Chapter Thirty-Nine
Josephine
morning was monumental for two reasons.
First, we had to decide which architecture firm to hire for Lorena’s new offices. This was a big deal and would ultimately shape the entire design of her store.
Second, there was the little fact that Julian and I had made love on Saturday night and now we were going to have to work together. No biggie.
I woke up early on Monday, stood in front of my mirror, and applied a thin layer of makeup—mascara to hide my nervous eyes, red lipstick to give me false confidence. The entire time I got ready, I replayed the previous day and contemplated how easy it’d been to wake up in Julian’s bed.
“Dude, you’re basically crushing me right now,” I said, pushing him off of me at the crack of dawn.
Julian was a cuddler, a suffocating cuddler. I woke up with half of his body on top of my mine. I was practically suffocating and when I rolled over, my lungs thanked me for the extra air.
“Mmm…again,” he murmured, still half-asleep. His hand found my left boob and I rolled my eyes.
“You don’t get sex before I get breakfast. Now get up and let’s go find a bagel.”
“You’re so high maintenance.” He laughed, rolling over and stretching his arms above his head.
HELLO, NAKED JULIAN.
The man was all toned, tan skin and six-pack abs. I wanted to lick him from his toes to his forehead, but more than that, I wanted a bagel and some damn cream cheese.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. I’m hungry.”
He groaned and threw the blankets off, and my eyes bulged out of my head a little bit. The man needed to warn people before he just stripped down like that. I was momentarily dumbstruck as I took in the contour of his abs and the curve of everything that lay below.
“Jo, my eyes are up here,” he joked.
My face turned the color of a Cherry Icee and I promptly turned away from him to examine his hotel closet.
“I’m stealing a t-shirt and then I’m going to leave this apartment to hunt down food. My stomach is eating itself as we speak.”
Julian’s hand wrapped around my waist and then he pulled me back against his chest. His palm splayed out on my stomach and then he inched lower. My stomach dipped and my knees buckled. Traitorous body.
“Nope. No,” I said, resisting the temptation to give in to his pursuit. “If that hand moves any lower, I’m going to karate chop you.”
It moved lower and my body betrayed me. My stomach was like, “Meh, I can wait to eat,” and my girly parts were like, “HELL YEAH, this is a great idea.” And that’s the story of how Julian banged me on the floor of his closet with his suits and ties judging us from above.
Our breakfast turned into a stroll through Central Park and then a lunch. I eventually made an excuse about having to do laundry (yeah, right) and cleaning (ha ha) and we parted ways after a breath-stealing kiss.
As soon as I stepped away from him and walked to the subway, the last twenty-four hours started to set in. The same parts of my brain that had pushed me to sleep with Julian were now firing off insecurities and worries at a pace of 1000 thoughts per second. Were you sexy enough? Did you make enough sexy sounds? Did you make too many sexy sounds, thus coming across as a crazy porn star? Did giving him a blowjob seem cool and hot or just plain desperate? Did you come across too needy or were you cool and casual?
Cool New York girls can have sex without emotions. They are confident and strong. They don’t second-guess their decisions and they don’t question what a man wants. YES. That’s me! I’m cool and confident!
I walked a little quicker to the subway after that with my head held high and my shoulders pushed back. I could have broken out into a choreographed dance routine if only I’d had backup dancers with me.
Unfortunately, that confidence had dwindled sometime during my various REM cycles because by Monday morning, my take-no-shit attitude was gone.
After I finished getting ready, and stuffed a breakfast bar and an apple into my purse, I opened my laptop to check my email. I had fifteen minutes to spare before I needed to head to Julian’s hotel, and I definitely didn’t want to show up early.
I hadn’t had time to check my email over the weekend, and it definitely showed. My inbox was overflowing with emails from my bank and various spam coupons that I never got around to unsubscribing from. A few emails stood out. The subject lines all pertained to the Marc Jacobs fashion show or interview requests. I kept scrolling, losing count of how many there were. ABC News, The Today Show, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and People Magazine were at the top of my inbox. My first instinct was to assume that all of the emails were from spam accounts. How could they not be? There could not have been an email from Vogue sitting in my inbox.
My hand shook as I hovered my mouse over the subject line. By the time it finished loading, I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest. I checked the email address to confirm it wasn’t something like [email protected] Nope. The email was from [email protected]
Holy shit.
I scrolled down and started to read, trying to remain as calm as possible.
Dear Ms. Keller,
My name is Elizabeth Hope and I’m the Social Media Team Leader here at Vogue. First of all, congratulations on your runway debut last week. You were quite the talk of the show afterward. I’m sure you’ve seen the news around the Internet since then, but I wanted to reach out and contact you personally. Vogue has been looking to hire an in-house blogger, someone to expand our readership to a younger generation. Our ideal candidate would be a fresh face, someone new to the fashion scene, and someone willing to team up with Vogue to expand our readership—
I zoned out after that. Straight up spaced out in the middle of my apartment. I think my brain short-circuited midway through her email. I backtracked and reread what she’d typed. I was the talk of the show? News on the Internet? Truth be told, I hadn’t checked my blog, YouTube, or Twitter since Saturday morning. Julian had been quite the distraction…
I paused midway through her email and pulled YouTube to check my notifications. Last I’d seen, I had somewhere around ten thousand subscribers. Now? Well over two hundred thousand. What the fuck? In twenty-four hours? My hand shook as I refreshed the website, just to confirm my eyes weren’t deceiving me. Nope. No error. My Twitter was the same and when I went to check the hits on my blog, I had thousands upon thousands of new readers.
How?
How had these readers found me so quickly?
I went back to Twitter and searched my tags. The culprit for my stardom wasn’t hard to find. One particular photo from the fashion show had spread like wildfire. It was a photo of me standing at the end of the runway with my hand on my hip and a devious smile on my lips. I looked far sexier than I ever had before, owing to the lighting and dress, I’m sure. Marc Jacobs had posted the photo first and after that every major fashion magazine had reposted it with #FashionWorldsCinderella. Apparently someone had leaked the fact that I wasn’t actually a model, and people everywhere had found my story endearing, so much so that Vogue was now offering me a job.
The chime of another incoming email pulled me out of my thoughts and my eyes scanned to the clock on my microwave. Shit. I was going to be late. I closed my laptop and ran to grab my purse on shaky legs. I didn’t have time to finish reading Elizabeth’s email, but I already knew that my life was about to change. Interview requests? A possible position working with Vogue as an in-house blogger? This had been my dream for as long as I could remember. I wanted to be a fashion blogger and I wanted to make enough money blogging that I didn’t need to moonlight as a janitor.
I still hadn’t fully processed the sharp turn of events in my life when I knocked on Julian’s hotel door fifteen minutes later.
“Coming!” a female voice sang from the other side of the door.
I let my hand fall back by my side and stared at the hotel room number, completely confused. Why was there a woman answering Julian’s door less than twenty-four hours after we’d had sex?
So help me god.