Bad Boy (34 page)

“Allison! Allison called in sick? On an editorial meeting day?” Beth asked.

“Marcus will kill her,” Sara said.

“She’s fearless. She probably iced Jon,” Tracie said confidently, then smiled. She opened the bag and took out the farm cake and her coffee. “Beth, I thought you were getting help to get over these obsessions. What does your therapist say?”

“He’s just interested in prescribing new meds for me. We don’t really talk. He’s more of a mental bartender. Speaking of obsessions, I thought you were through with those chocolate cream cheese muffins. You know, they’re addictive.”

“I haven’t had one in awhile. Just this once . . .” Tracie began.

“You’re worried about something,” Sara said.

“No I’m not!” Tracie answered a little too quickly.

“Okay. So tell us what Jonny said about Allison, then,” Beth insisted.

Tracie turned away from them. “He didn’t say anything. He didn’t call,” she admitted.

“He didn’t call? Oh my God! He always
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calls. Oh my God! Tracie, she’s got him. She’s got him, just like she got the others. He’s just a fish on her hook, another pike on her lure, a trout,” Beth ranted.

“Would you please cut the fish talk? I can’t take fish analogies on an empty stomach.”

“Poor Jonny,” Beth said, shaking her head. “He deserves better.” Tracie knew that as far as Beth was concerned, Beth was the only thing better. Oh well, everyone had their blind spots. Then Tracie’s phone rang. “It’s him! I bet it’s him. I’ll get it,” Beth exclaimed, going for the receiver.

“Excuse me! I think this is
my
phone and
my
office,” Tracie reminded her.

“Well, it’s definitely your
cubicle
,” Sara quipped. The phone rang again.

“Please let me pick it up,” Beth begged. “I’ll give you fifty dollars next payday.” The phone rang once more and Tracie tried to reach it, but Beth blocked her way. Tracie, too, was dying to hear what had happened, but she wouldn’t reveal that for fifty dollars, a hundred, or even for a farm cake. How many rings before it kicked into voice mail? Usually three, but sometimes four. She tried to reach past her friend, but, like a goalie on speed, Beth blocked her again.

“Beth, stop it!” Tracie said. “Have some self-respect.”

“God! This is better than
The Young and the Restless,
” Sara joked.

Feinting to the right, Tracie grabbed the receiver from Beth’s left side before Beth could
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pick it up. “Would you guys grow up?” she said as she placed the receiver to her ear. “Hello.”

“Tracie? It’s Allison.” Ha. Tracie could torture Sara and Beth now, payback for their harassment. Plus, she’d get to hear how Allison had leveled Jon, and she’d savor every minute of the story. She didn’t like to think of herself as a bitch, but he really deserved it, and he’d be glad of it in the end.

“Oh, hey, Allison,” Tracie said smoothly. As she expected, her words galvanized Beth and Sara. Sara’s eyes opened so wide, they might have popped, while Beth’s curls actually looked as if they were standing on end. Sara jumped up from the desk and came to Tracie’s side, motioning to get at the receiver, while Beth immediately did the same on the other side. Tracie tried to wave the two of them off while she listened to Allison.

“I’ve got this problem, Tracie. I can’t get out of bed.” Tracie thought that’s what she heard, but Allison’s voice was getting even lower. She sounded awful.

“Is it the flu?” Tracie asked.

“No. I just can’t get out of bed.” Beth gave Tracie a sharp elbow in the ribs, not because she’d heard what Allison said but because she couldn’t. Tracie had the phone pressed tightly against her ear.

“Well, there’s a lot of virus going around. And you have laryngitis for sure.”

“No I don’t. I’m not sick,” she said in a whisper that sounded annoyed. There was a pause. “I can’t get out of bed because I don’t
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want
to. I’m here with Jonny and . . .” Tracie fell into her chair, nearly knocking Sara over.

“Oh shit,” Sara said. “This’ll look great for Marcus.”

Beth and Sara tried again to listen in, but then they noticed that Tracie’s expression had changed from her superior smile to a grimace. She turned her back to the two girls, who were watching her intently. She felt as if her head was spinning. She’d missed something that Allison had said. “. . . I just can’t get out of bed. I don’t want to ever again. And I’m exhausted.”

“But . . . but . . .” What could she say? He’s not really that good in bed; he’s just my friend? Don’t believe what you see and feel; he’s really a dweeb? Don’t be nice to him; punish him because he deserves it? “But . . . the editorial meeting,” she said lamely.

