“I really wish I could give you a hand,” she said, after I explained my dilemma. “But Mitch caught an earlier flight and he’s already in a taxi.”
“Oh,” I said, knowing it was pointless to argue. Besides, I was happy for Carla. Happy and not the slightest bit envious. Nope. No green in my blood.
I cleared my throat. “Right. Well, guess I’ll let you get back to it.”
“You know, if John thinks it’s so important that you have office furniture at home, maybe he should have hired someone to put it together for you.”
“Yeah,” I said, figuring that it would be more likely that pink pigs would fly by my open window. “True enough.”
Carla sighed, obviously understanding what I hadn’t said: I’d never once defied my boss and I wasn’t about to start now. “Listen, Mitch will probably go home early tomorrow. I mean, he’s got to unpack, right? I could help you then.”
“Great,” I said, but without a lot of enthusiasm. I hung up the phone before she clued in to my suddenly miserable state. If Carla needed shelves assembled, she had Mitch. Me? I had neither a considerate boss nor a studly boy toy.
I leaned against the fridge and sighed, then took another sip of soda. The fact was, I was a neurotic mess. I mean, had I really announced to Carla that I wanted to up my score on a slut test? That was so not like me.
I called Carla back and told her that. She immediately laughed. “Are you kidding? That’s exactly like you!”
“Excuse me?”
“In school, if you made a lousy grade, you obsessed about it until you got it right. That’s why you’re still working for ballbuster John, isn’t it? Because you can’t go somewhere else until you’ve made a huge success of that? Which is ridiculous, actually, because you never wanted to be the queen of reality television. But you’re giving your life to the job. You haven’t finished a new screenplay in months. It’s your dream, Mattie, and you’ve stopped chasing it.”
We’d had this particular conversation about a million times, with Carla pushing and me pushing right back. I’d taken the job to further my writing career, and Carla damn well knew that. Today, though, I wasn’t in the mood to remind her. “This isn’t about my job. It’s about me. I mean, what normal person wants to up their Slut IQ?”
“Whoever said you’re normal?” she countered. “And you’re being ridiculous anyway. You and I both know it’s not about being a slut.”
“It’s not?”
“Of course not,” she said. “You just want to cut loose. Honestly, Mattie, it’s about time. You said yourself that your sex life is boring. And it has been boring ever since your first date. Louis Dailey? I mean, come on! You could have done so much better.”
I frowned at the phone. She had a point. I tended toward the safe guys. The nice guys. I wanted the spice in my life, but I think I was a little afraid that I was too…something for the bad boys. That they’d end up dumping me. And, yes, I was waaaaay too competitive to let that happen.
So I ended up with guys that I ultimately dumped. Guys without the adventurous quality that I craved. The wrong guys—I knew it from the start—but I hooked up anyway.
For years, I’d been living on the edge of a vicious—albeit comfortable—circle. Then Dex had gone and dumped me and my entire world view had shifted one-hundred-eighty degrees.
“A wild fling with Cullen is just the ticket,” Carla said, apparently reading my mind. “He’s definitely the guy to spice up a girl’s sex life, but you know he’s not boyfriend material, so it’s not like you’d date him. So there’s no emotional risk, you know?”
I did know. And it sounded delicious. In a super-scary sort of way.
The truth is, I’ve always played life pretty safe. Studying my ass off in high school because I was terrified of a bad grade. A good college. An even better law school. Not because I wanted to be a lawyer but because my parents had pounded into my head that I needed a solid career. Hobbies—like my love of writing—were fine…so long as I didn’t take them too seriously.
And so I’d emerged from school with a plan. Be an attorney. Get rich. Then do what I wanted. But I’d caught the Hollywood bug (to the chagrin of my mother who likes to pretend that Los Angeles is merely an economic center and not the heart of the film industry). I made the first unpredictable leap in my life—leaving law to take a television job.
I’d had night sweats for weeks before finally making the decision, but even then, I’d played it safe. I hadn’t taken temp jobs to support my writing habit. No, I’d taken an executive-level job with a major production company for an extremely lucrative salary. I was secure, my mom was happy. And most important, I was safe.
Except that so far, safe hadn’t paid off for me. Not in jobs (last I’d noticed, I had yet to win an Academy Award) and not in relationships. Looked at that way, I had to admit that scary might just be good for me.
And besides, Cullen Slater was a male model. A male model. As in über-hot. Odds were good he’d ignore me completely and I’d never be forced to face the sheer lunacy of my plan.
Thus reassured, I hung up from Carla once again, then stood there, peering into the living room. The bits of unassembled furniture were still scattered about. Apparently, the house fairies hadn’t taken pity on me and assembled the things while I was taking my break.
I frowned at the couch, under which the Allen wrench still resided. I didn’t want to rummage under there for the wrench any more than I wanted to sit on my rump staring at doodles that were supposed to be assembly instructions. This was my one rare weekend off! What the heck was John thinking, making me do construction work? Hadn’t he ever heard of worker’s comp? What if I hammered a finger? Or chipped my manicure?
I had a sudden mental image of John in khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, panting after some former child star, hoping she’d either shoot up on camera or deign to sleep with him. And all the while, he’d be mainlining Bloody Marys and soaking up the sun.
With a picture like that in my head, is it any wonder I decided that Carla was right? Debauchery really was the way to go. And the damn furniture could wait. After all, I had relaxing of my own to do.
“MATTIE, RIGHT?”
The smooth, masculine voice wafted over me, and I peeled my eyes open, then looked up at him through my RayBans.
“Mike Peterson,” he said, apparently in answer to my blank stare.
“Oh, right. I know. Hi.” In my sunscreen and margarita-induced haze, I’d fantasized the voice belonged to Cullen, home early from this weekend’s photo shoot. I hoped I didn’t sound too disappointed.
He dragged a lounge chair closer. “Do you mind?”
“Um, no.” That was a half lie. After abandoning furniture assembly, I’d rummaged in my cabinets until I found my blender, then repeated the process in the freezer until I found some limeade. The tequila didn’t require a search. I keep it handy, right on top of the refrigerator. One can frozen concentrated LimeAid, a bunch of ice cubes, and a can full of tequila, and I was good to go.
I’d finished one glass and was nursing my second when Mike joined me. Since I’m a lightweight, I already had a nice little buzz going, and I was perfectly content to lie there in the sun, reveling in my newfound status as the rebel of John Layman Productions.
Still, I supposed I could manage to revel and be polite to the new guy. Especially a new guy who looked so damn sexy in swim trunks and a black Universal Studios Hollywood T-shirt. Too bad he was the computer geek, nice-guy type. Too much like Dex to be a candidate for my “guy to have a sexually adventurous relationship” plan. Besides, Carla and I had already picked Cullen. And he was, undoubtedly, perfect for the role.
“Playing