Thrill Me

“…me wrong here, Beck, your books are great, you know they’re great and you know I love them. But I just feel…”

He pictured her squinting off to one side, gesturing in swooping circles the way she always did, as if she were beckoning the words out of her mouth. “Yes?”

“I just feel like we’re sitting on something that could get bigger, you know?”

“Bigger.” He let the word drop, then waited. Old sales technique his father taught him; let the silence sit and your opponent will fill it with what you need to know.

“Sharon and I think you should try more emotion in your stories, more warmth, add a girlfriend for Mack, soften him up a little. Believe me, you’ll double your readership. Women will buy you in droves. Right now you’re selling to men. Women are a huge market in book sales. Huge. This is the next big step in your career.”

Beck leaned back in the chair he’d brought with him from his condo on East 97th Street, spanned his temples with his thumb and middle finger and squeezed to try and relieve the ache. “Let me get this straight. You want me to take my hero, Mack, who has seen more of the baseness of human nature than anyone alive, and—”

“Soften him up. Give him more heart. Give him more sensitivity. Give him…”

“A puppy?”

He heard a sharp thwack, and knew Alex had slammed her palm on the desk, a sure sign his complete joke of an idea excited her. “Yes! Perfect! A puppy. Small one, the kind women love to stop and pat in the street. He could meet his—”

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Alex.” Next she’d want Beck’s ruthless detective spending afternoons shopping for shoes. “Mack is a man. No, he’s more than that, he’s the man.”

“So make him the man with the woman.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a loner, he’s a tough guy. It’s not him.”

“Give him a woman strong enough to change him.”

“Strong enough to—” Beck reached for his bottle of Evian water and found his fingers trying to strangle it. Change him? Change the man Beck had lived with in his imagination for seven years, through more harrowing adventures, more near-fatal experiences, more death-defying risks than any mere mortal could stand? The man who’d taken down serial killers, drug lords, crime bosses, international art thieves, muggers, murderers and everything between? Change him? With a woman? “I thought women knew never to get involved with a man hoping to change him.”

“She can change him without trying. Simply by being who she is and affecting him that way. Having him become a better person because of loving her.”

“The only effect I want any woman to have on Mack is a raging hard-on. I don’t write romance novels.”

Alex made the sound of exasperation New Yorkers excelled at, a cross between a cough and a raspberry. “I’m not asking you to write a romance novel. Just make him more human.”

Beck exhaled his annoyance. The very quality that made Alex Barkhauser an incredibly effective agent on his behalf, also made her a formidable opponent. Namely, she was a pit bull. “I’m sorry, I can’t see Mack—”

“Here’s an example.” Pages rustled over the line. “The sex scene you have here with whatsername.”

“Tamara.”

“Tamara.” Alex’s voice turned scornful. “Total stripper name. Call her Susie or something.”

“Susie? Susie wears pigtails and scuffed sandals, not black lingerie. And women named Susie don’t masturbate.”

“Well no woman masturbates like this.”

“Like what?” The defensive edge in his voice disgusted him.

“Like a male fantasy from a porn movie.”

Beck’s mouth opened to protest. Then closed. Because it had nothing to say. That’s exactly what had inspired the scene. A movie he’d snuck in to see as a teenager and had never forgotten.

“You can’t tell me your girlfriends do it like that when they’re alone. Wearing this entire black lace getup, do you have any idea how itchy and uncomfortable that stuff is? Plus, you have to be five-eleven, one hundred and ten pounds but oh, yes, somehow with enormous boobs, to look good in it. And the ten-inch dildo? Please.”

“Alex. Can we move on to—”

“Make it more real, Beck. That’s what I’m saying. The book rocks otherwise. But make Mack’s relationship with women, his attention to women, his sex with women, more real. Less like a teenage boy’s wet dream. Let’s start there and see where it takes us, okay?”

“Where it takes us? To five percent sell-through, that’s where it takes us. For every female reader we gain, we’ll lose two men. I guarantee it.”

“No. Your stories are great, Beck, this story is great, that won’t change. You’re not going to lose men over a love interest for Mack. Most men have actually been in love, you know.”

“But this is fantasy. They read my books to escape all that.”

“To escape being in love?”

Beck closed his eyes. “That came out wrong.”

Or maybe not. Weren’t most men wanting to escape now and then from the female-directed rules of “relationship” into something nice and tidy like good guys blowing up bad guys?

Relationships had to be examined and worked on in exhaustive detail. Men had to be told they weren’t doing this, that or the other to female satisfaction. And always the question, what happened to the wonderful romantic men they used to be?

The wonderful romantic men they used to be disappeared about the same time the adoring sweet women they were dating became critical, judgmental shrews.

“Just try it, Beck. Try it. Soften up the sex scenes. Especially make Tamara’s self-pleasuring scene more real. Try that one first. And when Mack joins her, make him feel it in his heart as well as his dick.”

“Alex—” Beck sighed. It was hopeless. When your editor and agent were against you, things were tough. Add in the members of the marketing department and the ever-dreaded focus groups, and you might as well bend over and take it.

If he had a dime for every person envious of a writer’s so-called complete freedom in his work…

Well, if he did, he’d be rich enough to keep Mack’s mind on his dick during a sex scene, where it belonged.

“Okay.” He ran his hand over his aching head and jaw. “Just on the one scene with Tamara. See how it feels. How it reads.”

“Wonderful. You’re fabulous. It’s going to be so much better, you’ll be amazed, I promise.”

“Right.” He shook his head and hung up the phone harder than he needed to. Got to his feet and strode over to the window, pulling back the sheer curtains to gaze out at Madison Avenue.

Damn it to hell. He might have known this would hit eventually. This or something like it. He didn’t know a single writer who hadn’t come up against a brick wall at some point in his or her career. And Beck’s journey so far had been relatively easy. Alex had picked him up when he was still unpublished, working as an editor, still learning the craft in his own writing and from that of his authors. She’d seen enough raw talent to judge him a good commercial risk.

After extensive revisions, his first book had sold, then his second and his third. Mackenzie “Mack” Adams had starred in six books in the past six years, and for a while it seemed Beck’s star would never stop rising. Three years ago he’d quit his job to write full-time. Then the flattening sales, the apparent loss of reader interest.

And now back to extensive revisions. And the girlification of a true man’s man.

Worse, to rewrite the scene the way Alex et al wanted him to, Beck was going to have to find a woman who would be willing to describe her masturbation practices for him.