Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
That catering door never stops and even if she didn’t have a direct line-of-sight to Cynthia Lear and that liar Steve Smith, she would still be in the mood to murder someone.
This day started badly and it doesn’t seem to be looking up. She was stuck in the elevator for seven hours last night. Seven. Hours.
She made herself hoarse from screaming. She has bruises on the sides of her hands from pounding on the doors. And when the elevator doors finally opened, she was half-asleep on the floor—curled up in the fetal position because it was freezing in there—and a whole group of readers saw her and immediately assumed she’d passed out drunk from the night before.
The next thing she knew they all had their phones out, recording.
She wanted to rip their hair out. She wanted to rant and rave about how unfairly she was being treated… but instead she ran away and took the stairs up to her standard room with one king bed and a tiny fridge she had to pay extra for.
It was only then, once she was in her room, that she realized she could’ve used those readers to spread her rumor.
Which, she is certain now, is no rumor.
Steve writes the books. Essie is the face.
They are a couple of twin-faced liars.
Thinking about it rationally, though, it’s fortuitous that Leslie didn’t spilled the beans to those nobodies who found her in the elevator. She needs a gossipy Bookstagrammer. No, better. She needs one of those bitchy BookTokers!
Yes. She rubs her hands together, watching the crowd in front of Cynthia Lear’s table grow bigger and bigger by the minute.
Leslie is going to out Steve and Essie at their own stupid conference. She’s going to turn the entire romance world against them. She’s going to make them pay.
And she’s gonna do that right now.
Leslie slaps her hands on the table, gets up, and is just coming out from behind it, determined with every fiber of her being to find herself a bitchy BookToker, when the catering door comes swinging out, smashing her right in the face.
The next thing she knows, she’s covered in blood, surrounded by paramedics—who, contrary to every romance book ever written about paramedics, are not hot—and a crowd of people are recording her in all her bloody glory.
The last thing she hears as she’s wheeled out of the signing hall and pushed inside an ambulance for her broken nose is a PA announcement for fans with wristband numbers three hundred to three hundred and fifty to get in Essie’s line.
Leslie raises her fist and mumbles a curse past the ice pack on her nose.
She will get them if it’s the last thing she ever does.
No. Better. She will ruin them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There’s a really funny section in one of the Master Choke books, I forget which one, but it stands out because the Master Choke books aren’t intended to be particularly funny. They are pretty hardcore, in fact. And knowing now, definitively, that Steve is the one who wrote all of that stuff is simultaneously sexy and confusing. In part because I tend to overthink things and get stuck in rumination cycles.
Like, is Steve actually Master Choke himself? Is the character based on him? He doesn’t seem all dark and twisted. But we did have sex (I had sex!) and he did kind of… Anyway. So, is he really just chronicling his own escapades in those books? Since he clearly didn’t steal from Leslie Whatshertoes, are those books more of a memoir than a fiction? Etc. Etc. Etc.
None of these things are true, I can’t imagine. None of these things make sense, even. But my brain starts trying to piece together ideas in order to make them have some sort of logic. Because, as noted, I tend to get stuck in rumination cycles. To which end…
What was I thinking?
Oh, right. The funny bit.
There’s this funny section where Master Choke gets into an accident. A car accident. Not a bad one or anything, just a fender-bender, but it does cause him to whip his head around at exactly the wrong moment and, as a consequence, he winds up having to wear a neck brace for a bit. Which is obviously a funny and ironic image. This guy, this master of choking, having to wear a neck brace that covers his own throat.
And, on the surface, that’s all it is. A funny and ironic image.
But, because SS, aka Steve Smith, is a good writer, it’s also more than that. It’s a commentary on the nature of Choke’s identity and a clarifying moment for Choke on a personal level that gives him an opportunity for self-reflection and all kinds of other introspection on his own history and what led him to become ‘Master Choke’ and all that jazz. I don’t know if everyone would read it and glean that, but it leapt out to me when I read it and has stayed with me ever since.