Happily Ever After: A Novel (7 page)

I ended up with several chapters about a superhot girl named Sally who fucks the brains out of a loser named Kurt and then dumps his ass because he’s a jerk who just can’t get the OTK right. Afterward, I felt as good as if I’d had every orgasm myself, so I kept right on going.

I wallowed in the language. I used tongues and teeth and throbbing cocks and masturbation while on public transportation. I used leather whips and handcuffs and nipple clips. There was spanking and bondage and domination. Everything was hot and wet and pulsing with desire. I bought the Kama Sutra and studied the pictures over my morning coffee. I used wine and molten chocolate cake to bribe sexual confessions from friends and acquaintances while I took detailed notes. I never would have guessed how many seemingly normal people wanted to have sex in the elevator of a skyscraper.

Less than a month later, I dropped a fully formed manuscript into Liz’s e-mail box. She called me the very next day.

“God, Sadie,” she said. “This made me so horny I had to call my husband and have him go down on me over the phone.”

Fuck Jane Austen. K. T. Briggs had arrived.

Chapter 11

A
s we drive away from the hospital, I pepper Cousin Harry with questions.

“Does any of this look familiar?”

“No.”

“You said this was about love. Do you remember why?”

“No.”

“Are you married?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“A boyfriend?”

He shrugs.

“So what
is
the last thing you remember?”

“A bar. A dark restaurant. Maybe sushi?”

“Are you asking or telling?”

He glares at me. I ease up.

“I’m going to take you to my house,” I say. “I’m not sure what else to do with you.”

“The cup holders are very nice,” he says. “Perhaps if you cleaned her, she wouldn’t make that noise every time you go around a corner.”

“What noise?”

“Never mind. I’m sincerely grateful for your help. I’m sure I’ll feel much better very soon.”

I don’t tell him, but I suspect I’ll have him identified via the Internet way before that. Good-looking, custom-suit-wearing, chauffeur-driven guys are not a dime a dozen, you know, even in the tristate area. Somebody out there must be looking for him.

I pull the minivan into the garage at 32 Elm Road and shut the door before I click the lock release and allow my new houseguest to climb out. The lots here in Billsford are huge, but I know people use binoculars to spy on their neighbors. Yes, it’s twisted, but people with a lot of money are often bored out of their minds, and spying gives them purpose. Neighborhood watch, they say. Just keeping the ’hood safe from . . . what exactly? Bears? Trolls? People with less than seven-figure incomes?

Cousin Harry does not fit in my house. It’s a girls’ house, populated these last five years entirely by females. It’s light and airy, and there is no shortage of flowery furniture and drapes. In the wine refrigerator, we have Chardonnay, rosé, and a selection of decent Pinot Noirs. But we never have beer. If you want beer, you better bring your own. We put our shoes away. Our dirty laundry goes in the hamper. We never slobber toothpaste all over the sink, and our toilet seat stays permanently in the down position.

Harry frowns, like he can’t quite fathom my house as an actual dwelling.

“I think I live somewhere up high,” he says, looking around. “On the top floor maybe? A penthouse?”

This does not exactly come as a shock. In the kitchen, I gesture for Harry to take a seat at the table. Where is Greta? But more important, what the hell am I going to tell her when she turns up?

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“I feel like oysters and champagne,” he says. I laugh. He doesn’t. I don’t think he’s kidding. I stop laughing.

“How about some leftover macaroni and cheese?” I ask.

“To eat?”

You’d think rescuing a guy from canned peas and Jell-O would garner a little gratitude, but apparently not.

“My German housekeeper made it,” I say. “It’s the best.”

Harry must be on the verge of starvation, because he agrees to try it. Three bites in and there’s a moan of pleasure. Greta’s mac and cheese will do that to you. Before I advertised for Jason, I ate a lot of it.

While he swoons over his plate, I wonder how insane it would be to leave a total stranger alone in my house while I run off and get Allison from school. But Harry does not seem threatening. I feel as if I know him, and have known him, even though that’s not possible. Plus he’s in a fat- and carb-induced coma of sorts. How much trouble can he get into?

“I have to pick up my daughter from school,” I say. “When I come back, we’ll get busy on the computer and figure out who you are, okay?”

It takes him a second to come to, but he’s clearly rejuvenated by the Greta calorie bomb. There’s even a bit of pink in his cheeks.

“Okay,” he says. “How do we do this picking up your daughter thing?”

