Chapter One

This is what happened.

I met him at the candy store. He turned around and smiled at me. I was surprised enough to smile back.

This was not a children’s candy store. This was Sweet Heaven, an upscale, gourmet candy store. No cheap lollipops or chalky chocolate kisses. The kind of place you went to buy expensive imported truffles for your boss’s wife because you felt guilty for fucking him when you were both at a conference in Milwaukee.

He was buying jellybeans, black only. He looked at the bag in my hand, candy-coated chocolate. Also in only one color.

“You know what they say about the green ones.” The rakish tilt of his lips tried to charm me, and I resisted.

“St. Patrick’s Day?” That was why I was buying them.

He shook his head. “No. The green ones make you horny.”

I’d been hit on plenty of times, mostly by men with little finesse who thought what was between their legs made up for what they lacked between their ears. Sometimes I went home with one of them anyway, just because it felt good to want and be wanted, even if it was mostly fake, and they usually disappointed.

“That’s an urban legend made up by adolescent boys with wish-fulfillment issues.”

His lips tilted further. His smile was his best asset, brilliant and shining in a face made up of otherwise regular features. He had hair the color of wet sand and cloudy blue-green eyes. Attractive, but average. When paired with the smile…breathtaking.

“Very good answer,” he said.

He held out his hand. When I took it, he pulled me closer, step by hesitant step, until he could lean close and whisper in my ear. His hot breath gusted along my skin, and I shivered. “Do you like licorice?”

I did, and I do, and he tugged me around the corner to reach inside a bin filled with small black rectangles. It had a label with a picture of a kangaroo on the front.

“Try this.” He lifted a piece to my lips, and I opened for him although the sign clearly said No Samples. “It’s from Australia.”

The licorice smoothed on my tongue. Soft, fragrant, sticky in a way that made me run my tongue along my teeth. I tasted his fingers from where they’d brushed my lips. He smiled.

“I know a little place,” he said, and I let him take me there.

* * *

The Slaughtered Lamb. A gruesome name for a nice little faux-British pub tucked down an alley in the center of downtown Harrisburg. Compared to the trendy dance clubs and upscale restaurants that had revitalized the area, the Lamb seemed out of place and all the more delightful for it.

He sat us at the bar, away from the college students singing karaoke in the corner. The stools wobbled, and I had to hold tight to the bar. I ordered a margarita.

“No.” The shake of his head had me raising a brow. “You want whiskey.”

“I’ve never had whiskey.”

“A virgin.” On another man the comment would have come off smarmy, earned a roll of the eyes and an automatic addition to the “not with James Dean’s prick” file.

On him, it worked.

“A virgin,” I agreed, the word tasting unfamiliar on my tongue as though I hadn’t used it in a very long time.

He ordered us both shots of Jameson, and he drank his back as one should do with shots, in one gulp. I am no stranger to drinking, even if I’d never had whiskey, and I matched him without a grimace. After the initial burn, the taste of it spread across my tongue and reminded me of the smell of burning leaves. Cozy. Warm. A little romantic, even.

His gaze brightened. “I like the way you swallow that.”

I was instantly, immediately, insanely aroused.

“Another?” said the bartender.

“Another,” my companion agreed. To me, he said, “Very good.”

The compliment pleased me, and I wasn’t sure why impressing him had become so important.

We drank there for a while, and the whiskey hit me harder than I thought it would. Or perhaps the company made me giddy enough to giggle at his subtle but charming observations about the people around us.

The woman wearing the leather jacket was a funeral director. The man in medical scrubs was waiting for his dominatrix mistress. My companion wove stories about everyone around us including our good-natured bartender, whom he said had the look of a retired gumdrop farmer.

“Gumdrops don’t come from farms.” I leaned forward to touch his tie, which featured a pattern that upon first glance appeared to be the normal sort of dots and crosses many men wore. I, however, had noticed the dots and crosses were tiny skulls and crossbones.

“No?” He seemed disappointed I wouldn’t play along.

“No.” I tugged his tie and looked up into the blue-green eyes that had begun vying with his smile for best feature. “They’re harvested in the wild.”

He guffawed, tilting his head back with the force of it. I envied him the free and easy way he gave in to the impulse to laugh. I’d have been afraid people would stare.

