Was she about to apologize? Maybe this was already going better than expected. Lucas began ticking off all the things he’d need to do during their sex tonight. Be more assertive. More confident. More—oh, crap, he’d stopped actually listening to her.
“… and that’s why I’m not going to sleep with you,” she concluded.
“Wait, what?” So much for Carmen’s concession speech.
“We’re going to write the columns, Lucas. But we’re not basing them on sex. At least not any sex that we’re having with each other. I’ll make out with you. We can fool around a little bit to get some color. But you and I will not be having intercourse.”
“So then why did you agree to—”
She interrupted. “You know, it’s not quite fair, is it? Keeping your identity secret.”
“I just … can’t.” His mind flashed uncomfortably to the look on his grandmother’s face at opening a copy of Empire and reading about his sexual exploits and humiliations. “I’m not a grad student by the way.” He gave Carmen a searing look. “I actually work at Empire.”
“Oh, come on.”
He nodded. “I’ve been a fact-checker there since July.”
“That fucker,” she said to herself. Then to him: “OK, so besides Jays, who at the magazine knows about this?”
“Nobody knows. Jays doesn’t know.”
Carmen looked startled, then impressed. He could sense that she was making some kind of mental recalculation. “Well, aren’t you full of surprises,” she said.
Lucas didn’t respond. He just watched her. For a good thirty seconds, they only looked at each other in silence. “And,” he finally said to break the silence, “I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell Jays.”
Carmen didn’t acknowledge the comment. “We might as well get this show on the road,” she said, then stood up and walked to him, skirting the coffee table. She knelt in front of him and fixed her dark eyes on his own. For the first time, Lucas understood what people meant when they talked about drinking in a person’s gaze. He imagined kissing Carmen’s eyes. He thought about suctioning his lips against her eyelids and lightly pulling. How bizarre was that? He had never been attracted to anybody’s eyelids before.
Then Carmen was kissing him deeply. His body flooded with warmth. His fingers tingled. He kissed her back, leaning into her, circumnavigating the tip of her tongue with his own. She murmured, so he ran his tongue around hers again.
Abruptly, she pulled away. She reached for a notebook on the coffee table, flipped it open, and began writing. Lucas watched, dumbfounded.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking notes, Lucas,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be doing the same?”
“Right now? In the middle of—”
“What did you think this was going to be?” Carmen asked, impatient.
“I th-thought…,” he stammered. “You don’t have to be so transactional.”
“This is work, Lucas. We are colleagues and this project is about mechanics. Now, do you need a piece of paper and a pen?”
“I can type on my phone.”
“Fine. Let’s take a few minutes to jot down our initial impressions and then we can give it another try.” She scooted away from him on the couch so that he couldn’t see what she was writing. Every so often, she reread her work and chuckled to herself. Clutching his iPhone, Lucas closed his eyes and searched for the warm, tingling sensation of a few minutes ago. But there was nothing. Only the inert object in his hand.
Nice Guy and Carmen Kelly: The Reunion
Valued Readers,
Welcome to “Screw the Critics,” the first-of-its-kind experiment. We’re answering a question none of us has the stomach to investigate ourselves: Can unvarnished, honest feedback make someone a better lover? New York was atwitter these last few weeks as our sex columnist, Carmen Kelly, excoriated a young man after a one-night stand—and then the man, who we’re calling Nice Guy, shot back in the same pages. But rather than nurse their wounds alone, they’re reuniting in the sheets—this issue and every issue—to review each other in Empire, take each other’s words to heart, and become intimate once again. What will happen? You’ll only find out here.
Yours,
Jay Jacobson, Editor, Empire
Nice Guy,
When the Texan arrived at my place, as he did every week for quite some time, I took off my shirt before he’d taken off his shoes. Whenever I invited the Chef over, he let himself through the front door; I’d lie naked in bed and wait. These were men who deserved the welcoming, with their charm and skill and confidence. Then you waltzed into my apartment last Sunday, cologne slicked to your neck, and expected the same treatment. You expected sex. Fuck-buddy status isn’t some raffle you win, Nice Guy. It’s a job you earn—a job with expectations, a results-oriented task—and you haven’t earned it yet. Yet here we are, all the rules mashed into nonsense: You wrote into a magazine and, much too much like a raffle, literally did win a job. And that job is to be my fuck buddy.
