by Sarina Bowen
By the fifth try, I’m not even crying. I’m too numb.
I have to fix this. I’m going to be unemployed and begging for gruel in two months if I don’t fix this quick.
That phrase makes me think of Tom. He’ll fix this, right?
I want to believe it. But life experience has taught me that waiting for men is a bad idea. It’s like waiting for a sale on wrap dresses, only to find that it’s just a ten percent discount on the yellow dresses that clash with my skin.
Too little, too late.
20 Yummy Balls
Brynn
Ash and I are camped out at my place. All the curtains are drawn, because the photographers have found me now. There are at least a dozen of them outside my house. They took photos of Ash’s butt as she walked up the driveway.
Ash has a nicer than average butt. Even so, I wish the world would just go away.
We’re eating popcorn on my sofa, and I’m pouting.
There’s a video of me on the internet having sex. It’s still there. I know because my mother is having a heart attack every hour. One of her besties from church saw it and called her.
“I need to change my name,” I say suddenly, dipping my hand into the popcorn bowl again.
“Because of the job-hunting thing?” Ash asks. She’s bathed in the light of my computer screen. I can’t bear to look at my inbox, so she’s doing it for me.
“The job-hunting thing is pretty crucial,” I admit. “It’s a shame, because I always liked being Brynn. It’s unusual. It rhymes with ‘grin.’”
“What are you going to call yourself?”
“No idea yet. Something else the rhymes with grin? Shin? Spin? What are you doing?”
She taps away on my keyboard. “I’m deleting all the dick pics.”
“People are sending dick pics? This is why I’m changing my name. I could be…Berlin!”
“No. Your name stays the same. Maybe you could just close your Facebook account. That sounds easier.”
“No one will hire me without Googling my name.”
Ash flinches, and that’s how I know it’s really bad. Ash isn’t a flincher. Once, in college, she fought off two muggers with one high-heeled shoe. “It will blow over eventually,” she says.
“The internet never forgets. I also have to change my face.”
“What?”
“My face. I can’t keep this one. It’s no good.”
She looks up. “Not sure you have a choice. Don’t go all Silence of the Lambs on me.”
“Ew! No worries. I don’t like fava beans and Chianti.”
“I know.”
“But—” This is the thing I can’t get past. “—the internet has seen my sex face. Before last night, that was private. Even I hadn’t seen my sex face! And I would have liked to keep it that way!”
Ugh.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Ash says, patting my hand. “I would switch places with you if I could.”
“Really?”
“Sure! It would probably be great for my real estate business.” She sits back as a dreamy look steals across her face. “I think I should claim to be a porn star. It doesn’t even have to be true. I could triple my listings.”
I give her a little kick. “You’re mocking me.”
“I’m not!” She looks up in alarm. “I’ll prove it.”
She starts to turn the screen in my direction, but I look away. “Don’t show me my sex face!”
“Calm down. We’re looking at your blog stats.”
“I haven’t posted anything new in three days!” My whole life was going to hell, and I didn’t even have a carefully styled pastry to eat while Rome burns.
“They don’t care, Brynnie. Look.”
The graph of my daily unique visitors looks like a cliff in the Alps. A flattish line bumbles along from left to right and then leaps up. “What the hell? Is this thing broken? I can’t have forty thousand unique visitors today.”
“Au contraire, mon frère!” Ash cackles. “Scandal is good for web hits. Also, you have a really nice sex face. My sex face looks like I just farted.”
“Holy cannoli,” I breathe, eyeing the stats, not responding to Ash’s sex-fart-face.
“You know what would really make you feel better? You could make us some cannoli. From scratch,” Ash suggests. “That sounds really good right about now.”
“I’m not your personal chef.” Lately it makes me touchy when people ask me to cook for them.
Ash pokes me. “I’m not Steve, damn it. I’m just hungry, and we can’t go out for a boozy lunch because there are photographers camped out on the front walk. I’ll cook for you if you want me to, but we both know where that will lead us.”