“And you,” he said at last. His gaze pinned me, held me in place. “What are you?”

“Gumdrop poacher,” I whispered through whiskey-numb lips.

He reached to twirl a strand of hair that had fallen free from my long French braid. “You don’t look that dangerous, to me.”

We looked at each other, two strangers, and shared a smile, and I thought how long it had been since I’d done that. “Want to walk me home?”

He did.

He didn’t attempt to make love to me that night, which didn’t surprise me. He didn’t try to fuck me, either, which did. He didn’t even kiss me, although I hesitated before putting my keys in the door and smiled and chatted with him before saying good night.

He hadn’t asked for my name. Not even my number. Just left me buzzing from whiskey on my doorstep. I watched him walk down the street, jingling the change in his pocket. He faded into the darkness between the streetlamps, and then I went inside.

***

I thought about him the next morning in the shower while I washed the scent of smoke from my hair. I thought about him while I shaved my legs, my pits, the curling dark hair between my legs. When I brushed my teeth, I caught sight of my face in the mirror and tried to imagine seeing my eyes as he had.

Blue with flecks of white and gold visible upon closer observation. A feature many men praised, because telling a woman she has pretty eyes is a safe way of judging whether they can next move on to putting a hand on her thigh. He hadn’t mentioned them. He hadn’t complimented me on anything other than the way I’d drunk the whiskey.

I thought about him as I dressed for work. Plain white panties, comfortable in cut and fabric. Matching bra, a hint of lace, enough to make it pretty but designed to support my breasts rather than flaunt them. A black skirt cut just above the knee. A white blouse with buttons. Black and white, as always, to make the choices easier and because something about the pure simplicity of black and white soothes me.

I thought about him on the ride to work, my earbuds tucked inside my ears to discourage random conversation from strangers. The shield of modern times. The ride was no longer than it ever had been, nor shorter, and I counted the stops the way I always did and gave the bus driver the same smile.

“Have a good day, Miss Kavanagh.”

“Thanks, Bill.”

I thought of him, too, as I climbed the cement steps to my office and pushed through the doors precisely five minutes before I was due in my office.

“You’re late today,” said Harvey Willard, the security guard. “An entire minute.”

“Blame the bus,” I told him with a grin I knew would make him blush, although the blame was not upon the bus but my distracted gait that had made me slow.

Up the elevator, down the hall, through my door, to my desk. Not one thing was different, but everything had changed. Not even the columns of numbers in front of me could wrest my mind from the puzzle he’d presented.

I didn’t know his name. Hadn’t given him mine. I’d thought it would be easy, two strangers looking to fill a mutual need. A standard seduction. One that didn’t need names to complicate it.

I didn’t like men knowing my name, anyway. It gave them a sense of power over me they didn’t deserve, as if by gasping out my name when they jerked and spasmed they could cement the moment in place and time. If I had to give a name, I gave them a false one, and when they shouted it out in orgasm-strangled voices it never failed to make me smile.

I wasn’t smiling today. I was distracted, disgruntled, discombobulated…I’d have been disenchanted if I’d ever been enchanted to begin with.

I worked the problem in my mind like I’d figure a calculation. Separate the equations, decipher the individual components, add the pieces that made sense and divide them by the parts that didn’t. By lunchtime, I still hadn’t been able to relegate him to a memory.

“Hot date last night?” Marcy Peters, she of the big hair and tiny skirts, asked. Marcy is the sort of woman who will always refer to herself as a girl, who wears white pumps with too-tight jeans, whose blouses always show a little too much cleavage.

She poured herself another cup of coffee. I had tea. We sat at the small lunchroom table and peeled open sandwiches delivered from the deli, hers tuna and mine, as usual, turkey on wheat.

“As always,” came my reply, and we laughed, two women bound in friendship not from qualities in common or mutual interests but because our alliance is the cage that protects us from the sharks with whom we work.

Marcy fends off the sharks with a blunt and unassuming, forthright presentation of her femininity. Of herself as woman all-powerful, all-intriguing, all-encompassing. She is blond and buxom and not above using her attributes to get what she wants.

I prefer a more discreet approach.

