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?