Narcissist Seeks Narcissist by Giselle Renarde Page B

send it directly to you.”
    “Yeah, thanks, darling.” She’d stopped listening, but grabbed hold of his hand when the lounge door swung open. This could be her doppelganger. This could be the woman who was so like her, so physically similar and devoted to the same ideals that they’d fall for each other in an instant.
    A young woman in leopard tights stepped into the lounge and Szuszu’s heart thumped hard as she cast her gaze around the room. All Szuszu’s dreams, or at least the ones in recent memory, were coming true. “That’s her! My twin, my mirror image—that’s her!”
    Kenzo writhed in her grip, but she wouldn’t release his hand. All he said was, “ That’s her?”

 
     
     
    Chapter 2
     
     
    “ H oly crap, that’s her!” Naomi tapped her chewed up fingernail against the lounge’s darkened window. “That’s Szuszu! That’s her!”
    Erin shielded her eyes against the glare from the streetlights and looked through the glass. When she turned her gaze back to Naomi, she looked like her eyes were about to pop out of her head. “ That’s her?”
    Digging through her big-ass purse, Naomi found the magazine she’d had in her possession for nearly as long as she could remember. She flipped through the weathered pages until she arrived at the spread that had put her to bed -- if not to sleep -- as she discovered her sexual self.
    There was nobody nearby except the doorman, so Naomi held up the magazine for Erin to get a better look. Szuszu was nearly naked in most of the pictures, and fully naked in all the rest, but the face was definitely the same. The woman in the lounge was the woman in the magazine.
    “I can’t believe a huge model would resort to taking out a personal ad.” Naomi felt absolutely giddy.
    “I can’t believe any intelligent woman would resort to answering one,” Erin shot back.
    Naomi raised an eyebrow. Comments like that made her feel like a bit of a moron, but nothing could douse her enthusiasm. “Well, we can’t all marry our bosses, now can we?”
    Before Naomi could apologize for being catty, her best friend said, “Besides, this chick’s, like, twenty in those pictures, and she’s how old now? Like, a hundred?”
    Naomi watched through the window as the woman whose photo spread she’d spread herself for all those years knocked back a drink. Szuszu imbibed like a cowboy in a western saloon, and that image made Naomi tingle. “So she’s a little bit older. So what? Your husband’s older than you.”
    “That’s different.” Erin cleared her throat, but didn’t explain how or why her case was so unique.
    “No it isn’t. Besides, she obviously has a great sense of humor, if her personal ad is any indication. I love that she doesn’t take herself too seriously, you know?”
    Erin read Szuszu’s ad again. “I don’t know, kid. What if she’s serious? What if she really is a huge narcissist and she’s expecting some anorexic supermodel to walk through that door?” Erin glanced quickly up at Naomi, and then shifted her eyes back to the personal ad just as fast. “I mean…you know I love you, but you don’t exactly fit the bill.”
    Naomi stepped back from the window until the glare allowed her to see her own reflection in the glass. She wasn’t very tall, but she wasn’t particularly short, either. Everybody told her she had a pretty face, and she believed them, but always with a grain of salt. That’s what people told fat girls to raise their self-esteem, wasn’t it? Such a pretty face! Like her grandmother, pinching her chubby cheeks as a child. Such a pretty face! She did like her hair, though. The cut and color Erin had suggested looked great: dark with bright red strands sweeping across the front and kind of spiky at the back. It suited her.
    “You just don’t get the comedy in the ad because Szuszu’s British and they have a different sense of humor than we do.” Naomi was trying to convince herself as much as Erin. “And see? Look,