Midtown Masters

by Cara McKenna

  She believed that, too—Meyer was compulsive in many ways, but lying wasn’t among them. Types like him had no reason to lie, anyway. Dishonesty was driven by shame or self-preservation, and Meyer felt justified in all things. Must be nice to be a well-funded, attractive, educated, white Western male.

  “I have a new theory about Miss Lindsay,” Suzy told him.

  He stood from the bed. “Christ, you’re obsessed.”

  “I think she’s a secretary.”

  “That would ruin my shut-in theory,” he said, pulling his shorts up his legs.

  “I chatted with her, after the hour wrapped.”

  Meyer’s eyes widened with an emotion he rarely wore—alarm. “What? Why? We don’t do that. As a rule—a rule you came up with. No talk unless we’re billing for it.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Do not tell me it was social.” He zipped his pants, shrugged into his shirt. Slipped off his ring and set it atop the closed laptop with a click. “Tell me it was strictly feedback, strictly business.”

  “Not precisely.”

  “Jesus, Suze . . .” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I need a drink.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what she said?” she asked, following him down the hall and into her kitchen. “What I learned about her?”

  “Not even remotely. I’m invested in our clients for only what they invest in us—money. That’s the only way this stays as simple as it has. The only way it functions.”

  “Well, I pretty much had her nailed, just FYI.” Suzy leaned against the door frame, crossing her arms. “Clearly lonely, completely inexperienced. She’s basically using us to figure out what sex is even supposed to look like.”

  Meyer laughed as he poured himself a ginger ale, the noise a sharp bark. “She’s got it all wrong, then—the sex we have for her is not what sex looks like anywhere outside of romantic movies. Anybody who’s making love to their spouse in this day and age would secretly rather be fucking a complete stranger in a needle-strewn alley.”

  “You’re awful.”

  “That goes for husbands and wives, both.” He took a sip of his drink, frowning like it had called him a nasty word. He was nearly two years into his relationship with sobriety but clearly not over his past lovers—gin, scotch, vodka. “Is this diet?”

  “Yes. And that’s just not true,” Suzy said, “about nobody wanting to make love or whatever. Just because we’re kinky doesn’t mean the rest of the human race is, too.”

  “Have you seen the Internet?”

  “Plus we know for sure that at least one person still wants sex with Vaseline on the lens.”

  “Lindsay,” he said, seeming to taste lemon on the name. “We ought to drop her. You’re losing perspective, and it’s unprofessional. Moreover, it’s dangerous. I don’t know which of you I fear might stalk the other.”

  “We couldn’t drop her even if we wanted to; she’s pre-paid for three more hours. Anyway, ask me why I think she’s a secretary.”

  He rolled his eyes mightily and finally humored her. “Why?”

  “Because she types really fast. And really accurately. I watched the little messaging program, and you know how when the other person is typing there’s a little dot-dot-dot thing? Well, her dot-dot-dot would blink for like, ten seconds, and then a whole paragraph would pop up, and with caps and punctuation and everything. I can’t type that fast, not even using abbreviations, and I’ve written more papers than I care to remember.” All to earn a degree she wasn’t using, but hell, she had time. Who grew up before thirty-five these days?

  “What are they paying this secretary, that she could afford us?” Meyer demanded. “You know what—never mind. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you care far too much about this woman. It’s alarming.”

  “I’m fascinated by her,” Suzy admitted. “Actually, I’m a little infatuated. Haven’t you ever felt that, about any of our clients? Just a little curious?”

  “I’m a man. I’m visual. I want what I can see, not some sad little concept of a woman, probably typing in some sad little hovel in some sad little godforsaken pocket of misery who knows where in the country—in the world.”

  “Where do you think she lives? Her English is perfect, and I didn’t notice any British spellings—”

  “You need restraining. Let’s hope tomorrow’s client agrees.”

  She had to smile at that. “Asshole.”

