I blink. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. You’re not building a music career, darling. You’re building an illusion. An uptown girl with downtown daring. She summers, but doesn’t post about it. She glows, never sweats. She’s money without anxiety, silk with structure.”
“Sounds like fiction.”
“Of course it is. That’s why people believe it.”
The limo glides to a stop in front of Bergdorf Goodman. The revolving doors look like golden portals into another dimension.
We step into the perfume-clouded cathedral of fashion. Antoine leads me into a private, chic styling suite tucked behind velvet ropes.
A tall woman emerges from a side corridor with dark hair scraped into a ballet bun.
“Mr. LaRue,” she says, her voice filled with respect. “Your suite has been prepared.”
Antoine turns to me with theatrical solemnity. “Bix. Now the work begins.”
Inside, the suite is part hair salon, part designer couture sanctum. Sunlight filters in through elegant gauzy curtains. On a small table sits a silver tray with pale pink macarons and two flutes of something bubbly.
“It’s not Champagne,” Antoine clarifies. “I ordered elderflower sparkling tonic. No alcohol. Sharp lines need sober minds.”
I bite my lower lip to stop myself from hurling a snarky comment.It’s just fabric we’re talking about, right?
Antoine gestures for me to sit in a low, soft chair beside a curved mirror. “Let’s examine the raw material,” he murmurs, waving the hairstylist over.
I tense. “You’re not touching my hair.”
“No,” he says tactfully. “Your curls are divine. But your blonde can use a lift.”
“It’s natural!”
“Just a touch of gloss. And your hair could use a trim.”
Antoine snaps his fingers, and a hairdresser appears.
“You can’t touch my hair!” I say.
“And why is that?”
Both Antoine and the stylist look at me.
“Because...”
Because Slayer likes my hair the way it is,I feel like saying. That night we spent together, I remember the way he twirled that guitar-strumming forefinger of his through my curls.
And the delighted expression on his face when he unrolled one of my natural spirals, and it curled right back up again before his eyes.
Then I remember the way he fisted my hair as he drew me in tight for a kiss, his hands sliding firmly over every curve and plane of my body like a sculptor.
He seemed to love me then.Why does he hate me now?
What did I do to have him to glare at me like that after the faux audition?
“We’re only going to brighten your hair, and give it the tiniest of trims,” says the stylist, showing an eighth of an inch with his finger.
I nod, resigned, then grimace repeatedly as my hair is washed, sectioned, snipped, and blown dry.
Antoine circles me like a sculptor prepping his block of marble. Then he fires off another list of demands for the assistant taking detailed notes.
