’t expect things to be back to normal right away.”

“Right,” I said softly, astonished that he realized on his own that things couldn’t go back to being the way they had been. Just then the waitress returned with my credit card, two copies of the receipt, and a full glass of Coke for me. I signed the receipt, put my card away, and took a small sip. Tom took my hand again.

“So I was wondering . . .” Tom paused and tilted his head to the side imploringly. I leaned forward eagerly. This was it. He was going to beg me to take him back. “I was wondering if maybe you could loan me some money for a while. Since you threw me out and all. Then we can have some time apart and maybe try to work things out, you know?”

Everything inside me went cold, and I drew my hand away. I stared at him. He was still looking at me imploringly, an innocent expression on his face.

Suddenly I wanted to reach out and strangle him. Surely it would be justifiable homicide. Any jury would understand.

“You want to borrow money from me?” I asked very slowly, staring at him. Tom shrugged.

“Just a few thousand. To get on my feet, you know.”

“Just a few thousand,” I repeated flatly. Everything inside me had turned to ice.

I looked down at the receipt for the meal I’d just paid for. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been so stupid. I’d bought everything he’d said. I’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

Again.

“Yeah,” he said. I glared at him with the most intense anger I’d ever felt. “You know,” he said, smiling at me with a sappiness that was so obviously fake. “I heard you got a raise at work. I don’t think we should move back in together right away. That might put too much pressure on us. I want you back, and I want to do it right. And since you threw me out and all . . .” He paused and gave an encouraging smile.

“So you want a few thousand dollars,” I said flatly.

He shrugged.

“Give or take,” he said casually.

He winked at me, and suddenly I detested him. I had come here prepared to listen to his explanation and maybe even to reconcile. He had come to try and trick me into giving him a check. I felt physically ill. He pressed on.

“I just want to make things right between us,” he said with a half smile.

I stared at him for a long time, then I smiled at him slowly.

“You know what?” I said. I suddenly felt calm. “I’ve been thinking about it. And I want to make things right between us too.”

“Really?” he asked hopefully.

“Oh, yes.” I stood up from the table. In one smooth motion, I picked up my full glass of Coke and flung it into Tom’s face, drenching him in a shower of sticky coldness.

He jumped up, his chair clattering to the floor behind him. Around us, people stopped eating and stared, but I hardly noticed.

“What the hell?” Tom demanded furiously, holding his arms out to his side and shaking the soda off. His face dripped with beads of brown liquid, and his hair was drenched. He looked like a drowned rat. A pathetic, hairy, repulsive drowned rat. I smiled.

“I thought you wanted to make things right between us,” I calmly repeated. I shrugged and grinned as he glared at me. “Well, that was a start.”

Still smiling, I turned on my heel and marched out of the restaurant, my head held high. I’d been foolish to think anything good could ever happen between us again. I knew that now, and I knew I wouldn’t turn back.

“You go, girl!” a woman murmured to me as I stormed out of the dining room.

“Thanks,” I said as I kept walking. “I will.”

The Sexy Siren

W
endy took me out that weekend, and for the first time since last Saturday—maybe even for the first time in a year—I finally felt like things were okay. I didn’t need Tom. I didn’t need anyone who would treat me like that. And as Wendy’s blossoming romance with Jean Michel proved, you never knew when you were going to run into Mr. Right.

Or at least
Mr. Right Now.
Heck, at this point, I would have settled for Mr. Maybe, or even Mr. Slim Chance if he actually showed me some attention. But no such luck.

On Sunday, Wendy came over and helped me clean out the closet. Everything that belonged to Tom was thrown in big green garbage bags. Then, on second thought, we went through the bags and pulled out all the items I’d purchased for Tom the times we’d gone shopping and his credit card hadn’t gone through. All the shirts I’d bought to surprise him, the ties I’d bought because I was thinking of him, the stain-resistant Van Heusen khakis I’d bought because I was sick of scrubbing ink stains out of his pants before trudging them off to the laundromat. By the time we extracted the clothes I’d bought for him, mounds of shirts, socks, boxers, pants, and ties lay strewn across my living room floor.

Wendy grinned.

“What do you want to do with them?” she asked. I smiled. It wasn’t like they belonged to him. He’d gotten them under false pretenses, while pretending to be a faithful, sensitive boyfriend. Which he obviously was not.

“I can think of a few things,” I muttered. We settled on hacking a few of the ties into satisfying little pieces with a pair of scissors, then we bagged up the rest of the clothing to take to Goodwill. As for the clothes Tom had actually purchased for himself, we put them in a heap outside my apartment, and Wendy called to leave a message on his cell phone.

“Your clothes are on Claire’s doorstep, and they’ll be there only until ten o’clock tonight,” she chirped. “If you want them, you’ll have to come get them before then.” After she hung up the phone, she turned to me. “You don’t need to sit around waiting, wondering when he’ll show up. If he doesn’t come tonight, those clothes go in the incinerator.”

