by Julia Kent
“Carrie?” Chloe calls out as I pass her door.
I back up.
“Can you come in for a minute?”
I step into her office, which is pristine, as usual. Her raincoat and tote bag are on a chair by the door, ready to go. Since she became a mom, she tries hard to leave on time every night.
“You look great,” she observes. “You’re on duty tonight?”
“Thanks, and yes. The food just got here.”
“I’ll only keep you for a minute. I have a proposition for you.”
“You do?”
“You’ve been doing a fantastic job, Carrie. Your design is first-rate — it’s like you know what I’m thinking before I even know. And you have all the details under control, budgets, installation schedules, everything. Suppliers love working with you. It’s very impressive.”
“Wow,” I stammer. “Thanks.” This is unexpected.
“You know O San Francisco is slated to open next year.”
“Yes.” I start to get excited. She’s going to send me out there to check on construction! California is a dream business trip — and if the timing works, I can stay over a weekend and go to Napa. Mini-vacation!
“I can’t believe I’m even saying this.” She shakes her head, swinging her hair. “But what would you think about moving out there as Associate Director of Design? I need someone I trust on the West Coast. O LA is in the works, and they’re talking about Seattle in 2019. It’s a lot of work — a huge amount, actually — but it would mean a promotion and a raise. You’ll be responsible for all the West Coast design, plus have a hand in staffing and operations. It’s a lot like my job here, but you’ll have me to back you up.”
I drop down onto one of the chairs in front of her desk. I just look at her.
“I mean, take a couple of days to think about it,” she says. “It’s a big decision. I don’t know how I’ll do without you here, but we’ll still be working together, just not in the same city.”
“Chloe, I… thank you,” is all I can manage. It’s too much to absorb.
“You have totally earned it,” she smiles. “You made it happen. Now go get the food before the guys come looking for it.”
As I reach the door, she says, “How did the weekend end up? I haven’t seen Ryan hanging around your desk lately.”
“It’s fine. It’s all working out for the best,” I say weakly. “Thank you again.”
Three thousand miles. He definitely won’t be hanging around my desk.
RYAN
It’s just another day at work.
A regular Tuesday.
Nothing special.
Unless you count groaning when I realized I had a divorce party today as special. Unless you mean leaving my car at home and taking the T to avoid being in the parking lot at all. Unless you mean taking the stairs to prevent any elevator awkwardness in case I got trapped with… someone from the administrative side.
Like I said — nothing special.
I put on my cop uniform, adjusting the g-string with the flashing blue and red lights on the pouch, moving the battery pack and wires. Over the weekend, I perfected the device, swapping out the ridiculous 9-volt battery for a slim lithium system that makes more sense.
And doesn’t give me an unwelcome prostate exam.
“Ingenious!” Henry says in a low voice filled with admiration. “You really have a way with electronics and design.”
I just grunt my thanks.
We’re in the O Spa locker room, getting ready for our shift. Divorce party at 6pm. Big affair, all hands on deck (so to speak). Which means Carrie’s working late and will be on call in her office to manage any blips.
“Ryan? What’s up?”
I look at my crotch. “Nothing.”
Henry rolls his eyes. “That’s a Zeke answer.” His hand goes on my shoulder, the gesture respectful but filled with concern. “You seem distracted.”
“I’m waiting to hear about a grad school application,” I say, mind scrambling to find something to say other than I love Carrie and she doesn’t love me back.
“Really? Where are you applying? What field?”
“Electrical engineering.”
“Nice. Which schools? MIT? WPI?”
I appreciate the fact that he immediately goes to top schools. Henry’s working on his master’s degree at Harvard. He doesn’t judge me by what we do for a living.
“Stanford. Berkeley. Cal Tech,” I admit.
His eyebrows go high. “You’re leaving us?’
“Shhh. Only if I get accepted. There’s a professor at Stanford with a huge grant and he’s considering me as a research assistant for a January start. Maybe next August. Not sure.”
