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CHAPTER ONE: TAG IT - PART TWO
“Nothing.” Phil shook his head. Pip, God love her, was one highly sexed woman. She literally made her living off learning, talking, writing, and having about as much sex as she could. Repressed as her childhood may have been—and how repressed could it really have been, if it’d produced her, anyway—Phil very much doubted that she’d have been helped by an earlier headstart down her road to deviancy.
Not that he was dumb or crass enough to say it. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he swore, shaking his head and staring at the leaf-strewn sidewalk.
“Uh-uh.” She tsked, crossing her arms over her double-breasted chest, her full lips, painted to match her vibrantly red coat, frowning. She narrowed dark eyes at him. “That was not nothing.”
Phil looked up at her. Undeniably pretty, with dark, pecan-colored skin and curly hair so deep and rich a brown it looked almost black, not to mention a body fit more for a fashion model than a blogger, he wondered what she thought she really knew about struggling with sexual desire.
From what he knew about her—kinky, pansexual, and polyamorous—Pip seemed to have no trouble whatsoever getting any kind of sex she wanted. Anytime she wanted it.
To a guy who’d grown up geeky, awkward, and pretty much dateless all through high school, Phil didn’t think there were that many eureka moments in porn that his sixteen-year-old self hadn’t long ago figured out with a stash of his Dad’s magazines and a bottle of lotion.
“I just can’t imagine teenage-you analyzing the statistical variance of your porn consumption.” He held his hands out in truce. God knew, he hadn’t been thinking too hard about it then. It was just porn, just a means to an end. “Pretty sure, teenage or not, people aren’t exactly waiting for science’s stamp of approval before clicking X-rated links on the internet.”
“It’s not about permission or approval.” Pip breezed ahead of him again, her slim hips swaying peevishly as she passed. “It’s about not feeling like such a freak for having desires and urges that no one wants to acknowledge, much less talk about.”
Phil fought the urge to smile at her frustration, her heels clicking snippishly on the sidewalk with each step. “Studies show that self-reporting women downplay or downright deny sexual arousal, claiming to be mentally neutral or turned off, even when their bodies and minds react sexually to porn.” Her hair—this dark cloud of tight spirals swirling in the wind—whipping free from the band she vainly tried to tame it in. “Of course we do! When we’re told from young ages that desire, as a woman, is unladylike and wrong. It’s such an isolating and confusing experience, becoming sexual in such a sex-negative culture! And that’s not even taking into account the additional shame and hypersexualization of women of color, especially black women.”
Lord, she was something to watch when she got in a mood. When her passion was up and her thoughts were firing. Hers was a strange sort of geekdom—the science of sex—but she talked about it with the same drive and expertise that his tech friends did with their latest toy. “Think about that for a second.” Her already sultry voice lowered dramatically for effect. “We teach women to act mentally turned off by the things that biologically are wired to turn us on. And that study was with just good ole fashioned, made-by-and-for-heterosexuals, completely vanilla porn. God help you, if you have non-normative desires!”
Phil raised an eyebrow and looked at her. Well, that phrase just begged for a topic change. But Pip was just gathering steam on this, he knew, when her narrow shoulders tensed and her long legs picked up pace.
So, instead, he watched her coat’s belt flail about her, tied free and loose about her waspish waist instead of belted properly, the buckle kicking against her hip and back and thigh while she walked. He watched that intriguing bounce and heard her say, exasperated, “I remember growing up and thinking I might be crazy.”
Phil watched, amused, when Pip turned to look back at him when he stayed quiet a moment too long. Holding back laughter, he froze his face in the very image of who-me? innocence. He sniffled back a snicker at her indignant huff. She wagged a censuring, manicured finger at him. “If you say that being queer does make me crazy, you’re paying for my coffee.”
Phil shoved his hands in the pockets of his pressed slacks, adopting an overly innocent expression. “I didn’t say a thing.”
Not that he had to. She knew him well. And knew that, while he very much ascribed to the “live and let live” philosophy, he found Pip’s particular sexual exploits excessive. Sure, he liked sex as much as the next person, but she took it to a level that he just didn’t understand. Over-analyzing the world’s oldest and simplest act. Inserting toys and dressing up an act evolution and nature had already perfected eons ago.
And for what?
He didn’t imagine that it made sex better. Sex was sex. An orgasm, an orgasm. He supposed, if one needed all the costumes and equipment, they were well welcome to them. But he—and he suspected, despite its growing popularity, the vast majority of people—did just fine without all that.
She glared at his face, that even he knew was set in a smug, self-satisfied expression, and shoved his shoulder. “You are so buying me coffee, jerk.”
Which wasn’t much of a punishment, really, as Phil would happily pay every time they went on a coffee break together. But, of course, it was a playful struggle she maintained, this game of credit card draw. To see who had the fastest hands this side of the marketing department, when it came to exchanging tender with the barista.
