Cosmic by celeste, p.24
Cosmic by Celeste, page 24
Inside, every inch was engineered for sensation. Crystal chandeliers overhead splintered the LED washes into constellations, mapping star fields onto the white velvet walls. The music was orchestral, but the arrangements kept flickering between minor and major as if the night couldn’t settle on a mood. At the bar, the stemware sparkled with cocktails laced with edible glitter and a hint of something that tingled on the tongue. Scent diffusers, hacked, per Celeste’s orders, for more subtlety and phase variation, pulsed the first notes of Cosmic into the air: a hit of ozone, then the warmth of cardamom and something unplaceable, almost like the skin of a lover three hours after a fight.
The first arrivals clustered in the entry gallery, a murder of fashion editors and blue-check models crowding the step-and-repeat. Paparazzi installed themselves like barnacles on the velvet ropes. A junior beauty influencer live-streamed her entire walk from the curb to the coat check, narrating every micro-interruption (“Oh my god, you guys, they have vegan caviar!”) while racking up two hundred thousand hearts a minute.
The press corps milled about in preassigned zones, their armbands color-coded to denote loyalty: green for style, red for business, black for the lethal hybrids who traded in both. The old guard, columnists with too many enemies and not enough liver, held the west wall, nursing whiskey and scanning for the first slip-up.
It was a chessboard, each piece perfectly staged, and none of them ready for the opening move.
Thad and Celeste entered after nine, in sync in their refusal to play the usual power-couple choreography. He wore a suit so sleek it looked liquid, shirt unbuttoned enough to show the suggestion of a tattoo at his collarbone. His hair was longer than last week, swept up as if he’d styled it by headbanging. On his arm, Celeste. Her gown caught every color in the spectrum, rendering her silhouette in shifting light: sometimes chrome, sometimes blood orange, sometimes the blue of absolute zero. She moved with the controlled slouch of someone who’d spent half her life hiding in labs and the other half learning to walk in six-inch heels.
They were supposed to pause at the photo wall, but the flashbulbs went off the second they crossed the threshold. Two dozen photographers fired in a sequence, painting the inside of Thad’s eyelids with a strobe-lit afterimage of himself. He blinked and saw Celeste as the world did: sharp angles, the aura of someone who’d already said the most interesting thing in the room.
A handler intercepted with a tablet. “You’re up for the satellite interviews in seven minutes,” she said, smiling with her teeth but not her eyes. “They want a couple’s shot first.”
Thad glanced at Celeste, a look that said, You drive.
She smiled back. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
“Depends,” he murmured, “are you going to bite me again?”
She nudged him toward the step-and-repeat, flashing her best PR smile, and the crowd inhaled in unison.
In the controlled chaos of the flashes, he leaned into her enough for the body language experts to annotate the footage for weeks to come. Celeste laughed, and for a heartbeat, it was the two of them; the rest of the world refracted and irrelevant.
The shot was perfect: he rumpled, her incandescent, both in on the joke.
The party proper unfolded on the second level, a gallery converted into a lunar landscape of a white carpet and drifting glass. Strategic bottlenecks funneled guests toward the “Experience Stations,” each one calibrated to maximize Instagram content per square foot. On the far side, a team of perfumers in black lab coats ran a deconstruction demo, isolating each note of Cosmic for the skeptical and the obsessed.
Celeste worked the floor with a scientist’s calm, her presence a black hole for the ambitious and the merely curious. A beauty director tried to ambush her with a question about “molecular patents,” only to find herself gently redirected into a two-minute masterclass on chiral compounds and the philosophy of scent.
Thad, for his part, played the prodigal son with the ease of someone who’d trained for it since birth. He air-kissed the art world’s more notorious bad boys, got cornered by a Wall Street analyst who tried to con him into a “joint venture,” then spent ten minutes charming a table of TikTokers by teaching them how to stage-dive in five-inch platforms.
