Love's Little Instruction Book (15 page)

“What?” he replied.

“Tell me about Kirk.”

“Kirk? Why?”

“Is he a good guy? He’s been your friend for a long time, right?”

Dave blinked. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about this entire conversation. “Since we were in grade school. Why?”

“He is
so
hot. Is he seeing anyone? He’s a nice guy, right? Not a jerk?”

Dave drew in a deep breath and glanced helplessly at Denise, who looked intrigued but said nothing. “He’s a great guy,” Dave said. “But I’m not sure that he’s exactly looking for a relationship just now.” Not one that lasted more than the space of a night, anyway.

“But he’s not seeing anyone?” Presley persisted.

Dave considered lying, but then thought better of it. Lies had a way of rising up to bite you in the ass afterward. “No, he’s not seeing anyone. But I’m not sure that he wants to be, either.”

Presley held up her hand to staunch whatever he had been about to say next. “That’s all I really wanted to know,” she told him. She turned to Denise. “You’ve never met this guy before, right? He is just
so
sweet. He reads romance novels to the blind and he knows just everything about sports. And he’s really, really easy to talk to.” She turned her eyes back to Dave. “I want you to bring him to the Jingle Bell Rock,” she said, referring to the holiday concert party that the station was going to be sponsoring in a few weeks. “I’ll make sure you get two tickets — for you and him, got it? You’re not to bring a date, just Kirk. After that, I’ll take care of it.”

Dave blinked. This was absolutely unforeseen. He started to shake his head. “Presley, I’m not so sure that this is such a good idea.”

“Bull hockey!” she snapped. “If you want something in this life, you have to be able to make a move for it, and I want to get to know this guy better. He’s handsome, attentive, and so far he’s great fun to be around. I’m not going to just sit by passively and let opportunity pass me by. If he turns out to be all that I think he is, I may very well be in love with your good buddy Kirk.”

“What’d you read this week, Dave?” Kirk asked the following weekend.

Dave pointed to the copy of
Heated
by Bertha Little that lay on the coffee table next to a grinning Santa Claus in a rocking chair Christmas decoration. “That,” he said simply.

“Was it any good?” Kirk asked.

“Great,” Dave replied. “If you like soft core pornography.”

Kirk set down Ghoulie’s book and reached for Dave’s with all due haste.

“What?” Ghoulie asked.

Dave could feel himself starting to redden. “It was about this Irish girl who has to go work for the local lord who seduces her. Then his son and wife find out, so they both sleep with her. So she marries the milkman to get away from them and he and she fuck like bunnies until she’s kidnapped and sold to white slavers who have their way with her all the way to the orient where she’s sold to a harem. The eunuchs and the ladies of the harem introduce her to more sexual positions while she waits for the head of the house to choose her for the night. He beats her, which turns her on, but then one of the eunuchs gets jealous of her influence over the old geezer and tries to kill her but he messes up and kills the geezer instead, so the other ladies of the harem arrange to smuggle her out and the story ends with her on a ship bound for Ireland where she hopes to be reunited with the milkman so that she can share with him all of her new skills and perversions and show him how to please her so that they can live happily ever after.” He shook his head. “God, it was so dumb! And — I hate to say it — kind of gross. I mean, the story was far fetched, the sex was kinky, and the only characters that seemed to develop were the penises — they grew and changed, all for the bigger, and the characters just stayed the same.”

“I want to read this one next,” Kirk announced.

“There was no romance. Hell, I don’t think that there was even any real love involved. Just fuck, fuck, and more fuck.”

“Making it one fuckingly impressive book,” Kirk quipped.

Dave rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t real. There was nothing in there that’s going to help me with Denise.”

“Not unless you make a whole lot of progress with her first,” Kirk agreed.

Dave shot him a look. “Speaking of progress in the romance department,” he continued, “I have to say this and I hope to God I only have to say this once. If you hurt Presley, I’m going to kill you.”

Kirk blinked. Ordinarily Dave might have thought that that blink was an attempt at acting innocent, but now he wasn’t sure. “I thought you didn’t like Presley.”

“I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I want to see her get hurt, either.”