Marcy laughed at my response because the Elle Kavanagh she knows does not go on dates, hot or otherwise. The Elle Kavanagh of her acquaintance, junior vice president of corporate accounting, makes the cliché of the lady librarian with spectacles and bun look like Lady Godiva.

Marcy doesn’t know anything about me, or my life outside the walls of Triple Smith and Brown.

“You hear the news about the Flynn account?” This was Marcy’s idea of lunchtime conversation. Gossip about other employees.

“No,” I said to appease her and because she always did manage to dig up the best stories.

“Mr. Flynn’s secretary sent the wrong files over to Bob, who’s handling the account, right?”

“All right.”

Glee danced in Marcy’s eyes. “Apparently, she emailed Mr. Flynn’s private expense account, not the corporate one.”

“It has to get better.”

“Apparently, Mr. Flynn likes to keep track of how many hundred-dollar hookers and bootleg cigars he buys!” She wriggled in her seat.

“Bad news for Mr. Flynn’s secretary, I guess.”

Marcy grinned. “She’s been blowing Bob on the side. He didn’t tell Mr. Flynn.”

“Bob Hoover?” That was unexpected news.

“Yeah. Can you believe it?”

“I guess I can believe anything of anybody,” I told her honestly. “Most people are far less discriminating about who they take to bed than you’d think.”

“Oh, really?” She gave me a ferrety look of interest. “And you’d know this because…?”

“Pure conjecture.” I pushed away from the table and threw away my trash.

Marcy didn’t look disappointed, only more intrigued. “Uh-huh.”

I gave her a sweet and bland smile and left her alone to meditate on my mysterious sex life.

***

The fact is, people are far less discriminating in who they fuck than anyone wants to admit. Appearance, intelligence, a sense of humor, wealth, power…not everyone has these qualities, and fewer have more than one.

But here’s the truth.

Men don’t need to be clobbered over the head with the sight of your tits to know you’re looking for action. Even pent-up librarian types can get fucked with their panties around their ankles and a brick wall scraping bloody welts on their backs.

At least, this one can.

Or at least I’d been able to three years ago, which was the last time I’d gone out looking. I hadn’t been looking for action at Sweet Heaven, merely jonesing for chocolate. So why, then, had I let him take me away? Why had I asked him to walk me home and been so disappointed when he left me on the doorstep with nothing but a wave?

That I hadn’t been looking to find someone that day only exacerbated my private torture. If I’d found him in a bar instead of Sweet Heaven, if my hair had been loose about my shoulders, if my blouse had been unbuttoned, would he have kissed me on the stoop, his hands slipping around my waist and pulling me against him tight? Would he have asked to come inside my door? Come inside my body?

I would never know.

I thought of him all that day and all the next, and the wanting of him grew and grew in my mind like pouring water into a vase filled with stones. Thinking of him consumed my waking moments and seeped into my dreams, leading to sweaty nights amongst tangled sheets. I studied my face incessantly, wondering what he had seen that day to take me from the candy store and to the pub, but not to bed. Had I failed somehow? Had I said some wrong thing, revealed some flaw, laughed too loudly or not quickly enough at his humor?

I knew I was obsessing. That’s what I did. Turned things over and over in my brain to pick them apart from every angle. Analyzed and calculated and pondered.

I could not forget the way his breath smelled when he leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Do you like licorice?”

I could not forget the warmth of his hand on mine when he congratulated me for downing that first shot of whiskey.

I could not forget the flash of his blue-green eyes, or the small but perfect cleft in his chin, or the faint freckles on the bridge of his nose and forehead, or his voice and laugh, the slow deep honey of it that had made me want to lean against him and rub myself on him the way cats do, purring.

The last time I picked up a man in a bar and let him take me home, he’d ejaculated all over my skirt and cried beer-scented tears all over my face. Then he’d called me a bitch and a whore and demanded I pay him back for the drinks he’d bought me. It had been one last bad encounter in a string of them. Boys who didn’t know what to do with their pricks, older men who thought two seconds of fingering counted as foreplay, sweet-faced lads who turned into abusive bastards the moment the doors locked behind them.

