behave themselves.
But the groom-to-be was a friend of her roommate’s so she knew him and his fiancée, and Liv was glad she’d said yes. She’d made enough in the last hour to pay her rent this month. So far, the party was topping the bachelorette one last month, and the couples therapy party the month before that.
As she sold some warming lube to the best man she thought, as she had many times before, that if her Chinese mother or Japanese father ever caught wind of her “job,” she’d be banned from Thanksgiving for the rest of her life.
But she’d tried to find work with her marketing degree, and so far had failed miserably.
* * *
Her dad had offered her a job at the law firm, of course, right out of school, but the last thing Liv wanted to do was spend all her time in her father’s shadow or tucked away in some file room. When her good friend Kat had retired from the sex toy business last year, deciding to ditch it and go to law school, Liv needed serious convincing to take it over. What did she know about sex toys? She’d never even owned one before.
Besides that, she’d only ever had sex with two guys, anyhow.
There’d been her clumsy college boyfriend of six months who’d left her for a girl who lived down the hall in the dorm, and her second—a random hook-up from a neighbor’s party—had been quick and blah and ended with him asking her if she would do him the favor of not sleeping over.
But, as it turned out, hosting sex parties was easier than having sex. It was playing a role, just like during her college stage days when she flirted with majoring in drama. Nobody expected her to deliver, and she found she liked acting naughty. It was the first time she’d ever really gotten the chance, if she was honest with herself.
Plus, the hours were flexible, the pay was great, and she wouldn’t have to move in with Mom and Dad. It also gave her plenty of time during the day to go in for interviews. If she dressed up in a leather corset and heels on weekends, who cared? What her parents didn’t know wouldn’t kill them. She’d been an angel throughout high school, never seriously rebelling. She was long overdue some naughtiness, she thought.
The bachelor party was starting to get rowdy as two of the guests began a mock sword fight with pink vibrators. A knock on the door signaled a late arrival, and Paul got up to let him in.
“Hey, Liv, what are these for?” One of the guests held up two metal balls on a black string; pleasure balls, à la Fifty Shades of Grey.
“Those were made famous by Christian Grey,” she said, grinning. “Ladies wear them.”
“How?” the best man asked.
“How do you think?” Liv smiled devilishly as she took the silver balls from his hand and held them vertically, giving them a little nudge upward.
“No way! Inside?” Paul’s eyes grew larger than the silver balls Liv held. He had returned to the living room with the new arrival, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a baseball cap and jeans who stood next to Paul by the couch. There was something familiar about him, Liv thought, but his cap was pulled down over his face.
“She puts those up there? Seriously?” One of the guests shook his head.
“They find the G-spot, so you don’t have to,” Liv sang, and the boys laughed. The new guest eyed her from behind the couch. She felt her neck flush a little. He was moving closer, toward the table of toys.
“I’m getting some,” the best man declared, jumping up from the couch.
“Now you’ll finally have some balls, Preston!” one of the others teased.
The stranger was near her now, and she could see him out of the corner of her eye. He grabbed a massive purple rabbit vibrator from the table.
“Okay, fellas, next up we’ve got flavored lubes,” Liv said as she picked up some neon-colored bottles. The men hooted and hollered. “I’m going to pass out a few sample bottles. Don’t get too crazy on me now...” Liv handed Paul some samples to distribute.
The new guest moved to her side, eyeing the contents of her table.
“Whoa,” the stranger said, holding the oversize vibrator in his hands. “What’s this one called?”
“That’s the rabbit...” Liv took the latex-covered vibrator from the man and looked up, and then the rest of the sentence dried up on her tongue. She stood frozen, clutching the thing, in front of Porter Benjamin: a junior partner at her father’s law firm. He looked so different wearing the baseball cap and sweatshirt—she only ever saw him in expensive dark suits.
Liv’s stomach tightened, and a cold sweat broke out instantly on the back of her neck. Porter knew her family. Porter knew her dad. And she was in a leather corset and stilettos holding a purple vibrator, in a roomful of sex toys.
Porter was still looking at the rabbit and hadn’t yet made eye contact with her. Liv considered simply walking out the door, leaving her $1,000 in merchandise sitting in Paul’s living room. But then she’d be out $1,000, and the other $250 Paul owed her at the end of the night, plus anything she managed to sell before then. She couldn’t afford to walk away, and she knew it.
Then Porter glanced up at her, and a smile of recognition formed on his face. Too late to run, anyway, she thought.
“Olivia! I thought that was you.”
“Porter,” Olivia said almost grimly, and nodded.
“So...uh...you’re...selling...?” Porter’s eyes glanced around the room at the various sex toys, his eyes widening in surprise.
Oh, God. This was not good. Her first instinct was to lie. She had amnesia. Her body had been taken over by aliens. She was not somehow Liv Tanaka, sex toy goddess. But staring at Porter’s sharp brown eyes, his defined chin, she knew he would not buy any of that. He was friends with Paul, and Paul knew she did this for a living. She couldn’t even say she was filling in for a friend.
“That’s right,” Olivia said, as brightly as she could muster. No sense in acting ashamed now. She was holding a giant vibrator.
“That sounds like fun.” Porter looked down at her outfit, his gaze roaming up her body appreciatively. “Wow, Olivia, I have to say...you look...”
Liv felt her face burn. The last time Porter had seen her, it was at a family picnic at her parents’ house the past summer. She’d worn her face bare, her jet-black hair in a hasty ponytail, with jeans and Converse sneakers. Her mom didn’t even approve of lipstick, so makeup was out of the question. Both parents had started going to a new, more conservative protestant church in the last ten years, so premarital sex and makeup were sinful, in her mom’s opinion, as were flirting with boys, French-kissing, dancing, and drinking. Anything constituting a life.
If Porter told her parents what she was wearing, and in a roomful of men, most of whom were single...
“You look...amazing,” he finally finished, nodding. “I mean...wow.” His glance moved to the table behind her, filled with every kind of X-rated toy you could imagine: anal beads, cock rings, lube in a rainbow of flavors, and, of course, giant dildos and vibrators ranging from mini-size to, well...supersize—all realistically