“I’m just saying,” Phil continued as they walked down the street, the brisk late fall air blowing about them with the scent of the ocean, “considering my sister was pregnant with my niece when she was fifteen, I’d rather teach teenagers about proper condom-usage and STI rates than how to embrace their inner deviant.”
———
“Why does it have to be one or the other?” Pip pushed the shined glass door to the café open, ignoring Phil’s obvious jab. “When you’re fifteen and horny and don’t really understand why, it’s hard to worry about the risk of burning rashes when you’re pretty sure you’re going to burn in hell.” And wasn’t that a lovely mental image. “It was only after I let go of the unnecessary shame and baggage wrapped up in my sexual urges,” she said haughtily, “that I gained the freedom to think more practically about the kind of sex I actually wanted.”
Pip turned back to him, the door held open while she waited. But he stood on the street, near the curb, staring across the way. “Phil?”
His jaw was set and his gray eyes looked so intense that Pip felt a chill shiver through her. She walked back toward him, the glass café door closing with a whoosh behind her. She touched his shoulder, feeling the rigid tension in his stance. “What is it?”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was low and eerily controlled. He stepped out of her reach and into the street. “Excuse me.”
For a stunned moment, Pip just watched him make his way across the road to a couple—a young blond woman and an older, dark-haired man—who stood outside a restaurant in an intimate embrace.
Pip’s eyes narrowed when she noticed the older man’s fingers curled around a collar about the girl’s neck possessively. The girl’s upturned face was practically glowing while she stared adoringly into the man’s eyes.
Pip was still thinking about that look, when she saw the dark-haired man angrily push Phil away as Phil tried to tug the girl aside. She hissed at the two men’s suddenly defensive stances before rushing over too.
“Let’s go, Sam,” she heard Phil order in a no-nonsense tone that had her own spine snapping straight.
“She’s not going anywhere with you.” The dark-haired man pushed the blond girl behind him.
“You think I’m going to leave her here with you?” Phil asked, disbelieving. “She only just turned eighteen, you know. I’m not leaving her with some thirty-something-year-old man who I don’t know and who has no business being with a high-school-aged girl.”
“Don’t see how it’s any of your business.” The man sneered, narrowing his gaze and balling his fists. “Who the hell are you anyway?”
“He’s my uncle.” The girl—Sam—pushed half-heartedly against the other man’s restraining arm. “Look,” she said, staring pleadingly at Phil, “I can explain.”
“And you will,” Phil told her, “while I drive you back to school. C’mon.”
“Look,” Sam reasoned, trying to cool tempers, “the school day is almost done. I’ve already missed two of my four classes; there’s not much point in going in now.”
Pip cringed. That wasn’t the greatest argument to make at the moment. Especially not, considering the flush of fury that burned the back of Phil’s neck. Stepping in, Pip put herself between the two glaring men. “Hi, Sam.” She extended her hand to the girl. “I’m Pip Jones; I work with your uncle. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Sam’s face suddenly brightened. “Oh my God, hi!” She clasped and shook her hand vigorously, her gray eyes that looked so much like her uncle’s lighting up excitedly. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
Pip nodded before turning to the dark-haired man. “And you are?” She offered her hand to him as well.
“Fischer.” The man grunted before his large, ring-covered hand closed over hers in a firm clasp.
“Fischer?” Pip frowned. There was something familiar about that name.
“Scott Fischer,” Sam answered for him before biting her tongue when the older man turned to shoot her a sharp look.
Pip frowned as Sam shrugged and cringed in on herself. “So Scott—”
“Fischer,” the man corrected.
“Right.” Pip smiled and batted her eyelashes a bit. Manipulative, to be sure, but—spotting the restaurant’s maître d' nervously waiting in the doorway—Pip thought the rising tension on this street seemed to call for a little manipulation. “Fischer,” she began again, making her throaty voice sweet and inviting, “Sam’s supposed to be in school right now and, even if she doesn’t see the point in going to her afternoon classes right now, we all do, right?”
Fischer’s hand tightened on Pip’s for a brief second, the metal of his rings biting a bit into her skin, before letting her hand go with a terse nod. “Why don’t you call me later, Sam?” He stepped back and away from the rest of them, his gaze never leaving Pip and Phil. “When you’re free.”
They watched him enter the restaurant alone. Once the door shut behind him, Sam spun on her uncle. “Thanks for embarrassing me.”
“Embarrassment is the least of your worries, Sam.” Phil grabbed her arm and tugged her down the street toward Infommunity’s parking ramp. “Your first concern should be getting back to class, followed closely by what’s going to happen once you get back home and talk to your mother.”
Pip stood on the street alone, watching the two storm away while they heatedly argued. She checked the time on her phone and sighed.
Time to head back.
She spared the café one last look before heading back to the office, thinking this coffee break didn’t seem likely to do jack shit for her productivity.
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