Celibacy had become the better option. A challenge I set myself that became habit. The day I’d met him in Sweet Heaven it had been three years, two months, a week and three days since I’d had sex.

Now, with thoughts of him on my mind, that nameless stranger, I couldn’t stop thinking about fucking. A man I passed on the street could catch my gaze and my cunt would clench like fingers closing on a flower. My nipples rubbed with constant friction against my bras. My panties tugged incessantly at my clit, urging me to stroke that small button over and over, no matter the place or the time or the circumstance.

I was horny.

My assignations had never been about any sort of amorous feelings. They’d been about filling an emptiness inside, of chasing away the dark cloud I could usually escape but sometimes…could not. I went to bars and parties and the park to pick up men who might take me away for a few hours, might make me forget everything in my head. Sex had been a choice I made to ease an ache inside. I knew it. I knew why I did it. I knew why I looked like a librarian and acted like a whore.

Until now, it hadn’t mattered. I’d met men who made me laugh, who made me sigh, even a few, very few, who’d made me come. Until now, I had never met one I couldn’t forget.

For two weeks I stuttered along this way, my concentration knitted together by strands of habit rather than any effort on my part. My work didn’t suffer, only because the numbers came so easily to me, but everything else did. I forgot to mail bills, pick up the dry cleaning, set my alarm.

The spring days were still easing into night early enough that sometimes my ride home on the bus was done in darkness. I sat in my usual seat, the one at the back, my coat and briefcase folded neatly over my lap, my legs crossed high up at the thigh. I stared out the window and imagined his face and the smell of his breath, and then, with the rocking of the bus to aid me, I began to get myself off.

At first, just a gentle squeezing of my thigh muscles done in time to the thump of the bus wheels on the pavement. My pussy swelled. My clit became a tiny hard nodule pressing against the soft fabric of my panties. My hips, hidden by the coat and briefcase, rocked on the plastic seat. With both hands folded sedately on my lap, nobody looking at me would have any idea what I was doing.

Streetlights cast bars of silver on my lap and made swiftly moving lines of light that slid up my body and away, leaving behind darkness interrupted a minute later by another streak. I began to time my pace to the passing of the lights.

Sweet tension curled inside my stomach. My breath caught and held, then hissed out between my parted lips when it began to burn inside my lungs. I kept my eyes fixed on the window and the sights outside it, but I saw none of them. I saw the ghost of my face reflected now and again in the window glass. I imagined him looking at me.

My fingers curled on top of my leather briefcase, holding tight. My foot moved up and down, up and down, squeezing my thighs together, rubbing my clit in a small but perfect motion. I wanted so badly to touch myself, to stroke my fingers in circles around that hard button, to slide them inside and fuck myself while the bus sped on toward its destination — but I didn’t. I rocked and squeezed, and each lamp we passed urged me that much closer to climax.

My body shook from holding so still when it wanted to writhe. I had never done this before, this furtive dance toward completion. Masturbation was done at home alone in the bath or in bed, straightforward and swift, a release of tension. This, here, was almost against my will. My thoughts of him, the movement of the bus, my celibacy, had all conspired to set my body burning with a fire only orgasm could quench.

Sweat slid down the line of my spine and into the crack of my ass. That touch, that light tickle, so much like the feeling of a tongue along my skin, sent me hurtling over the edge. My cunt tightened as my body tensed. My nails scratched thin lines in the leather of my briefcase. My clit jumped and spasmed, and bolts of pure bliss radiated through my entire body.

I shook in silence, drawing less attention than if I’d sneezed. I turned the gasping sigh into a cough that barely turned heads. In another moment looseness pervaded me, and boneless, I slumped a bit in my seat as the bus eased to a stop.

My stop.

I got off on trembling legs, certain the smell of sex had to be clinging to me like perfume, but nobody seemed to notice. I exited the bus into a spring mist, and I lifted my face to the night sky and let it kiss me all over, not caring that it flattened my hair and dampened my blouse.

I had made myself come on a public bus thinking of his face, and I still didn’t know his name.

***

For better or worse, that solo touch on the public transportation eased some of my need. The numbers came back to me, filling my mind with their steady stream of plus and minus. I threw myself into my work, landing several big accounts that had been the responsibility of Bob Hoover, now too busy getting lunchtime blow jobs from Mr. Flynn’s secretary to handle the load.

