Lethally Blond Read Online Free PDF Page B

tuckered-out salsa. I guess you’d have to call my apartment the spoils of my two-year starter marriage, and I never stop feeling . . . well,
spoiled
by it. Though it’s just a moderately sized one-bedroom with an itsy-bitsy kitchen, it has two drop-dead features: the large brick terrace and what I behold from it. There’s no glimpse of landmarks, but nonetheless it’s a gorgeous, quintessentially Manhattan view. It looks to the west, toward a skyline of nondescript redbrick and limestone apartment buildings topped by nineteen wooden-shingled water towers. At night, when the sky is inky black and there are lights dabbled in different apartment buildings, it seems almost fake, like the backdrop of a Broadway musical.
    I took a long swallow of cold beer and then leaned back in my chair, encouraging my mind to idle for moment. Though it was warm out and the red geraniums in my clay pots were still blazing with color, I could feel a touch of fall in the air. Just like cold spots in lake water, there were cool ribbons threaded through the breeze that hinted at the not-so-balmy October and November days ahead.
    I should have been happy about the imminent arrival of fall. First and foremost I would be an author, with the arrival of
Bad Men and Wicked Women
late in the season. In addition, I’d just bought a pair of black suede boots that were so snug and gorgeous, my calves had nearly orgasmed when I’d tried them on. And last but hardly least, it had been a bitch of a summer, something worth distancing myself from.
    Yet all of a sudden I felt overwhelmed by melancholy. Maybe it was because I’d had such high hopes for the summer, and it was tough to consider how pathetically they’d unraveled. My initial plan had been to write a few gripping articles, spend as many weekends as possible in the sun, take Rome by storm, and have a fling that would leave
my
friggin’ toes curled. I know you aren’t supposed to bank on anything in life, I know that “shit happens,” but
nothing
had worked out as planned. What I’d anticipated as a Gorgonzola soufflé kind of summer had ended up resembling a grilled-cheese sandwich made with one of those individually wrapped singlets that taste like socks you’ve worn too many days in a row.
    For starters, there was the humiliation of being bounced from the gig I’d had for several years at
Gloss
magazine. When the editor, Cat Jones, had confessed that her newsstand sales were plummeting and she was morphing the magazine from a sexy, edgy read for married women into
Take-a-Chill-Pill Monthly
, I’d tried to be sympathetic to her plight. But that didn’t make it any easier to know my crime pieces were going to be replaced by stories along the lines of “The Secret Power of Bath Salts” and “How to Cure Mild Depression by Organizing Your Shoes.” Fortunately, I’d found my way to
Buzz
.
    The worst thing about the summer was what had happened with Beau Regan, documentary filmmaker and documented heartbreaker. At first I’d thought he was the fun, sexy summer fling I’d been longing for, but I’d ended up falling hard—hard as in onto a car hood from a tenth-story window. I’d come right out and told him that I couldn’t see him if he was sleeping with anyone else. I’d thought for a moment that he was going to give up the one chick he’d been seeing casually on the side. But then an assignment had come through out of the blue and he’d taken off for Turkey, saying that he felt he couldn’t make a decision until he returned—in mid-September. There’d been one lousy postcard with the breathtaking message “Hope your summer’s going well. I’ve been thinking about you.”
    My co-worker Jessie had suggested I read a book about the failed patterns of love and see if I could learn how to stop falling for the wrong guy. But I didn’t think Beau had been the wrong guy. It had just been the wrong moment.
    Something else was making me blue: Tom Fain. The fact that he’d lost