Loe raamatut: «Perfect 10»

Chapter One

OMG. Are you insane????

Katrina Phillips glanced at the text from her best friend, Samantha, and ignored it. She didn’t have time for drama. She was on the subway and she was late posting the Deal of the Day for one of her clients, Mind & Body Yoga, on all of its social networking sites. She really should have at least gone through the tutorial on her new phone, but she’d figured it was a phone, not a plane. She’d had a dozen previous smartphones, each one simpler to figure out than the preceding model.

Except for this one. All her apps and contacts and data had transferred, but it seemed to be doing some sort of internal knitting together of every individual account she had, weaving them into one lumpy, messy pile of informational yarn. Which reminded her. She had to tell the knitting club she’d joined on a whim that she was quitting. She sucked at knitting.

Only she couldn’t do that because she couldn’t figure her damn phone out.

Her phone dinged again and it was a text from Bryan, a guy she’d gone out with twice who had agreed that they’d split the check for cocktails, then had managed to slide the change into his pocket when she wasn’t looking, stiffing her five bucks. Why would he be contacting her after two months of mutual avoidance?

Bitch.

Well. Good thing he’d bothered to get that off his chest. Annoyed, she deleted the text. Only to have another one replace it.

Hey, baby, wassup? Long time no talk.

O-kay. That was Dirk, a hookup from the year before. Hot, funny, great in bed. Not one to call the next day, as she’d found out. Why would he be crawling out of the woodwork?

Along with James, whom she’d dated for two months.

And Seth.

And Michael.

The texts and emails rolled in, one right after the other, like a This is Your Sex Life retrospective, and she thought OMG was about right. This could not be a coincidence. Alarmed, she shifted on her plastic seat, the coughs of the other passengers and the rumble of the train louder than she was used to. She wasn’t studiously ignoring everyone with her earbuds in as she usually did, because she couldn’t use her phone. And had she mentioned she couldn’t figure out her phone?

Why? She texted Samantha, suddenly very, very concerned.

Go to your profile.

Uh-oh.

It took her an agonizing minute to figure out how to bypass all the initial demands her phone was making of her. Honestly, it was worse than her mother and no, she would not like the GPS enabled right this second, she freaking knew where she was. But when she finally got to her profile and saw what exactly her glorious little piece of electronics had synced, she wanted a GPS to guide her to the nearest hole to crawl her hipster ass into and die.

Her BootyBook app had synced with her personal page.

Now every detail about every guy that she had logged in to her handy, and slightly tawdry, app equivalent of a little black book was now visible to everyone. Including ratings on their manners, clothes, conversation during the date, and yes, their penis size if she had hooked up with him. Along with whether or not she’d had an orgasm, the quality of foreplay, and her overall general impression of his sexual prowess.

OMG became OMFG.

Delete, delete, delete. Her hands started to shake, her armpits cranked out massive quantities of sweat, and her heart started to race so fast she wondered if a stress heart attack was possible at twenty-four. “Come on, come on,” she muttered to her phone, evil little piece of shit that it was, and clicked and scrolled and pinched and read, trying to figure out how in the hell she could get rid of what she had just seen. Forever.

When she thought she’d severed the mysterious connection she refreshed the site and finally remembered to breathe. It was gone. She called Samantha. “Check and see if it’s still there!” she blurted out without a greeting, her phone slipping in her sweaty hand. There wasn’t air-conditioning strong enough in the world to prevent clammy palms in this situation.

“It’s gone!” Samantha said, her voice triumphant. “Thank God. What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly.” Regardless of the fact that leaning against a subway window was never a good hygiene choice, she needed the support. She sagged backward. “But it doesn’t matter how. It did and I seriously don’t want to think about how many people saw it.” Given the commonality of instant notifications on status updates, it could be a lot. Everyone on her friends list. Including her mother.

Her phone dinged in her ear. And then again.

Katrina smacked the back of her head into the window so hard she actually managed to garner a side glance from the man sitting next to her, no small feat in New York, where eye contact on the subway was a social no-no. “I’m going to die,” she told Samantha.

The man looked away again. He so didn’t care.

“I’ll meet you at your place,” Samantha told her. “I’ll bring wine.”

“Thanks.” It was something.

“We’ll strategize damage control. Don’t freak.”

Yeah, too late. “All right, thanks. See you in a bit. Bye.” Tucking her hair behind her ear, Katrina bit her lip and gave her phone a sidelong tentative glance as it rested in her lap on her red skinny jeans, afraid to see who the latest texts were from.

