The Sexpert

by JA Huss

  I’m tapping on my tablet again. “New graphics, got it. But I’ll have to take this up to the art department. I don’t know how quick—”

  “I’ll run my idea past Pierce and get his approval. He’ll want to make this first priority, so just go pull the articles and tell them to get started.”

  She does this little wave thing with her hand. It’s one of those you’re-dismissed gestures. So I nod, gather myself by straightening my back and turn to leave.

  “Oh, and Eden?”

  “Yes?” I say, turning back again.

  “#StopTheStealing is stupid. Don’t use it.”

  “Sure,” I say. “OK. I’ll brainstorm with my intern and we’ll come up with something—”

  But she’s already pressing text buttons on her phone. “I have to tell Pierce I have an idea how to save this.”

  I leave because that’s what I’m supposed to do. But… she? She has an idea?

  No. That was my idea.

  I’m totally a team player. I’m not a credit whore at all.

  But…

  She’s stealing my idea.

  CHAPTER FOUR - ANDREW

  “Pierce? Mr. Hawthorne is here.”

  Pierce nods at Myrtle and waves me into his private office. Pierce’s office looks like someone took a French castle, whittled it down to fit into twenty-five hundred square feet, and then plopped it onto the top floor of this glass and steel monolith in the middle of the Colorado mountains. The artist in me wants to believe that he did this as an artistic choice. Like, he was making some conscious commentary on the contrast between the man-made and the nature-made. The glory of the natural world versus the grandeur of human design. The contradicting aesthetic between the new, the old, and the ancient.

  But the realist in me knows that he just likes having nicer, cooler shit than everyone else.

  Myrtle holds the door open for me, and as I pass by her into the space, I’m pretty sure she lets her hand graze my dick when she turns away. She’s kind of the perfect assistant for Pierce, I decide.

  “Derek, I’m telling you, we are going to find out who this bitch is, and we’re going to sue her until she dies!”

  He’s marching around the space, swinging a golf club in circles like it’s a weapon. Which I suppose it could be. I hate golf, so it’s torture for me either way.

  “Pierce, calm down,” comes the voice from the speaker phone. The voice I assume belongs to Derek.

  “Fuck you, Derek!” he yells at Derek and hangs up on him.

  “Who was that?” I ask, plopping down on the Victorian-era loveseat that my friend, the editor-in-chief of Le Man magazine, keeps in his office. (Asshole. You gotta love him.)

  “Goddamn attorney,” he kind of growls, still swinging his golf club around.

  “Mon ami? Could you put that down before you hit something with it? Notably, me?” He throws the club to the ground, flopping down in the throne (literally—a throne) across from the loveseat. “Dude... What’s going on? Why are you so upset?”

  “You heard the bitch on the radio.”

  “I did.”

  “Someone is trying to sabotage me!”

  “Sabotage you? You don’t think that’s a little...looking for the word...hold on...oh, got it...fucking paranoid and insane? Realize that’s four words, but...”

  “I’ll bet it’s one of my enemies,” he says, ignoring my question. Which is fine. It was rhetorical anyway.

  “Your enemies, huh? OK, man. I’ll play. Let’s assume for a second that you’re right, and that this woman on the radio is trying to undermine your grand Sexpert idea by doing it first. What makes you think it’s one of your enemies?”

  There’s a long pause as he looks out the window. Finally, he says, “Our quarterly reports came in today.”

  Doesn’t feel like an answer to my question, but I go with it anyway. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Do you know how much money this magazine lost last quarter?”

  “I very much do not know.”

  “Seventeen percent over the same quarter last year.”

  “Wow, that’s—”

  “Yeah, it’s a fucking lot.”

  “K. That sucks. So?”

  “Man, all of our publications are taking a hit. Everything. All the newspapers. The magazines. Even the goddamn TV stations. Everything. Know why?”

  “Because people don’t read or watch TV anymore?”

