rolled his eyes. “Anything before twenty-six is too young to count.”
Bobby was right about that. The marriage had been too short, too casual to count, and Sam had stayed far away since then. Maturity and wisdom would do that to a man. But today, he found himself wishing there was someone to go home to. Not because he wanted a home-cooked meal, oh, no. His reasons were more basic. Sam was still carrying around an extra seven inches of pain and misery from a little too much “cold silver against a naked breast,” and it would be nice to have someone to take the edge off.
Like Mercedes Brooks, for example.
Sam closed his eyes and groaned, low and painful, and a mere two decibels louder than he intended.
Tony looked at him sideways. “What’s wrong?”
Both his friends were staring, because Sam didn’t have problems. He didn’t groan. He didn’t complain. And usually he didn’t suffer from slip of the tongue disease. Lack of sleep, lack of sex seemed to be taking its toll. Damn. Sam shook it off. “It’s the show. We got stuck without a second guest for Thursday night. A city manager broke his leg, and now I’m guestless, except for the judge.”
“What does Charlie say?”
“He wants to do something lighter.”
“What do you want?”
It was a loaded question because up until that moment, Sam would have answered differently, but his whole body was tense and taut, and the more he considered it, the more he thought that maybe Charlie was right. They did need something lighter. More provocative. “Sex.”
Bobby howled. “Hard up?”
“I meant for the show.”
“Then book a sex therapist.”
“No.” His mind was racing along various roadtracks, but he kept coming back to the same endpoint.
“A hooker? You know, they’re trying to unionize in Canada. That could be both sexual and political.”
You know, Bobby had a point, but not now. And not in San Francisco. Sam was busily pondering other plans for San Francisco. “No.”
“Sam, you’re boring.”
“I’m not boring,” he protested.
“So find somebody.”
He knew somebody. She’d be the perfect somebody. They could discuss the white-noise of sex in America. She could blissfully talk about sex—meaningless, passionate sex between two consenting adults, locked in a tangle of bare flesh, while he drove inside her, tasting the curve of a firm naked breast…
Damn.
Sam really needed to get laid. It’d been over three months since he’d broken up with Shelia. She’d been nice enough, but she wasn’t The One. She wasn’t even The Maybe One.
“Book somebody, Sam,” said Tony with an almost-smile.
“Great looking,” added Bobby. “It’s about time that your guests weren’t old, fat and bald.”
“Can you guys give me a break? Enough about my show, let’s talk about something else. Like Tony. The purpose of this dinner. Remember?”
Bobby nodded. “You got to get back on the horse, Tone. Sam’ll find some club, you’ll meet women, see them all nicely dressed, or undressed, and remind you of what you are.”
“What’s that?” asked Tony.
Bobby smiled, wide and slow. “You’re the rarest of the rare. A precious quantity to be savored and sipped, and tupped as often as you like. You’re a single, heterosexual man in New York.”
He might as well have thrown his friend in front of a bus, for all the good it did. Tony attempted a weak smile. “I don’t know that I can do this.”
Tony was going to need all the reassurance he could get. “Don’t worry about it,” Sam said. “I’ll call Franco. He knows the good places.” Sam made a note to himself to call Franco, and stuck around for another couple of rounds. But tonight, it wasn’t the taste of alcohol that put him on fire. It was one Mercedes Brooks.
On the way home, he stopped by the bookstore in Paramus and picked up a copy of her book, buying it quickly before anyone noticed.
When he got to his house in north Jersey, he settled down to read, and got halfway through the first chapter when he made up his mind. Mercedes Brooks was going on his show. Charlie was right. What would be so wrong with a little talk about sex?
He laughed at himself. Yeah. Since when did he agree with his producer? He looked down at the book, flipped to the cover, watching the faint images come to life in his mind. It wasn’t politics he was thinking of now, far from it. She’d stayed there in his head for nearly a year. Maybe it was time to see Mercedes Brooks again.
In the flesh.
2
THE LITERATURE PANEL AT the Algonquin Hotel had been the idea of Portia McLarin, Mercedes’s agent. At first, Mercedes had thought it’d be a blast. After all, the Algonquin was a New York landmark for the literati. When Mercedes had stepped through the dark oak entrance, she knew she had made it to the big leagues. At one time, the hotel’s Round Table hosted the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber and Robert Benchley. And tonight—the one, the only—Mercedes Brooks.
Yeah, right.
There were two other authors besides Mercedes. Linda who wrote fiction, and Cecily the poet. Linda was snazzily attired in a nipped-waist blazer that was probably Marc Jacobs. She’d paired it with jeans and a tie, although the shoes were a little too penny-loafer for Mercedes’s taste. All things considered, the outfit was wonderfully chic.
However, the positive aura was spoiled when Linda proudly announced that she had received an MFA from Columbia and wrote “lit-ra-chur.” Mercedes slunk an inch lower in the leather-backed chair.
The second girl was Cecily, a Bohemian-vegan type with frizzy brown hair, and wire-rim spectacles, and absolutely no sense of fashion or style. Cecily wrote “abstract poetry” and lived in a warehouse in Brooklyn, no surprise there.
They were only twenty minutes into the discussion, and the bright lights were already starting to make Mercedes sweat, as was the moderator, a stuff-shirted academic. As someone who wrote about sex, and had just published a book of erotic fiction, Mercedes really didn’t have the time nor the inclination to deal with someone who desperately needed to get their rocks off, assuming he had any.
“Miss Brooks, can you tell us why you feel the urge to write fiction designed to titillate?” The man’s voice sliced down her spine like broken glass, but Mercedes was determined to stand up for the constitution, especially that pesky first amendment.
“Why does any writer need to write?” she asked, dodging the titillate word deftly. “It’s part of documenting the human condition.”
“But don’t you feel your—work,” he said, with a dismissive sniff, “reduces the human condition to a training
