Charlie said, “Did you read that article by Gigi XXX? The one I sent you?”
“The one where she accused some poor woman of being delusional and pathetic for forgoing sex?”
“The very same, but I think her point was that the reader was avoiding love, along with sex.”
“The reader was me,” Stacy admitted.
Charlie feigned surprise. “I had no idea!”
Stacy pinched his bicep. “Do you think she’s right?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “She could have said the same thing about me, too. By having sex with women I don’t love, I’m avoiding an emotionally risky situation myself. But men can have sex for sex’s sake without guilt. Women can’t have casual sex without the afterglow of self-loathing. That’s why your revirgination project is failing. You think you’re in hot pursuit of casual sex but, by choosing the wrong partners, you’re making sure you won’t actually get it. Because if you did, you’d hate yourself.”
Stacy had her doubts about his theory. Luck had been against her, not her own subconscious. She said, “What if I were to choose a partner I already care deeply about?”
“How are you going to find someone like that in the next three days?”
Stacy smiled and said, “Drink up, sweetie.” She poured Charlie another glass.
He sniffed, swirled and sipped the vino. “The French reds are really…blah, blah, blah.” Stacy was sure he was saying something insightful and debonair, but her buzz, and her nervousness, impaired her hearing.
Like lightning, she made her move, plastering her lips against his. He pulled back and said, “What do you think you’re doing?” As he righted himself, his glass of wine spilled all over his white shirt. The red splotch looked like a knife wound.
To apologize, Stacy leaned in for another kiss.
With his two massive hands, he gripped each of her shoulders and held her back, her lips puckered five inches from his face. He said, “You’ve lost your mind.”
“I was planning on saying that — afterwards,” she declared. “Something like, ‘What was that about? I must have been temporarily insane. Let’s pretend it never happened.’ ”
He said, “It isn’t going to happen.”
“Certainly not here. I’m taking you back to my office. There’s a swell stairwell I’d like to show you.”
Charlie was adamant. “I’m not attracted to you,” he said.
“All evidence to the contrary,” replied Stacy, pointing at his pants. “If you’re not attracted to me, explain that.”
He sat upright, fixing his trousers. “I can’t believe you killed the wine.” He looked at the overturned bottle, the burgundy fluid seeping into the grass. “You bought it to seduce me?” he asked. She nodded. “I’m the man you already care deeply about?” She nodded again. The circle of women to their right watched them with wide smiles, their sandwich swapping at a standstill.
“I had a plan,” Stacy said. The pout was for real.
Charlie said, “Don’t start blubbering.” He paused. “Okay, then, I’ll do it. But I don’t want this to turn into a psychodrama where you fall in love with me and we end up hating each other.”
“You won’t regret it, Charlie.”
“I am a damn good friend.”
She kissed his cheek gratefully, and wrapped her arms about his neck. He detached her by the elbows. “Take me to your stairwell,” he said.
“Good, you’re back. Lunch hour is supposed to be thirty minutes, Stacy,” said Fiona as they walked up the hallway toward Stacy’s office. “And why is there blood on your shirt, Charlie? Those greedy bastards at AOL just raised their price for keyword — one and a half million dollars. God, I hope the merger with Time Warner explodes like a hydrogen bomb and kills them all. Meshwear 2001 product line meeting in fifteen, Stacy. We’re going over the bustiers.”
Fiona misprounced it BUST-ee-ay. The correct pronunciation was BOOST-ee-ay. But Stacy would never correct her boss. Fiona was already gone, clicking down the hall in skyscraper pumps, off to terrorize another of her subjects. Stacy quickly led Charlie toward Fire Exit D. On the way, they walked past the samples closet, the small room where every item in the thongs.com inventory was hung or crammed into drawers. A size 8 mannequin was propped in the room, displaying a metallic blue mesh babydoll and matching tear-away G-string.
“Whoa!” Charlie stopped in the doorway. He peered into the room and, upon finding it unoccupied, said, “Forget the stairwell.” He pulled Stacy into the den of sexy samples, and locked the door.
