Bad Boy

The sick part was, when he teased her it made her hotter for him. Most of the men Tracie’s age were only too happy to grab her and stuff their thing inside her. Phil was the first man she’d known who knew how to hold off until she was almost ready to beg for it. She shivered just a little, but he was close enough to feel it. “I know you like me,” he whispered. “You can’t help it, can you?”

“No,” she murmured, and he lifted her at the hips and pulled off her jeans as if she were no heavier than an infant. He ran his tongue from her knees all the way up to her breasts.

“So pink and so pretty,” he said, and she felt a little thrill run from the back of her neck directly to her groin. He hooked his thumb under the elastic. “These always remind me of those frilly paper things that cupcakes come in.” He kissed her again. “Come to me, my little cupcake.” For an insane moment, Tracie thought about the farm cakes she craved, but when Phil moved his thumb elsewhere, she was right back to business.

And business was good.

Tracie’s eyelids fluttered open. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep again, but the sex had been so good, and being held by Phil and slipping off to sleep after a really satisfying orgasm had been too hard to resist. Not a bad way to spend Mother’s Day, or any day, for that matter.

She remembered Jon again. She sat up and began to gather her clothes. Phil groaned, rolled over, and grabbed her back. He put the side of his face in the crook of her neck so that his mouth was just at her ear. “If you didn’t have to leave,” he whispered in her ear as he caressed her arm, “I’d be tempted to start kissing you right here.” He was quiet while he kissed the nape of her neck, then her shoulder. His breathing was getting heavier. “I’d move my way down to your nipples and then I’d …”

Tracie felt Phil’s erection against her leg. “Still playing hard to get?” Tracie asked.

“Hard, anyway. And you know why? Because of you, baby.”

Tracie reached down to the inside of Phil’s leg. “Oh, yes,” she cooed. She took one hand and began to kiss his fingers. But then she stopped. “What is this?” She held up his hand. They both looked at it. A phone number was scrawled in blue pen across his palm.

“Uh.” There was a tiny pause, the shortness of which only an experienced girlfriend could interpret. Was it the pause to remember or the pause to make up a plausible lie? “One of the guys’ new phone numbers. From the band,” Phil said.

“An 807 exchange? You’re telling me this is a Gland’s phone number?” she asked. “Frank’s? Jeff’s? I don’t think so. Since when did they move to Centralia?” She looked at Phil, hoping to see truth in his eyes.

“Jeff moved awhile ago,” he said, pulling away from her. He swung his long legs over the side of the mattress, sat up, and reached over to the night table for a cigarette. “I have to call him about rehearsal tomorrow,” he told her.

“Whose number is it, Phil?” Tracie asked. She picked up the phone, prepared to dial.

“Jeff’s,” he said, his back still to her. He lit a match, sucked in a deep lungful of smoke.

She hated him right then. She wasn’t stupid, after all. It was probably the phone number of that skinny little girl from Friday night. She should have known! She began to dial. “Phil, if I dial this number and I don’t get Jeff, I’m going to cut off your hand, so your penis never has a friend again.”

“Go ahead, baby,” Phil said calmly as he did a French inhale. “Of course, you’ll look like a psycho bitch and I’ll look like an asshole, but hey, I don’t mind.”

Tracie paused. Was he being casual or just acting as if he was? She couldn’t tell. And did she really want to know? Phil took a deep puff, then exhaled. “I mean, I can’t help it if Jeff’s old lady answers the phone and gets mad. She hates him to get calls there. Especially from women. And so late.”

“Late? It’s only ten-thirty.” God! She’d be late for Jon!

“Why don’t you stop fussing and come here and get what you really want?” Phil asked her. Sometimes she hated him. He put his cigarette down and opened his arms again to her.

“I miss you already and you’re not even gone,” he said, and rolled on top of her and kissed her again. His long body wasn’t heavy enough to really pin her against the bed, but she liked the sensation of almost being pinned. His mouth tasted sharply of tobacco, but his tongue was so warm and alive. It searched hers like a friendly little vole looking for a home. Tracie dropped the phone and reached for the water bottle she kept on her bedside table.

“I’d like some of that, too,” Phil said, and started to get up on his elbows.

“It’s all yours,” Tracie replied, and doused him with it. Just in case he was a liar. He yelped, but she paid no attention. She had no time to find out—and maybe she didn’t want to know. She’d be hellishly late for Jon. She pulled on her clothes, slipped into her shoes, and crossed the floor. “I’m outta here,” she called from the door, laughing. Her last look at Phil was of him untangling the wet gray sheet from his lanky body.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_47a028c9-4d5b-5583-be6d-00f27a9b1124)

Jon’s office was impressive in size and location, occupying the corner of a building on the low-rise Micro/Con campus, with a view of the topiary garden. But instead of the usual corporate chairs and sofa he had been offered, Jon had used his decorating budget to buy vintage beanbag chairs upholstered in leatherlike Naugahyde. A lot of Naugas must have died, ’cause there were at least half a dozen shapeless mounds of chairs spread around the room. In the center of them, there was a coffee table actually made of coffee beans suspended in a clear acrylic. Jon particularly liked the coffee table. Narrow shelves lined one wall—not for books, or even software CDs, but for the vast collection of action figures he had acquired for work (he had a huge annual budget for them). They shared space with his numerous Pez dispensers (his own private collection). Jon had more than four hundred, including the rare Betsy Ross, the only Pez dispenser ever created based on a real person.