  “Give Andrew a gold star!” He leaps to his feet, grabs up the discarded golf club, and once again, I feel like it’s only a matter of moments before I catch a nine-iron to the dome.

  “So...” I start. Cautiously. “And I just want to make sure I’m tracking this... So, you’re assuming that someone who’s got a grudge against your publishing empire—”

  “It’s my dad’s empire. I only run this part of the kingdom.”

  “Fine. So, you think someone who’s got a grudge against your fiefdom is trying to take it down by launching a—from what I heard this morning—lightly viewed vlog about sex that happens to share the same name as an idea you had for some branded online content about sex tips. Is that what I’m hearing you say? Because that is what I’m hearing you say.”

  He points the golf club at me in a way that says, J’accuse! “You got it, man.”

  “OK,” I say. I don’t say the other things that are in my head. Things like, You’ve gone round the bend. Or, Not to be a dick, but it’s possible you’re just kind of bad at running a magazine and looking for reasons to explain why it’s coming undone. Or, What do you want me to do about it? Instead, I just listen.

  He goes running behind his desk. “Have you seen her?”

  “Seen her? No. I didn’t even know about her until you told me to turn the radio on.”

  “C’mere.” He hits some keys on his computer and waves me over. “Check this shit out.”

  I swing around behind his desk, pushing the golf club away from my head as I do. What I see, looking at his monitor, are two of the—and I don’t think this casually—most perfect-looking breasts I have ever seen. They’re not even naked. They’re covered by a V-neck tank-top kind of a thing. But even so. They. Are. Perfect. Holy shit. I don’t know if it’s possible for tits to have a personality, but these do. So I guess it is possible. They seem to say, Hi. We’re friendly but dangerous. And we will fucking end you, dude. I’m momentarily transported somewhere, imagining what the rest of the human who is attached to these breasts might look like.

  And then I hear the voice.

  “Hi, everybody, and welcome to another installment of The Sexpert.”

  There’s this momentary jolt of déjà vu that hits me at hearing the sound coming from the speakers. Which isn’t all that weird. It happens a lot these days, since the little app I invented that has started this avalanche of tech success currently chasing me down the mountain is a thing that alters and masks your voice virtually into one of a couple dozen or so pre-programmed vocal IDs and has—for reasons passing understanding—caught the public’s imagination and gone global.

  There’s the husky setting. Tweety Bird, which actually drives me insane. Darth Vader is a super-popular one (better be for what we had to pay George Lucas to get the rights), and so forth.

  It’s just kind of a silly thing I stumbled on in my bedroom while I was frustrated with the progress I was making on an art project that I have since abandoned. And then wham, bam, thank you, augmented voice reality... Next thing you know, I’m a friggin’ tech billionaire and titan of industry.

  Life’s weird that way.

  The fabulous breasts on Pierce’s monitor are using the Sultry Siren setting.

  “Are you listening?” Pierce’s voice is now the one doing to my thoughts exactly what his first name implies.

  “No. I wasn’t, actually. What?”

  “How do we figure out who this is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t we use your app to ID this fucking harlot?”

  “Harlot? D
ude... No. That’s not what the app does.”

  “Jesus Christ!” He thrusts his hands into his suit pants’ pockets and kicks at the ground. It almost looks like a Gene Kelly imitation.

  “I don’t get it. Can’t you just send a cease-and-desist order to the website? I presume you have Sexpert trademarked.”

  I have only once in my life seen Pierce Chevalier appear shamed or embarrassed. Junior year of college, I slept with a girl he had a crush on. Not my fault. It was at a party, I was drunk, and I didn’t know it was the girl he had been crushing on. She and I wound up dating for almost a year. A year in which I stayed drunk most of the time. Because she was the first in a series of relationships I had with fairly unpleasant and kind of—what’s the word? Oh—mean women over the next several years.