I laugh. I can’t help it. My cousin Harry was clearly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. As I laugh, Harry first smiles and then joins me. It’s a wonderful sound, bottomless and full, and I experience it in my thighs as a quivery, tense sensation that overwhelms the circuits in my brain.

Lust. It’s a feeling so unfamiliar it renders me momentarily speechless.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” I say, standing up and fanning my face with a bit of German-language newspaper. “Suddenly hot.”

How dreadfully embarrassing.

“Well, I did notice it’s unusually warm out,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “Practically steamy.” I continue to fan my face. “Why don’t you get cleaned up while I pick up Allison? There’s a shower upstairs, two doors down on the left, fresh towels under the sink. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

But somehow I’ve blown it, because from the way Harry eyes me, much has been revealed. I’m an open book. Or better yet, a tasty morsel. I don’t believe I have ever been looked upon in this fashion.

“A shower sounds great,” he says slowly, “but I think I have the answer to at least one of your questions.”

“My questions?” My brain sizzles, possibly requiring measurement in Kelvin. If I were a cartoon character, steam would vent from my ears.

“In the car,” Cousin Harry says, “you asked if I had a wife, a girlfriend, or a boyfriend.”

He smiles. It’s predatory and sarcastic, as if he is already laughing at what he is about to do.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t have a boyfriend,” he says, “because what I really want to do right now is hike that skirt up over your hips, bend you over this table, and fuck you until you beg me to stop.”

My cheeks flare bright red. My stomach does a gold medal backflip off the high dive. Who talks like this? His eyes bore into me as he waits for an up or down vote. But all I can think is this guy has tried this approach before and met with success. He does not seem the type to attempt a failed line twice.

“It’s a skort!” I blurt.

That takes a bit of the puff out of his sails. “A what?”

“A skort,” I repeat. “Shorts and a skirt together. As one. So, you know, you can ride a bike or do cartwheels and not flash innocent bystanders.” And hey, what about all that love business in the hospital? What happened to that?

“Show me,” he says.

“What?”

“The skirt thing. The two-in-one.”

It’s a sincere request. He’s never heard the word
skort
before. And why would he have? Skorts have no place in his penthouse, Bentley-limousine, thousand-dollar-haircut life. He waits.

This is all my fault. I felt lust and desire, and now I’m going to have to pull up my skort as punishment. I roll the hem of the awful khaki garment just enough to reveal the black cycling-style shorts beneath.

“A modern-day chastity belt,” I mutter, eyes averted, as he studies the setup.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he says with a curious smile. “You’re . . . soft.”

He stares at my midsection as he says this, and so help me God, I think seriously about smashing him over the head with the Pyrex of macaroni and cheese. Soft? Why do good-looking people think they can act like assholes and get away with it? Well, mostly because they can.

“I don’t care if I’m
unique
in your experience,” I say. “I’m still not going to let you pull down my skort.”

He shrugs. “I had to try,” he says.

“Go and get cleaned up,” I say.

And with that last directive, I grab my keys and flee the house, the flames that just consumed my last shred of dignity nipping at my heels.

Chapter 12

I
drive the route to Holt Hall so often, I can practically do it with my eyes closed. Which is a good thing, because right now my concentration is completely shot to shit. I’m sweating, and the skort, usually the pinnacle of comfort if not glamour, feels itchy and constricting.

I have a number of friends, but I don’t run with a mommy posse or claim a BFF as some around Billsford do. When I’m faced with a crisis, I usually call Roger. This is partly reflex and partly laziness. Roger knows my backstory. He doesn’t require lengthy explanations for my behavior.

He answers on the third ring.

“Oh God,” he says, panting. “I was trying to recite the words to ‘Instant Karma’ while in a headstand. It made me dizzy.”

“Hi, Roger,” I say. “Busy?”

“No.” Of course he’s not. Roger is never actually busy.

I explain briefly about Cousin Harry. I leave out the part about him wanting to fuck me on the table. I don’t see how sharing that detail will be helpful. There is a long pause, during which I can hear Roger pursing his lips.

“What,” he says after a moment, “is
wrong
with you, Sadie?”

A lot of things. Many things. But I don’t think that is what Roger is asking.

“You’re the one who gave me that book about feeling good by helping people in need,” I shoot back.

“Nowhere in that book did it say take in strangers suffering from mental illness.”

He’s right. The book was definitely more soup kitchen/animal rescue type stuff. But isn’t the idea the important part?

