Slow Seduction (Struck by Lightning) Read Free

“Except there wouldn’t be space for another person in this closet.”
    She chuckled at my joke. “Maybe I’ll come visit at the break in July. Oh, speaking of which! Eek! I better get dressed. I’m supposed to be at class by two o’clock.”
    “Ooh, okay, I’ll let you go.” I wanted to hear about her class. She was teaching a summer session literature seminar and had been stressing majorly over it. I was sure I’d hear all about it later. “Bye, Becks.”
    “Bye, Rina. Don’t forget! Tea with Paul and Michel tomorrow.” She waved one last time and then her screen went dark when she closed her laptop.
    The tiny room felt very empty then. I sent an e-mail to my sister, Jill, telling her about tea at the Buckingham Palace Hotel.
    The sun was setting on this warm summer evening as I stared out of the open hotel window. The sky was alight with streaks of rose and magenta. The towers of the train station really looked more like a castle than a transit hub. Two children ran down the cobbled street toward the park, laughing, their father following behind, unhurried. I wanted to imagine that it was a castle, that I had come to a fairy-tale land, but reality was holding me in a very firm grip.
    I sat back down on the bed. I wanted to walk around but I didn’t know the neighborhood. Was it safe? Maybe it was at the moment, but once the sun went down, would it be? I remembered all the warnings my mother had given me, first when I went to college, then when I moved to New York City for grad school. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go out at night. Don’t walk alone. They all applied suddenly. I was in a foreign country and out of my element.
    The e-mail Becky had sent with the links to the LL fan sites beckoned me. Well, that would be one way to keep myself busy for a while…
    I had avoided looking at the sites up until now. It was weird enough that the man I had fallen in love with, the man with whom I had done some of the most intimate and outrageous sexual things, was secretly an international rock star, but it was even weirder to realize that millions of women, my own roommate included, spent their days lusting after him.
    I clicked on the first link somewhat hesitantly. A fan site popped up, and a song of his began to play. Headings on the site beckoned me to sections: News, Photo Gallery, Your Stories, Meetups.
    The News page appeared to be a mix of blog posts and links to news stories about anything and everything remotely related to Lord Lightning. Some guy who had once played guitar on one of his albums had a solo record out now, and so most of the recent articles were about him. The Photo Gallery contained promo photos, concert shots, and occasional fan photos where people had uploaded pictures of themselves meeting him. Most of them were women, grinning wide-eyed in excitement and disbelief at standing next to their idol. None of those were more recent than several months ago, the last time he appeared.
    The night we met.
    I had to stop looking at the pictures. He always appeared wearing a mask or so heavily made up he was unrecognizable, but the comments people left freaked me out a little. “So beautiful! The most beautiful man alive!” read one. “Yummy. I could nibble those abs like ears of corn,” read another. Others were more graphic. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with them, but the flare of jealousy I felt was so hot my cheeks burned. Jealousy and arousal, too, triggered by the frank erotic thoughts these fans had about him, about the little bit of skin he showed in a photo shoot or the suggestive pose on an album cover. Some guys get up there, sing, and get famous, I know that. But Lord Lightning wasn’t just a musician. He was a Sex Symbol with a capital S. He was made of sex.
    The Your Stories section was even worse. One section was meant to be true stories like “The Day I Met Lord Lightning for Winning a Radio Contest,” but there were only a few postings there. The fiction section,