Chapter 19 Surrounded by Fake Schlongs
SURROUNDED BY FAKE SCHLONGS
Michelle
I was, in fact, surrounded by fake schlongs.
“Admittedly, I’m intrigued,” Sutton said in her crisp, British accent. Her eyes sparkled as she held a monster-sized vibrator that might have been as long as her arm.
“As one should be,” I answered, tapping a fingernail against the fleshy dildo larger than a venti.
Sutton set the toy down, so perhaps now was not the time for her to satisfy her curiosity.
“But I would like a new friend for when Reeve is away on shoots,” Sutton said.
She had freely admitted to spending more time with her toys while her actor husband was shooting a new movie in Vancouver.
“Anyway, we’re not here for me. We’re here for you. ”
We wandered around Eden on the Upper East Side to another section of the store.
I had scanned the sidewalk up and down before we’d entered the pleasure palace, then had been careful to survey the shop itself to make sure the coast was clear.
Sure, a patient could walk in at any given moment, but I was taking my chances anyway because I didn’t want to wait for delivery from the online store.
A flurry of tingles rushed down my spine when I spotted The One.
Jack hadn’t used that toy on me, but still, just knowing that he’d played a role in its creation excited me.
Then again, most things he did thrilled me.
Our first two weeks together had been nothing short of spectacular.
It was everything he’d promised when he’d made his most unusual proposition.
Nights of bliss. Nights of pleasure. Nights with him were that and only that.
We’d laughed, and teased, and flirted, and then we fucked.
Every time, I felt as if he were fucking the hurt and the longing away.
The ache inside me from the last several unwanted years was being erased.
Jack Sullivan was a crash course in learning to heal.
I had something in mind for him. He’d had a busy week, so I wanted to surprise him with a treat.
Hence, we were perusing a section of the store with smaller toys.
“What does one get for the man who makes these things?” Sutton mused, tapping a finger against her ivory cheek.
“It is quite a quandary, isn’t it?”
But almost immediately, I spotted the gift that I wanted for Jack. I snatched it off the shelf, marched to the counter, purchased it, and then left to have a catch-up with Sutton.
“How are things with you?” I asked. “Do you miss Reeve, with him in Vancouver right now?”
“Terribly,” Sutton said, clutching her heart. “I should be used to it, but I’m not.”
Sutton and Reeve had been together for two years, married for one. A powerful casting director, she’d helped him earn his first big break, but once he nabbed the role in Escorted Lives, his career took off like a shot.
“It’s hard, isn’t it? All the missing,” I said, and while I’d never known the kind of love Sutton and Reeve had, I knew a thing or two about those pangs of longing.
I’d experienced it in the deep heart-wrenching way that only death can bring when my parents had died.
And I’d felt it for Clay for years, though in a vastly different way, of course.
Even so, it was a far-too familiar emotion—the empty ache I’d felt for years for my friend who I’d hoped would become something more.
In college, at the height of all that loneliness, he’d come into my life.
Beautiful and handsome, kind and smart, he was best friends with my brother.
That made him forbidden, in a way, even though we’d had only one drunken kiss during my sophomore year.
That kiss had done a number on my vulnerable heart.
It became the match that lit the fire I’d been building on the kindling of my very own raw and untended emotions.
Now, years later, I understood enough about emotions to figure out there’d been a transference going on, a displacement of grief into unrequited love.
In retrospect, I should have let go of the unrequitedness years ago.
I should have known better. Maybe I’d clung on to it to protect myself from more hurt.
Perhaps believing that Clay was the one had kept my heart in that safe zone where it couldn’t be broken again, like it had the night my family fractured.
Now that I knew that, and truly understood it, I had started to move on from Clay.
Or maybe it was so much simpler. Maybe it was the birds and the bees. Perhaps it was Jack that made Clay start to feel more and more like a distant memory.
Great sex had a way of erasing the past.
“Missing is the hardest thing,” Sutton said.
“It truly is,” I echoed, linking elbows with my friend as we walked down the street in a classic New York scene: two women, out on a quick late afternoon shopping break and talking about their hearts, and their men.
Not that Jack was mine.
Not at all.
“By the way, did you see that picture of you with Mister Sex Toy Mogul?” Sutton asked in an offhand way.
“What?” I stopped in my tracks.
“I saw it on social. Someone was sharing it, and I was searching to check for Joy Delivered products. I think it was you in the picture. You were the gorgeous brunette he was spotted having dinner with at Gia’s, I trust?”
I blushed, flashing back to Carla’s comments about public lives. At least I hadn’t been named. No one knew me. No one needed to know me. I flew under the radar, unlike Jack. I’d been right, though, about Jack being recognized by those women that night. They must have taken his picture. Mine too.
It was an unsettling feeling, having my picture taken without permission.
Having it taken and posted online was even odder.
But then I reminded myself it wasn’t a big deal.
I’d probably been in the background of a hundred selfies I never knew about; this time I was in the foreground.
I’d simply had dinner with a public figure.
There was nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t as if we’d been filmed having sex on top of the Met Life Tower.
We resumed our walk, passing a drugstore.
“Oh, Sutton,” I said. “I forgot. I need to pop into the store and get a pair of reading glasses.”
“Since when do you wear those?”
“I don’t need them for reading,” I said suggestively.
“You dirty girl,” Sutton said, her eyes lighting up. “Let’s both go get some glasses.”
Jack
I’d said hello to the receptionist then headed straight to my corner office and shut the door, a clear sign I wanted to be left alone.
My only companion was the view of Manhattan from the windows.
I could see New York. No one could see me.
My phone buzzed, and I was tempted to ignore it.
But the possibility that it might be her again had me grabbing it from my pocket.
Michelle: Remember that time you knocked on my office door after your first appointment?
Jack: Yes.
Michelle: You told me you had unfinished business with my pussy.
Jack: I did. I still do. Only because I fucking love your pussy, so I’m always going to want to do business with it, to it, for it, and in it.
Michelle: I have unfinished business with your fabulous cock.
Jack: Now you’ve done it again. Why do you torture me like this?
Michelle: It’s only torture if I’m going to leave you blue-balled.
Jack: Well, what’s your plan, beautiful? Because my dick is hard, and I have no intention of jacking off in my office, and I have two more hours of work to get through.
I waited, and waited, and waited. But no reply came.
“Fuck it,” I muttered, because it was time to focus.
I tossed the phone on my desk. I needed to take care of a few thorny issues with suppliers before the weekend, but all I wanted was to rid my body and mind of the residual tension from the day.
The meeting with Team Eden combined with the time at the therapist’s, in addition to all those jumbled feelings of fuck-uppery with Aubrey had me on edge.
And Michelle was nowhere to be seen to take that edge off.
I’d just fired up the computer screen when my office phone beeped with the receptionist. I stabbed the answer button. “Hey, Christine. How are you?”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Sullivan. There is someone here for you with a delivery from the library. She wants me to send her back,” the receptionist said, lowering her voice.
“The library?”
“She said you ordered some books for personal delivery,” Christine said, sounding thoroughly flummoxed. I was too. Until some neuron fired and I had the sneaking suspicion the edge was about to come off.
“Send her back,” I said, and then hung up as my cell phone rattled once more.
Michelle: I hope it’s not work that involves other people.
Jack: Why not?
Michelle: Because I wouldn’t want them to see what I’m about to do to you.