Chapter 10 There is No Try
THERE IS NO TRY
Where were all the luscious lips hiding? wondered Sasha. Was it really so hard to find a mediagenic, memorable, camera-ready, kissable, friendly-but-fuckable mouth?
The clock was ticking, and Sasha had only booked three models for the Seraphina commercial.
She needed five more. And she feared she’d lost her touch.
Sasha was holed up in Elizabeth Street Garden, her workspace for the day.
She sat at a wrought-iron bistro table covered with printouts of model and actor headshots—all genders, all body types, all ethnicities.
None of them screamed Autumn Kisses campaign.
Tapping her foot, she tilted her face up to the sun and shut her eyes.
Focus, focus, focus, she told herself, rubbing her browbone.
You’ve done this a million times. What’s wrong with you?
The Elizabeth Street Garden usually helped her channel her most creative self.
Nestled just north of Manhattan’s Little Italy, it was a fanciful urban sanctuary with twinkling birdbaths, sculpture gardens, and shadowy trees.
It was a charmingly gothic little secret. Like something from an Anne Rice novel.
Today, Sasha couldn’t find inspiration. And she knew why.
It was so impersonal, trying to create casting gold without actually meeting the talent.
Ordinarily, she didn’t mind that the industry had gone digital.
For someone who could feel anxious around strangers, the less people she was around, the better.
But, this was about lips. She needed to see texture, movement, talking—maybe even kissing.
An in-person casting was the missing link.
Chewing on her lip, she pulled up Joni Yao from her phone contacts. When Sasha was first hired, the Seraphina Global creative director insisted she was available to chat anytime. Time to take her up on the offer.
“Sasha. Hello.” Joni was a friendly, collaborative emo-type with a septum bar and incredible vision—but she was overworked. Thus, her responses were always short. She famously only spoke two words at a time.
“Hi, Joni, how are you?”
“Good. You?”
“Great! But I’m having some thoughts about the Project Pucker casting.”
“Mmm. Shoot.”
“For the final five, I’d love to hold an in-person audition. Possibly in the next few weeks? Is there a budget?”
“Yes. Yes.”
Sasha pantomimed a silent cheer. “Perfect, I’ll arrange. Talk soon?”
“Wait.” And then, to Sasha’s dismay, Joni launched into a multi-word monologue. “About your Seat F email—do you ever dabble in the dark arts? I know a kitchen witch who could find Seat F in forty-eight hours. She’ll just need a fingernail clipping and four eyelash hairs.”
Sasha’s entire soul drooped. Dear Lord, she’d never escape that email. She stared down at the phone, scrambling for an adequate response. Until she remembered that April in HR advised her to say the email was an inside joke.
“No need for a kitchen witch, Joni.” She hoped she sounded peppy. “But thank you! That email was an inside joke gone wrong. Crazy, right? Ha ha. More soon.”
Sasha shoved the phone in her jeans pocket and sipped her lemonade glumly.
This was her life now. She was a joke. The thing is, she’d think the Seat F situation was hilarious, too, if it hadn’t happened to her.
Why hadn’t some programmer or Silicon Valley savant or high school hacker invented a way to permanently erase emails from the interwebs?
The only way to chase that cursed email from her mind was to sink into the memory of Seat F.
His voice, his eyes. The feel of him taking her hand in his.
Their connection had felt so perfect, like a dream.
Over the past few weeks, she kept returning to the feeling he gave her—it was the only way she could exhale, even a little bit.
It was uncanny, the way a complete stranger matched her, feeling for feeling, experience for experience.
There was a reason they met. She wondered how Wes was doing with the case.
Since they spoke on the library steps, she’d been racking her brain for Seat F details she’d forgotten.
Something that’d help Wes’s investigation.
A missing detail was scratching just the edges of her subconscious, but she couldn’t access it.
Whatever. She had to stop being a busybody.
But it was hard to concentrate on anything else.
Work was going nowhere. So, Sasha packed her printouts into her oversized tote and went for a walk.
Elizabeth Street Garden was perfectly situated at the crossroads of Nolita, SoHo, and the Lower East Side.
Listening to the Black History Buff podcast, she walked down Elizabeth Street for a few miles, passing bistros with tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, chic boutiques, and multimillion-dollar townhomes.
A warm, flat wind lightly carried the summer-in-the-city scent of heated cement and, well, trash.