“The hell with Marcus and the meeting. This is just too good.”

“It is?” Tracie asked before she could stop herself. After all, she was a girl who had blown off work for a bad haircut. “It is?” she asked again.

“The best!” Allison whispered in a knowing voice.

Well, if anyone knew, it would be Allison, Tracie thought bitterly. What was wrong with this picture? Beth was pushing her on one side and Sara on the other, but Allison was talking again.

“Tracie, I owe you an apology. I never thought you liked me very much, but I guess I was wrong.”

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No you weren’t, Tracie thought. But you’re wrong now.

“What?” Beth said. “What did she do to him?” Tracie elbowed Beth and covered the phone with her hand.

“I guess I just want to say thank you,” Allison continued. “Jonny told me what close friends you are and . . . I’m just really grateful to you for the best night of my life.” Allison’s voice sounded teary and she stopped as if to catch her breath. “Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Tracie replied.

“Oh, he’s waking up. I have to go,” Allison informed her. “Thanks again, Tracie.” And then the phone went dead.

Tracie put the receiver down and slowly turned back to her two friends. “She spent the night with Jonny.”

Beth groaned. “I can’t stand it. It’s just not fair.”

“She’s in bed with him now,” Tracie said, shocked to feel tears rising in her eyes. She suddenly felt incredibly lonely. “I don’t get it. I mean, how good
is
he?”

“
Really
good,” Beth told her, then got up slowly and turned to leave. “Maybe I should go back to Marcus,” she said as she walked out of the cubicle.

Sara looked at Tracie. “What are you going to do?”

Tracie forced herself to sit upright in her chair, picked up her farm cake, and took a huge bite. “Wait till Sunday’s brunch,” she said with her mouth full. “I’ll
kill
him.”

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Jon lay against Allison, dozing, his legs against her silky backside. Her skin was one of the wonders of the world. He moved against her, freshly aroused, his cock bumping gently against the small of her back. For a moment, he thought of Parsifal. If there were a way to build
this
into a virtual reality game, he could buy Bill Gates out in a matter of months.

Jon smiled. Last night, like the previous two nights with Allison, had been incredible, but it topped a whole series of successful nights. If he wanted to think of his recent sexual successes as conquests, Allison was Waterloo and he was the Iron Duke.

His cock moved again. He supposed there would never be a more perfect moment in his life. Yet something was missing. He thought, for some reason, about the Bible: not because Allison was a blessing, though she was very angelic in appearance, but because of the way the Bible described sex. In the Bible, when men slept with women, they “knew them.” In a way, he could understand that, because the act of mounting Allison, of seeing her beauty naked and open beneath him, was an act of knowledge. And when he entered her, there was a thrill of possession and of a deeper, more forbidden knowledge. But he did not know
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Allison. Not in any real way. Perhaps someday he would, but he had no idea what he would find. All he knew right now was that she was exquisite and that moving on her and in her and over her had become a pas de deux, more erotic and beautiful than any ballet. But he also knew that he was lying next to a stranger. And he was worse than a stranger to her: He was an imposter.

Jon’s eyelids fluttered. He sat up and stretched. Allison rolled onto her back, exposing not only her lovely face and the aureole of wheat-light hair on the pillow but also her absolutely perfect breasts. It was amazing, but he felt himself stand up for her again, as if three times hadn’t been enough.

Actually, to be honest, the sex, though good, hadn’t been terrific. Allison was used to being pleased, and she was nowhere near as good a lover as, say, Beth, but just looking at her had given him enough of a thrill to make up for the difference. So he was thinking about another attempt, when his phone rang.

He had taken her to his place
‌
—breaking the rules, which Tracie would not have approved of, and here was his punishment. He thought for a moment of just ignoring the phone, but he didn’t want Allison to think she was that important to him, or he’d never get another shot at her. He hoped it wasn’t Beth. So, on the second ring, he reached over and picked up the receiver.

“Hey, Jon. Do you know what day this is?”
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a male voice asked, and he nearly dropped the phone.

“Dad?” he said, but then he didn’t know what else to say. He hadn’t heard from his father for at least two years, except for one postcard he had gotten from Puerto Rico, and then a letter from San Francisco begging him to invest $100,000 in a new venture that his dad and two other losers were trying to start. He had barely been able to understand the prospectus, but he had sent his father a money order for a thousand dollars and a note that wished him luck. He hadn’t heard from him since then.

“Dad . . .” he repeated. Beside him, Allison turned and lifted her head, leaning it against her arm so she could look at him. But he didn’t want to be looked at right now. He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed, turning his back on her.