Lucky you, I suppose. But not lucky me.
If this is our burden, then my role is clear: I must teach you how to be like the Texan, like the Chef, or at least the closest to those men that you can muster—if not for your sake, then at least for my own sanity. But we will not get there quickly. The thing they had, and the thing you lack, is instinctiveness: They knew how to touch another body, how to move with it, how to lead it. When you touch me, you’re like a teenager holding a baby for the first time—all searching for guidance, as if the baby is going to tell you how it wants to be held. The baby will not tell you. But I will, here, in these pages. When we’re in person, you’ll just have to figure it out.
And that’s why we started on Sunday like we were at eighth-grade prom: We made out for a little, and, aware as I was of your erection, I wasn’t going to help you with it. You’re a so-so kisser. A little reactionary, always one beat behind, waiting to see what I’ll do first. Kissing is like a jazz tune: There’s a riff that the band repeats—be-bap-be-bap—and then the musicians solo, return to the riff, solo again, and so on. The riff is the simple kiss, and you’re good there. Your lips are soft, and you move them well. The solo could use some work, though. You don’t go on very long; I think you get lost in it, unsure how fast to move your tongue and how long to open your mouth, and so you return to the riff, until soon enough the song is mostly just be-bap-be-bap on repeat. Work on that. If you can get there, I might let you touch my breasts.
Carmen,
Do you know what teenage boys do when they’re home alone? Two things, mostly. One, they masturbate. And two, they try figuring out why the girl they’re infatuated with is so intimidating. Why is she so confident? Why is she making things so difficult? Then the teenage boy grows a few years older, and discovers that the girl wasn’t actually any different from him. No girl was. Everyone at that age was nervous and fumbling! Nobody knew what the hell they were doing. It’s a life-changing revelation.
But you, Carmen. You are every teenage boy’s nightmare come true, because you are highly skilled at playing the intimidator. You are trying to make me question myself—maybe even my self-worth. But I’m not falling for your games. For starters, I’m going to tell readers exactly what happened on Sunday.
I showed up at your apartment expecting to start this grand experiment of ours, but from the get-go you decided you weren’t going to play fair. You’d decided that we wouldn’t be having sex that day—as if, you know, we hadn’t already done it once before. We’d just be kissing, you said. It was like you were trying to trick me or throw me off guard. But fine. We kiss. And then you break away and write down some notes, and snicker to yourself. Then we repeat the whole process four times. What the hell, Carmen? What were you trying to prove anyway?
So, what can I report to our readers? Uh, I can confirm that you have a nice couch. It’s a comfortable place to sit while being humiliated. Maybe next time, I can sit there while you read old sexts of mine, on speaker, to my
mother. And the kissing? I wish I could insult you, but you’re good. You kissed me the way someone kisses when they want to be remembered. I kissed you back with equal passion all four times. Though I doubt you’re woman enough to admit it. But I know what I know, Carmen. You’re not intimidating me and you’re not playing me. Game on.
CHAPTER 12
Carmen had convinced Jays that the columns should move slowly. This was a striptease, not porno, and the game was to keep readers wanting more. The slow build would raise tensions. The cliff-hangers would get people talking. She had not, however, told Jays that she never planned to sleep with Lucas again—that doing so would cross a line she had drawn for herself.
For his part, Lucas wasn’t sure he saw the difference between having sex and doing many of the other things that (he assumed) were still on the table. He often found foreplay more intimate than sex; there was more touching, more exploring, more mouth. But he wasn’t going to give Carmen a reason to declare anything else off-limits. No sex for a while? Fine. This was his chance to master everything else—what Mel was afraid of, or uncomfortable with, or that, truth be told, he and she had skipped once sex became routine. Once, a few years ago, Lucas felt a sudden desire to kiss Mel’s butt cheek, and so he flipped her over and did it. And then he moved a little closer to her crack. And closer. And it felt naughty and exciting, even though he wasn’t quite sure what to do when he landed in between—and then Mel turned to him, concerned, and said, “What if I fart?” And that was that.
