Read Real Men Do It Better Online
Authors: Carrie Alexander Lori Wilde Susan Donovan Lora Leigh
Real Men Do It Better
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Contents
HIS BODY ELECTRIC
by
Carrie Alexander
BED AND BREAKFAST
by
Susan Donovan
Don’t miss these other sexy anthologies from St. Martin’s Press
His Body Electric
by
Carrie Alexander
1
“Cock-a-Doodle-do. May I help you?”
Thick wet breaths filled Karen Jaffe’s ears.
Great. Another mouth-breather.
“Sir?”
She heard movement. Far too familiar movement, accompanied by short grunts.
She adjusted her headset. “You’ve reached Cock-a-Doodle. How may I help you?”
The caller panted up against his mouthpiece. “Help me.”
“Yes, sir.” Karen looked at the computer screen, even though she’d memorized the company’s spiel. “Would you like the Cock-a-Doodle special, three month’s supply of pills billed at the amazing low price of eighty-nine ninety-five, plus shipping and handling? Or we have the Rooster Booster package, which is—”
“What’ll the pills…” more wet breaths and slippery sounds “… do?”
Karen looked at the ceiling. He knew what the product did, or at least what the company claimed. But the callers always wanted to hear her say it. She closed her eyes and took a breath. “Rooster Booster is our trademarked powdered supplement, which may increase your potency and vitality in the bedroom. Our Cock-a-Doodle pills may increase the length and/or girth of your penis.” She sped up because this was where the mouth-breathers always interrupted. “We’re running a special this month for the—”
“It’s getting bigger!” The caller’s voice was harsh and excited. As if he’d climbed Everest. “
Damn almighty.
Lookee that. My dick grew just from talking to you.”
Karen raised her brows at Kong, the overweight brindle cat sleeping in her lap. His whiskers twitched. She made kissy lips for him. “Would you like to place an order?”
“No—I mean, yeah.” The squidging, fleshy sounds sped up. “Yeh.
Yeh, yeh, yeh—
”
Beep.
Karen disconnected the call.
She sank her fingers into the cat’s silken fur and returned to studying the water-spotted ceiling. She loved her big, old, rambling farmhouse, but it had come with a list of to-dos as long as Santa’s naughty roster. For the past ten months, she’d been working her way through the house, painting, patching, stripping, and refinishing. Yet the space she used most often, the back room that had become her office and studio because of the tall north-facing windows, remained last on the list. Why was that, when, after nine years of marriage and one year spent discovering that she wasn’t cut out for the Manhattan singles scene, she finally had no one to please but herself?
Another call came in. The computer software brought up the corresponding spiel and order forms as she checked the screen. She took 1-800 calls for products from a company that sold everything from foam mattresses to Miximakers, the ten-in-one kitchen appliance that looked a lot like a food processor to Karen.
Just her luck. Cock-a-Doodle again. It was almost seven-thirty in Iowa, so the PST-zoners must be getting home from work. She glanced at the sky, which had darkened to a steely blue within the past few minutes. The roots of her hair tingled at the electricity in the air.
She beeped in. “Cock-a-doodle-do. May I help you?”
A silence stretched before snapping with a short, sharp cough. “
Cack.
Uh. Sorry. Is this the, uh, place that sells, uh, those grow-your-penis pills, because, uh, like, my dick’s only, uh, one inch long. Uh. One and a quarter.”
“One and three-eighths,” said a muffled second voice, followed by giggles.
“That’s right.” Karen answered with her sternest manner. She must have tensed up, because Kong jumped down from her lap with a heavy thud and an insulted
miaow.
“If you’re over eighteen years of age, sir, you may place an order.”
She heard more laughter, followed by urgent whispers.
Ten … nine … eight …
The caller came back. “Uh, wait a minute. We’re measuring for the record.”
Seven … six … five …
“Because, uh, if my teeny weenie doesn’t grow, I’m gonna sue.”
Beep.
Sometimes she didn’t have to wait for
one.
The company wasn’t a stickler about the age thing, as long as the credit card number was good. Crank calls could be suspended at her choice. Even though she was paid per minute of talk time, the sooner she hung up the phone the better, in her opinion. She didn’t earn enough to listen to jokers and jerk-offs.