  “I have to go now, darling wife.” He drained his glass and set it in the sink. “Men to enamor, you know how it is.”

  “Cocktease.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, grabbing his jacket off the hook on the door, twirling it on in his effortless, Meyer Cohen way.

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “I know. I may be a sinner of great variety, but I’m never late.”

  True. “See you. Be good.”

  “Tragically so. And you,” he said, turning as he opened the door, jabbing a finger back toward her face, “stay off the fucking Internet.”

  Suzy made a shifty face, but nodded. She knew she was flirting with something dangerous and deserved the reprimand. Too bad Meyer had plans—she might’ve enticed him to punish her for it all. “Cross my heart,” she promised, making the gesture.

  With a final “Night,” the door swung shut at his back.

  Suzy looked around her kitchen—at the sink half-full of dirty dishes, the small mountain of unopened mail—thinking she had plenty to keep her busy, except the orgasms had wrung the motivation right out of her. She eyed the fridge, knowing there was an unopened bottle of pinot nestled in the door.

  “Netflix and chilled wine it is,” she declared.

  Sex with her fake husband, a date with herself. It’d do for a few more months, but she couldn’t deny she was getting itchy for something more.

  Since when did romance start to sound so goddamn taboo? she wondered, clasping the bottle by its neck.

  And since when, precisely, was it a woman that had her drinking to distraction?

  Chapter Four

  John Lindsay shut his laptop feeling naked. Exposed. Strangely . . . known.

  He shivered before his oak desk in the front corner of the darkened den. The sun had set and the large room grown cold, the only real light coming from his antique library lamp. He capped his pen and set it atop his spiral notebook. Outside the tall front window, the streetlights had come on, and a young couple walked arm in arm past his brownstone.

  Known. Ridiculous. A ridiculous notion, considering they thought he was a woman.

  No one could fault the Parkses for assuming, either. He’d used his surname knowing full well it was misleading, and he had no doubt that the sex he requested from the couple was . . . what was the right word? He was a writer, he ought to have the precise modifier just waiting on the tip of his brain. Only everything regarding his sexuality was as mysterious as the novels he traded in.

  Feminine? No, not quite. Safe? Generic? Perhaps basic was the closest to the truth. Basic sex—and of a persuasion he imagined appealed to a typical woman—was what John was after. Of course there was no typical woman, even if some of his critics might like to suggest he believed such a thing.

  “Lindsay writes female characters with all the depth, diversity and flavor of a cardboard shirt insert.” That from the Times, regarding his third published novel—a commercial success like every title in the hard-bitten detective series, but those write-ups still stung. And the critical ones all read roughly the same.

  “No one can fault Lindsay’s plotting, his stories deftly twisted and peppered with clues only the savviest armchair sleuth would detect,” wrote one female reviewer. “But where these books fall down is in their heart. Sometimes it feels as though the author has never heard actual human beings talk to each other, to say nothing of wooing. I was physically repelled by the
brief sex scene in his latest Russo installment, and was left wondering if John Lindsay has ever spoken to a woman, let alone brought one to orgasm.”

  Ouch.

  She was wrong, anyway. John spoke to women regularly. Clerks, waitresses, baristas . . . His sister, a few times a year.

  As for the orgasm jab . . . well, fine. Guilty as charged.

  John was a virgin for all practical purposes. He’d had sex exactly once, when he was twenty-two, and that encounter had been brief, alarming, and unsatisfactory for both parties. Hardly a conquest worthy of inspiring Jacob Russo, the hero of John’s now eight-book-strong series. They’d all hit the best-seller lists since the sophomore installment, and the first season of the television adaptation had recently aired its finale. It was a hit, though damn if some of the most glowing reviews hadn’t managed to ding his ego all the same.

  “The action and atmosphere are just as addictive as the books, with the added bonus of vastly more dynamic female characters and believable sexual tension than readers will recognize from the novels.”

