Chapter 10
Noah
It wasfair to say that in my thirty-five years on earth, I’d seduced some women. The first time was when I was fifteen—both the best and the worst thing I’d ever done—and it continued from there. Your seduction game doesn’t mean much when you’re a kid living on the streets of Chicago, but once Tower made money and I was sent to L.A., I leveled up. Way up. The women I’d seduced in the past ten years had been mostly rich, mostly famous, and universally gorgeous. None of them were particularly hard to get into bed. Sex is a Hollywood pastime.
But this seduction was different.
It wasn’t just that I had a serious assignment. I mean, Jesus—I’d had no idea when I fooled around with Emma Riley on my deck that it was going to be such a momentous occasion. Operation Give Emma an Orgasm woke up all of my competitive instincts, but that wasn’t the reason I was standing on Broadway, contemplating going into one of New York’s largest and finest sex shops. No, it felt different with her. She felt different. I thought of that sexy body, that smoky voice, that red hair, and I wanted to do this right. I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I was determined to find out.
I walked into the sex shop to take a look around and hopefully get some inspiration. It was a big store, and except for the clerk behind the front desk, it was empty at the moment—not surprising for three o’clock on a weekday afternoon. The lighting was bright and there was quiet jazz playing over the speakers. I slowly walked the aisles, thinking about Emma.
She wouldn’t want theatrics, I thought. No costumes or masks. Riding crops or ass paddles? You never knew if someone was into pain, but it was a bit aggressive to bring those on the first real encounter. Vibrators? A woman as sexual as Emma—and a woman who had her particular problem—probably had her own library of them, including her tried-and-true favorites.
This woman was going to be a challenge. One I wanted to win.
“Do you need any help?”
I turned to find the store clerk—a woman of about twenty-five with streaks of hot pink in her hair and a lip ring—standing next to me. “Just browsing,” I said, giving her a smile. “Trying to find a way to make it special.”
My smile brought out one of hers, a pretty smile that was accompanied by a blush on her cheeks. “She’s lucky,” she said, boldly. “Or he is.”
I quirked a brow at her, but before I could answer my phone rang in my back pocket. I pulled it out and saw that it was Aidan. “Sorry,” I said to the clerk. “I have to take this.”
She shrugged, disappointed. “Go ahead. You don’t have to leave. You can use one of the booths.”
I looked where she was pointing and saw a row of three booths, each with a red curtain over the entrance. Some kind of peep show, maybe. I gave the clerk a nod as I answered the phone and put it to my ear. “What’s up?” I asked my best friend and business partner.
Aidan was all business, because it was the middle of a weekday, and unlike me, he was actually at work. “I’ve been going over the second quarter results,” he said. “Do you have them in front of you?”
I pushed aside a red curtain and stepped into a booth. “Not exactly.”
“Well, I want to discuss them anyway. I’m going to conference the others in.”
While Aidan got Alex and Dane on the line and the phone clicked and beeped in my ear, I looked around the booth. It was new and clean, but it was designed as an old-fashioned peep show of some kind, with a bench and a screen. A console told me that I could insert my credit card and get a three-minute show for twelve bucks. Damn, sex wasn’t cheap anymore, especially in New York.
Still, I was curious, so I put my credit card in the slot and sat down as my business partners came on the line. The screen lit up—peep shows had entered the digital age—and a woman appeared. Her lips moved, and I noticed a pair of headphones hanging beside the screen. If I wanted the full experience, I’d have to put them on. But I was on a phone call, so I just watched her on mute.
“Are we all here?” Aidan said.
“Here,” said Dane. He was in Long Island, I knew, living with his girlfriend Ava, who was Aidan’s sister. Ava was a few months pregnant, and the two of them were living in couples’ bliss, since apparently they’d been hung up on each other for more than a decade without any of the rest of us knowing. Dane had actually taken a leave of absence from the company, but he was one of our original founders and the man who invented the software that launched us, so Aidan kept including him in calls like this no matter how many times Dane told him to fuck off.