“I’m not planning to hurt her,” Kirk replied. “You said yourself, it was her idea for you to give me a ticket to the Jingle Bell Rock.”

“Yes, but I think you’re planning to sleep with her.”

Kirk nodded. “If the situation presents itself, yeah, I am. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Not if she wants it, too. And if I’m reading the signs right, I think she does.”

“I think she does, too,” Dave agreed. “It’s just, hell, I don’t know. Presley doesn’t deserve to get screwed and left, that’s all. And you don’t exactly have a track record of long term relationships, there, Kirkie. I have to face the woman on a daily basis. And besides, she’s Denise’s friend and I don’t want to get on Denise’s bad side by association with the man who used her best friend and then dumped her.”

Kirk shook his head and huffed in righteous indignation. “Look, you’re the one who invited me to the museum so that I could run interference with Presley while you spent time with Denise. I did that. If I found the woman attractive besides, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. If she found me attractive, too, there’s nothing wrong with that either. And if two consenting adults decide that they share a mutual attraction and would like to share a little bit more than that, not only is there nothing wrong with that, but it’s really none of your damned business. I’m a big boy, here, Dave. At least give me some credit, for Christ’s sake.”

David hung his head and blew a puff of air out of his cheeks. “You’re right. I know. It’s just that I don’t want to mess things up with Denise.” He shot Kirk a look from beneath his lowered brow. “Plus there’s something cosmically wrong with me spending all these months trying to attract Denise, and you get to score with Presley after just a couple of hours in the Museum of Fine Arts.”

Kirk spread his hands. “You’re looking at the master, babe. Besides, I think it’s taking longer for you because it matters so much. Me, I got nothing to lose when I hit on a girl, I’ll either score or I won’t and it’s no big deal, but you, you’re different. For you, this matters. Big time.”

Dave pressed his lips together and nodded. “It does. And I’m not like you, Kirkie. I don’t stumble my way into women’s beds that easily.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I always thought that some of it was your looks, you know. You’ve never had to work hard to win a sexual playmate, but me … Well, it’s not as easy for me as it is for you.”

Kirk sighed and sat heavily on the sofa. “I suppose that this is the part where I’m supposed to feel like a real bastard because I don’t have to struggle to find a bedmate, but I’m not going to. Maybe I’m charmed, maybe I’m blessed. Maybe it’s just that I have a really good reputation and it precedes me.” Ghoulie snorted. Kirk looked Dave dead in the eye. “Maybe it’s easy because it doesn’t matter so much to me. I don’t know. But I’m not going to apologize for it.”

“Then don’t,” Dave told him. “Maybe I’m just feeling sorry for myself again. I’m afraid of screwing this up and then I look at you, and I think, why can’t it be that easy for me?”

Kirk frowned. “It probably means more if you have to work for it.”

Dave nodded. “Yeah. Although I read these dumb novels and it looks so easy. The guy never has to work for it. They never put the moves on a woman and get shot down. They all end up having sex. Hell, most of them manage to have sex within the first few days of their acquaintance.”

“Not all of them,” Ghoulie corrected. “I’ve read a few where the sex doesn’t happen until the end of the book.”

“Yeah, but when they do, it’s hot,” Kirk pointed out. “Multiple orgasm, earth shattering, hot monkey sex.”

Dave eyed Kirk without saying anything. He felt his face growing hot.

Kirk noticed. “What?” he asked.

Dave sighed. “It’s not like that for you, is it? Like it is in the books, where the women feel the earth shatter and sometimes even lose consciousness with the sheer rush of it? I mean, that part’s exaggerated, right?”

Kirk stared at the book in his hand. “How should I know what a woman feels? I just know that it feels good, and they seem happy enough after.”

Dave nodded. It was probably just exaggeration. Really. And who knew what a woman experienced, anyway? He could only try to imagine it. He decided that there was really no point in discussing it any further with the guys. Hell, they didn’t know any more about women than he did.

But the one thing that he did know was that, given the opportunity, he would do his damnedest to try to give Denise an earth shattering, conscious-stealing, mind-blowing night of hot monkey sex, complete with as many orgasms as he was capable of giving her.

