Excerpt of Sexiest Man Alive by Diana Holquist

Chapter 1

Everyone loves a celebrity. Oops...make that everyone except Jasmine Burns. Falling in love with a celebrity is her worst nightmare.

Chapter One

“Hi! I’m Jasmine Burns!”

The naked man stared up at Jasmine blankly.

Great. She sounded like a cruise ship director on crack. She cleared her throat and adjusted her black teddy. “It’s great to meet you!”

Ugh. This was definitely not working.

Jasmine met her eyes in the mirror on the far (okay, not-so- far) wall of her tiny Upper West Side studio. This only looks crazy, she silently assured her reflection.

She looked down at the tiny naked Ken doll perched on her couch.

Okay, it was crazy. Call-the-cops nuts, even.

She paced. Seven steps. Pivot. Seven steps. Pivot. Exercise #12, page 127 in her Goodbye Shy! workbook had made sense in theory: practice job interviews with a doll to focus on until the panic is gone. For best results, rehearse the interview with both parties naked to achieve optimal vulnerability. Jasmine just couldn’t get completely naked; she settled on a black lace teddy for herself. Ken wasn’t so shy. He went all the way without complaint.

The mind controls the body. Let the panic wash over, then continue. Repeated exposure to the object of fear will dull the emotion.

So why was her terror growing? Her interview was three days, seven hours and twenty-seven minutes away and she was getting more panicked by the second.

She flopped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling of her shoe-box shaped apartment. The heel end was crammed with her elaborate double iron bed, centered between the door to the hallway and the door to her tiny bathroom. The toe end was dominated by a lead-glass window that stretched four feet across and from the ceiling to within two feet of the floor. And what a window. If she stood outside on the sidewalk and craned her neck to the fifth floor, it reigned proudly between two identical, grand windows. Once, they had let light in on one expansive room. Sometimes Jasmine would imagine she still heard the muted footsteps of the maids hurrying over the hardwood floors from the days before the brownstone was sliced into tiny studios. She’d smell the pipes of the long-gone men in dressing robes reading the New York Saturday Post.

Wonder what those guys would have made of Ken?

Despite her exhaustion, she forced herself off the bed and back to the “living room”—a flea-market, white-boned couch, one white over-stuffed chair, and a white coffee table rescued from a curb-side trash pile all arranged neatly at the foot of her bed. She flopped next to Ken on the couch and toyed with a scrap of black wool (worsted, Italian) that she had scored the day before from a sample table on 37th Street. Salsa music and car horns floated up from Amsterdam Avenue below, a melody of the city she barely noticed anymore.

This job was the chance of a lifetime. After all, her tailoring business she ran out of her apartment was an accident, not part of her plan. A hem here, a tuck there and within weeks she was in demand. She became known as a miracle worker who could make a cigarette hole in silk pajamas disappear, take in a suit better than anyone west of Hong Kong, rescue your mother’s mildewed wedding gown. It wasn’t a bad way to make a living. She rarely had to leave her apartment. But now that her graduation (M.A. in costume design from N.Y.U.) was five months past, her ex-classmates were out hitting the pavement, interning and networking, sometimes in theaters, sometimes even getting paid (she let the wonderful possibility of one day being in their shoes spread through her). And she was playing with dolls.

Naked dolls.

Maybe that was the problem. Naked Ken was too much. After all, if Ken were impersonating a famous costume designer, shouldn’t he have amazing clothes? She carried Ken to the white-washed plywood door balanced on two white wooden saw horses next to her window. Her 1949 Singer nine-stitch sewing machine gleamed in welcome. She ran her hand down it, her steel and chrome kitty. She settled at the table next to it and began to sketch.

What would Arturo Mastriani, New York’s top costume designer, wear to interview her, Jasmine Burns, his next brilliant new assistant?