There was a running joke that the band was getting back together. In fact, two of Thad’s old bandmates had flown in from Berlin for the launch. They stuck out like wolves at a dog show: battered leather jackets, chain-smoker pallor, and an aura of cultivated indifference. The more the event planners tried to contain them, the more they became the party’s centrifugal force, popping up behind the bar, sneaking out on the terrace for cigarettes, and leaving cryptic graffiti on the bathroom mirrors.
One of them, the bassist, managed to get a bottle of Cosmic off the security plinth and spent the next hour spraying it onto unsuspecting guests, providing real-time feedback to anyone who cared to listen. “It’s like a moon landing,” he declared to a passing socialite, “but instead of planting a flag, you plant your libido.” She laughed, then asked him to sign her arm with a Sharpie.
By then, the air was thick with anticipation and the slow build of drama. Thad and Celeste made the rounds, their progress tracked by a thousand phones and a live commentariat.
At the main bar, a Vogue editor stopped Celeste. “What’s the real story?” she asked, leaning in like a conspirator. “Is this all a revenge plot? Or are you two actually in love?”
Celeste sipped her drink, then said, “Why not both?”
The editor grinned, delighted.
As they moved on, Thad whispered, “You’re getting good at this.”
Celeste arched an eyebrow. “Faking it, or loving you?”
He grinned, then kissed her shoulder, where the scent of Cosmic lingered.
She closed her eyes, letting it settle: the noise, the hunger, the strange peace of finally belonging to something bigger than herself.
By eleven, the event’s hashtag was trending in twelve countries. Every social channel was live: the party streamed to millions, the narrative mutating in real-time.
In the upstairs lounge, the bandmates staged an impromptu jam session, commandeering the event’s string quartet and warping them into a noise-pop ensemble. The first chords were so discordant that the crowd flinched, but within a minute, the entire balcony was swaying, and the glassware was vibrating to the rhythm.
On the dance floor, two rival beauty CEOs slow-danced while live-tweeting barbs at each other. Near the windows, an old-money heiress sobbed openly at the reveal video, then demanded a selfie with the scent’s creator.
Celeste watched it all from the periphery, her hand on Thad’s arm. “This is insane,” she said, almost to herself.
He glanced at her, reading the edge in her voice.
“You want to leave?”
She shook her head. “I want to remember this. All of it.”
He squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry. Someone’s probably archiving the whole thing.”
She smiled, then pulled him into the swirl.
At midnight, the event peaked: the lights dimmed, a thousand phones went up, and the two of them stood together on the upper landing, bathed in laser-cut starlight. For a moment, they were mythic, the center of a narrative neither had written, but both had decided, at some point, to own.
The press took their shot: two figures backlit by the afterglow of their own invention, both a little dangerous, both more beautiful than the world could process in real-time.
It was one second. A blink.
But it would last forever.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Every launch had a peak. Thad knew the rhythm intuitively, the way a room of strangers could be coaxed from cool detachment to molten anticipation and, with the right push, fused into a single organism. Tonight, he felt it before he saw it: the slight hush in the upper gallery, the way all the music and laughter folded down into a tide pulling toward the stage.
The event MC, a legend in her own right, took the mic with the confidence of someone who had outlived three generations of PR crises. She thanked the crowd, called out the “luminaries of beauty and rebellion,” then cued the house lights down to a shiver. A single LED strobe illuminated the lectern, and Thad was up, his name amplified not by the sound system but by the collective voltage of every lens in the room.
He paused, blinking against the glare, and for a heartbeat, considered walking off. Nobody would blame him; half the crowd expected him to be a beautiful disaster, and the other half had bets riding on it. However, his mother's memory, her disdain for quitters, and her unwavering commitment to the moment propelled him forward.
He gripped the mic, knuckles white, and looked out across a thousand upturned faces.
“Thank you all for being here tonight,” he said. “If my mother could see this, she’d probably try to fire half of you, but she’d also be proud.”