They kissed. He was a larger man than she was used to, and she liked feeling small. They dropped to their knees and lay on the floor among the bolts of fabric, cast-aside panties and slightly irregular peignoirs. Stacy directed Charlie to lie back on a large duffel bag full of the lavender-scented sachets (free with each order of $50 or more). He made himself comfortable while Stacy unbuttoned her dress.
Charlie breathed heavily with excitement. He said, “Hmsuph.”
She said, “Don’t speak, Charlie. Just feel.”
Agitated, he gasped, “Hmssush! Muphsss!” He pointed wildly at his mouth. Stacy looked inside. His tongue swelled before her eyes. It puffed like a fish. He turned around and grabbed at the duffel bag. “Wassaha?” he asked frantically.
“They’re lavender sachets. To make your underwear drawer smell nice.”
Charlie jumped to his feet. “Lafffnnr?!!” Stacy suddenly had a vague memory that Charlie had severe allergies to certain flowers. He grabbed the wall phone near the door and dialed. He thrust the phone at Stacy.
The operator said, “Nine-one-one.”
As Stacy gave the address and explained the situation, Charlie struggled to breathe and, in a panic, ran out of the samples closet. Stacy dropped the phone to go after him, rebuttoning her linen dress on the way.
Before she’d taken a step outside the door, someone screamed in the hallway. Stacy, still partially unclothed, ran now, colliding with petite Janice, knocking her on the floor. She shrieked, “A man’s been shot! There’s blood everywhere! He’s collapsed in the hallway!”
Stacy found Charlie two doors down. His face had turned a sultry shade of scarlet. “Ambulance is on the way,” she assured him. Someone must have called the building’s on-site nurse’s office. A man in a white uniform pushed Stacy out of the way and gave Charlie a hypodermic injection.
The needle man said, “It’s epinephrine. He’s in anaphylactic shock. This will keep his breathing passages open until we can get him to a hospital.”
Stacy, reeling from concern, guilt, and horror, couldn’t help noticing how handsome the building’s nurse was. He had a Tony McGuinty quality that she couldn’t ignore. Besides which, the shot worked. Charlie’s face settled to a hot pink, and he breathed more easily. The EMS team arrived. They loaded Charlie onto a stretcher.
As they wheeled her best friend toward the elevators, Stacy said, “I’ll visit you in the hospital later. Do you think, once you’re stabilized, that we could, you know, finish up?”
Charlie glared at her from behind his oxygen mask. She’d take that as a “no.” The elevator doors closed, and he was gone.
The male nurse, Stacy and a half dozen onlookers stood silently at the elevator bank, unsure of what to do next. Stacy straightened her dress and checked her watch. She still had a few minutes before the big meeting.
She turned to the nurse and said, “I think I need a quiet place to lie down. Don’t you have a couch in the medical station?”
He looked at Stacy, head to toe, and smiled. “Right this way,” he said, hitting the UP button.
Chapter Twelve
Thursday afternoon — still
“Shall I lie down?” asked Stacy. She and the strapping male nurse had entered the Park Avenue tower’s medical center, a suite on the top floor with an anterior triage room and an interior examination room. Very antiseptic, crisp, and white. As she pointed at the hospital-quality examination table with its paper sheet and stowed sti
rrups, Stacy felt a twinge deep inside her pelvis, recalling, not fondly, her last pap smear.
The man in starched white who’d saved Charlie’s life shook his head (“I was only doing my job. You’re embarrassing me with all this flattery — but I like it,” he’d said in the elevator after Stacy praised him excessively), his extra-long bangs swinging to and fro. “Have a seat here” — he pointed at the desk and chairs in the triage room — “I have to make a report, do the preliminaries.”
“About Charlie?” Stacy hoped “preliminaries” was his way of saying “foreplay.”
“I want to talk about you, too,” he said. She noticed the plaque on his desk that read, Gregori Romanov, M.D. “You said you didn’t feel well downstairs, remember?”
“You’re a doctor?” she asked.
“I’ve got a stethoscope and everything,” he said.
Stacy had a seat. “Are you Russian?”
He smiled, showing a haphazard placement of teeth, some overlapping and crooked. He sat behind the desk and booted up his computer. “I was born in Moscow, but I’ve lived in New York since I was eight.”
“I don’t hear any accent at all,” she said.