  Thanks?

  No matter. All that was going to change. John might be cripplingly shy, borderline frightened of people—and none more so than attractive women—and a sexual know-nothing and generally useless with other human beings, but goddamn it, he was an excellent researcher.

  Mr. Parks made the perfect role model for John, and by proxy, Jacob Russo, to emulate. Take his confidence, his wife’s fearless sexuality, and the ability to direct them both, to have them illustrate, live, the sort of sex John wished he could perform, himself . . . Perfect, perfect. Worth every penny, and he’d invested his fair share in the month and a half since he’d begun watching—even if he didn’t dare ask his accountant to make a deduction of it. Watching, studying, and obsessively dissecting, frame by frame, as he’d paid a premium for permission to record and retain the videos. They could sue the growing fortune out from under him if the videos ever cropped up on the Web at large, but no worries. Those encounters were the most intimate experiences of his life, and he didn’t want anyone else’s eyes on them.

  Intimate? What a joke, when the people actually making love didn’t even know his gender. Coward. But even a social failure like John knew that everything was less creepy, coming from a woman. Or seeming to.

  And, as always, he was far more comfortable hiding behind his words.

  “Better get to work,” he told the room. He spoke aloud to his study far more often than he did to any actual humans. He opened his laptop and the screen came to life, browser still on the Mr. and Mrs. Parks Web site. He eyed his notebook. He had actions and dialogue and descriptions to transcribe, and he wanted to draft another two thousand words before he turned in tonight. All the same, he caught his finger on the track pad, the cursor sliding up to the tab labeled “About Us.” Click.

  He’d read their bio a dozen times, but his eyes went to that photo, hungry. Hungry for the details of the people in that candid image. It was a black-and-white photograph of the two of them on a couch, Mrs. Parks’ legs draped over her husband’s lap, arms around each other’s shoulders. He was looking at the camera. She was looking at him, smile making an apple of her cheek and squinting her eyes. John studied every pixel, wondering what on earth was missing inside him that kept him from feeling that sort of ease and warmth with another pers—

  Bloink.

  He no less than jumped in his seat, truly as if someone had snuck up behind him and burst a paper bag. Sweat broke out under his arms as he found the little circle beside the Parkses’ name in the chat sidebar had turned from gray to green. And someone was typing. He watched the little dots cycling, heart in his throat. Christ, how pathetic he must look, still being online. They probably assumed he’d masturbated and wondered why on earth he hadn’t passed out by now.

  Still up? Me too. Mrs. Parks, he imagined.

  I work at night, he typed. Just opened my laptop back up. Thanks again for another wonderful night.

  Nothing right away. He ought to play it remotely cool and shut the damn tab, but as long as that little dot beside their avatar stayed green, John couldn’t help but wait. One minute, two, nearly three, and he was starting to give up hope, only he never signed off until they had, until there was absolutely no chance they—

  Shock of shocks, a little ellipsis began blinking in their message bubble.

  And you’re welcome, again. It was fun to mix things up a little, too.

  His heart was pounding in an instant, as hard as though the sex were just beginning. He wrote back, Oh good. It was fun for me, too.

  Fun hardly covered it. Thrilling, and a touch scandalous. He wouldn’t have asked for what she’d offered, going down on her husband—it certainly wouldn’t be making it into any of his books—but the primitive male in him had been undeniably transfixed. He’d never felt that act himself, and it made him envy Mr. Parks with an ever-deepening pang.

  You should always feel free to push the boundaries, with us, Mrs. Parks wrote. We’re here to be everything you want to see.

  He swallowed, throat feeling constricted, collar tight. He knew what he’d asked for was hardly “pushing the boundaries,” not even by a Catholic schoolgirl’s standards. Hell, he’d seen the little descriptions of the sample sessions on their Web site—you could watch a two-minute clip for free or pay twenty bucks to watch a full pre-recorded session, and they had several different . . . flavors, you might say, available to view. John had paid for the full-length video described as “passionate lovemaking,” but he’d read the other blurbs as well. What he’d wanted tonight was nothing. Probably bored them to tears—

  He cut himself off from the thought. These sessions with the Parkses had come to mean far more to him than mere research. He wouldn’t let his own brain bully him into feeling shameful about them.