“I’m impressed.”
I shrug and center the police light right over my balls.
“The Bay Area is home.” This is weird. Awkward. I’ve spent two years working here and this is the most I’ve revealed about myself to anyone other than Carrie. Guys don’t stand around in g-strings and sex-play costumes talking about their feelings.
“Good luck.”
“Yeah, thanks. Hey, don’t say anything to anyone, okay? It’s not official. I don’t want to lose my job because Chloe thinks I’m not serious here.”
“You’ve more than proven yourself. We’d miss you if you left, but no one wants to hold you back from moving forward with your real career.”
Real career.
“Right.”
“Besides, you don’t have anything keeping you here.” Henry smiles. “No girlfriend. No wife. No mortgage. You’re still free to be.”
Free to be.
“Uh huh.” My fake gun belt cuts into my hip. I move it, unholstering the plastic pistol and checking to make sure the candies it shoots are properly loaded.
“Change is good. Grad school is great. Good for you.”
And with that, he leaves.
I can stall for only so long, other masseurs and staff streaming in. Finally, the time comes.
I walk into the hallway, starting the swagger I have to allow to inhabit my hips, my thighs, my shoulders, the cocky walk we create as part of the fantasy.
Fantasy.
That’s what my entire life is now.
Nothing but fantasy.
“Ryan,” Chloe says as I finish pinning on my fake badge. “Can you come to work on Thursday morning for a phone tree meeting?” Nick Grafton is behind her, holding a black leather portfolio and talking on his phone.
“Sure.” Shit. Carrie’s running that meeting.
Nick gets off the phone and looks me up and down, clearly suppressing a grin. “I like how you helped with the software issue. We need someone with more knowledge to take a look at their proposal.”
“You mean you want me to tell you whether you’re getting shafted by an overbid,” I reply.
He grins. “Have you thought about a different job here at O?”
“You mean one where I don’t wear cop lights on my dick?”
Chloe’s big, mink brown eyes turn into headlights. “Ryan!”
I ignore her.
“I suppose the software developers can wear whatever they want if you’re so attached to that feature,” Nick muses. The dry wit goes over my head for a second.
Then I laugh.
“Most of them just wear stupid sarcastic slogan t-shirts and jeans, though,” he adds.
“I’m good in the job arena,” I tell him, not wanting to share my future plans. “But thanks.”
He nods as Chloe’s phone buzzes. She turns away, murmuring something about her daughter into the phone, just as Carrie comes down the hall carrying a giant flat white box of City Donuts.
Like something out of a comedy, she catches my eye and stops short, tripping just enough that the entire box crumples up, the top flying open, the donuts bouncing up and pelting her chest and face like a little sugar missile test being conducted by the pastry version of North Korea.
I move to catch the box before it falls to the groun
d, everyone in slow motion, glazed sugar coating Carrie’s face and top while Nick catches a powdered jelly donut in each hand.
As I pivot and manage to get the half-filled box before the contents all hit the industrial-strength hallway carpet, something in my crotch pulls hard, a yanking feeling that brings tears to my eyes.
The unmistakeable sound of police sirens fills the air.
“Is your crotch on a 911 call?” someone behind me asks.
Snickers fill the air. I look down. Blue and red lights make my package look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is fighting a Smurf in my pants.
“OH.MY.GOD!” Carrie finally gasps, hands splayed at her sides.
“You look like Carrie,” Zeke says with a snort. “You know. From the horror movie? Only instead of covered with blood, you’re covered with blueberry compote and cream filling.”
Carrie peels a maple donut off her right breast and wings it at him, so hard it whacks him in the eye and he screams like a little girl.
I can’t help it. I start laughing. But something in my crotch warms up.
Zeke, ego wounded, grabs the box of donuts from me and turns them into sugar bombs with Carrie as the target. She ducks into a conference room.
