Her stomach dropped to her toes. Dread gathered in its place. The first video that came up was of her wrapped around Jordan like she was devouring him. To be fair, that’s exactly how it had been for her. An insatiable hunger.
“No more of that,” Natalie demanded, hand outstretched. “Gimme.”
“What? No!” Vanessa clutched her phone to her chest. The horror of being parted from it was unimaginable. Her phone was her lifeline.
“Yes, cousin. Give it to me. You’re not having an anxiety attack in Colin’s chair, and no good comes from doom-scrolling through endless videos of you kissing a hot guy. So, gimme.” She flexed her fingers in a beckoning gesture. “I’ll clean up the worst of it, so you don’t have to see it.”
As nice as that sounded… “It’s too late.” Vanessa crushed the phone to her chest.
“You doom-scrolled.” Her cousin gasped. “Ness, I taught you better than that. Why do you do this to yourself?”
Vanessa tossed a hand in the air. “I don’t know. I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess.” She stared at her phone as tears threatened to spill again.
Her agent had warned her endlessly. She couldn’t afford the slightest slip up, not even kissing someone in a bar. She was under a strict good-behavior clause until she found a way to get her work life back on track. “It’s my career, my reputation. I can’t ignore what 1.6 million people are saying about me.”
“You know,” said Colin, who’d given up working on her hair and was chewing on a donut. “Instead of obsessing over comments, you could spend the time doing something that redeems your reputation.”
“Like what?” she asked flatly. “I already support charities. I’m the face of the national animal rescue organization. I donate most of the clothes I get gifted from designers. What more do you want from me, Colin?”
He shrugged, shoving the rest of the donut in his mouth. “Dunno. It was a suggestion,” he mumbled, icing dust puffing out with each word.
“You could do something local,” Chantal piped up from her chair.
They all turned at once, remembering there was a fourth party present.
“I donate my clothes to thelocalthrift store,” Vanessa clarified. “I mean, I guess I could do a video next time. Kind of a ‘come with me as I drop off designer clothes to the thrift store’ type thing.”
“No, no,” Chantal said. “Not like that. You’re trying to get off your phone, right?”
“Well,” Vanessa said, at the same time as Natalia said, “Right.”
Chantal swiveled her head between them. “I work at a drop-in center fifteen minutes from here. It’s a place for at-risk youth to hang out when they don’t have anywhere else safe to go. We run out of an old community center, and it’sgetting pretty shabby. We’ve been fundraising for a while now, so we can do renovations on the gym. We’re nowhere near our target goal. The city would subsidize, but we need to come up with at least twenty-thousand dollars ourselves.”
Vanessa waved a dismissive hand. “If that’s all you need, I can make a donation, and my brother-in-law can pay the rest. He’s, like, a gagillionaire.”
“I see,” Chantal murmured, pursing her lips. “Merely an idea. We were talking about doing a Valentine’s fashion show to raise money, and since you’re a model, I thought it would be great if you volunteered to be a part of it.”
“Wasa model. I’m an actress now.”
Natalie coughed into her hand. “You’re unemployed now.”
Vanessa ignored her. “I’m more than happy to contribute money to the cause, but I think it’s better I stay out of the nitty gritty,” she told Chantal.
“Why?” Her cousin smacked her shoulder. “What the hell else are you gonna do? Sit here and let Colin work his magic on your hair every day while you doom-scroll?”
Vanessa rubbed her shoulder. “Look, I can’t just create a fashion show. I didn’t organize shows. I walked in them. It’s very different.”
“Why couldn’t you?” Colin asked.
More like, why were Natalie and Colin being so oblivious? No way she could be involved in something like this. It was laughable. She’d never be able to pull something like this off with so little time, no crew, and very likely zero budget. People only saw the runway’s glitz and glamor, not the sleepless nights and endless hours of planning behind it. Even if they did, she couldn’t afford a single misstep. It would have to be perfect or nothing. Her reputation couldn’t afford a public failure that big. Not when she was still tryingto convince everyone, and herself, that she wasn’t a massive screwup.
“Because.” She chuckled nervously. “It’s…there’s too much…” How did she put this politely?
“You know what? It’s okay. You’re a very busy lady.” Chantal got out of her chair. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use the bathroom before you rinse this out of my hair.”
“Down the hall to the right,” Natalie called after her, then abruptly turned to Vanessa. “Why are you such a snob?”
She gasped. “What, I’m not a snob!”
