by Adira August
Janet's burger was growing cold in her hands as she listened in semi-horrified, semi-amused fascination.
He shrugged and gulped down soda. "I already knew you wanted me, so, then I started thinking about what I would say to sell me to you. The rest followed kind of naturally."
She had three pen names for the quickies, depending on heat level. She also had two for the short stories and another for the novellas. Her novellas were the things she felt she'd been working toward and had finally gotten right. She insisted she would pick the author name she wanted for them. He insisted she use a list he provided. She chose "Miranda Devers."
She understood "Miranda," it sounded like a romance writer's name.
"Why 'Devers'?" She asked Ben, who was focused on her pages propped up against gallon cans of insecticide next to his monitor, as usual.
"Ever, verse, devil, served," he said. "Letters don't have to be in order for your brain to read words."
He saved to disk and hard drive, then swept the pages together, using a sharpie to make a big red checkmark on the first page, and reached for another story from the marked-up pile.
There was no pile.
"You're done," she said.
It was like watching a parade balloon slowly deflate. He lifted his hands and rubbed his face and she realized how exhausted he must be. He was still captain of the baseball team, still carrying a huge academic load. And because she had the quirk of typing on an old Underwood, he'd spent hours he should have been studying or sleeping entering her words into a computer because he couldn't afford to pay a typist.
Now, after weeks of his unrelenting effort, it occurred to her that she could have. She had the money to pay a work at home mom or a service to do the typing. But he hadn't asked. He'd just shouldered the burden himself and it hadn't occurred to her to offer. Janet Julia Johnson felt like a complete asshole.
She went to him and put her hands on his shoulders. "It's all on me now, the stories. Get some rest. Really. Go home. "
"I am home," he said.
What?
She remembered finding a shoebox under the sink in the bathroom in the hallway with a lot of shaving stuff inside, along with ibuprofen and a toothbrush. There was a sleeping bag rolled up on a shelf next to a plastic crate with some clothes in it. She'd just assumed he occasionally slept there.
"How long have you been living here?" She asked him, sinking down next to his chair so she could see his haggard young man's face.
"Since I came to school. My Uncle Nolan owns the place," he said. "I'm a student athlete, I shower at school, keep a lot of stuff in a locker. Coach gave me an extra one."
"Ben, you don't have a car."
He stood and stretched. "It's a morning run, getting to campus. No big deal."
She stood up as well. "Why?"
"You're nosy."
"You keep promising to have sex with me, Ben, I don't think I'm asking for the secrets of your soul, just your living arrangement. Or were going to do me on the hay bales?"
He grinned, a half-mast effort. "Where do you think the phrase 'a roll in the hay' came from?"
She leaned back against his crate desk and folded her arms.
He sighed a frustrated surrender.
"Look. Ivy Leaguers don't get regular athletic scholarships, okay? I was going to need loans. This way, I don't have any. The grants and scholarships are enough and I don't have to ask anyone for money. Or accept any alumni gifts."
She let it go. Maybe it was male pride, he certainly had enough ego for it. Maybe he was orphaned or just from a very poor family. But she know he was driven. Ambitious. Smart. He wouldn't be living in a storeroom in a farm and feed (and hardware) store for long.
"C'mon," she said, grabbing her coat and purse.
"What?"
"Bring some clean underwear, we're taking the night off."
"And I need underwear?"
"For morning. You're coming home with me for a decent dinner, and a very long night's sleep in a real bed. Tomorrow's Saturday. We'll be rested and ready to kick ass."
She could see he wanted to argue. She could see he wanted to give in.
"Please. It would make me happy," she said, trying to tip the scale for him.
He nodded.
The Launch
They didn't have sex that night, or any night while he was still a student. But he did stay over at her place a few nights a week, ate well, and showered in a stall that hadn't been previously occupied by fifty other naked men and their fungi. That day.
