A very suitable virgin slayer indeed.
Ezra Adelman didn’t want me. Fine. But Malcolm Waters might, and I was very interested in seeing where that could take me.
I stood, placed a hand on Mal’s, held back my satisfaction when he winced like I was hot to the touch.
“No need for flattery. I was planning to help you out anyway,” I said, guiding him to his feet. “Come on. Let’s go find Renata.”
Chapter Four
Mal
Mal could hardly believe his luck. When the woman in gold, now known to be Josephine Boateng of @drjojobee fame, opened the door, he’d been certain that he was cursed. There was having zero game, then there was getting caught mumbling to yourself in a woman’s bedroom and promising that you weren’t there to steal her underwear. And yet, despite his many foibles, Jo was guiding him through the foyer, two manicured fingers hooked loosely into his, melting barriers between him and the other guests with the efficiency of a blowtorch. She had a cosmic pull, dragging people from across the room into her orbit to say hello, to kiss her on the cheek and tell her, “You look incredible tonight, Josephine. Who are you wearing?” To waggle their eyebrows and toss him knowing looks and ask, “Now, who isthis?”
“Malcolm Waters, author ofShe Blooms at Dusk, which may sound familiar because it’s been dominating the lists lately,” she would say, smiling like she was unveiling a masterpiece. “He’s very humble, so he won’t tell you any of this, which is why I’m doing it first.”
“A pleasure,” he would say after their requisite oohs and aahs,marveling at how simply being perceived as hers turned him visible.
Mal knew he tended to romanticize real life. It was what made him a strong storyteller, but also what had kept him going back to his ex over and over again, despite years of evidence suggesting they were best apart. One heartfelt apology, one well-timed sunset kiss, and he would be sucked back in, spinning together the vision of a future in which Portia returned to him a changed woman and their second (third, fourth) attempt at romance could end with a happily ever after.
And right now he was romanticizing Jo. Jo, who, when she leaned in to whisper a joke in his ear, smelled like ginger spice and jasmine; Jo, who, draped in shimmery, slick gold satin, seemed to glow from the inside out, luminous as the full moon he could see peeking through the panes of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Jo, whose focus made him feel like the most important person in a room full of newscasters and TV producers, actors, models, and entrepreneurs.
He’d thought she was beautiful when she was one of the one thousand and fifty-two people he followed on Instagram. He’d thought she was charming in her messages—alternately bold and self-effacing, witty and occasionally profound, curious in the way academics so often were about exactly how people ticked. More than once during their conversations, he’d considered asking her to meet up.We’re in the same city, he had wanted to say,why don’t we continue this conversation over coffee?But then he’d recall that he was just one follower in her legion of four hundred thousand, and he’d remember Portia telling him that he wasmuch better on paper, and the whim would pass. Besides, social media was a disguise. It was the face people chose to show the world, not the one they lived in all day.
Except Jo’s face in real life was so much more.Dr.Jojobee was glamorous, aloof, and always put together, but Jo was charming, cheerful, a little silly, even. He wanted to go back upstairs and tell her all of his truths. He wanted to kiss her, if she’d like it. If the night continued to go the way it was going, he thought he might try.
“Ugh. Where is she?” Jo said, frustrated, leading him out of the atrium and into the hall. She sucked in her cheeks, annoyed, then turned and gave him a helpless look. “I’m sorry. I promised you that I’d deliver you to Renata, and I’ve introduced you to basically everyone but her.”
“That’s okay,” Mal said. “I appreciate it. Lots of interesting people out there.”
Jo wrinkled her nose.
“You really enjoyed listening to Boris tell me about hisgout?” she said.
Mal laughed.
“I thought it was fascinating that an Academy Award–winning director comes to you for medical advice,” he quipped.
Mal expected a laugh from her, or at the very least a pleased eye roll. But Jo’s gaze had shifted to somewhere over his shoulder and had turned hard. When it slid back to his, it didn’t soften.
“Your bow tie’s crooked,” she said, suddenly curt, and then, with a click of her heel that sounded like she intended to drive it through the floor, she stepped in close to adjust it herself.
Before Mal could fully formulate the question gestating in his mind, its answer presented itself.
“Jo,” a man said, breathless. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Mal turned and found himself the subject of intense scrutiny.
He had never seen Ezra Adelman in real life, but he managed to be more aggravatingly good-looking than he appeared in his photos, the combination of Renata Kovalenko’s inhuman beauty merged with Paul Adelman’s aggressive averageness to create a man Mal had once seen declared America’s Bachelor Prince.
“Can we talk?” Ezra said, presumably to Jo, though his eyes hadn’t left Mal’s.
“I’m a bit busy,” Jo said. She’d undone Mal’s bow tie entirely and was retying it with the deftness of someone who’d tied a thousand bow ties before, many of them, Mal realized, possibly worn by the man who was glaring daggers at him right now. “Have to deliver this one to your mom. This is Malcolm Waters. She’s trying to buy film rights to his book, and for some reason decided the best place to talk to him about it was here.”
Ezra’s expression cleared as cleanly as if he’d wiped it away.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, in a way that suggested thatnicewas generous.Then, to Jo, “It’ll just take a minute.”
Jo snapped Mal’s bow tie tight, then tapped it once with the tips of her fingers.