I didn’t mind. More work meant greater opportunity to show the higher-ups I deserved my title, my corner office, my extra vacation time. It meant I didn’t have to invent reasons to stay late at work so I’d need to choose between going home and facing an empty house or heading out to some meat-market bar and testing my strength of will.

“Sex,” Marcy declared in the lunchroom, “is like this chocolate éclair.”

She’d brought me a powdered sugar doughnut. I studied her eclair. “Full of cream and makes you feel like you want to puke, after?”

She rolled her eyes. “What the hell sort of sex do you have, Elle?”

“None, recently.”

“I’m shocked.” Her tone made it clear she wasn’t. “But no wonder, with an attitude like that.”

She might have big hair and trashy taste in clothes, but Marcy could make me laugh. “Tell me why sex is like that éclair, then.”

“Because it’s tempting enough to make you forget everything else you’re supposed to do.” She licked some chocolate off the top. “And it’s satisfying enough to make you glad you did.”

I sat back in my chair a little, watching her. “I take it you had some sex last night?”

She made a mock-innocent face, and I realized something. I liked her. I was not in the habit of liking anyone, really.

Marcy fluttered her eyelashes. “Who, little ole me?”

“Yes, you.” I put the doughnut back in the box and snagged the last éclair. “And you’re dying to tell me about it, so stop wasting time and get to it before someone else comes in and we have to pretend to be talking about business.”

Marcy laughed. “I wasn’t sure you’d like to hear about it.”

I studied her face. “You think that about me, don’t you. That I don’t like sex?”

She looked up from her gooey plate, her smile sincere, and something passed over her expression. Something a little like pity. It made me frown.

“I don’t know, Elle. I don’t know you well enough to say, really, but you act like you don’t like much of anything, sometimes, except work.”

Hearing something you already know shouldn’t ever be a shock, but it usually is. I wanted to answer her right away, but my throat had closed, and my eyes burned with tears I blinked against to keep from falling. I put one hand on my stomach, which had lurched at her words in recognition of their truth.

Marcy, despite her appearance and occasional dumb-blonde performance, was anything but stupid. She reached at once for my hand and closed her fingers over mine before I could pull it away. She squeezed my hand and let go fast enough to keep me from startling.

“Hey,” she said softly. “It’s all right. We all have buttons.”

Right then, at that moment, I had the chance to make Marcy my friend.

A real one, not a business acquaintance. I have stood on the edge of so many things, so many times, and I most always back away. If there is a time when telling the truth will open a door, I lie. If a smile will forge a connection, I turn my face.

But this time, surprising myself and probably her, I didn’t.

I smiled at her. “Tell me about your date last night.”

She did. In detail enough to make me blush. It was the best lunch I’d ever had.

When it was time for us to go to our separate offices, she stopped me with another squeeze of my hand. “You should come out with me sometime.”

I let her squeeze my hand because she was so earnest, and we’d had such a good time. “Sure.”

“You will?” She squealed, the hand squeeze turning into an impromptu, full-length hug that made my entire body stiffen. Marcy patted my back and stepped away, and if she noticed that her embrace had turned me into a wooden effigy, she said nothing. “Great.”

“Great.” I smiled and nodded.

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and it had been a long time since I’d had a best girlfriend. Any sort of friend. I caught myself humming later, at my desk.

Euphoria doesn’t last under the best circumstances, and when I pushed open my front door to find the light on my answering machine blinking steadily, mine vanished.

I don’t get many calls at home. Doctors’ offices, sales calls, wrong numbers, my brother Chad…and my mother. I keep the landline so I don’t have to give her my cell number. So she can’t find me when I’m not ready to face her. The red number four mocked me as I dumped my mail on the table and hung my keys on the small hook by the door. Four messages in one day? They could only be from her.

Hating your mother is such a cliché, comedians use it to make audiences laugh. Psychiatrists base their entire careers upon diagnosing it. Greeting card companies stick the knife in further by making consumers feel so guilty about the way they really feel about their mothers, they’ll willingly pay five dollars for a piece of paper with some pretty words they didn’t write, echoing a sentiment they don’t feel.