Reading Romance dot com launched the Friday of Halloween week. Ben used his last fifty dollars to pay two kids to go from dorm to dorm and sorority to supermarket, leaving piles of his ad packet: a free sample story and a web address. Post a link to your Facebook or Twitter sharing the Reading Romance url, and get three free stories.
It was simple. It was a pyramid scheme in a way. It was supposed to spread like wildfire upslope in a hot wind.
Nothing happened.
Having been up most of the night checking every link on multiple browsers, Ben snored the day away in her bed while Janet followed the hit counter on the site. A few hits. No sales. She sat all day, watching DVDs on her TV with her laptop open on the coffeetable.
Ben came wandering out of her bedroom around four, in gym shorts and a sleeveless sweatshirt, his hair enticingly messy. His ridiculously well-developed biceps and sexy-ass five o'clock shadow rubbed against her hormones from the kitchenette, irritating her from a distance.
He got sandwich makings from the fridge. "You hungry?" He asked.
"Nothing's happening," she whined, waving a hand at the screen.
"So, you're not hungry?"
"Dammit, Ben, look at this!"
"You want me to come over there to look at nothing happening?"
He laid rye bread out on a plate and gave the mustard bottle a shake.
"I want you to come over here and see if this thing is broken or something. How can there be nothing happening?"
He piled ham and swiss cheese and pickle slices on the mustard-covered bread and squashed the top slice down over it. He took a bottle of micro-brew from her fridge and sat on the kitchen side of the counter.
"It's still daylight," he said and took a gargantuan bite.
"Could you just check in with your geek guy?"
"I'm eating," he mumbled around the half-masticated mess in his mouth. "And you need to calm the hell down." He swigged half the beer and belched.
Janet stared at him. "I cannot believe I ever find you attractive. You're a damned fourteen-year-old, I swear." She threw herself back on the couch, pulling up her feet into a half-lotus and crossing her arms over her chest. She glared at the screen.
He slid off the counter stool behind the island and took off his shorts. Balling them up, he threw them at her head. They unballed in the air and ended up draped over the laptop screen.
"What are you doing ... oh my god!"
He tossed the larger ball of his sweatshirt at her. It made it to the middle of the floor.
He was naked from the waist up. She assumed he must be wearing - wait - were those his briefs inside the shorts she snatched off the monitor?
"Benedict Hart!" She saw he was sitting again, calmly finishing his late lunch. "Are you … are you sitting on one of my white leather barstools naked?"
He nodded, picking up his beer. "I'm a little worried about my sac sticking to it, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for you."
"A ... are you insane? A sacrifice?" Her outrage was getting very hard to sustain. There were those trapezius muscles again, as mesmerizing as that first day in class.
Only now there were also collarbones meeting at a shadowed dip in front of a strong column of neck. Below them: pecs. Wide, well-defined. Overhanging the smooth escarpments of his abs.
Janet found herself running sweaty palms up and down the outsides of her thighs against her yoga pants. She raised her eyes to his face. He was smirking at her. You could hi
de a Mini Cooper in that dimple, she thought.
"Why are you naked?" She finally managed to croak.
"Bring my clothes over here and I'll tell you," he said.
She swallowed, her mouth wet and hot, like another part of her body.
"Or I can just get up and get them myself, I suppose," he said, making as if to rise.
YES! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YES! was what she did not shout.
"No! Just - wait there," she told him. She carefully straightened her legs and stood, a bit shakily. Keeping her gaze fixed on things that were not Ben, she grabbed the soft mound of blue sweatshirt from the floor. She laid it with his shorts on the counter, checking for crumbs and mustard smears before she did.
"Sit," he ordered as if he was in a military commander's uniform instead of bare skin. Eat." He pushed the sandwich makings toward her side of the counter and retrieved his clothes.
Janet sat and ducked her head over a napkin she used as a plate, constructing her own sandwich. Ben plunked a beer down before her along with the mayonnaise jar. Janet couldn't abide mustard. A plate and a knife followed.