He more than liked the nonsense of his office. There was a method to his madness. It put people at ease, and encouraged playfulness, hence creativity. But there was no nonsense on his desk. Only three photographs were set at the corner of the shining (renewable) teak surface: a picture of his mother, a picture of Tracie and him at college graduation, and a picture of a much younger Jon standing with his mom next to his father, just after they’d planted the wisteria around the doorway of their house and just before Chuck had split.

Now he pulled out the Polaroid his mother had taken earlier in the day and inserted it into the corner of that frame. He stared at the picture: Jon Delano, twenty-eight years old, embracing his mother, and for a moment, it changed before his eyes. It turned black and white and suddenly there was no mature blooming wisteria nor a mature Jon. Instead, a very young Jon and his young mom were embracing while Mr. Delano walked past them, struggling with two suitcases. Jon blinked and the actual Polaroid returned. Spooked, he got up and walked away from the desk.

Well, he was really tired. Not to mention stuffed. Thank God Toni, his last stepmom but one, had canceled at the last minute, or his stomach would probably have burst. He looked out the window to the lit garden and the darkness beyond. It was almost 10:00 P.M., but that didn’t stop people from working on Sunday at Micro/Con. All the staff prided themselves on the incredibly long hours they put in. Sunday was just another workday, and even now the parking lot was almost half-full. Jon patted his belly and sank into a beanbag, wiggling his butt until it assumed the position. There was something about Mother’s Day that depressed him, and it wasn’t merely surveying the trail of human wreckage his father had left behind.

Jon had grown up listening to the women’s complaints. It wasn’t only his father’s various wives, though; it was also the women who gathered for coffee at his mother’s house. Other women had even worse stories about their exes, stories that he’d listened to, hiding behind the couch, when he was seven, nine, and fourteen. His mother’s friends seemed incapable of ditching their husbands or finding ones who treated them well. Why’d they stay? he still wondered. He thought of Barbara and her baking. After the biscuits had come the inevitable question: “Hear from your father?” He thought of Janet’s skinny shoulders when she turned her back on him, pretending to arrange the flowers, and asked, “Have you heard from your father?”

It wasn’t Mother’s Day, Jon decided. Not for him. For him, it had been Heard from Your Father Day and Have You Got Anyone Special Day. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and, with his right hand, removed his glasses so that he could massage the reddened flesh under the nosepiece. Jon had almost two hours before his customary midnight date with Tracie and, although he had piles and piles of work to do, if he just kept his eyes closed and napped for just a minute, ten minutes at the most …

Jon was eleven and sitting in a leatherette booth across from his father. A plate of untouched eggs, their whites runny, the yolk congealing, sat undisturbed in front of him, while his father was busy tearing pieces of the running egg albumen with a side of his fork, then pushing the nasty stuff onto a burned corner of toast and popping it into his mouth. Jon was aware that he was asleep, yet the man in front of him was so real, so perfectly reconstructed in his dream, that it was impossible to believe the guy was not there. Jon could have counted each bristle of his father’s five o’clock shadow. Chuck finished the last bit of egg, wiped the plate with some of Jon’s toast, and began to chew it up. He leaned forward. “Just remember this, son,” he said. “There’s not a woman in the world who won’t buy a lie she wants to believe.”

Jon jerked his eyes open. He was losing it. Weeks of endless toil on the Cliffhanger project and a lousy Friday and Saturday night, topped off by this Sunday, bloody Sunday had given him the willies. He looked at his watch: 10:31. If he could just get out of the beanbag chair, he could get in at least a solid hour of work before meeting Tracie and reviewing what a lousy weekend they’d both had. Jon might have a surfeit of mothers to entertain, but on this weekend, he was careful to be extra attentive to Tracie. Without a mother, the day hit her hard. Not to mention her holiday article. God! He’d forgotten the article! She had E-mailed the draft to him and it was really good, but you never knew what it would look like when it was published in the Times. He’d been so busy today, he hadn’t had a chance to get the paper or even to look at a copy. He’d better do it on his way over to Java, The Hut.

Actually, work was the only part of his life he had under control. Unlike Tracie, he had a successful career, liked and respected his boss, a wild woman who’d been in on the start-up of UniKorn. Bella was great, his staff was great, his job was great, and the money was great. Now he’d been given control of the Parsifal project, and if he made it happen, well, the sky was the limit. And he could make it happen. Parsifal was the code name for the project Jon had fought for since he’d joined Micro/Con almost six years ago. He was trying to bring together convergent wireless technology for a laptop/TV/phone product so advanced, he wasn’t allowed to let his right department know what his left department was doing. It would make him or break him, and it was certainly taking up every minute of his time. But if Parsifal worked, no one would ever buy a TV or phone from Panasonic again.