Gallipoli is beautiful, Seat F had said. It smells like cypress trees and the sea.
As Sasha walked, she tried to imagine cavorting along Southern Italian beaches with him.
Was she living in a fantasy? Had she hallucinated him?
A few nights ago, she decided she needed something tactile to keep his memory alive.
Impulsively, she googled “cypress” and “sea” for a perfume, incense, or anything that carried that scent.
When she landed on Molton Brown’s Coastal Cypress candle, she actually yelped.
And then bought it for next-day delivery.
Delusional? Perhaps. But she kept the candle burning at her bedside every evening, ever since.
Sasha had never allowed herself to be nutty about a guy, rationality be damned.
To fall. It was all so freeing! Strolling by the Gelateria Gentile gelato shop, she caught her reflection in the window.
She looked downright giddy. When was the last time she spontaneously, authentically, smiled all alone?
Sasha focused her eyes and zeroed in on a mustached patron demolishing a sundae while reading.
The book he was reading: How to Not Die Alone.
She stopped in her tracks, goose bumps trailing up her arms. She openly gawked at the guy—until he glanced up and shot her the finger. Waving apologetic hands, she went along her way. This was a sign too coincidental to ignore.
I feel like a rom-com heroine who falls in love with a ghost only she sees, she thought, allowing her mind to drift.
Like Sally Field in Kiss Me Goodbye. Or Demi Moore in Ghost. Why aren’t there any Black ghost romances?
Can we get Zendaya or Keke in a torrid love story costarring a sexily deceased Damson Idris? Why do I have to think of everything?
Sasha took a left on East Houston Street, heading to the West Village. Before long, she ended up in front of the Film Forum movie theater.
The Film Forum. She paused, a spike of adrenaline surging through her.
I go there, alone, every Friday night when I’m in town, he’d said.
It was Friday. She rushed up to the marquee. The first show of the evening was 6:40. She had three hours. Frantically, she whipped out her phone and called Wes.
6:30. Houston Hall, a cavernous, crowded beer hall diagonally across the street from Film Forum, on West Houston.
We’re hiding out in a booth at the window, keeping eyes on the front of the theater.
Unobstructed view of neon awning and customers slowly filing in and out of the theater.
After 30 minutes, no sign of anyone fitting Seat F’s profile.
Sasha was spying on Wes as he jotted down notes in his journal.
She tried to be covert about it, but she was sitting directly across from him in a booth—hard to ignore.
Every so often, he’d glance up, and she’d quickly look out the window.
Their booth was flush against a front window overlooking Houston Street.
A prime location to spy on the Film Forum’s entrance.
Heart thundering with anticipation, Sasha’s gaze traveled back to Wes as he wrote in his small, five-by-seven notebook.
Curiously, the corner of each page was stamped with the Wordle logo, and receipts, napkins, and cards were stored between the pages.
The random, messy journal was at odds with his crisp streetwear style: short-sleeve maroon tee, slouchy carpenter pants, and impeccable sneakers.
Everything he wore hung exactly as it should.
He smelled deliciously smoky, like cedar, amber, and crackling fireplace.
Odd, in the middle of June. But his scent was heady. Sumptuous.
Wes had shown up twenty-five minutes after Sasha called. She remembered this; his dependability. He was never unreachable. Wes and Sasha had that in common. They both dropped everything for work.
“Out of all the things I could imagine doing at six thirty on a Friday night,” she said, sipping her white wine, “spying on the Film Forum wasn’t one of them.”
“Wild, right?” Wes didn’t look up from his notebook.
His expression was stern and focused, and his voice sounded a bit .
. . restrained. Like he was actively trying to neutralize his personality, to avoid being overly familiar.
She supposed that, per the rules he laid out on the library steps, he was putting a healthy professional distance between them.
He was taking this “we’re not friends” thing seriously. But it felt so unnatural.
Spontaneously staking out a movie theater was exciting stuff. Sasha was buzzing with anticipation—especially since she was pushing her anxiety boundaries, being away from her apartment basically all day. This was an adventure! But Wes looked like he was balancing his checkbook.
The silence was killing her.
“Big Wordle guy, huh?”
Wes abruptly stopped writing and glanced at her. “Sorry, what was that?”
“The cover of your journal has Wordle on it. Are you a fan? Where does one procure Wordle merch?”