Except one was from Drew Jordan, her best friend at NYU, her secret crush for four years, then her onetime lover after a boozy night at an art exhibit. Her throat caught as she frantically read the text, all too aware of what he must have seen.

Magnificent penis huh? I’m kinda speechless.

And with that, her humiliation was complete.

Because while there were quite a few BootyBook entries she remembered only in the vaguest sense, she distinctly recalled what she had written about Drew in the first flush of morning-after bliss when he had left her apartment. She had rated him a nine, skimping on a full ten because they weren’t in an actual dating relationship and because she had coaxed him into bed only after many vodka tonics. For kissing she had given him a ten, along with the description “dreamy.” His penis had been rated, well, magnificent, as he had noticed.

And she had written, “Now I understand what everyone is saying. Sex with someone you love is better. Happy sigh.”

But that happy sigh had turned into weeks of misery when it became apparent that neither one of them knew how to deal with the sexual aftermath of crossing that line in their friendship. She had acted weird, texting him too much. He had pulled away. She had flaunted a guy in front of him at a concert. He said she drank too much. Then came that fateful day when she realized that he was avoiding her altogether.

And she had absolutely and utterly humiliated herself by drunk texting him that she missed him.

So really, in the context of that text, she wasn’t sure she’d made it any worse.

God. Her life was over. No man was ever going to want to date her again.

* * *

An hour later, Katrina felt as though she was on a QVC infomercial. But wait, there’s more!

Just when she thought nothing could be added to her shopping cart of suck, yet another text or email came in, proving that it could always get worse.

“Who is James again?” Samantha asked.

“He’s the guy who didn’t have a condom and when I insisted he find one, he came back with a sandwich bag and said he could make that work.”

“Oh, gross, that’s right.”

There was a moment of silence where Samantha contemplated the horror of that moment, and Katrina relived it. At the time it had seemed like possibly one of the worst things ever to happen to her. Oh, the naïveté. This was so, so much worse.

Spending the rest of her life dateless and sliding into crazy cat lady status one litter box in her apartment at a time was the veritable tip of the awful iceberg. Because apparently not only had her BootyBook information posted to her personal social media site, it had uploaded itself as a spreadsheet to her business page.

“How does that even happen?” Samantha demanded, popping the cork on their second bottle of pinot grigio. It was that kind of night.

“I must have hit the share button when I was setting up my phone and it uploaded to all of my accounts,” Katrina said, wishing she had a shovel to bash herself in the head with. She’d even settle for a gardening trowel.

But this was Brooklyn, not her hometown upstate. There were no tools of any kind hanging around her apartment, unless you counted the guy who lived next door who went tanning three times a week.

The palms of her hand were numb from squeezing her hands into fists. “I don’t remember setting it up that way, but you know how it is. You get efficient. You start clicking and connecting and the next thing you know, you’re Facebook friends with your ex-boyfriend’s mother. We’re always just one tap away from complete and utter disaster.”

Samantha pushed up the red frames of her glasses, her fringe bangs starting to brush the top. She was into the granny chic look, with Peter Pan collars and lots of floral patterns and blouses, and she was smart enough not to have a BootyBook account. “Trina, you need to do damage control.”

“How do I do that?” she demanded, wanting her glass refilled but unable to get off her couch and walk the three steps to her pseudo kitchen. It was really just a three-foot space in the corner outfitted with appliances better suited to a leprechaun family, but she didn’t cook anyway. She had created a makeshift island in front of the row of cabinets and the minifridge out of an old dresser, and Samantha was leaning on it, having poured herself a fresh glass of wine.

Katrina removed her purple scarf from around her neck and threw it on the coffee table. It was too tempting to strangle herself with it. She had already gotten several emails from clients demanding an explanation, and the truth was, she didn’t have one. No one was going to buy that she had been hacked. The information was too detailed, and it would serve no purpose for a hacker other than to humiliate her, and that generally speaking wasn’t their MO. No, everyone was going to know it was her screwup and hers alone.

“Well, you need to issue a statement, both on your personal page and your professional page. I mean, it worked for Kristen Stewart, right? She apologized within hours and RPattz was hers again. She’s not unemployed, either.”

“I’m not sure it’s the same thing. And they didn’t end up together ultimately anyway.” But Samantha was right. Katrina sighed. “I guess I should do that before I get drunk.”

“Yeah, let’s not compound the problem. We’ll write the statement, post it, then we’ll go out to dinner and try to pretend none of this happened. You can leave your phone at home.”

