Velvet Kisses(21)
The girls file into the room before I can properly sucker punch him.
We finish up, and Annie and Blake both retire to the sofa like an old married couple. I pause at the door a moment just looking at their heads knit together as they enjoy a brief moment of solitude. They’re in love. Annie and Blake are proof that the unicorn indeed exists. If my mother were here, she would flood the room with tears.
Marley and I drive back to Whitney Briggs in a contented silence.
“So are you going to get that business plan together?” she asks, as she opens the door to the car.
“Yeah, I am. Why don’t you do the same?”
Marley cocks her ear toward me as if she misunderstood. “My plan?”
Her shirt hangs low in the front. She’s all but offered the girls to me on a platter, but my eyes still manage to stay trained on hers. Marley’s plan to herd me toward the bedroom is working spectacularly. If she’s demanding to be tied to the bedpost, who the hell am I to stop her? I should be penning a thank you—tattooing her name across my chest for the privilege.
“Yes, your plan.” I gently touch my finger across her lips, and her eyes close involuntarily. “Draw up an inventory of what you’ll need for that research of yours.”
“My research?” Her beautiful features soften. Her lips fall open, and I memorize her like this. “It requires a willing participant—no inhibitions—a good back and lots of stamina.”
“I have all of the above and then some.”
Marley leans in, her cleavage dips as if to say hello. Her eyes light up the dark interior of the car like sirens.
“Are you telling me you’re in?”
“I’m in.”
Words I hope I won’t live to regret.
Something tells me I won’t.
At least not in the immediate future.
Good Vibrations
Marley
“So? Did he fall for it?”
“Of course, he fell for it. He’s a red-blooded American male with a boner the size of the Washington monument. He’s designed by nature to fall for it.”
I wasn’t being totally dishonest when I asked for a little assistance with my article. Wyatt just doesn’t realize it’s for a much larger piece I’m working on tentatively titled “Sex and the Modern Woman: What’s Love Got to do With It?” If I’m lucky I’ll sell my coitus opine to the New York Post and have a real journalism badge under my belt. Scratch that. I’ll sell it as a memoir and make millions.
“You’re not going to hurt him are you?” Annie looks nervous as if I’ve proposed to skin him alive and wear him as a winter coat.
“Only if he asks real nice.” I make a face. “Blake himself said he was practically a gigolo.”
“Did not!”
“Okay, I believe the verbiage Blake used was man-whore. Same difference. I’m using Wyatt for sex. He gets pleasure. I get pleasure and perhaps the start of a very provocative thesis. It’s a trade as old as time. The only point I want to prove is that it’s high time women turn the tables on men and make something lucrative come out of their fornicating adventures.”
“Now who’s the gigolo?”
“Point taken.”
“Why not just fill him in on the rest?” Annie is literally pale at the thought of Wyatt laying it all out on the line literally.
“Please. We’re talking about a man who would have gladly used me for his own promiscuous purposes night one had I not squandered that opportunity spectacularly by way of my mouth.” I take a breath and consider Annie’s point. “Besides, the thought of me spotlighting his bedroom moves in a lasting memoir might make him skittish. He thinks my article is silly. Trust me, I’ve done nothing but amuse him at the thought of us engaging in sexual research. He even asked me to come up with a naughty checklist so we can cross things off with a fat, red pen as we blow through the condoms. It’s panning out to be as clinical as can be.”
It’s safe to say Will wrecked both my head and my heart. There’s no way I would have even remotely considered penning a sexual memoir as a way to prove the point that you can lead a very productive life without a man to pin your happiness on. It was only after weeks of greedily inhaling Netflix marathons of Gilmore Girls did I even begin to get a kernel of hope, and, by hope, I mean revenge.
What better way to turn my weak, broken heart into a solid sheet of iron than to remove the element that is lauded as a god to be worshiped—horrifically fictitious in nature—love. Love is a fickle, slippery serpent that coils around its victim when they’re least aware and slowly suffocates them by the token fantasy that all it promised ever really existed. Love is a big, fat, fake, and I intend to blow its cover—ironically between the covers.