“Quick,” I said.
Within seconds, I was no longer wearing his T-shirt oranyT-shirt. I had dispensed with David’s zipper and was halfway under his boxer briefs. We met in a clash of lips, teeth, and desire, and he’d pinned me against the wall, one of his legs making its way between mine.
I’ve never been so horny in my entire life and, again, I’m used to the wanton sentiment.
“We said quick,” I told David in a moan, as he was torturing me with expert, meticulous care and getting himself even more acquainted with every single spot on my nape.
“There’s no rush,” he said, biting my earlobe and drawing out a throaty pant from me. And he had a point. Everything could wait, I guess.
I’m sorry if, like me, you thoughtthiswas the moment when I finally managed that phenomenal fuck I’d been craving. Fate was mistreating me in the worst, most devious ways.
I’d dropped David’s jeans and underwear to the floor, and he was diligently taking care of my bra when an alarm blasted.
“¿Qué está pasando? David said, taking his lips from my clavicle to begrudge. “Not another non-fire.”
But the alarm sounded different from what we’d heard the day before.
“No, that’s my Bat-Signal.” I sighed, resting my head on his naked chest , and I can’t really emphasize how resigned I sounded—and felt.
“Yourwhat?” David said, and he was carefully reclasping the lingerie he’d just unfastened.
“My Bat-Signal,” I repeated. “My mother made me promise to carry this electronic device with me everywhere. If it sounds, it theoretically means there’s been a security breach of some kind, and the family needs to regroup because there can be a potentially dangerous situation.”
“You sound eerily calm for a potentially dangerous situation.”
I paused, realizing that Gloria Fucking Kingsley had made public the place where I lived in her pretend reporting. But I dismissed the possibility of a real threat against me. Statistically, this was another sort of situation. “Are you acting like that because she interrupted us?” David asked me, still confused.
“Yes. Plus, my mother abuses this thing whenever she feels like summoning me.” I searched the clothes I’d left on David’s floor and found the sound-emitting device in one of my jean pockets. I made the sound stop. “We should probably get dressed. They’ll be picking me up in less than five minutes.”
27
“What would the non-emergency be this time?” I asked my mother as her security team escorted me inside her office at city hall.
She dismissed the man and woman who’d picked me up at my place less than ten minutes before and only talked once they had left the room.
“Elena, you look terrible. What happened to you?” Of course, she’d be the one to realize that I hadn’t seen shampoo, body wash, or a hair dryer in days. She never missed anything.
“Ah, you know, the life of the in-between-gigs screenwriter who gets interrogated by the police,” I said, trying to sound cool.
“I wouldn’t know, actually.” She was nothing if not proper. “And this wasn’t asummons.”
“Really? You don’t want to advise me on my attire for next week’s dinner thingy with the San Francisco people, or remind me not to smoke pot in public? I switched to edibles anyway.”
“I wish you stayed away from that stuff altogether.”
“Why? It’s fucking legal in California!”
“Elena, language. And I didn’t make you come here to talk about your questionable lifestyle choices.” I wanted to say she’d just admitted that she had indeed summoned me, but she continued, “But to talk about your questionable choices in men.”
My face must have said pretty transparently,What the actual fuck?because she explained herself.
“It’s come to my attention that Victor and you are no longer an item,” she said, choosing to use a euphemism as usual.
“You politicians are even faster at gossip than writers.Technically, we haven’t been an item for months. Today we just broke up.”
“And I can infer that means you resumed your entanglement with the reporter?”
“Again, if we get technical, theentanglementwas resumed months ago. When he published an article exposing the man who had attempted to coerce me into sexual favors. And after we’d broken up because I was told not to tell him about that man so that I wouldn’t jeopardize your career.” I may have sounded a tad bitter.