  Pierce never said anything though until it was all over. And then, finally, after we broke up, he admitted to me that he was jealous and had been since that first night we got together.

  I said, “Why? She’s awful.”

  And he said, “I know. For you. But I think she and I were made for each other.”

  I have to give him credit. Guy knows what kind of an asshole he is.

  Anyway, the sheepish, lost-little-boy expression he had when he admitted that to me is one I’ll never forget. It really got to me. It exposed a side of Pierce that he doesn’t show many people. Or maybe any people. And it’s the one that caused me to say, “Hey, I’m sorry. I will never let something like that happen again. For both our sakes.” And I quit drinking and after that started making all my bad relationship decisions stone-cold sober.

  But the point is, that it was the only time I ever saw that fragile, almost weirdly untethered look on his face. Until now, when I make the relatively simple assumption that he put a protection in place for his idea that he thinks will save his magazine.

  “Dude,” I say, slowly.

  “Just don’t. OK? I was going to get to it!”

  Jesus.

  “OK,” I offer up. “So. What’s your plan?”

  “I’ve got Derek, et. al. looking into fast-tracking this trademark thing. I assume that whoever this chick is, she hasn’t yet. I’m hoping.”

  “And?”

  “And we’re going to roll out our own content. Our reach is broader. Our microphone is bigger. And we’re going to drown her out.”

  “But she...”

  “And that’s why I need to know who she is. I need to know who the hell we’re dealing with here. She has to be someone with access to what we’re doing.”

  “You mean... like a spy?”

  “Exactement, mon frère! A spy!” He spins around in a circle as he says it. It’s odd. Pierce is sober too. But to see him now, you wouldn’t know it. “Isn’t there anything you can do to help? You make voice software, for fuck’s sake!”

  I sigh. Long. Hard. And then allow words I know I’ll regret to start slipping out of my mouth. “We are...”

  “What?” he asks. “What? You are what?”

  “We are working on this voice tracker ID thing that...”

  “That what? That you can find out who this is?”

  “Yeah? I mean the reason we’re developing it is...” I take a long pause because Pierce is my brother and always will be, but it may be best if...

  “Is what? What’s it for?”

  “Nothing. Just... I’m happy to help, but again, man, it feels like maybe you’re just having a bad morning.”

  “Oh, I am definitely having a bad fucking morning. But one thing’s got nothing to do with the other.”

  “Really? ’Cause it feels like maybe it does.”

  “Can you help me find out who this person is or can’t you?” He points over at his computer screen.

  I sigh the sigh of a friend. A friend who swore a private oath to his brother that he would always have his back. “Yes. I can help you.”

  He grabs me and kisses me on both cheeks. I always think of the French thing as kind of a joke because he came to America when he was, like, four, and has only even been to Paris for visits and stuff, but Pierce takes it all very seriously. Just like he takes everything.

  “Stop kissing me now, thanks.” He does. I back up and look him in the eye. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Does it matter if I say no?”

  “No,” I tell him, then continue, “Is the magazine going under?”

  He looks at me like I asked him if he’s really Aquaman or something. “Le Man is my baby. I don’t want to be too dramatic—”

  “Since when?”

  “—but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this is my life’s work. This is something that I told my father was important. Even with the death of the publishing industry, even with other, more established men’s publications closing shop, there was a place in the world for a sophisticated and sexy magazine for men. That men would buy. That men would care about. That would compete with the likes of Vogue, and GQ, and Vanity Fair, and...” He pauses. His eyes drift off to the mountains somewhere and he looks lost for a second. Sad, maybe. “Le Man is not gonna go under. K? It’s not. So...”

  I press my lips together and slap him on the shoulder. “OK, man. Good deal. I’ll help you. I’ll find your mystery saboteur. K? I’m on it.” I’m not sure that I actually can. At least not yet. And I’m less sure that’ll it’ll matter all that much if I do. But I said I would and my man clearly needs to feel like there’s something hopeful about the view he’s facing. And if I can help grant him that for a little while, so be it.