She’s right. The ER. Ash can cause food poisoning while fixing up nothing but air. She’s magic that way.
We do need food, damn it. “I’ll see what I can scare up. This popcorn isn’t going to last forever.” This kind of crisis requires frequent snacking. “Hey—look at my Amazon ranking, would you?” I heave myself off the couch and wander toward the kitchen. I’m not in the mood for sweet things. Stress calls for salty things, and since I can’t have sex right now, I’ll just make some artichoke dip.
“Hey!” Ash calls out a minute later. “Yummy Balls is ranked ninety-seven.”
I ponder the interior of my refrigerator as I try to make sense of that ranking. “Ninety-seven in appetizers and side dishes?”
“Nope!”
“Um…” I pull out some mayonnaise, parmesan, a lemon, and artichokes. This is not a dip for the calorie-afraid. “It can’t be ranked ninety-seven in all of cookery,” I yell. I never rank that high.
“It’s ninety-seven in the entire Amazon store.”
The mayonnaise and parmesan fall to the floor with a thunk. Luckily, I’m able to cling to the lemon and artichoke hearts. “Don’t tease me, Ash. I’m fragile.” Unless we’re talking about my hips. Those’re about as fragile as a bulldozer.
“Yummy Balls is a bestseller in three categories,” Ash says. “You got the little orange flag and everything!” The excitement in her voice is proof enough. She’s not bullshitting me.
“Screen shot!” I yell. “Quick!” This has never happened to me before. Still clinging to my lemon and artichoke hearts, I run for the living room. “Where is Tasty Dips?”
“That one is ranked at a hundred and twelve. Your dips are lagging your balls, you slacker.”
“Omigod. Omigod!” I flap my elbows, because of the ingredients in my hands. “I’m having a moment!”
She snaps my laptop shut. “See? There’s your silver lining. You’re going to earn thousands on your cookbooks this month.”
But then reality sets in again, and I shudder. “Why bother with the cookbooks at all? I could just do porn. It obviously pays well.”
Ash makes a sad face. “I’m just trying to look on the bright side.”
“I know.”
Suddenly, I do need sweet things. Maybe that’s been the problem all along. I have misaligned my emotional crises with the wrong food response! Artichoke dip? What a disaster! No—I know what we need. And it’s serious. This is not-fucking-around-anymore serious.
“We need chocolate,” I say in a deeply terrified voice. “We need it right now.”
“I could run to the store for you,” Ash offers. “I was going to do that anyway.”
“No need,” I say with a sigh. “Put on an apron, though. You’re helping.”
21 Happy Face Stickers
Tom
I swear to God, as soon as I turn onto Lovett Street I can smell…chocolate? Chocolate. I’m not having a stroke. I really do smell it, and, as I walk toward her duplex (where the stairs really need to be repaired), the scent washes over me. It sort of mixes with the rosemary bush I’m holding.
Bush. Plant. Whatever. I stopped at the store for flowers, but then I saw these little Christmas tree plant things, and the poster said you could use the leaves in barbecue or something. It mentioned bar
becue. Don’t judge me.
I’m pretty sure that the last time I was in this neighborhood, there was no crowd of people milling around in front of a little old Victorian.
And the satellite news trucks are definitely a bad sign.
Fuck.
I stand there, fifty paces off, breathing in chocolate and the rosemary pine and panicking.
“Holy cow!” someone yells. The voice comes from behind me and then I hear the snick of a phone taking a picture. “It’s Mr. Fixit! He’s visiting his lady friend! And he’s holding a bush!”
I turn around and smile, because really? What else is there to do? I could hold the plant in front of my face, try to tell whoever it is to fuck off, but I don’t have the energy. And these are fans, not professional photographers, so telling them to fuck off would be plastered on social media. I can just see the live Facebook feed and all the hell that would bring.
It’s tempting, actually. A quick end to my career and then I could stay here and be enveloped by chocolate. And Brynn.