“It’s my day, Jon. It’s Father’s Day. Remember? And I
am
your father.”

There was a defensive yet pleading tone to his voice that made Jon very uncomfortable. Had he been drinking this early? Jon still didn’t have a watch, but it was early
‌
—
very
early for drinking. Of course, he didn’t know what time zone Chuck was in
‌
—or even what hemisphere. Maybe it was cocktail hour in Singapore.

“I wondered if you’d have the time to meet me?” his father was saying. “I came a long way, son, to see you.”

Jon shrugged a little. If his father was calling
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him “son,” it was definitely a sign that something was wrong. His father never liked to admit that he was older than thirty-five, which made it awkward to have a son Jon’s age. As he aged, his women hadn’t, though there’d been a frightening decline in quality. Jon sighed and hoped his father didn’t hear it. “Sure,” Jon said. “Sure I can meet you.”

“Shit! Shit,” Tracie said as she looked at the papers spread out on her living room floor.

“Come on, his eggs aren’t that bad,” Laura said. They were having a late breakfast, prepared
‌
—oddly enough
‌
—by Phil. He had insisted. Though the eggs were cooked until they were brown and the potatoes were uncooked, so that they were unpleasantly crunchy, Tracie had hardly noticed. Instead, she was mourning the abortion Marcus had made of her feature on Father’s Day. It hadn’t been easy to think of an original angle, but she’d been pleased with the piece, since what she’d managed to do was a piece about alternative fathers. A priest who had helped raise a dozen orphan boys, a Yuppie who was Big Brother to a wheelchair-bound fatherless nine-year-old, a guy who had run a summer camp and served in loco parentis for dozens of boys, as well as a couple of grandfathers who were raising their grandsons.

It had run four full columns in length, but it had been cut to less than a column, mentioning only the grandfathers in detail, with
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the others given barely a sentence. And someone else had supplied the usual crap about where “normal” kids were bringing “normal” dads to celebrate, along with a list of restaurants serving special brunches. Enraged, she glanced at the byline and found that while her name was on it at the bottom, it did add “With special reporting by Allison Atwood.” “Goddamn it!” Tracie said, and threw the paper halfway across the living room.

Oblivious to her pain, Phil chose that moment to ask, “How do you like the eggs?”

She could hear Laura stifling a laugh behind her, but she managed to suppress her own rage at the paper long enough to turn to Phil with a tight smile. “Really good. Thanks.” What she thought was that she’d cooked him probably a hundred breakfasts without any fuss, and, usually, without any thanks. But if a guy fried up one goddamn egg, he expected the Nobel Prize.

“Really? You like the eggs?” Phil asked, probably because they hadn’t praised him enough, and Tracie wondered, not for the first time, if she could perhaps somehow manage to live without sex.

Tearing himself away from Allison had not been as painful as the apprehension of what little treat Chuck Delano had waiting for him.

Jon didn’t hate his father. It would be easier if he did. Instead, what he felt was a kind of
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indignation cut with pity. It was the pity that had gotten him out of his bed, into his clothes, and into a taxi. He wondered again what was waiting for him.

When Jon was just a teen, his father had made him go with him on several of his little excursions. Chuck
‌
—he didn’t want to be called Dad
‌
—would sit across from some young woman but direct conversation to Jon. “Now, son, I want you to meet my new girl. Isn’t she a pip?”

There had been a lot of those, because, though Jon hated to acknowledge it, his father was a good-looking and sometimes charming guy. But when Jon was in his early teens, Chuck had been at the top of his game. As his career had ebbed, so had his looks, and he’d found more solace in Southern Comfort than the entire Confederacy had. And more and more frequently, Chuck had used him as a prop to help with the women. He hadn’t had a choice
‌
—his father had visiting privileges
‌
—and a part of him had wanted to see his dad. What kid didn’t? As Jon hit maturity, Chuck certainly still hadn’t. Just before he’d left Seattle for parts largely unknown, he’d taken Jon out for the last time. Another one of his jobs had ended in disaster, and after a few drinks and a lot of self-pity, Chuck had become maudlin. “Gotta start again somewhere,” he’d said. “Got it all planned out. And I want you to be a part of it. You’re my flesh and blood.” Jon had been working at Micro/Con for a few years, but his father told him to quit. “You’ll never get rich
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working for someone else,” he said. “Take it from me. I’m striking out on my own.” Striking out was more like it.