She was a VSR—virtual service representative. The job enabled her to work odd hours at home, making ends meet while she tried to spark gallery interest in her welded metal sculptures. She could set her own schedule, then, in between calls, sketch or work on twisted wire maquettes, small-scale replicas of her large pieces. Tools and bits of wire littered the desktop she’d made by resting an antique oak door on sawhorses rescued from the barn loft. For a make-do type of person, the old barn that had come with the house was a treasure trove.
She stared broodingly at one of the unfinished miniatures, abstract figures engaged in a twisted dance that looked a lot like sex.
Karen groaned. She had sex on the brain these days, and all because of her job. Not Cock-a-Doodle, which was as sexy as dirty socks and nose hair. But before Cock-a-Doodle there’d been a short-term experiment with phone sex, which she’d tried for the better pay, continued because she was good at it, then quit because it hadn’t been good for her.
Two more calls came in. Karen kept them waiting while she got up and closed the casement windows around the room. She paused at the third to inhale. The sense of space and the clean country air had been what she’d missed most during her time in the city. Here in Iowa, her home state, she had room to think and to create. While the art scene in New York had been inspiring in an electric, intense way, she wanted her work to come from within. It was there, waiting to be released, if she could just find the key.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Next came the soft patter of raindrops in the upper branches of the tall trees that surrounded the farmhouse, sparse enough that few reached ground.
The phone rang again. She shoved down on the warped window frame and took the calls, completing a couple of orders, including one for the Miximaker from a little old lady with a Texas twang who actually wanted to chat about her grandson’s trouble with the police. While trying not to think about her own loneliness—
loneliness
being less accurate but more polite than
horniness
—Karen told the lady about the approaching thunderstorm and gently sent her off to make a solitary dinner.
Karen cleared the screen, shut down the computer, and crawled under the desk to unplug the phone line. It was too quiet outside. The air was dank and heavy with the threat of a bad storm. Power could be tricky in the countryside, going in and out at any provocation.
The rain increased, splattering against the windowpanes. Her skinny black cat, Shadow, appeared in the doorway with a tiny
mew.
Time to round up the animals for the night.
The house looked gloomy in the early darkness. Karen yawned and lifted her hair off her neck, where prickles sprang up as distant lightning briefly brightened the windows. The cats threaded around her legs on their invisible Hot Wheels track, racing through the front hallway and into the back parlor, with Shadow leading on the back-of-the-sofa homestretch. Shadow sprang, but the ponderous Kong didn’t attempt the leap-to-the-mantel finish line.
Karen went to the mudroom and selected rubber boots from the utilitarian footwear that had replaced her small stash of designer shoes. She stomped into the boots, grabbed a windbreaker off the hook, then checked the wood box. A little low. It was mid-May, warm during the day, but she’d be wanting a fire if the electricity went out for long.
“You guys stay in,” she told the cats, who were crowding the door. She nudged them aside with a boot toe, and slipped outside.
The leaves of the oaks and elms had ruffled in the rain. They lifted like the skirts of cancan dancers as a gust of wind rolled in off the open fields. Karen zipped up. She’d bought five acres, a house, a barn, and assorted outbuildings for less than what a rat-hole studio would cost in New York City. The adjoining land had been sold to a farming corporation, so she was surrounded by fertile fields. Kidder, the closest town, was seven miles away.
POP.
1,259, the welcome sign read.
Karen’s horses stood in the muddy corral with their heads down and tails clamped to their hindquarters. She’d read that turkeys could drown in the rain because they were too brainless to put their heads down. Sometimes she thought that horses were as dumb. They stayed outside in the worst weather.
At a glance, she saw that the chickens had more sense. They were tucked away in the henhouse, the rain playing their water dish like a tin drum.
She climbed the corral fence and shooed both horses inside, promising an extra ration of oats as she closed the stall doors behind them. Spindrift swung around to nose Karen’s pockets for carrots.
She’d fallen in love with the dainty, dappled gray mare at a country auction. Buying a horse instead of a set of chintz china seemed the perfect way to celebrate her return to Iowa. A few months later, she’d come home with Tinker, an aged, chestnut gelding who’d been destined for the butcher’s. She’d been compelled to save him, even though he was rarely ridden and about as useful to her as a crooked wheelbarrow.
The gelding whickered and stomped when she lifted the lid of the feed bin. “Greedy guts.” To tease him just a little, she tipped the scoop into Spindrift’s bowl first.