Nick stands in the middle of everything, his expression alternating between the need to assert control and the desire to join the food fight.
My crotch starts to smoke. The siren makes a dying sound, and I grab my belt, ripping the pants off at the Velcro seam down both sides.
My dick is on fire.
Literally.
“Ryan!” Carrie screams. “Your penis is on fire!” She grabs a Boston Cream donut from the floor and drops to her knees at my feet. Taking aim, she shoves the donut over my smoking genitals and squeezes.
Hard.
Goo covers my balls, my penis, the g-string pouch, the little plastic red and blue light chambers, and most of my groin area. Carrie starts patting my cock with the now-empty donut hull.
Someone starts humming the melody to Donna Summer’s song Hot Stuff.
“Stop it,” I hiss to Zeke.
He points to Nick.
Who just shrugs. “I’ve never seen a crotch do an imitation of a Samsung Galaxy 7 before,” he says.
“You giving Ryan a moisturizing treatment there, Carrie? A sugar scrub?” Zeke jokes, everyone around us laughing as Carrie realizes she’s basically giving me a hand job with a donut.
My perverted teenage self came up with lots of really inventive ways to whack off, including a Playtex glove/Crisco combo that I’ll take to the grave, but it never occurred to me to use a hollow cream-filled donut as a vessel for emptying my nuts.
“Oh!” Carrie falls backward, then rolls over, flashing me a nice view of her ass. As she stands, I smile at her and she smiles back, unguarded and embarrassed, the absurdity of the situation cutting through our mutual discomfort.
For about three seconds.
I take off for the locker room, turning my back on the giant mess behind me. Just as I open the men’s room door I hear Chloe chewing someone out, calling for staff to clean up the mess.
Zeke’s on my ass as I strip naked and check out my junk. No injuries.
“Short circuit? Nice.”
“Shut up.”
“Carrie made your cock ignite.”
"Shut UP!” I roar, naked from the waist down, wearing a fake cop’s uniform on top, hat and all. The associate professor at Stanford in charge of the wireless robotics project I would love to work on would, I’m sure, be impressed with my credentials right about now.
“Geez, Ryan, it’s just a joke.”
I tear the rest of the uniform off (easy to do with Velcro) and take a very fast shower, washing off the sticky cream filling and other bits of sugar all over my legs and midsection. Two minutes later I’m re-assembling myself.
My outside self, that is.
My insides are a whole different issue. I feel like someone squeezed me, hard, and made my gooey center fall out.
I shove on a non-electric g-string and glare at Zeke, who is leaning against a locker, arms crossed, making it clear he’s going to torture me with conversation. “What?” I bark at him.
“What the hell happened to you at that wedding?”
“Nothing.” Everything, I want to scream, but I don’t.
“You and Carrie…?”
“I told you. I did her a favor. It was all pretend.”
“You know damn well it wasn’t.”
“We’re not compatible.” The last word tastes like contempt.
“You are!”
“Turns out I was wrong.”
“At the wedding, you were grabbing my shirt and threatening me when I talked about you and Carrie fucking. Now it turns out I’m right?”
“Yeah.” I slam my locker door and adjust the cop uniform. My basket will have to be enough. No flashing lights. The air smells like singed hair.
My singed hair.
“Bullshit.”
I shrug. “Believe what you want to believe.”
“Ryan, you know damn well nothing you did at that wedding was pretend.”
“It was pretend for her. All of it. That’s what she said.”
“She said that?”
“Yes.” I don’t mention she said it to Chloe. I’m sick of this conversation. Parts of my body are zooming from Carrie’s touch and the pyrotechnics display.
My heart’s zooming, too.
Zeke lets out a low whistle. “She’s more of a player than I thought, then.” He washes his face with his palm, rubbing his upper lip with his index finger. “She’s hard core.”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“I will be.”
“You need to get laid.”
“If that’s an offer, my answer is no. You’re not my type.”
