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hair dryer?
    I collapsed on the floor of my bathroom and cried for five minutes, which might have been an inappropriate response. My insides jumped around even faster than my thoughts, and it took me a while to compose myself, with the help of a crumbled, leftover muffin from my flight the day before.
    Luckily, one of my neighbours had a locally-sourced hair dryer, so two hours and a borrowed bag of frozen peas on my puffy eyes later, I hit the streets of London in a fabulous vintage brown tweed dress and red knee-high boots. I looked so damn cosmopolitan I should have been stopped by a style blog.
    A woman who looks like this would never be left by her lover. No, indeed, she’d dash into the studio offices, totally on the guest list, and breeze into the large conference room where the table read would take place. And there it was—my name on a tented card dead centre along one side of the table. Jayde Loving, Samantha Lytton. Oh, how I loved her silly name. For every ridiculous ‘y’ added to a character name, she gains ten per cent more sexy.
    I’d shown up early, which is not a thing the stars of a film tend to do, I’d discovered. But better early than late. I was one of the two major leads of this film, and I could not fuck it up. Just the thought of making an ass of myself and costing the studio fifty million dollars gave me a wave of such anxiety I actually had to sit in the folding chair. I played it off by diving into my bag to search for nothing. Soon, folks were introducing themselves—some of the other actors, the Director of Photography, other technical wizards who would be paid to stare at my face in close-up for many, many hours. I apologised for this to some of them, and they laughed. Yes! I was a functioning adult! I was a fabulous starlet! I was…drooling.
    Oh, baby.
    He walked in the room. Daniel Zhang, the man People magazine had placed third in their most recent Sexiest Man Alive issue. When asked later, I would tell my best friend Ellen that I heard slow-mo saxophone music timed to his long, lean strides. He smiled before he took off his aviator sunglasses, which he twisted off in the hottest move since hip-thrusting was invented. He was so handsome up close that he didn’t seem real—warm brown eyes that crinkled at the corners, tanned skin smooth and perfect, his hair black and brushed forward gorgeously in the way that only comes from four-hundred-dollar haircuts.
    Recently, he’d ended a Tony-winning run in Hamlet on Broadway. As Hamlet—the first actor of Asian descent to do so. I sighed. Yes, sighed when he came straight for me and extended his hand down, down, down. At six feet tall, he had me beat by an entire foot.
    We’d emailed a little, but he’d been so busy we hadn’t got a chance to talk. We hadn’t even read together, the producers figuring he was so golden that he’d create enough chemistry for six romantic sub-plots and innumerable fanfictions.
    With a smile I hoped would mean big box office for us, he said, “I’m so delighted to finally meet you, Samantha.”
    And at that moment, the first verified case of ‘death by unbelievably sexy British accent’ occurred.
    Almost. I shook his hand, mine cold and clammy, and managed to stutter, “Hi. Yes. Me, too. Mister Zh—Dan—Daniel. Zhangiel.”
    He laughed. “My friends call me Danny.”
    I giggled, but in a very professional manner. I collapsed back into my seat while he worked the room, which parted lovingly for him like a pair of overeager female thighs. When he circled around, his ass was so perfectly formed in his brown pinstripe pants that I had to literally think close your mouth, Samantha . My disloyalty to the main ass in my life slapped me, and I vowed to not gaze adoringly at strange butts anymore. Well, not overly much. I wasn’t dead.
    I checked my phone—nothing from Sam, not even in response to the texts I’d sent earlier. I decided to be angry rather than fearful about it. I functioned on angry,