Suddenly, I am enveloped, but it’s not by either of the things I’d been hoping for. It’s a pair of sharp, scarecrow, yoga arms threading around me and pulling my face down into a chest of augmented boobs. Goddamn plastic surgery. “Oh my god!” the woman squeals. “I love you so much! Judy, take our picture!”
Judy takes a series of pictures, and then I’m signing something. (Please let it not be a boob.) And I’m telling them how great it is to meet them. All the while, I’m planning evasive maneuvers. Because the news crew a few houses down is going to see me any second.
“I, uh, left my hammer in the car!” I say, apropos of nothing.
“You need that hammer!” the woman squeals. The pitch of her voice turns a few heads on the people standing down the block, and I’m spotted.
Fuckity.
“Gotta run nice chat!” I say over my shoulder as I take off running between two houses. I jump over a boxwood, and run past some nicely trimmed dwarf rosebushes and a napping Chihuahua. Which backyard is hers? I wish I’d looked more closely at the house. I pass two yards, and then a third. But the smell of chocolate gets very strong in the next yard, so I leap up onto the saggy little porch.
It really needs some new joists. I make a note to think about that later.
I pound on the door. “Brynn? It’s me. Open up.” My heart is in my throat. I can hear pounding feet behind me.
Then Brynn opens the door and grabs my bush for me.
That. Did. Not. Sound. Right.
“Are you okay?” she asks, when I am safely inside her entryway.
I don’t have an answer for that, so I hold tight to her bush (the rosemary plant), and then just lean down and kiss her. She even tastes like chocolate. “Chocolate,” I say out loud because I’m fucking smooth.
“Flourless chocolate cake,” she says in a breathy voice, as if this explains everything. Actually, it does.
This woman. I need one more kiss, so I help myself. Her lips are soft beneath mine, and her body molds to my chest so perfectly.
I was having a really shitty day until just this second. But she kisses like a dream. My brain goes offline until she takes a step backward and looks up at me shyly. “Thank you for the rosemary.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Did you get the video back?”
Fuckity.
“Yes and no.” I sigh. “I now own the video, and my agent is slapping every website that posted it with a takedown notice. But social media has already spread it around pretty well. We’re doing our best.”
Her eyes get sad.
“My publicist has a few ideas, though.” I shift my weight from foot to foot and put the shrubbery down on a kitchen counter. Laminate top, unfortunately. My favorite girl could use an upgrade.
I do this wherever I go—I mentally renovate every room I’m in. Can’t shut it off. Occupational hazard.
“What ideas?” she asks.
Right.
“Can we sit down?” I ask her. This isn’t a conversation for standing around the back door. Besides—there are knives in this room. She might use one of them on me after she hears my publicist’s suggestion.
Brynn leads me through to a living room. The blinds are drawn, so it’s dark. But I can tell the moldings are original and the plaster ceiling work is prewar. It’s cute.
“Well, hello,” her friend Ash says from the couch. “I just remembered somewhere I gotta be.”
I’ve barely opened my mouth to greet her when she shoots out of the house with a blown kiss at Brynn, and vanishes. We hear the sound of camera shutters clicking, and Ash’s voice saying, “Oh, fuck off. Unless you want to buy a house. Then come to mama.”
The sounds die down, leaving Brynn and I eyeing each other in the dim light of the room. “So,” she says quietly. “You were saying?”
A nervous chuckle escapes my chest. “Becky—my publicist—thought that if there were a couple, uh, more respectable news stories out there about us, the, uh, video might fade.”
“You mean…” When she frowns, the cute little forehead furrow returns. “Photos of us together, with our clothes on?”
“Yeah. That’s a good start. The magazines would love that.”
She chews her plump lower lip, and I’d like to chew it too. “What else?”
“Well…” I don’t even know how to say it. “Becky thought…” I clear my throat twice in a row, but it doesn’t get easier to say. “If you and I were engaged, it would be a big story. The media would run with it.”
