booktok pose

POSE FOR ME, PRETTY BOY She Writes Romance. He Delivers Trouble. Ren Akiyama has two things going for him: a face that stops traffic and absolutely no money to show for it. Broke, skinny, and running on half a boiled egg a day, he survives on late-night delivery gigs and a wardrobe held together by taste alone. Then one delivery goes six flights up to apartment 602 — and into the life of Shiori Kurose. By day, she's a reclusive twenty-eight-year-old shut-in surrounded by cold coffee and unfinished drafts. By night, she's Lady Scarlet — one of the industry's most in-demand adult romance novelists and illustrators, a secret she's guarded since she found her great-grandfather's forgotten collection at eighteen and never looked back. She takes one look at Ren and offers him a job: pose for her. Model for her books. Get paid to stand there and look exactly the way he already looks for free. He needs the money. She needs a muse who won't run at the first shameless joke. What starts as a strictly professional, extremely over-negotiated contract slowly turns into something neither of them put a clause in for — messy cohabitation, chaotic found family, and two people who are far better at pretending not to care than they are at actually not caring. It's funny until it isn't. It's shameless until it means something. And somewhere between the bad jokes and the worse timing, "pose for me" stops being a job description and starts being an invitation.