“Gia and Gina want to see me next weekend. How about — “
“Sure.” I wave him off. “We’re late for the divorce party.” The last thing I want to do is dance for a bunch of bitter women, but it’s better than what just happened with Carrie.
Zeke follows me, hand clapping my shoulder. “We’ll get you out there and over this, Ryan. I guarantee it.”
“Right."
As we walk into the hallway, Carrie suddenly exits the women’s locker room. We’re inches from each other, face to face. She smells like coconut body wash and is wearing a new outfit, a simple but tight dark red sweater and a long, pencil skirt made of deep blue. Her makeup is fresh, a smudge of powder on her collar.
I don’t touch her.
“Um, thanks for catching the donuts,” she says.
“Thanks for putting out my dick.”
Zeke starts wailing with laughter.
Carrie gives him such a glare he begins coughing, hard, and disappears like a rabbit. She looks at me, uncertainty making her painted face softer.
“Ryan, we should talk about — ”
“Using a donut as a fire extinguisher?”
“Ryan,” she pleads. “This is hard enough.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I imitate Zeke, minus the accent. It’s the only way I can get through this moment, this pain, this anger. “We had a fun weekend. I did my job. You knocked ‘em dead, Kitten.” I give her a grin that I can’t feel in my eyes and pat her shoulder twice. Exactly twice. “It was good fun. Now we’re back to reality.”
I can’t look her in the eye. I’m a coward. I admit it. If I looked in those beautiful honeyed pools, what would I see?
Pity.
A man can handle many, many insults, but being pitied by a woman he slept with, one who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, isn’t one of them.
I turn away and give her a little wave, headed for my roomful of horny divorcees who know I’m pretending, and who pretend right back.
We’re even. Equitable. On par.
It’s simple — I just made my feelings balance with Carrie’s.
She was pretending last weekend.
&
nbsp; And I just pretended back there.
Chapter 14
CARRIE
“Oh, my God, how much sex are you having, Jenny? Every single wrinkle on your face is gone. You look nineteen again!” I squeal as we hug in the Grind It Fresh! flagship coffee shop in the Seaport District. Jenny’s finally back from her nearly month-long honeymoon and has time for coffee with me.
I’m pretty sure she knows about the mess with Ryan, because Jamey is constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret from his sister.
Well, other than his own big one.
“You didn’t know me when I was nineteen, Carrie,” she says sensibly.
“If I had, you’d have looked like this. A long honeymoon suits you.”
“I credit Aiden entirely. He picked Bermuda, he picked the resort, but best of all — he picked me.” She beams. “And who would have guessed there are cruise ships to Bermuda directly out of Boston?” Her eyes wrinkle at the corners just like Jamey’s. When she smiles, she looks like him, warm and smart, playful and attentive.
“I’m so happy for you,” I say, sitting down across from her at a table made of broken shards of ceramics and some lightweight metal shaped like a Game of Thrones sculpture.
“What about you and Ryan?” She winks. “You seemed really cozy at the wedding.” Leaning in, it’s clear she expects me to dish.
And by dish, I mean describe every second of fabulous sex.
Jamey must have kept his mouth shut about what happened with Ryan after all. There’s a first time for everything.
“About that,” I jump in, deflecting. “I’m sorry again for missing the brunch. I drank too much.”
“So did everyone. You didn’t miss out. We basically spent a small fortune for people to drink water and munch on plain bagels while begging for ginger ale. Everyone was shitfaced.”
“Oh.” Guilt returns when I remember that morning. As maid of honor, I really dropped the ball.
Then again, when your heart breaks, you don’t exactly worry about whether your hair looks good. I wasn’t in any frame of mind to be at a brunch and do my duties. I just couldn’t.
She gives me a one-eyed squint. “Something’s off.”
I touch my hair. “What?”
“You. Ryan. What happened?” She peers at me, hard. “What really happened?”