She risked a glance. He was dressed, putting the mustard away. She cut her sandwich into four parts.
He cleared away the makings and wiped the counter. "Now," he said. "Did you figure out why I was naked?"
"Because I was about to give myself a stroke obsessing over a webpage?"
"Yup, that's me. Saving lives and impressing women with my selflessness."
"There's a euphemism I hadn't heard before," she said, picking up the cold moisture-beaded bottle of beer. "Seriously, tell me why you aren't worried."
"Imagine you come out of your dorm and find our stack of ad packets. You take a quick look hurrying to breakfast or a class. It's a free story. Remember the first line of the quickie we gave them?"
"How could I? You never told me which one you picked."
"Oh. Yeah, I forgot." He looked sheepish. "Anyway, it's - 'She threw her head back, wondering if the intensity of her orgasm could snap her spine.' "
"Teacher's Pet!" Janet said, referring to the title of the very short, short story. "So what's it got to do with - oh!"
"Right. You are either going to toss it in the trash or put it away to read later. In your dorm. In your bed, maybe. If you do read it before that, maybe you'll tell a friend. Or, you might see another girl with a copy. That's why we used pink paper. Maybe they'll talk about it. Read it together."
She finished her third square of sandwich and picked up the last. "So, you always expected no action until evening?"
"It's getting on five. And I doubt there was no action at all. I expect a some housewives have checked in by now."
She looked to the laptop still open on the coffeetable in front of the sofa. "There were a few hits."
"How many in a 'few?'" he asked.
"Thirty-four."
"And now?"
She checked the laptop. "A hundred fourteen!"
"Okay. Most afternoon classes let out by four. Yours always did. So right about now, we can expect potential readers to be gathering at coffee shops and in the library."
He was on the phone with Geek Guy. "Scroll down," he said to her.
"Links," she said, awe in her voice. "Six ... seven!"
He hung up and grinned. "There are fourteen new accounts and twenty-six stories accessed. Eleven free ones for promoting the site. The rest are sales. And one of those is a novella."
"And you think it's just starting, right?"
"We're on the east coast. If they get to Facebooking and Tweeting - yeah, we could have a very good night." He headed for her bathroom where he kept a duffel bag of clothes. "Time for some bar hopping."
"You want to take me bar hopping?" She asked.
He leaned out the door, shirtless, again. "Not you - you have a reputation to protect and an identity to keep secret. I'm going to spread the word and a few more stories around."
Back in the bathroom, he shouted his battle cry, "Never stop promoting!"
It all worked exactly as he'd predicted. Readers devoured the stories like ravenous wolves in a hot dog factory. Geek Guy made sure nothing crashed, and tweaked the site to be as user-friendly as possible.
Ben used the profits to buy a small server. By contract, no one was getting paid until the end of the academic year. When he submitted his project for a grade, Ben promised to distribute the profits. Janet wondered how much profit there could be when he kept spending the income on more promotion and better equipment.
But she didn't have time to dwell on his financial decisions or pay attention to the site counter. And Ben was off her radar, buried under classwork and new business responsibilities. He left it to Janet to get the rest of her titles ready for upload.
There was time for little else but teaching, sleeping and re-writing. She used old tests rather than take the time to write new ones. She paid a retired executive assistant to type the rest of the titles up. She laid in a supply of frozen dinners so she wouldn't have to cook. And no matter how quickly she got a new title up, there were complaints that the catalogue was too small.
Janet emailed constantly constantly with Graphics Guy on cover designs and branding for the different pen names. None of the three employees had ever met and, as far as she knew, the other two didn't know any names, either. She cancelled her Thanksgiving trip home to polish the last of her novellas. Ben wanted another 100 titles up by Christmas break.
It was exhausting, exhilarating and terrifying. She was sure one day everyone would realize it was all written by the same person, and that person was a redundant hack.
Juggernaut
By Christmas break, she was out of material and the demand for new titles was even higher. She gave her classes no papers to write over the holidays so she'd have no huge volume of work to grade when they got back.