“Engaged?” she squeaks.
“Right. At least for pretend.” I hate the word, honestly. And fake-engaged sounded even worse.
“We’d pretend to be engaged?”
“That’s the idea. We’d let a couple of tabloids take our picture together. You know—smiling. With our clothes on. The slutty story becomes more banal. Then it’s not two people fucking. Two people fucking is hot. It’s two almost married people fucking, and who wants to see that?
“Okay. Good point. So we’d be fake-engaged until…? How does this resolve?” She crosses her arms under her delectable tits. It pushes them together a little, and my dick says, I could just slide right between those babies and I say, Down boy!—I hope to god not out loud.
The problem is that I don’t actually know how this will end. Last year I’d tried to get for-real-engaged to a woman who I didn’t like very much, and it turned out she didn’t like me very much either, and she said no. The odds of convincing a woman I liked a lot to even pretend to be my wife were not that high.
The universe hates me. Obviously.
“Well, we’ll pretend just until the worst of it blows over,” I offer. “Until you get a job in your field, and some other poor fool’s bare butt is seen flexing on the internet.”
Brynn moans. It’s not a sex moan, but my dick isn’t a very good listener. He sits up and begs for another. Moan again, baby he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. I am probably going to say it a thousand more times before this is over.
“It’s not your fault,” she says. “It’s mine.”
“What? No. That stupid party.” Worst idea ever.
She puts a soft hand on my wrist, and I look down, liking the view. “I jumped you. It was totally out of character for me. And look what happened.”
“Why did you, anyway?” The question has nagged me.
“Well…” Her cheeks turn pink. “I really wanted to. But first, Ash dared me.” She smiles. “You know…actually…” Her eyes brighten, and she smiles. “Let’s blame everything on Ash!”
“And Braht,” I add, smiling back. “The party was his idea. I just went along with it.”
We’re grinning at each other like a couple of happy-face stickers. And then I remember my publicist’s stupid idea.
Fuckity.
I clear my throat. “Publicist Becky is waiting for your answer. She needs to know how you want to play this. I’m happy to tell her where she can shove h
er crazy idea. But I thought I’d just run it by you first.”
Brynn makes a face. “I just got out of a marriage. Pretending to get into another one is a terrible idea.”
“Unless you want to make your ex jealous.” The idea just pops out. It’s my fragile male ego talking.
“Like my ex would even notice.”
“Of course he will. If I were married to you, and then I lost you, the regret would be pretty intense.”
Her face softens. “You are the nicest guy, Tom. If I ever wanted to be fake-married to somebody, you’d be at the top of the list.”
It’s the best compliment I’ve ever been given. Even better than the fan letter I got from a woman claiming that watching me operate a nail gun had given her an orgasm. I don’t even want to know what Dr. Freud would say about that one.
“Any guess as to how long our fake engagement would last? Like, how long before it blows over? A week?”
I don’t answer. I’m thinking.
“Two?”
Thinking is hard.
“More than a month?” Brynn asks me.
The answer arrives, thankfully. “The next season of my show is supposed to start filming in September. I’ll be on location somewhere far away from here, and the tabloids will forget about us. When the season wraps up in March, my agent can release a line or two to the press that says you and I decided not to get married.”
She licks her lips. “Does it help you if I play along?”
“A little,” I admit. I don’t want to tell her about Chandra, and getting dumped last spring. It’s not a secret. It’s just embarrassing. “You’d make me look like a family man and not a porn star. But I don’t care, Brynn. You don’t have to do this for me. Even if the network fires me under their morality clause, it’s no big deal. I don’t really care if season ten never gets made. I’ve had a good run.”
Her eyes widen. “They can do that? They can fire you for having sex on the internet?”
“Sure. But even if they did, I’d get offers.” Not good ones, though. Only this morning my agent fielded an inquiry from a cable station. They want me to do home renovations in the buff.