“I’ve been in America for twenty-five years,” he said, “and I picked up English in elementary school, no formal language training, so I learned to speak colloquially.”
“You picked up English in elementary school? You make it sound like you picked up the laundry,” she said, more and more impressed with Dr. Zhivago. “I thought you were a nurse,” she confessed.
“Understandable,” he said. “Most on-site medical personnel are nurses. I start my residency at NYU in September. Cardiothorasic surgery. Until then, here I am. Now, let’s get on with this.” He proceeded to ask her a series of questions about Charlie (name, address, phone number, medical conditions, allergies, insurance policies, age, height, weight). When she couldn’t provide the necessary information, Gregori smiled and said, “That’s quite all right,” with a soothing bedside manner.
He asked the same questions of Stacy, who was happy to give him her phone number. Dr. Romanov entered all the info expertly and accurately. She paused before divulging her weight, and said, “I want to ask you something.”
“Okay,” he said, looking away from his computer screen and directly into her eyes like a laser beam. He had sallow skin, deep-set eyes, a sloping forehead, disastrous teeth and retro hair, but Stacy was transfixed by the overall picture. He was, as the French say, jolie laide, “beautiful in ugliness.” Maybe she was captivated by his tall, gangly body (her favorite type). Could be the fact that he taught himself English, or that he worked so close by and didn’t wear a wedding band. Or perhaps her unexpected pow (biff, bang, smash) of lust was caused by all the sexual stops and starts of the past several days. Her drunkenness helped. And the situation was the stuff of fantasy — handsome doctor, attractive patient in need of attention of the sexual kind.
Whatever the reason, Stacy wanted Gregori. Bad. The idea of lying down on the examining table and playing doctor with him seized her brain and she could think of nothing else. Not Charlie in the hospital, not Fiona undoubtedly fuming downstairs, not the meeting she was conspicuously missing, not moral and ethical pause. And certainly not the threat that casual sex would make her feel bad about herself. (Where on earth had Charlie ever come up with that bogus idea? What did he think his troupe of ex-girlfriends were doing with him anyway? Coming back for another dose of self-loathing? Stacy would have to disabuse Charlie on the subject, right after she proved it to herself — right now.)
“You wanted to ask me something?” Gregori prompted.
She realized that she had been gazing mutely into his angular face. “I have a terrible condition,” she said. “I’d hoped you might give me some medical insight.”
“I’d be happy to. What are the symptoms?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.
“My breathing is accelerated.”
“Yes?”
“My pulse is quick.”
“Okay.”
“My face feels hot, flushed.”
“Go on.”
“My nipples are erect.”
“I see.”
“My vagina is secreting a clear, plasmalike fluid.”
“I think I have enough information to make a diagnosis, Ms. Temple,” he said, “if you’d like to come into the examining room? I need to confirm a few things.”
She had never moved so fast. She hopped on the table, the paper sheet crinkling under her legs. The doctor followed her inside and closed the door behind him gently but purposefully, a hungry, predatory smile on his face.
He put his large, bony hands on her shoulders and said, “Part your lips, please.”
Which ones? she wondered. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes, knowing she would get a big surprise.
And she did. A wooden depressor pressed flat on her tongue, Stacy’s eyes sprang open. Gregori was squinting into her mouth. He removed the stick, and checked her ears. He took her pulse and made her cough. Finally, he hit her on the knees with a rubber mallet. Her reflexes were just fine. Her instincts were way off.
He said, “You’re experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. What happened with your friend was so disturbing to you that you have physical manifestations of your fear for his health.”
“That doesn’t explain the vaginal secretions,” she said.
“From what I surmised at the scene, you’d been alone with Mr. Gabriel in a closet, immediately preceding his attack, correct? Your hair was mussed and your dress was unbuttoned. You’ve had something alcoholic to drink, too.”
“Yes, but —”
“You are in perfect health, Ms. Temple. You just need a few minutes to relax,” he said. “You can stay here if you like.”
“I need more than rest,” she said.
He nodded. “I can give you Tylenol.”
“I’ll take a hug,” she tried.