“Here.” That was Alex. He was our Dallas guy. He did our oil deals and anything else that came up in the South, even though he was a Chicago boy like the rest of us. Apparently cowboy types didn’t mind a guy with tattoos and a prison record for assaulting his own brother. Alex had a bit of a temper, especially on the topic of his ex-wife, but I liked him. He was still single, like me.
“Okay,” Aidan said. “The first thing I want to go over is the Chicago project.”
Last year, we’d bought the rundown old apartment building we’d rented as teenagers and we were fixing it up to build a community center. The whole thing had been my idea. It wasn’t going to be a profitable project, but we were doing it anyway. “Shouldn’t Samantha be on the line for that?” I asked, since Aidan’s wife had been put in charge of it.
As if on cue, there was another click on the line. “I’m here,” Samantha said.
I listened to the others talk as I watched the muted screen. The shot was of a bed with rumpled white sheets on it. The woman lying on the bed was naked except for a paper-thin pair of panties, and she was lying back, her back arched and her hand inside the panties, between her legs. Judging from the way her mouth moved, she was moaning pretty loud.
“I think it looks good,” Aidan said about something I hadn’t paid attention to. “Do you agree, Dane?”
“I’m on vacation,” Dane reminded us all. “But yes, it looks good.”
“Noah,” Alex said, startling me out of my reverie. “Are you even in the office right now?”
I cleared my throat. “I work sometimes,” I said as the woman on the screen continued to hump her own hand.
“He’s probably going surfing,” Aidan said.
None of them knew I was in New York right now. I hadn’t told them, because I’d come here specifically to talk to Emma, then hopefully have sex with her. I was flying back tomorrow before any of them would know I was gone.
“I’m not surfing,” I said. No, I was sitting in a peep show booth in a sex shop on Broadway, watching a woman peel her panties off and spread her legs wider. What was I supposed to actually do in one of these booths, anyway? Jerk off?
“Well, it doesn’t matter if he’s surfing,” Alex said, “because the numbers on the Omni investment have gone through the roof.”
“Have they?” I asked.
“Jesus, you didn’t even look?”
“I was going to look later tonight.” That was a lie, of course. I was hoping to make Emma Riley—the sister of the woman on this phone call right now—come later tonight.
“Pearson,” Dane said, “I honestly don’t know how you fucking do it. You pick them every time.”
I sighed. Omni was an L.A. company that was developing a new kind of camera arm to shoot action scenes with. It used specialized software and the arm incorporated drone technology. It was incredibly expensive technology to develop, taking months of time and many rounds of failed testing before it could be perfected. And once it was actually ready, the use for it would be limited, expensive, and soon overtaken by the next piece of new technology to come along. Frankly, when I’d put together the investment deal, I was sure it would be a dog.
And for a few months, it was. It really was. And then they actually perfected the thing, and three weeks later Steven Spielberg decided to use it in his next feature film. And Omni made us our investment back several times over.
I’d made the company a bunch of money, and now I was here, sitting in a booth that definitely contained at least one other guy’s jizz, thinking about sex with Emma Riley instead of working. Life was really strange sometimes.
The boys and Samantha kept talking about the other things in the second quarter results. In the meantime, on the screen, a man walked into the room to join the masturbating woman. He was buck naked and hard, and at the sight of him she sat up with her knees spread, licking her lips. The dude was about to get a blow job, but first…
I watched, and the idea hatched in my head.
“Listen,” I said into the phone. “I gotta go.”
“Do you have a meeting?” Samantha asked.
“Yeah,” I said, still watching the action on the screen. It was simple, but it was the answer. I just knew it was.
“With who?” Aidan asked.
“I’ll talk to you all later,” I said, and hung up.
I stood up and pulled the red curtain open, stepping out into the shop. A couple browsing the aisles a few feet away from me stopped what they were doing and gave me a surprised look.
Yeah, it looked like I’d been beating off in a sex shop in the middle of the afternoon. For twelve bucks. I gave the couple one of my smiles. “Worth every penny,” I said.
They turned away and I walked past them down the aisle, picking out what I wanted.
Simple. Inexpensive.
And I still thought it was going to blow her mind.