Wendy called a locksmith who came quickly and changed my locks. He gave me new keys, and Wendy pressed my old key into my palm.

“Throw it in a fountain or something,” she said. “Maybe it’ll bring you good luck.” It couldn’t hurt, I had to admit. It would be hard for my luck to get much worse.

We set off for Goodwill, each of us hauling a plastic bag full of things I’d bought for Tom. After we dropped them off, Wendy insisted on treating me to dinner, to celebrate getting rid of Tom once and for all. We took the subway uptown and made a quick trip to Rockefeller Center, so I could throw my old key into the fountain. There it settled, alongside mounds of pennies carrying wishes from their previous owners.

“What did you wish for?” Wendy asked me as we walked away.

“I can’t tell you, or it won’t come true,” I said playfully. But I had wished that I would never again settle for someone who didn’t treat me like I deserved to be treated.

Oh, and I added a wish to have sex again sometime before I hit thirty. After all, a key is bigger than a penny. I figure I was owed at least two wishes.

Over dinner (which Wendy paid for on a credit card that didn’t bounce), we laughed and talked, and toasted freedom and self-respect. Cute waiters smiled at me, and I noticed. They smiled at Wendy, and she seemed genuinely oblivious.

How the tables had turned.

Back at my apartment, the doorstep was bare. Tom had come to get his things. Relief swept through me. I didn’t owe him another phone call, another encounter, another smidgen of contact in any form.

“To Tom being gone forever,” Wendy said triumphantly, popping the cork in a bottle of champagne we had picked up on the way home.

“I’ll toast to that!” I said, raising my glass. “And to my apartment being
my
apartment again.”

“Well, I was meaning to talk to you about that,” Wendy said, cocking her head to the side and smiling at me. “Now that Jean Michel and I are officially dating, I won’t be eating out quite as much, and I have the feeling I’ll have a bit more money for rent. I was wondering if you might be interested in a new roommate?”

“Oh my gosh, yes!” I exclaimed, setting my champagne flute down and hugging her. She hugged me back, and we both laughed and jumped up and down with excitement. “Really? I would love for you to move in! I can’t believe it! Do you mean it? We can turn the office into your bedroom.”

“Really? You sure you want a roommate?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” We toasted again.

After Wendy had gone home for the night, I drifted happily into a dreamless sleep.

*

The phone rang on Tuesday morning at 6:45, jarring me out of the first pleasant sleep I’d had in months. My first thought was that if it was Tom again, I’d kill him. What was with this new trend of shaking me out of bed at the crack of dawn? I was
not
a morning person.

I grumpily answered the phone and was surprised to hear not Tom’s voice, but my mother’s.

“How dare you?” she demanded, without even a hello. I sat up in confusion and rubbed my eyes. I looked at the clock again, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined the time. Nope, it was now 6:46 a.m. I cleared my throat.

“Um, good morning,” I said sleepily.

“I can’t believe you’d embarrass me like this, young lady,” my mother said immediately. “I am just stunned at your behavior.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a moment. Then I put it back to my ear. I couldn’t imagine what was going on.

“What are you talking about?” I asked finally.

“Don’t play innocent with me,” my mother said angrily. I took a deep breath, scanning my brain for any offending activities I might have taken part in, but I came up blank.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said finally.

“Your aunt Cecilia just called me,” my mother said slowly, her voice icy. “She was on her way to work when she saw a copy of that horrible tabloid
Tattletale
. How dare you embarrass me that way?”

My heart was suddenly pounding although I still had no idea what she was talking about. But I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I closed my eyes, and all I could see was a vision of a smug, smirking Sidra DeSimon.

“What was in
Tattletale
?” I asked slowly. This couldn’t be good.

“Oh, I think you know,” my mother said coldly. “If you want to shack up with a movie star, that’s just fine with me. But when you tarnish our good family name by being splashed across the cover of a tabloid magazine as Cole Brannon’s
sex toy,
that is unforgivable. I did not raise you to be a slut.”

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

A sex toy?

Cole Brannon’s sex toy?

“Mom, I never did anything with him,” I finally squeaked through a closed throat. My palms were sweaty, my mouth dry. “I swear. Are you sure it was me? Was Cecilia sure?”

“She’s sure,” my mother said, her voice icy. “You’re right on the cover, Claire. How am I supposed to live that down? What am I supposed to say when your eighty-five-year-old grandmother sees you on the cover of a tabloid, looking like a cheap hooker?”

“Oh my God,” I murmured, too stunned to respond to the fact that my own mother was accusing me of looking like a hooker. My heart was racing. I finally spoke. “This is all a big mix-up, Mom, I swear. I interviewed Cole Brannon, but that’s it.
Tattletale
is a tabloid, Mom. It’s not real news. You can’t believe everything they print.”