Ripples of laughter, the first easy exhale of the night.
He ran a hand through his hair, not even pretending to stick to the script. “When Jocelyn Hastings left me this company, I wasn’t ready. I tried to run away, literally, in some cases.” More laughter. “But you can only outrun your DNA for so long. Eventually, you have to face it.”
He glanced at the floor, the words heavy. “I wanted to make something new, but I was terrified of wrecking what she built. Then I met Celeste.”
The crowd, primed by gossip and Instagram, shifted as one. Every phone in the room angled up, waiting.
“She showed me that legacy isn’t about keeping things the same. It’s about taking a risk on something beautiful, even if it scares the shit out of you.”
He looked up and found Celeste in the crowd. The room and the world beyond it telescoped into a single moment.
“So tonight, I’m proud to announce the launch of Cosmic by Celeste. Not as a product but as the future of everything we’re trying to do here. Because sometimes, you have to burn down the old universe to make a better one.”
The applause detonated. It was all noise, but the kind that felt good, the kind you wanted to fall into and never crawl out of. Thad gestured for Celeste to join him on stage. She started forward, the room parting before her.
That’s when the screaming started.
Not literal screaming, not yet. But the kind of commotion that made everyone pivot, all eyes searching for the source.
Richard, somehow both disheveled and immaculate, elbowed his way through the crowd, a manila folder clutched in his fist like a subpoena. His suit jacket was open, tie askew, sweat pooling at his hairline. He looked feral, running on spite and the fumes of some last-ditch plan.
He commandeered a mic from the AV table, voice amplified and ragged.
“I think it’s time for some truth,” he said. “Don’t you?”
Half the phones in the room were trained on him, the other half still fixed on the stage, torn between spectacle and story.
Thad, cold, tried to step down, but security was already in motion, forming a human buffer as if expecting a weapon.
Richard laughed, a loud, unpleasant sound. “Don’t worry, Thaddeus. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to save this company from fraud.”
He held up the folder and shook it in the room.
“Here are documents proving that the Cosmic concept was mine. That Celeste Bellamy, if that’s even her real name, stole my research, my contacts, even my fragrance accords.”
A shocked murmur, half disbelief, half delight. Nobody loved a train wreck more than this crowd.
He pivoted to the cameras. “You want the real story? Here it is: the so-called genius behind Cosmic is a thief, and Thad Hastings is another rich kid in over his head.”
He started pulling papers from the folder, waving them like a conjuror. “NDAs, emails, even her old contract with the French parent company, she never mentioned. Do you think this is her first time? She’s been running this scam on three continents. And she’s got Thad so wrapped around her finger he can’t even see it.”
A woman at the bar gasped. Someone else yelled, “Fake!” but the attention stayed on Richard.
He slammed a stack of printouts on the edge of the dais, spittle flecking the first row. “You wanted a launch? Here’s your launch. The real Cosmic is a fraud. And if you buy into it, you’re an idiot.”
The room was a cacophony of noise and adrenaline, with phones vibrating with the heat of a new scandal. Social feeds went atomic, hashtags splitting like cells: #CosmicByCeleste, #FraudByCeleste, #RichardExposed.
Onstage, Thad stood paralyzed, jaw clenched, every vein in his neck threatening to snap. Celeste, halfway up the stairs, went dead still, her face a blank slate. For the first time all night, she looked truly alone.
Natalie, always one step ahead, was already texting, likely to the lawyer or the crisis team. But the narrative was out. The video is already viral.
Richard stood triumphant, the villain who’d forced the fairytale to end. He let the silence build, then dropped the last bomb.
“Congratulations, Thaddeus. You’re not your mother’s son. You’re another fool in love.”
The final flash went off, freezing the tableau: Thad and Celeste, caught in the lights, the future crumbling beneath them.
