See Jane Date by Melissa Senate

hardly anything else could appear on the cover. Eloise had thought of placing a tiny digital scale between the title and subtitle, with flashing red numbers popping up and fading. Skinny-Minny was Gwen’s book. I was “baby-sitting” it while Gwen was out, which meant I was being burdened with seeing it through all the phases of production and sending everything for approval by FedEx to Gwen’s house. The cover mechanicals had come back with corrections and dried slime that looked like either baby food or baby barf. But thanks to Jeremy, I no longer had to deal with it.
    â€œI’ll plan a hipster outfit for you and bring it upstairs tonight,” Eloise said, shutting off the light-box. “Oh, and I checked out the Gnat. She doesn’t look that much like Nicole Kidman. And hello? Who wears leather pants past Memorial Day weekend, anyway?”
    I kissed her, peered out of her office until I saw Morgan trot off somewhere, then sneaked out for the much-needed cigarette.
    Â 
    The tea kettle started shrieking in my kitchen just as I sat down to read the very juicy first paragraph of the Gnat’s first chapter. I ran to the stove to turn off the burner.
    Ten minutes later, everything I could ever want, for the next two hours, at least, was on a bamboo tray: a cup ofapple-cinnamon tea, two chocolate-caramel rice cakes, a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights and an unopened pack, a lighter, an ashtray and two dark lead pencils. I carried my bounty into the main room of my studio and settled myself on the futon, the first chapter of the Gnat’s memoir square on my lap. Cigarette lit and rice cake bitten into, I began reading.
    I was fucking one of the most famous actors currently in show business when he handed me a legal document to sign. Three pages preventing me from ever discussing him or our relationship in any medium to any media. He’d been trailing kisses up my thigh moments before he’d reached over me to the nightstand to pick up The Document. “It’s just a precaution that my agent, manager, accountant and press people insist on,” he’d told me between darts of his tongue against my clitoris.
    One of People magazine’s sexiest men alive was performing oral sex on me. Me, a small-time actress who’d never been cut a break. Me, Natasha Nutley from Queens, New York. The girl who’d never had a best friend. The girl whose parents thought she was a disappointment for as long as she could remember. The girl who’d managed to get two lousy lines on a prime-time hospital drama because she’d slept with the casting director’s assistant’s assistant.
    Who was I not to sign anything anyone put in front of me? And who was I not to feel like the luckiest woman in the world because The Actor was making love to me? Making love. That was a laugh. Making a loser out of me was more like it.
    Seven weeks. Seven of the most meaningful weeks of my life meant absolutely nothing to him. I’d reminded him of a girlfriend from drama school. He later told me that was why he’d chosen me. And while I thought he was falling in love with me, he was simply getting blow jobs from a girl who’d learned that was the way to a man’s heart a long, long time ago.
    Whip out the violins. And a barf bag, please. Did I really have to read this pornography?
    Remke and Jeremy would love it; it was exactly what they wanted. Dirty words, sex and enough woe-is-me, boo-hoo baloney to fill a big fat mass-market paperback summer read. What a bunch of melodramatic hooey.
    Never had a best friend. Her parents thought she was a disappointment. Give me a break! Natasha Nutley had had everything handed to her on a sterling silver platter from the moment she’d flashed those green eyes and red ringlets at her mother’s obstetrician twenty-eight years ago. Who did she think she was fooling? Maybe the American people at large wouldn’t know she was lying through