I don’t hate my mother.

I’ve tried to hate my mother, I really have. If I hated her, I might be able to put her out of my life at last, be done with her, put an end to the torture she provides. The sad fact remains, I haven’t learned to hate my mother. The best I can do is ignore her.

“Ella, pick up the phone.”

My mother’s voice is a nasal foghorn, bleating her disdain as a warning to all the other ships to stay away from me, the reason for her disappointment. I can’t hate her, but I can hate her voice, and the way she calls me Ella instead of Elle. Ella is a waif’s name, an orphan sitting in the cinders. Elle is classier, crisper. The name a woman called herself when she wanted people to take her seriously. My mother insists on calling me Ella because she knows it annoys me.

By the fourth message she was detailing how life didn’t seem worth living with such an ungrateful excuse for a daughter. How the pills the doctor prescribed for her nerves weren’t working. How she was embarrassed to have to ask Karen Cooper from next door to go to the pharmacy for her when she had a daughter who should be quite capable of taking care of her, but for the fact she refused.

She had a husband who could go for her, too, but she never seemed to remember that.

“And don’t forget!” I jumped at the suddenness of her voice ringing out from the small speaker. “You said you’d visit soon.”

There was a brief moment of hissing static at the end of her message as though she’d hung on the line, convinced I was really there and ignoring her, and if she waited long enough, she’d catch me out.

The phone rang again as I looked at it. Resigned, I picked it up. I didn’t bother to defend myself. She talked for ten minutes before I had the chance to say anything.

“I was at work, Mother,” I managed to interject when she paused to light a cigarette.

She greeted my answer with an audible sniff of disdain. “So late.”

“Yes, Mother. So late.” The clock showed ten after eight. “I take the bus home, remember?”

“You have that fancy car. Why don’t you drive it?”

I didn’t bother to explain yet again my reasons for keeping a car in the city but using public transportation, which was faster and easier. She wouldn’t have listened.

“You should find a husband,” she said at last, and I bit back a sigh. The tirade was close to ending. “Though how you ever will, I don’t know. Men don’t like women who are smarter than they are. Or who earn more money. Or—” she paused significantly, “—who don’t take care of themselves.”

“I take care of myself, Mother.” I meant financially. She meant spa treatments and manicures.

“Ella.” Her sigh sounded very loud over the phone. “You could be so pretty…”

I looked into the mirror as she talked, seeing the reflection of a woman my mother didn’t know. “Enough. I’m hanging up.”

I imagined the way her mouth pursed at such harsh treatment from her only daughter. “Fine.”

“I’ll call you soon.”

She snorted. “Don’t forget, you promised to come visit.”

The thought made my stomach fall away. “Yes, I know, but—”

“You have to take me to the cemetery, Ella.”

The woman in the mirror looked startled. I didn’t feel startled. I didn’t feel…anything. No matter what my reflection showed.

“I know, Mother.”

“Don’t think you can weasel out of it this year — ”

“Goodbye, Mother.”

I disconnected her, even though she still squawked, and immediately dialed another number.

“Marcy. It’s Elle.”

Marcy, bless her, revealed nothing but pleased surprise at my desire to take her up on her invitation to go out after work. It was exactly the reaction I needed. Too much enthusiasm would have made me rethink; too little would have made me cancel.

“The Blue Swan,” she said confidently, like she was reaching for my hand to lead me across a bridge swaying over an abyss. In a way, she was. “It’s small but the music is good and the crowd’s eclectic. The drinks are pretty cheap, too. And it’s not a meat market.”

So kind of her, really, to keep assuming I was afraid of men. She didn’t know I had once slept with four different men in as many days. She didn’t know it wasn’t sex that scared me.

Her kindness made me smile, though, and we made plans for after work on Friday. She didn’t question my change of mind.

Still staring at the woman in the mirror, I hung up the phone. She looked like she was going to cry. I felt bad for her, that woman with the long, dark hair, the one who only ever wore black and white. The one who might have been pretty if she’d only take care of herself, if only she weren’t smarter, if only she didn’t earn more money. I felt sorry for her but envied her, too, because she, at least, could cry and I could not.

Dirty