An entire evening was spent apologizing to her mother for missing Christmas as well as Thanksgiving. Something that would have been far less painful if she had been able to explain exactly why. Her mother assumed Janet was involved with a man. Janet didn't correct her.
Christmas Eve found her slumped in her desk chair at noon, still in her nightgown and robe, staring at her screen, her mind blank. The day was dark; a solid bank of gray clouds blanketed the sky, heavy with impending snow.
Her desk lamp was on, but outside the pool of light, her apartment was a shadowed gloom of indistinct shapes. Like my brain, she thought. Janet simply could not find one more way to describe parts of genitals or their actions in response to other parts on other persons.
It wasn't so much writer's block, she decided, as writer's vacuum. She felt hollow - inside her head, inside her body. She'd drained herself in isolation, working for a distant possibility of a monetary award. Some day. The only person she could safely share this with, this thing that had consumed her life, was gone. Ben had other demands on his time, certainly. Demands that didn't allow him to hand-hold his writer.
She heard a key in the door. Her heart leapt into her throat as the knob turned and the door opened. She jumped up as a snow-dusted dark figure, stomped his feet and pushed through the door, into her living room. She had the phone in her hand dialing 9-1-1 when he raised his head and flashed a familiar grin from under his hoodie, raising arms full of bundles.
Ben had come, bearing gifts.
She'd forgotten she'd given him a key when he was staying over frequently. Now, she gasped for air and sank back into the chair. "You scared the shit out of me."
"Sorry." He shrugged out of a fleece-lined leather bomber jacket and peeled off the black hoodie underneath.
"I just wanted to get in before everything got cold. Thought I'd surprise you when I heard you were spending Christmas Eve in front of your laptop," he said.
"Where did you hear that?" she asked, watching him roll up the sleeves of a nice white dress shirt before unpacking the contents of the heat-resistant bags onto her counter.
"Graphics Guy," he said, taking plates
from her cupboard. The aromas from the food made her stomach ache. She'd run out of frozen dinners and had been subsisting on cereal and Chinese delivery.
Watching him work, it suddenly dawned on her that he'd dressed up for the occasion. She hadn't seen Ben in a while and she'd never seen him wearing anything but jeans or athletic gear. Now he had on a very nice pair of charcoal grey wool slacks with a fine-grained leather belt. And he'd shaved. And his hair was cut.
"Did you know," he asked, rooting in her drawers for a carving knife, "that you can order an entire Christmas dinner from the grocery store deli?"
"I did, actually," she said. She moved to the counter to help and reached for a bottle of Riesling he set down.
"Nope," he said, smacking at her hand playfully. "I'm willing to bet money you haven't eaten and have been skipping meals. So, first food, then booze." He took the lid off a very large container that held a roasted turkey breast and a small pre-sliced ham. "You look like you lost ten pounds."
"Yeah, well, I could always stand to drop some weight," she said. Janet was only 5'4" and had a tendency to be soft and rounded, instead of firm and sinewy.
He stopped and looked her over, lingering on her hips. "Do not ruin my fantasy of holding your ass in my hands by losing said ass. I really like a women who feels like a woman, you know?"
She didn't reply, surprised his blatant sexual reference. Since that day in the wildflower garden, he hadn't once indicated by word, gesture or look that he'd promised to give her oragsms, someday. She wondered how long it had been since she'd had the time or energy to even think about sex, much less have any. Of any kind. Weeks, at least.
He rifled through cupboards for serving dishes. "Maybe you could find a candle or something and some napkins?"
The candle was a sickly peach color, half-burned down in a glass jar with peach blossoms on the label, and the napkins were paper, but the food was exceptional. The meat moist and the dressing savory, the sweet potatoes not cloying and the green beans done in garlic and butter, not canned mushroom soup. There was salad with a delicate vinaigrette and pumpkin souffle for dessert.