And then the crowd exploded.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The accusation lingered in the air like smoke, leaving a chemical aftertaste that even Cosmic couldn’t mask. The room split along invisible lines: half the faces turned to Thad, hunting for a crack; the rest watched Celeste, hungry for a reaction. The only constant was the wall of phones, screens lighting up in a synchronized burst as everyone, everywhere, recorded history with a thumb.
Onstage, Thad looked stricken. Not devastated, not yet, but locked down so tight he could barely breathe. His hands balled into fists at his sides; his jaw clenched so hard the bone stood out. A pulse beat at his temple, visible even from the second row.
The board members clustered near the dais exchanged nervous glances, their confidence in order and narrative vanishing in real-time. The head of PR looked ready to pass out; two junior VPs huddled as if bracing for shrapnel. Security drifted toward Richard, but no one wanted to be the first to escalate, not with every major news outlet and three international livestreams watching.
Richard, fueled by his own hysteria and the roar of the crowd, pressed his advantage.
“If you have nothing to hide, why not show everyone the lab logs?” he taunted, voice breaking into a grin. “Or are you afraid the dates won’t match up? Maybe you’re worried they’ll show how many times the formula had to be ‘corrected’ after the original was acquired from a better scientist.”
He jabbed a finger at Celeste, then at Thad. “You two have been lying since day one. To the board, to the market, to every single person who believed in this brand.”
He milked the moment, turning slowly in a circle to ensure every camera captured his best angle. “But it’s not too late for the truth, is it, Thad? Or are you as hollow as the product you’re selling?”
The insult ricocheted off the walls. Someone near the back started to clap, then stopped, uncertain which side they’d endorsed.
Celeste stepped forward, the crowd instinctively parting. She moved with a composure that appeared indifferent but was actually the absence of fear. She ignored the press of bodies and the microphones thrust in her face; she ignored Richard, who smirked like a toddler about to bite.
Instead, she made eye contact with Natalie, who was already ten steps ahead, fingers flying on her phone. A beat later, the house lights flicked on, and every screen in the venue pulsed to life. Instead of the Cosmic logo, the main wall now displayed a live feed from the company’s secure server: timestamped lab logs, date-stamped R&D notes, and a progression of the formula’s evolution from its earliest version to the one bottled tonight.
Natalie’s voice, crisp and undisturbed, rang out from the AV booth: “For the record, the entire process is a matter of public file, as is standard for any product in this category. The logs are immutable, and all modifications are tracked to individual credentials with third-party audits. The formula is unique and was developed under Dr. Bellamy’s direct supervision, with every iteration documented.”
Celeste took the mic, her voice steady and louder than Richard’s ever was. “Every step, Mr. Fellows, is right here. Not only that, but we’ve also included your own access logs, which show you attempted to pull the formula from the server twice during your so-called quality review.”
She paused, letting the weight settle. “You couldn’t even reverse-engineer it, could you?”
A ripple of laughter, thin but real, spread through the front rows.
Richard sputtered. “That’s, those logs could be…”
Celeste cut him off. “Every file is time-stamped, digitally signed, and mirrored to a legal archive. If you’re accusing me of fraud, you’re also accusing the entire board of it. Are you prepared to do that in front of the world?”
Richard wavered. For a moment, he looked like he might double down, but the weight of the gaze from a thousand faces and three thousand more online caved his bravado. He took a step back, then another, with the heavy folder in his hands.
A woman in the front row, one of the board’s legal advisors, stood and asked, “Are there any more questions, Mr. Fellows?”
The crowd laughed, and this time, it was a contagious kind of laughter. Richard, cornered and sweating, tried to muster one last smirk, but it collapsed on itself.
Celeste handed the mic to Thad, who took it with a hand that trembled a little. He looked out at the crowd, the house lights now illuminating every corner.
He said, “Thank you for coming to our launch. And thank you, Mr. Fellows, for proving that when you have the truth on your side, you don’t need to shout.”