It was a plan, though not much of one. Katrina was debating using the phrase “sincerely regret” versus “deeply sorry” as her phone continued to blow up. In the end, she went for “deeply regret an unfortunate technical error that caused private data to appear in a public forum.” She went on to say the information seen was neither accurate nor factual in any way, but merely an opinion based on personal observations and that she apologized sincerely for any embarrassment caused.

Awful. Plain and simple. “I’m done. Shitty damage control, but there you have it. I’m a social media manager. That’s my job. But I just proved that I can’t manage my own. Great endorsement for my business. Fabulous.”

Samantha sat down beside her. “It was up for about three minutes. Probably none of your clients even saw it. Plus look at the bright side. If you ever had a moment where you wanted a guy to truly know how you felt, you just got them all clumped together.”

Katrina raised an eyebrow. “That is supposed to make me feel better how?”

“And you know, it could be like a public service announcement. All those guys who thought they were the shit in bed now know the score. Maybe they’ll be more sensitive, maybe they’ll ask for sexual directions. Maybe they’ll discover why clitorises matter.”

“So I set off a wave of men in New York checking their prowess and embarking on a sexual odyssey?” She snorted. “Yeah, I doubt it.”

Her phone dinged for the nine thousandth time. She sighed and glanced at the screen. “Shit, it’s Drew again.”

“What did he say?”

Heart thumping at a rate more appropriate for a hummingbird, she unlocked her phone and tapped on the message.

Want to talk to you. Working tonight. Can you come up?

“Omigod, he wants me to meet him at the bar tonight. He’s working, but he wants to talk to me. What do you think that means?”

“That he wants to talk to you.”

Katrina threw back her wine, taking down half a glass in one swallow. “Yeah, but why? I mean, what is there to say?” Other than that she was a fuckup? That was a fact; it didn’t need to be discussed.

“Maybe he wants to talk about his magnificent penis. Maybe he wants to show you his magnificent penis.”

“What should I say?”

Samantha looked at her as if she was first idiot on the command bridge of the USS Moron. “That you’ll meet him. Look, we’re buzzed, you’ve been pining over him for years, I say you go for it. It can’t possibly be even more embarrassing than it already is.”

That remained to be seen, but she was just masochistic enough to want to know what Drew would say to her. “Okay, but I’m cutting myself off from wine then. No more alcohol or somehow I’ll end up crying in front of him. You know I’m a teary drunk.”

“Oh, yes, I do know that.” Samantha studied her. “What is it about Drew anyway? I mean, he’s cute and all, and I can see why he makes your lady parts flutter, but you wanted to legit date him, didn’t you?”

She had. For a minute, she reflected, thinking back to her years as an undergrad, new to the big city, feeling very pedestrian next to fellow students from Hong Kong and Hollywood and Istanbul. Students who were valedictorians, overachievers, with awesome style and raging confidence. She’d just been Trina, an A-minus student from the burbs with no particular skill but a drive to make something happen for herself. Drew was one of the first classmates she had felt completely comfortable around. He wasn’t pretentious, or arrogant, and he had listened to her.

Many late nights had been spent in her dorm room on her bed, their legs stretched out, listening to music and talking about everything from childhood memories to how to pull off the ultimate catfish. It was a lot of little things and it was one big thing.

“When my father had a heart attack, everyone was all ‘oh, I’m sorry,’” she told Samantha, whom she’d actually met the semester after that. “But Drew skipped class and went home with me on the train. He let me cry until I fell asleep on his shoulder, and he went to the hospital with me.” She swirled the wine remaining in her glass and stared at it, a lump in her throat. “That’s why I always feel like he’s the one who got away. He’s a good guy and we had a deep friendship.”

“Then you definitely need to see him. Even if it never becomes a relationship, you should try to reclaim your friendship.”

“You’re right.” Katrina tapped out a response. Sure. Be there around eleven.

Cool. :)

The smiley made her feel better. He couldn’t be super pissed if he was using positive emoticons. What it meant beyond that, she had no clue, but she was only going to allow herself one minute to think it was that he wanted to repeat that magnificent penis performance.

She set the timer on her phone.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m giving myself exactly sixty seconds to fantasize that Drew wants to be with me.” She closed her eyes and remembered the sensation of his mouth on hers, kissing her with passion and intensity. By the time she got to his lips trailing down over her breasts and to her girl bits, the phone alarm squawked.

She opened her eyes. “Okay, I’m good.”

Samantha pushed up her glasses. “You’re a freak.”

“Truth.”