• • •

Dave stood in the corner of the ballroom at the Season’s Hotel, a cola in his hand, watching as Kirk and Presley shimmied and swayed to “All I Want for Christmas.” He was starting to regret having agreed be the designated driver for Kirk tonight. It was looking distinctly like he wasn’t going to be the one Kirk went home with, anyway. But being the one who stayed sober also meant that he couldn’t leave early. It wouldn’t have been fair to bail on Kirk just in case he didn’t end up leaving with Presley. So Dave stood in the corner, trying very hard to keep his attention focused anywhere but on the one person in the room he really wanted to see: Denise.

She was hard to miss. She was beautiful in a sparkling red dress that wasn’t particularly revealing, but that skimmed and hugged her curves the way a pitched stone skipped over the surface of a brook, hitting them close and in all the right places. She wore red high heels that, God love her, made her even taller than her usual 5’10", and so she towered over all of the women and many of the men in the room. Beyond the sparkle of her dress and her excessive altitude, there was something else about Denise, he thought, that drew every eye to her. It was something about the woman herself — an inner glow, a confidence that drew all eyes to her.

“Hey, Dave,” a feminine voice said close to his side. He looked over to see Sally from the music library standing next to him.

“Hi, Sally,” he returned with a smile. “How’s the baby?”

“He’s fine. Getting big. He’s walking now.”

“Geez, how old is he?”

“Thirteen months.”

“Wow. That was fast.”

She smiled. “Yeah. My mother’s watching him tonight for me.”

Dave nodded politely.

“Would you do me a favor?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Do you have another room that needs painting?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that big. Would you dance with me? I love to dance and when I go home my mother will ask if I had a good time. If I say yes then she’ll ask me if I danced, and if I say No then she’ll say that I didn’t have a good time.”

“You could lie to her,” he suggested.

Her smile turned sheepish. “I could,” she said, “except that I really like to dance.”

Dave nodded. “Let me find a place to set my drink down,” he told her, “then we’ll wait for the next song to start. Do you have a preference for fast or slow dancing?”

She shrugged self-consciously. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever they play next.”

Dave nodded again. He knew that Sally had asked him to dance with him as a favor to her, but he thought that she’d be doing him a favor as well. Dancing with Sally would help to take his mind off of Denise, and off all of the things he wanted but couldn’t possibly have.

• • •

Denise scanned the crowd for Presley, finally spotting her on the dance floor, bumping and grinding to her heart’s content with Dave’s friend Kirk. Denise smiled wistfully, wishing that she could be as anonymous and as freewheeling as Presley. Instead she felt like she was back with Jason, co-hosting one of his society gatherings. Other people could have fun, but it was her job, as the face of the station, to keep the guests feeling welcomed and entertained. She knew that it was part of the territory, that she acted as an ambassador for the station even when she wasn’t on-air, but her feet were throbbing, her back was aching, and she really wished that she could go off to a back table with her friends and work on having a good time of her own instead of entertaining strangers.

She took a sip of her diet ginger ale, which she had been nursing all evening. It was a strategy that she’d hit on in college. She’d get a glass of ginger ale early in the evening and nurse it for as long as possible. It was a way of putting a barrier between herself and everyone else, giving her a little breathing room, and a way of deflecting any men who might want to try hitting on her by offering to buy her a drink. She watched Presley step into Kirk’s arms when the song changed to something slow and romantic. She was supposed to be driving home with Presley. They had come to the party together and had agreed that Denise would be the one to do the driving because she wasn’t going to be drinking at the party. This was a business affair for Denise, but it looked like it was going to be a night of conquest for Presley.

Looking at Presley as snuggled into Kirk, she couldn’t help but think of the things that she missed about being with a man. The feel of a man’s arms around you. The steady sheltering strength when you leaned back against him. The way a man’s hands felt so strong and warm and wide when they rubbed your back. The way he smelled. She sighed. It wasn’t that she was anti-men, she decided. It was just that she was anti-marriage. Given the right set of circumstances and the right man, she could see herself dating again.

She sighed as she watched Presley. She had a funny feeling that she’d be going home alone tonight.