  Bloink. You still there?

  Yes, sorry.

  Don’t be sorry :-) Anyhow, like I said, don’t be shy. Any night you’re with us, anything you want to see. Feel free!

  With us. He shivered at that, feeling more at those two tiny words than he’d have expected. Or perhaps more accurately, admitted to himself.

  You’re kind. I’ll think about it. But baby steps are probably best, for now.

  You got it.

  He hesitated, held back by both his shyness and his worry he was being too demanding of her time, continuing on like this, with the curtain already dropped for the night. But there was no denying these chats were every bit as stimulating as the performances. He’d be thinking about this conversation as much as anything else she’d offered him tonight, when he got into bed and gave himself pleasure, imagining a world in which his sex life looked anything like that of Mr. Parks’.

  He took a deep breath and shared a thought, a truth, an intimacy he worried was out of bounds in this arrangement.

  As I mentioned, I’m not very experienced. Or very daring. I’m quite shy in real life and my exploits aren’t much to brag about. Understatement of the century. I’m in my late thirties and am just now trying to figure out what excites me, what sort of lover I might want to be, one day, if I can find a way out of my shell.

  He hit SEND, feeling stripped way down to his soul. He hadn’t realized that was true until his fingers had burned it into those pixels—this wasn’t about his writing anymore. It had been at first, when it had been Jacob’s sex life he’d wanted to render in three dimensions, but the more he watched the Parkses, the more he envied the husband’s skills and the couple’s passion . . . John wanted those things for himself.

  It had been easy to believe he could take or leave sex, before he’d found anything out there in the world worth emulating. There was probably decent porn to be found, but one had to wade through so much dross—the corny, the degrading, the ugly, the cruel, and the sleazy, and the downright sick. He’d taken it all in and found nothing he envied, nothing he ached for. Until
the Parkses. He wanted what they had, and wholly for himself.

  Mrs. Parks’ chat box was ellipsising, and his heart settled high in his chest as he awaited her reply. She’ll tell me it’s out of line, us talking this way. That was what he feared. But what came back was, I’m sure you’ll find what you’re after, when you’re ready. For now, I’m happy we can help you explore what that might look like.

  His face flushed hot, from both humility and pleasure. You’re certainly doing that. You offer a facsimile of something I’ve not been able to find anywhere else. Not in real life, and not out here in the wilds of the Internet.

  For what it’s worth, our sessions are a very real part of my real life, Mrs. Parks wrote. But I know what you mean.

  He flushed. I didn’t mean to denigrate your work.

  You didn’t! I’m just trying to say that you can feel free to see these encounters as very much a real thing. We’re two flesh-and-blood people on our end of the cables and code, just like you. Whatever we are for you, it’s real. Just unorthodox.

  John sat with his hands in his lap, staring at those words and feeling weak all over. Awed and humbled and a little dumbstruck.

  When he didn’t reply, Mrs. Parks wrote, When this sort of arrangement is firing on all cylinders, it really is more than just live-action porn. To me it is, anyway.

  He was sweating for real now, damp all down his back, and that blush was positively burning his cheeks and neck. It is to me, too. In fact, this all feels more real than I’m comfortable admitting.

  I get that. But at least you and me, we can agree this is real, no matter what the rest of the world might try to call it :-)

  He told her a truth so deep it stung to see the words as they appeared on the screen before him. This is the closest I’ve ever come to having any sort of sex life.

  He tried to guess her reply, something kind but nevertheless painful to read. I’m sorry to hear that, perhaps. But as always, she surprised him.

  Color me honored.