It was just that in the last three or four years, there’d been no time for a social life, and when there was … well, it was safe to say it was very definitely less than great. He thought again of his bad Friday night, followed by a worse Saturday evening, and winced. Maybe his reasoning was faulty. He rationalized his lousy social life because of his demanding career. But perhaps one of the reasons he worked all the time was because it was easier than going out. When he tried, as he had this weekend, look what happened.

Jon groaned aloud and sank deeper into the chair—such as it was. The beanbag cupped him at just the right tilt. He didn’t feel like thinking anymore, nor did he want to sign on and see how many urgent E-mails he’d gotten in the last twenty-four hours while he bombed out with women and took care of his mothers—both step and natural. There would be mounds of work. Jon took a deep sigh. Every one of his employees thought that their problems were the most difficult and impossible for them to solve without either his help or his praise. He sighed again. He loved his work and he’d do the E-mail now, for half an hour. One less thing to do tomorrow morning. But he’d be sure to leave by eleven-thirty. Seeing Tracie was the high point of his whole week.

Chapter 6 (#ulink_333ae30e-ee3e-5d9c-bc48-a7120e87106c)

Java, The Hut was just one of the 647 coffee shops in Seattle, but to Jon it seemed different from all the others. It was suffused with memories of the hundreds of Sunday-night “breakfasts” that he and Tracie had shared, fifty-one weeks a year for seven years. From the time they met in French class and crammed together until today, the two of them had bitched, studied, laughed, chewed each other out, and even cried (he briefly only once, she at great length more than a dozen times) over mochaccino at Java, The Hut. Jon sat there now, finished with all work and all mothers for the time being. He waited for Tracie to show up.

He had the Seattle Times spread in front of him and was shaking his head as he read the hatchet job that Marcus had made of Tracie’s article. “You look like my Lab when ’e’s got water in ’is ears,” Molly, their usual waitress, said to Jon. Molly was a tall, slender blonde in her early thirties. A transplanted East Ender from London, she’d worked at the cafe since Jon and Tracie had begun coming there. Word was that she had been a rock bitch, one of those “successful groupies” who actually toured and slept with two important rock idols. Molly never spoke about it but Jon had heard she’d been with someone from INXS. Tracie claimed that after it Molly had made someone from Limp Bizkit hard. Whoever it was, it appeared that Molly had been dumped or had landed in Seattle and liked the town.

Rumors had run rampant that there might be a room or even a whole wing dedicated to Molly in the Experience Music Project, and that her first diaphragm was among the museum’s eighty thousand rock artifacts. Jon had never believed any of it, and the opening of the museum last June had proved the rumors false, but even if they had been true, it wouldn’t have changed Jon’s feelings for Molly. She was acerbic, witty, and warm—at least to him. If she wasn’t exactly a friend, she was a long-standing acquaintance and every time he rode by the blowsy, shimmering EMP, twenty-one thousand metallic shingles and the flapping, bright colors made him think of Molly.

“On your own, then, luv?” she asked now, though she knew the answer. Jonathan still shook his head as she indicated the empty seat with a jerk of her head. “The usual, then? Adam and Eve on a raft? Or are you going to wait for Little-Miss-Sorry-I’m-Late?” Molly asked sarcastically.

“I’ll wait,” Jonathan replied.

“Loyal, just like my Lab.” Molly left the table briefly, then returned with his favorite drink. “One mochaccino light while she takes you for granted.”

Jon looked up at her. “You really don’t like Tracie, do you?”

“Bingo! What insight. That must be why Micro/Con pays you the big bucks.”

“But why?” Jon asked innocently. “She’s so nice.”

“She’s so stupid. Thick as two short planks,” Molly said matter-of-factly as she placed his coffee in front of him, then straightened the place mat and silverware opposite.

“Hey! She is not,” Jonathan answered defensively. “In college, she had a four point oh in everything—except maybe calculus. She graduated with honors.”

“Oh. Summa cum stupid,” Molly said as she turned around, only to see Tracie looking in through the window advertising the Mother’s Day special. “I’ll leave you to it.”

A glowing Tracie entered and hurried toward Jonathan. Of course all the other guys’ eyes followed her, but she acted oblivious to that. Jon sometimes wondered whether or not she knew the effect she had on men. He quickly crumpled the newspaper and tried to hide it, pulling out the latest Little Nickel. He smiled when she sat opposite him in the booth.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Nice try, but I already saw the butcher job. Marcus always cuts my best parts. Could my editor be Edward Scissorhands’ evil twin brother?” Tracie shrugged out of her coat, then picked up the menu. He knew her well enough to know she was upset, but also not to push it now. “I’m starving,” she said, then looked at him as if for the first time. “God, you look beat!”

Jon smiled and shrugged. “Today was my annual Mother’s Day Olympics.”