“Where’s Allison?” he asks.

“I’m picking her up now.”

“You’re forbidden to take her home while that madman is in the house.”

We stop arguing long enough to laugh at the idea of Roger forbidding me to do anything and then return to the subject at hand.

“He’s not crazy,” I say. “He’s nice.”

True, he eyed me like a juicy steak and said things that were inappropriate, but somehow I just know he’s harmless. I’d bet my life on it.

“Would you have taken him home if he were ugly?” Roger asks. “If he had cold sores or a runny nose?”

“That’s gross, Roger.”

“Answer the question.”

I don’t want to answer because doing so will solidify my overall shallowness as a human being.

“I refuse,” I say.

“Which means you would have left an ugly guy in the hospital. Hell, you would have left an ugly guy to have a meltdown in Target!”

I shrug. Roger can’t see me.

“Whatever, honey,” he says. “I think you’re nuts, but who am I to say that what you’re doing is wrong? Just make sure he’s gone by bedtime.”

I agree to his terms even if I’m not convinced I’m going to abide by them.

The moms gather in the tree-lined school quad, clucking like hens, waiting for the children to be released. I linger at the edge of the group, hoping I can avoid any conversations that end with invites to play tennis or have lunch at the club or do a 6:00 
A.M.
Bikram yoga class at the new place in town. “Hot yoga is so great for your pores!”

But sadly I seem to have forgotten my invisibility cloak at home. Belinda, my next-door neighbor, makes a beeline toward me. Her carefully maintained honey highlights are tied up in a neat ponytail. She wears expensive workout clothes that have yet to encounter a drop of sweat and a tight smile full of professionally bleached teeth. She is the kind of woman to whom you want to offer a sandwich. A human body requires more than four hundred calories a day to survive. Hell, I can knock back four hundred calories with one quick trip to Starbucks, but I’m just that kind of girl, I guess.

Belinda is on one end of the divorce continuum. Her mission in life is to replace her lost husband. She trolls Billsford for single men with the commitment of a Long Island bayman. I, who seek sex with no strings attached on Craigslist, occupy the other end. Conversation can be difficult.

“
Who
was the man in your minivan this afternoon?” Belinda demands with no preamble.

I experience a wave of queasiness. Belinda suffers from competitive man hunting. If she saw Cousin Harry, I’m sunk. No matter what I say, she will translate it to mean I have a gorgeous young lover, and within minutes the whole town will know.

“What?” I say. Playing dumb is always a great plan. Sometimes it even works.

“The. Hot. Man,” she says, her face contorted in an unattractive way.

“There’s no hot man,” I say.

“Darling,” she says, draping a skinny arm across my shoulders. “Are you suffering from memory loss?”

An icy finger of panic pokes me in the gut. I might be. There’s half a chapter I have no memory of writing and a character I have no memory of creating.

“Well?” Belinda pushes.

“What?”

“The guy!” she shrieks. Several well-coiffed mom heads turn in our direction. I offer up a wan smile. Nothing strange happening over here. Nope.

“Sadie has a hot guy,” Belinda announces. “And I mean, hot. Very hot. And young.”

“You were using the binoculars, weren’t you?” I ask.

Belinda gets out of answering as the moms swoop in. They come like zombies to brains, drawn by the words
hot, young,
and
guy
.

Where are the kids? They need to come out right now. They need to save me from the zombies.

“So?” Belinda says. I feel the eyes on me. They wait. They move closer. I start to hyperventilate.

“He’s a second cousin once removed,” I say finally. “He’s visiting.”

I stop before I give up too much of my story line. I don’t want to be locked into details that don’t work later on.

“That’s it?” Belinda says.

“Sorry,” I say. Oh please, release the children. As an alternative, a giant purple rhino charging through the quad would be acceptable.

“You need to put that guy in one of your books,” Belinda sniffs. “He’s devastating. That face. Wow.”

Jesus, what sort of binoculars is she using these days? Military grade? But there is something in what she says that fills me with immediate dread, a close relation of panic but not exactly the same. I swallow hard. A sheen of sweat blooms on my forehead. What is it? What am I missing?

“So no details about your, ah, second cousin then?” Belinda asks with a wink.

“There aren’t any,” I say.

“Oh well, ladies,” she says to the other moms, “I guess we’ll have to wait for the book to get the dirty details.”

