Read Nine Women, One Dress for Free Online Page B

ninth espresso, and Albert, poor Albert, looked like he had spent the entire day nibbling the tips off Xanax just to keep calm. I had seen him do that before. It’s like he thinks it doesn’t count if he just takes a little bite off the top, but eventually those little bites add up to god only knows how many pills. They handed me a printout of a TMZ.com story, as if they thought I didn’t own a computer, and acted like my turning off my phone was a criminal offense. They were quite the combination, my agent and my publicist. When it came to me and my life, they usually had the instinct of a lioness protecting her cubs. Today they were like tigers on the hunt. Hank would shout out a solution and Albert would point out all that could go wrong with it. In the end, they agreed that the TMZ headline “Gay or Straight? Who’s Jeremy Madison’s Mystery Girl?” was better for my career than just “Gay!”
    This bothered me for a few reasons: one, the paparazzi will now have even more reason to follow me to try and find out who the mystery girl is; two, I feel bad about my brother, I really do. He has been out and proud since we were kids and probably could care less about all this, but I feel as a good brother I should speak out against this kind of public outing of celebrities. And there was also a third reason: now it would be assumed that I was just a cheating louse who broke everyone’s favorite Victoria’s Secret model’s heart. Truth? I really didn’t want to be that guy.
    But my advisers, whom, as I told you, I’m scared I would be nothing without, thought differently. Hank especially wanted no part of my gay-advocacy campaign.
    He was adamant: “Pick another cause, like the rain forest or puppy mills. And whatever you do, don’t get caught kissing any dudes.”
    They decided our best bet would be to answer the question “Who’s the mystery girl?” with a few staged red-carpet photos of Natalie and me, thus answering the gay-or-straight question as well. Of course this meant finding the girl again.
    They were so anxious I thought they might explode—how would they convince her to go along with it, would they have to give her some kind of hush money, how would they make sure
that
never came out in the press, and on and on. The only thing worse than the two of them pacing back and forth across my living room would be the two of them detonated into little pieces and splattered all over my walls, so I gave in, agreed to their plan, and told them I thought the mystery girl would be more than willing to go along with the whole thing. They were so relieved they both hugged and kissed me.
    “No kissing dudes!” I shouted, laughing, as I swatted them away.
    I really agreed to do it for Natalie, so she could make Flip Roberts sorry. So that he could spend the rest of his life thinking about the girl that got away. I was sure he would, because I hadn’t stopped thinking about her just from the one night. This plan also gave me a great excuse to see her again right away with no vulnerability on my end.
    Albert snapped back into his usual state of despair. “Wait. How do you know she’ll do it?”
    I alleviated their worry with one sentence. “There’s a guy she’s trying to get back at.” Revenge—that they understood.
    I put on the suit and pink tie that I’d worn the night before, and Hank and I headed to Bloomingdale’s while Albert went to his office to arrange the photo shoot. Natalie had told me the night before that she was working today and I was excited to see her again, though I said nothing to Barnum and Bailey about it. God only knows what kind of media circus they would create with that information.
    As we reached 59th Street I began to get nervous, and Hank must have noticed. “What’s up with you? You’re doing that thing you do before a big scene where you chew on your lip.”
    “No, I’m not.” I sounded like I was responding to my mother. I’ve been chewing on my lip like that when