  I start to leave, and he asks, “You excited?”

  “About what?”

  “All of it. Being here. Running things. Living in the TDH. All of it.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I feel like...”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m making a fresh start. I feel... I dunno. Invigorated or something.”

  “Yeah? That mean you’re finally gonna start getting laid again?”

  “Dude...”

  “Because if not, I heard there’s an order of Franciscans that might be recruiting.”

  “Goodbye.” I start to leave.

  “Hey, wait, I’m just fucking around. I think it’s good that you took some time off. Even if it was a total overreaction in my opinion.”

  “Think you’re the guy to lecture someone about overreaction?”

  “No, I mean it. I like that you went out and got in touch with you. Or whatever the fuck you do in the desert. That is what you do, right? You touch yourself?”

  “Goodbye.”

  “No! Wait. I’m sorry. I just... Seriously, I just worry about you dying alone. Like, literally. Like falling off a mountain or some shit and dying alone.”

  “Well, then you should come climbing with me.”

  “Fuck that. I look like a Sherpa to you?”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Let me introduce you around. I know some hot chicks who’re into all that outdoorsy shit.”

  “Let me just... get settled. K? Besides, I already met a girl, if it makes you feel better.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “The girl who loaned me this.” I hold up the charger.

  “The dumb broad who let you steal her shit on the highway?”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “It was hers, and now you have it. Did you pay for it?”

  “Dude—”

  “I don’t write the laws! Stealing is stealing. Speaking of... help me find this Sexpert bitch!”

  And we’re back to that.

  “I will. Cross my heart. But I gotta go. I’m supposed to be giving some rousing speech to the troops or something.”

  “Rouse them into helping me bring this bitch down,” he says.

  “Sure. Should totally get ’em fired up. Launching an assault on a faceless internet person in order to save the rep of a men’s magazine? Who wouldn’t be stoked to hear that first thing in the morning? That’s some real Saint Crispin’s Day shit.”

  I don’t
wait for him to throw a golf club at me—I open the glass door and head out. I pass Myrtle, who somehow makes me reflexively cover my crotch with my hands as I walk by where she’s bent over, adjusting her stockings and eyeing me with a look that’s half-amusement, half-tiger-stalking-prey. And as I’m glancing back over my shoulder at her to make sure she’s not going to follow me and drink my blood or something like that, I bump into someone and drop the charger I’m still holding onto the ground.

  We both go to pick it up at the same time.

  “Oh,” I say, seeing her face.

  “Oh!” she says back. She’s holding the charger now.

  “Oh, good,” I say. “That’s yours. Thanks.”

  Eden blinks at me a few times and tilts her head to the side. She sniffs and pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. She opens her mouth, squints at me, then closes her mouth again.

  She is so goddamn cute.

  “Why are you here?” she asks.

  “Me? ’Cause. Why are you?”

  “I work here.”

  “Oh, yeah? Cool. So do I.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “At... Le Man?”

  “Oh. No. Not here.” I gesture around me. “I mean HERE. Like, here in this building. What do you do here?”

  “Here in this building?”

  “No, here at Le Man.”

  “Oh,” she says. This is even more awkward than talking in traffic on the freeway. “Social media.”

  “Oh. Cool.” A beat. No one says anything. And finally—“So. Anyway,” I continue. “Thanks again for letting me borrow the charger. I think my friend would’ve done something silly if I hadn’t been able to talk him off the ledge.”

  “Is he OK now? Your friend?”

  “Not really. But that’s not unusual.”

  Pierce sticks his head out of his office now and shouts in my direction, “What are you doing for dinner?”

  I shout back, “Dunno. I’ve still got to get settled in my place, get some work done, somebody told me there’s a good rock climbing gym I should check out...”

  “Fuck that. We’re going out. Myrtle, make a reservation for eight-thirty.”