I’m so terrified of the Billsford villagers storming my house with pitchforks and ostracizing my daughter for time infinitum that I still bang out one romance by Sadie Fuller every year to hide behind. It’s what the neighbors think I do. But the Sadie Fuller romances are not what they once were. They’re formulaic now, a chore. It’s as clear as Lake Tahoe that my heart is elsewhere. Even my fans have begun to grumble. Soon K. T. Briggs and Sadie Fuller are going to have a smackdown, and I’m worried about how that will turn out.

“Not too dirty,” I say. My voice sounds funny. I squeeze my hands into fists and push them into my thighs. Relax, goddamn it.

The moms drift away with an air of disappointment. No brains today. But Belinda stays put. She’s like chewing gun in my hair.

“So,” she says. “Do you want to do yoga with me tomorrow morning?”

The basis of my relationship with Belinda is purely geographical, as in she is my closest neighbor and obviously spies on me unapologetically. The only reason she doesn’t know about Jason is that she’s with her personal trainer doing squats on Friday mornings at 11:30. I understand Belinda is difficult to like and lonely, but I still don’t want to do yoga with her.

“No,” I say. “I work in the morning.”

“Coffee?”

“I work all day, remember?”

“Early dinner?”

“I can’t, Belinda,” I say. “Oh look, here come the kids!”

Allison spills out of her fifth-grade classroom. She’s surrounded as always by a gaggle of tall, skinny girls who look as if a strong breeze could blow them clean away. They wear clothes worse than anything I can conjure in my nightmares. There’s a dress code at Holt, but they manage to work around it with tight, sparkly T-shirts, ridiculously short shorts, and sequined shoes. Some of them already wear makeup. Others have clearly mastered the porno pout. They have no idea what they are doing or why, but they feel its power. My heart aches every time I see them. Why rush into the adult mating game? There’s a lifetime for it later. Besides, after a while, it’s just chains wrapped around your ankles.

The girls chatter like squirrels, everyone speaking at once and no one listening. It’s good practice for being a mother. You can talk all you want but it’s very likely no one will hear you.

“Mommy,” my not-so-little girl whispers as I hug her. I’m already living on borrowed time. Kissing in public has been a big no-go for at least a year and a half now.

“How was your day, honey?” We walk together, practically shoulder to shoulder. What is Greta putting in her meat loaf, Miracle-Gro? Just yesterday Allison was clinging to my knees at preschool.

“Good,” Allison says. “We did science experiments and Rory got blue food coloring all over her face.”

It pleases me to no end that I pay forty-five thousand dollars a year for my daughter to turn things blue with food coloring. As we head for home, I mull over the best way to present Cousin Harry the houseguest to Allison.

“So I have a friend over,” I say as I drive. “You’ll get to meet him when we get home.”

But Allison doesn’t hear me. She’s plugged into her iPod. I worry about the next generation. How can you possibly have an original thought if you never experience silence? And when did
silence
become a dirty word? Maybe if I want to be really deviant in my next novel, I’ll have the main character sit in absolute silence and do nothing. What a wild idea. Or maybe I’m just old.

“Allison!” I scream. I toss an empty paper coffee cup over the seat and hit her in the head.

“Mom,” she says, annoyed. “What’s
wrong
with you?”

I’m getting that a lot lately.

“I’m trying to talk to you,” I say calmly. “Can you please remove your headphones?”

“Whatever,” she mutters. I will not survive the teenage years. I will not. I will not.

“I said I have a friend visiting.”

“Oh,” Allison says. “Like he’s hanging out with you?”

I occasionally get tripped up with the new meanings words have acquired over time. When I was young, hanging out did not involve fucking. It was sitting around someone’s cheap apartment or dorm room and smoking cigarettes. I choose to ignore the question to maintain my dignity.

“His name is Harry,” I say. “I think you’ll like him.”

“Is he moving in?”

“No! Of course not. What gives you that idea?”

“Well, Jane’s mother just invited the guy who teaches her golf at the club to move into their house. He’s even sleeping in Jane’s mother’s room!”

That’s because Jane’s mother is a slut.

“Harry’s just an old friend,” I say. “We’ve never played golf together.”

“Okay,” Allison says. She seems done with this conversation. But it reminds me that I completely forgot to tell Greta about Harry before running off to get Allison. There’s a good chance that by the time we get home, Harry will have been arrested for breaking and entering. Maybe I can spring him from a hospital and a prison all in one day? There has to be some sort of special do-gooder badge for that twofer.

“Can I listen to my music now?” Allison asks.

Whatever.