Page 38 of Unrealistic Expectations

Barbie pulled her hand back, freeing Jessica to procure more charcuterie.

“That good?” Kelly asked.

Jessica nodded as she spread some goat cheese with figs over bread. “That good.”

The rest of lunch was less focused on her love life and more focused on how Barbie had a day full of starlets to make up for an awards show and didn’t know how she would manage it.

As Jessica was leaving lunch, she saw messages from Galvin and Abby. The first one made her smile, and the second one made her anxious. She decided to call Abby back first.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, not answering your phone?” was the first thing Abby said to her. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for an hour.”

“You’re the second person to ask what’s wrong with me today, and I’m getting a little tired of it. I was just eating lunch.”

“You can’t eat with your phone in your hand like everyone else?”

“I was telling Barbie and Kelly how things were going with Galvin—”

“I don’t fucking care about that.” Abby cut her off.

“It was your idea.”

“Yes, it was and it worked,” Abby said, in a more singsong voice. “I was calling to tell you that you made the New York Times Best Sellers list!”

Jessica was sure she hadn’t heard what she’d just heard. “No.”

“Yes.”

“But how?” This had always been the goal, but she’d lost sight of that the moment she’d walked in her condo just as Luke was getting his shit and leaving. And then she’d gotten caught up in Galvin and their fake relationship. She’d just lost sight for a few weeks of what that fake relationship was supposed to give her.

It was supposed to give her this.

She’d thought she’d feel triumphant, free. She’d thought she’d finally feel like she was out of Luke’s shadow, and she was sure she wouldn’t feel like a little girl who didn’t have control of her life anymore.

And some of that was true. She felt more free than she had her whole life; she’d thought about Luke so rarely in the past few weeks that she was starting to think that he’d done her a favor by leaving, and she now wasn’t worried about her mother showing up unannounced and fucking up her life.

But it wasn’t because of anything that she’d done. It was all because of Galvin. It should make it all feel cheaper, especially given that no one but some of the stubborn hope that lived inside her believed that she and Galvin could make a go of things. She knew better than to put her faith in a relationship like the one they had. They’d only slept together once, and they hadn’t even talked about whether they should continue seeing each other after the PR relationship ceased to serve a purpose.

There was another reason that she wasn’t as excited about this as she should be. Part of the reason they were dating for public consumption was to raise the profile of her book. Every time she’d posted about him, her publisher had reported a bump in the sales figures. Galvin was a big part of her success. And now that her book had the highest profile there was, how long could they last?

“Are you listening to me?” Abby’s question shocked her out of her spiral. She knew better than to place any credence in the longevity of her PR relationship, but she needed to listen to her friend and publicist.

“I’m sorry. I’m just so surprised. I thought this would happen after the first week or not at all.”

“I did tell you that sometimes writers with smaller platforms take some time to build up momentum.” Abby had told her this, but her lifelong tendency to look on the catastrophic side had prevented her from thinking that it was true.

“That you did, but I just had no idea that sales had popped this much.” She should have been paying closer attention to her sales figures than to Galvin Baker.

“You don’t sound excited. Why don’t you sound excited?”

Jessica hesitated before answering. She couldn’t very well say that she was feeling maudlin because she’d gotten high on her own supply of PR dick.

“I am really excited. Just surprised.” She put her head on the steering wheel, grateful that this wasn’t a video call. She hated lying to her friends.

“Okay, so I’m going to set up some morning show press, and that feature writer who wrote that wild profile on Mimi Jameson last month for Vanity Fair is doing a piece called ‘The New Toxic Bachelors,’ and she wants to interview you next week.” Abby had been busy while Jessica wasn’t answering her phone.

“She wants to interview me as an expert on toxic bachelors?”

“Yeah, it’s the perfect fit.” Abby paused. “She also saw that you were dating Galvin and wanted to press on that angle. But I think I shut that down.”

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