Carmen, for all her faults, would not worry about things like farting. Carmen was a pro. She could probably hold a fart for hours.
But this also meant that Carmen would never take pity on him. So if he was going to stick his nose into some part of her body, he better damn well know what to do when it got there. It wasn’t easy to dish out criticism when he was so outmatched. Carmen was the better lover. She was also a precisely honed argumentarian. He’d had a burst of momentum—and, let’s face it, a lot of luck—with his initial column. But there he’d criticized the situation as a whole, not the play-by-play. And so, on the subject of kissing, she trounced him with turns of phrase and baited him into saying things that hadn’t seemed sexist at the time. (He now realized that “saying things that hadn’t seemed sexist at the time” is its own genre of “saying things that are sexist.”) It was embarrassing.
“Maybe we threw this kid in too fast,” Jays told Housman, who then reported this to Lucas. “If he can’t win some of the rounds, we might have to call the match.”
Tyler had his own take, of course. After “Screw the Critics” debuted, he posted on Noser, writing under his pen name J. P. Maddox, to declare open war. “The first time Carmen Kelly scorched Nice Guy in the pages of Empire, I made the poor sap an offer: ‘Don’t allow Carmen to feast on your tender Nice Guy flesh,’ I said. ‘Rebut! Refute! I will give you a platform to do so, and help restore your good (albeit anonymous) name!’ But instead, as we learned with a jolt this morning, Nice Guy took my idea straight to the Evil Empire. So now, I am declaring Noser the resistance.” Maddox then debuted a column called “Screw Off!,” a forum for readers to insult Carmen and Nice Guy.
Within an hour, “Screw Off!” had 142 comments. “Once after a hookup,” the first read, “this guy literally farted as he walked out my door, and I thought that was the worst. But no. Nice Guy’s column is the worst. Miss you, fart guy.”
Now it was the evening, and Tyler was sitting on the couch in his and Lucas’s living room still reading reader responses. “Look at this!” Tyler exclaimed. “Now we’ve got a commenter called Rogue Empire, who claims to be an Empire employee. We’ve got a mole!”
Lucas rolled his eyes.
“Here’s what they say,” Tyler continued. “‘Rampant speculation among the staff about Nice Guy’s identity. Many believe it’s click-bait fiction. What won’t Jay Jacobson do for page views?’”
“I’m sure Jays wouldn’t make this up,” Lucas said, trying to sound unsure.
Tyler wrinkled his nose. “Either way, I wish I could write these Nice Guy columns.”
“But that would defeat the whole purpose,” Lucas said. “The reason it’s entertaining is because people know it’s real.”
“No, it’s entertaining because people like to read about sex,” Tyler said. “But Nice Guy’s problem is that he’s a slow driver in the left lane. The guy has to keep up or move over. Readers may love a very public airing of sexual grievances, but even more than that, they want a fight. And right now it’s a beatdown.”
“So if you were advising Nice Guy, what would you tell him?” Lucas asked.
“OK, I see what’s happening. You’re going to pass off all my good advice as your own in order to get promoted at work. Advising the competition is professional treason.”
Competition? Lucas didn’t think so. Empire made news. All Noser did was talk. But Lucas shook it off: Tyler was joking. And anyway, Tyler knew which way this relationship flowed. “You’re going to tell me,” Lucas said, “because you’re hoping I’ll learn who Nice Guy is. And then maybe I’ll tell you.”
“Nah, you’re too trustworthy. But roommate to roommate: Didn’t Carmen write an article a while back about her favorite literary sex scenes? I’d tell Nice Guy to do a little reporting. Use her own desires against her.”