Not that he leaped at the opening, but he did come at her and give her a squeeze. She squeezed back. He patted her back. She grabbed his ass and started sucking on his neck. If she’d been trickling secretions before, she was now a river.
“Ms. Temple,” said Gregori. “Please.”
“Oh, yes, beg,” she said, detaching herself momentarily.
“This can’t happen,” he said.
“I won’t tell anyone,” she breathed. “I’m very discreet.”
“Ms. Temple,” he said, peeling her fingers from the seat of his pants. “I’m gay.”
She pulled back then, and examined his face for a lie. “But you’re not a male nurse,” she said. “You’re a doctor.”
“Doctors can be gay, too.”
“Not heart surgeons,” she protested.
“Even heart surgeons. Even orthopedic surgeons,” he said knowingly. “I knew this guy in medical school, he volunteered for all the grisly stuff, like rebreaking legs and hammering nails into hip bone. He had two great loves. Surgical handsaws with wicked torque and, actually, male nurses.”
“I feel ill,” she said.
“Are you nauseated?” he asked, pointedly, professionally.
“If only I could throw up my pride,” she said, and sulked out of the room, giving Gregori one last lustful look. He was too beautiful (in the ugliest way possible) to be gay. She supposed that, if doctors could be gay, so could ugly men. Even ugly doctors. And now she could never get sick or even get a scrape at the office until he left in September. She’d have to be careful.
Stacy returned, limp and enervated, to thongs.com. She checked her e-mail first. Fiona had fired one off, furious that Charlie had disrupted the workday and un-sympathetic to her need for medical attention. Janice sent one with a slightly milder tone. A dozen other staffers had sent e-mails updating her on the conclusions of the meeting she’d missed, and the pile of additional work she was saddled with.
As she scrolled down, she caught sight of a non-interoffice e-mail. The sender, [email protected], wa
s unknown to her, until she realized it was her fantasy date, the wealthy novelist/violinist who was searching for his one true love.
She opened the message. He’d copied her provocative suggestion that they meet tonight. And then he’d added:
“Fluffy, I will be at the bar at Jean Pierre Louis Paul at Hudson and Reade at 8 P.M. sharp, wearing a blue Armani suit, reading the New Yorker, and drinking a vodka martini. I hope you’ll join me? My best, Snap.”
Stacy e-mailed back:
“Dear Snap, I’ll be there. Look for a woman with pink cheeks, red hair, and, most likely (although I can’t confirm my wardrobe at this time), a basic yet elegant black dress. See you soon. Fluffy.”
Chapter Thirteen
Thursday night
Stacy arrived first. She knew the restaurant fairly well, having eaten their last birthday dinner there with her parents. Sol and Belinda Temple were born on January 10 and January 15 respectively. So, each year, the three of them met post-New Year’s for a posh, expensive meal with multiple bottles of wine, culminating in a nerve-wracking drive home to Short Hills for Mom, but not for Dad, who, in his morning hangover, would barely remember cutting off that SUV on the New Jersey Turnpike.
They’d come to Jean Pierre Louis Paul twice, having loved the sampling menu of twelve courses ($150 per person, not counting wine and coffee) that took over three hours to consume. The food was just the beginning for Stacy, who wasn’t quite the gourmand her father was (he’d eat anything, the more “innards related” the better — sweetbreads, haggis, blood pudding — then proclaim, “Tastes like chicken,” and expect everyone to laugh). Stacy loved the low-country French decor, the strategically placed bushels of apples and bound stalks of dried sunflowers, the farm tables and spindle-backed chairs with needlepoint seats. Above the waist-high wood-paneled wainscoting, murals of harvest scenes covered the walls. Lilac and heather scents mixed with the garlic and rosemary wafting from the kitchen. Heaven. Sensually speaking.
She wasn’t alone in her opinion. Jean Pierre Louis Paul was one of the most popular restaurants in the city, achieving the unusual status of both a tourist and local ruling-class favorite. SNAP showed good taste in suggesting this spot. Plus, it was right in TriBeCa, only a short walk from her apartment in SoHo. She’d worried about the ill effects of a stroll on her freshness quotient, but the night had cooled considerably — couldn’t be more than 80 degrees — and both the air and the exercise calmed her nerves.
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