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What a joke. At my expense. The industry is laughing at me.
That call with my agent set off a chain reaction that led to me getting intoxicated at some social media influencer party downtown where I met the girl that’s currently sleeping in my hotel bed. I needed an escape. I needed to get out of my own thoughts. I needed a blowout.
I don’t even know the girl’s name.
I groan and take another sip of caffeine. The commercial break ends, and it’s back to the news show. Now they’re on to celebrity gossip. I hear my name mentioned and I perk up.
They’re talking about me.
“Well, he is a Penmayne, and that means he was born into money,” one host says, a woman with black hair and a face caked full of makeup. “And everything else that comes with a last name such as his.”
“Victor Penmayne: who wouldn’t want a life like his?” her co-host, a bald man with too much Botox in his forehead, asks rhetorically. “To be handsomeandrich. What a combo!”
“And he grew up with six other brothers in a small town while their dad made the money.”
“That’s a lot of brothers...”
“But he has one crazy reputation,” the female host continues. “To many people, Victor Penmayne is a famous actor, but he is also well-known for his reckless antics. It is no secret he’s a playboy bachelor, with many women freely coming and going from his front door, stirring gossip left, right, and center. He courts the media. His dating life is very public and very much on the record.”
“Well, it’s no wonder why he wasn’t nominated yesterday for best actor,” the male host remarks. “Everyone can see why he was snubbed. It’s clear no one on that judging panel would take a bad-boy billionaire seriously with a reputation like that. Those judges prefer to see themselves as a prestige institution and would not want to include a playboy like Victor Penmayne in their ranks. They want clean and respectable actors, not tabloid fodder.”
“Certainly not,” the female host says. “The head judge said as much in an interview yesterday...”
Before she can finish her sentence and I can hear the stinging words of the head judge, I switch off the TV and aggressively throw the remote onto the couch.
Screw them, and screw that judging panel.
I can’t believe I wasn’t nominated.
I’ll need to do something about it, but right now I need to get pleasured.
“Victor? Victor?”
Just woken up, the girl in the bed is calling for me.
Perfect timing.
Those hosts think I should no longer sleep around? That I should beclean?Respectable?
That I shouldn’t indulge my playboy ways?
I put down my coffee and head back toward the bedroom. Screw stretching -thisis going to be a good way to properly wake up and forget about all my troubles.
As I stroll towards the blonde in my bed, I smirk to myself. I’m never going to get myself seriously involved with a girl.
I’m having way too much fun for that.
1
JOSIE
All I ever want to be is a mother.
Having kids has been my number one dream for a very long time. It’s been there as long as I remember - ever since I was a little girl playing with dolls and drawing fantasy houses on the back of scraps of paper. I never really thought about anything else for my future growing up, not even during that time after high school when I was seriously meant to be deciding on a path in life. A truckload of money or a fancy job title didn’t matter to me when a family was all I was pining after. Back then, I didn’t care where I might have kids, just as long as I had them one day. Anywhere was perfectly okay with me. It's funny... I vividly remember my friends in high school incessantly talking about how they wanted to climb up the corporate ladder and land good jobs and travel the world with their savings, but all I ever wanted to do was to find a husband and build a lovely little family I could call my own.
That is truly all I've ever wanted.
I wanted to build a nice little life. That’s it. That’s all. That was my dream.