* * *
Lucas found Carmen’s old column, only to discover that readers had largely ignored it. There were only a handful of comments, a rare act of collective disinterest in Carmen’s writing. The reason, it seemed, was the column’s sincerity. It was heartfelt: a rare clear peek into Carmen’s mind, which Lucas could now use to his advantage. He jotted down the titles she’d recommended—A Sport and a Pastime, set in France in the 1960s; The Lover, set in French colonial Vietnam; and a couple of works by Anaïs Nin, who, wouldn’t you know it, was French. Then he went to the library and checked them out. He read them diligently but was disappointed by how languid and abstract they were. He supposed he’d been expecting something more like Fifty Shades of Grey—something obvious, with a flashing neon arrow pointing toward Carmen’s clitoris. A manual, maybe, like the Kama Sutra. But all he had here was: France. Was she turned on by croissants?
There was one volume missing, though. Romance of the Bones wasn’t at the New York Public Library. After many hours calling booksellers, he finally tracked down a copy at a rare bookshop deep in the canyons of Midtown. On the first crisp Saturday of fall, he ventured out in search of it.
He found the shop in a run-down building huddled in the Garment District and took the creaking elevator to the second floor. The place was musty and packed with books. Lucas dinged the bell beside the register, but no clerk materialized, so he wandered around the store, pausing before a shelf of nineteenth-century social manuals. He pulled one out—The Gentleman’s Guide to American Manners—and was just flipping it open when, from the corner of his eye, he noticed a familiar form slipping among the shelves. For a moment, he just stood there, blinking, like she was a spectre, a gathering of dust motes and light.
Lucas’s colleagues had warned him that the longer he lived in New York, the more it would seem to collapse around him, like a trash compactor; everyone he knew would be thrust at him. You had to be careful sharing gossip while out to dinner, they said, because inevitably you’d turn around to find the subject in question eating pork cheek not three feet away. (This exact thing had once happened to Franklin, precipitating not one but two breakups.)
Lucas hadn’t believed his colleagues. In a metropolis as vast and complex as New York, what were the chances that two people who knew each other would ever wind up in the same place at the same time? But here was Sofia, very much flesh and blood, her boots creaking over the uneven floors.
“Hi,” Lucas said.
Sofia turned around. “Well, hi,” she said with surprise. “I thought nobody knew about this place.”
Lucas nodded sheepishly, as though he’d stumbled into her private boudoir. In respon
se, Sofia seized the book from him and flipped it open. “‘Published 1893,’” she read. “You know this advice is dated?”
“I just picked it up,” he said. “It seemed fun.” Better she catch me with this, he thought, than a novel called Romance of the Bones.
Sofia flipped the pages. “Ah, this should be enlightening. ‘In the Presence of a Lady,’” she read, and cleared her throat. “‘When entering a crowded streetcar, a lady should leave the door open. It is quite permissible for her to appropriate the seat of the man who gets up to close it.’” She looked up at Lucas. “I like that rule. It’s wily.”
“Seems a tad obnoxious to me,” Lucas said.
Sofia rolled her eyes. “Let’s see what other gems we’ve got.” She flipped further. “Now this is interesting,” she said. “‘If you meet a lady of your acquaintance in the street, it is her part to notice you first, unless, indeed, you are very intimate.’” Sofia nodded, looking gravely at Lucas.
He was supposed to say something clever here. “Indeed,” he managed.
“So what this means,” she said, “is that either you and I are very intimate or you are very rude.”
“So I was just supposed to ignore you? Or stand here looking at you until you noticed me? That doesn’t seem right.”
“So we’re not very intimate then?”
Lucas’s face reddened. She was flirting! And yet the logistics of simultaneous intimacy with two women seemed overwhelming, especially since he had to keep one of them a secret. The Gentleman’s Guide to American Manners would call his situation problematic, to say the least.
“You haven’t answered the question, Luke!” Sofia smiled invitingly. “But before you do, I should explain why this wise rule of intimacy was established.” She read: “‘The reason is, if you bow to a lady first, she may choose to acknowledge you, and there is no remedy; but if she bows to you—you as a gentleman cannot cut her.’” Sofia considered this for a moment, still looking at the book. “That doesn’t work out very well for the woman.”
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