“I don’t know what to say to you, Claire,” my mother said after a moment’s pause. “You’re clearly not the same young lady I raised.”

Her words stung. I took a deep breath and tried again.

“Mom, none of this is true,” I said. “You have to believe me.”

“I am so disappointed in you,” she said coldly. Then she hung up without waiting for a response. I sat there stunned for a moment, holding the phone to my ear until the dial tone snapped me into action.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I mumbled, jumping out of bed and rushing into the closet. I threw on a pair of jeans and a faded sweatshirt, the first clothes I could find.

I barreled quickly down the four flights of stairs, jogged down the hallway, and burst out onto the street, which hadn’t yet begun to bustle with people. I pushed my way inside the convenience store on Second Avenue and Fourth Street, scanned the media rack, and snatched
Tattletale
from its place on the shelf.

I froze as I looked at the cover.

On the upper left corner of the tabloid, there was a black-and-white photo of Cole and me, emerging from the men’s room at
Mod
. It looked like a still taken from one of the magazine’s security cameras, which meant that someone at
Mod
—no doubt Sidra—had to have sent it in to
Tattletale.
Cole had his arm around me as we emerged from the doorway, and I was looking up at him. It looked damning. But far worse was the headline with it that screamed:
MOD
EDITOR IS COLE BRANNON’S NEW SEX TOY.

“Ohhhh shit!” I cursed, loud enough for the man behind the counter to look up in surprise.

“Everything okay, miss?” he asked. I grimaced.

“No,” I muttered. With shaky hands, I put a copy of
Tattletale
down on the counter and gave him a dollar for it. “Everything is
not
okay.”

I stormed out of the store, flipping through the pages as I did. I stopped dead in my tracks as I reached page 32, where there was a whole two-page spread about our “illicit affair.” Standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, I stared, feeling my chest tighten as I took it all in.

Photos were splashed across the page, along with a small story. There was a picture of the amazing bouquet Cole had sent, and a close-up reproduction of the taped-together card that had come with it—courtesy of Sidra, I’m sure. There was a paparazzi shot of Cole getting into the taxi with me. There was even a photo of me leaving my apartment building alone.

“Cole Brannon Finds New Sex Toy,” the print clearly said. Beneath it, the copy read, “
Mod
senior entertainment editor Claire Reilly is the movie star’s latest fling—a
Tattletale
exclusive!”

I was feeling sick as I scanned the snarky text.

Tattletale
spies have learned that Hollywood’s hottest hunk, Cole Brannon, is getting busy with Claire Reilly, twenty-six, a senior editor at
Mod
magazine, which will be running a cover story about Brannon in their August issue.

“They met when she interviewed him for the August cover story,” says a
Mod
insider. “She talks about him all the time. She says he’s great in bed.”

Ms. Reilly has worked at
Rolling Stone
and
People
as a celebrity writer. She brought her talents to
Mod
eighteen months ago when she joined their staff as the senior entertainment editor. She is the youngest senior editor at a top-thirty magazine.

Tattletale
has learned that Mr. Brannon and Ms. Reilly were spotted leaving his hotel together, leaving her apartment together, and ducking into the men’s room at
Mod
magazine’s New York offices together.

Quickie, anyone?

“They looked quite cozy together,” says cab driver Omar Sirpal, who drove Ms. Reilly and Mr. Brannon from his hotel to her apartment last week. “He even fed her breakfast in my taxi.”

Ms. Reilly was recently estranged from her live-in boyfriend, so the romance with Mr. Brannon sounds a bit like a rebound to us here at
Tattletale.
As for Mr. Brannon, it looks like he’s fallen head-over-heels for his new sex kitten, who joins the ranks of Kylie Dane and publicist Ivana Donatelli in his cast of lovers.

“He sent her flowers last week,” says our
Mod
source. “She told everyone in the office who they were from and why he’d sent them. Apparently, he appreciated all the attention she’d been giving him, if you know what I mean.”

What kind of attention might that be? We don’t know, but we can guess. Ms. Reilly and Mr. Brannon were seen heading into the men’s room at
Mod
together last Thursday and emerging together fifteen minutes later, looking embarrassed and satisfied, according to our spy.

“We all knew what was going on in there,” says the
Mod
insider. “If it wasn’t obvious enough, we could hear them going at it.”

Who will be the next flame for Hollywood’s hottest, busiest bachelor? Check out next week’s
Tattletale
to find out.

I stared at the text in horror for a long time after I finished reading it. I read it once more, as if it might have changed to something less damning by the second go-round.

No such luck.

“Oh . . . my . . . God.” I was frozen in the middle of the sidewalk and had no idea what to do next. It would be my word against that of
Tattletale
’s source, who was surely Sidra DeSimon. Everything damning in the text had come directly from her. I was sure of it.