Free I'm Your Girl by J. J. Murray

picket fence, a bidet, a three-car garage, 2.5 children, and a dog.
    Hey now. I might like her a little bit after all. She doesn’t seem to like being a model any more than I like her being a model. And her mama pestering her about her love life? I know all about that.
    The phone rings on, so I bury myself in my down comforter.
    I’ll bet they saw the cover. No, Mama and Rosemary don’t read Maxim. It’s probably Daddy. He’ll tell me how I shouldn’t flaunt what God gave me, that he can’t show his face in church this Sunday, that he wished I had worn more clothes. But I know he’s proud of what he helped create. He has to be. He didn’t have any sons, but he did have two beautiful daughters, and I’m his baby. Rosemary did some modeling, too, but she quit looking good once she married and gave birth to the requisite male heir to the fortune two years ago. Her marriage is in trouble, but when I bring it up, Rosemary brushes me off with, “You’re not married, Ginger, so you cannot possibly understand.”
    I may never get married. Oh, sure, I’ve been rumored into an affair or two on the pages of People and Us simply because I’m seen walking with or talking to some movie star, pro athlete, or entertainer, but love has never found me. I haven’t exactly had the time for love, what with shoots 300 days of the year on up to five continents. Maybe I should give love my unlisted cell phone number so I’ll be easier to find.
    It’s hard to feel sorry for her, but I do. I mean, I have a cell phone…that no one ever calls, not even Mama. Not that I’ve ever given out my number to anyone. I have only put five telephone numbers into the memory, and three of them are for the library. I sometimes call my own cell phone from inside my house just to make sure it still works. I even leave myself reminder messages sometimes.
    I’m pretty pitiful sometimes.
    The phone rings on.
    Maybe it’s an emergency, though emergencies, as a rule, aren’t emergencies at all in my family. Rosemary will tell me that something’s wrong with Shizzy, her Shih-Tzu: “Shizzy has intestinal distress, Ginger, so could you please come by to hold my hand at the vet?” Rosemary even fainted the last time when the vet removed a single tick from Shizzy’s neck. If Shizzy isn’t falling apart, then Rosemary will try to impress me with her husband’s wealth: “Ginger, I’m going to send the driver to pick you up so we can go spend Fuller’s money.” As far as I can tell, money is the only thing she gets from her husband since he’s pushing seventy. Daddy will tell me about his roses then plead with me to talk to Mama, and Mama, well, Mama will still ask me about my love life: “Ginger, girl, you aren’t getting any younger, so you’d best find a man now who will love you when your titties hit your knees and your behind drags on the floor.”
    HAAAAAA! Another somebody’s mama uses the word “titties”! J.K., you’re on a roll. Don’t blow it.
    I should have turned off the ringer before I took my nap.
    I crawl out of my comforter to the nightstand and turn over the base of the phone to slide the ringer button to “off,” but as I do, the phone falls out of the cradle to the floor.
    Gee. What a coincidence. I know it happens, but it happens far too often in books. Why not just have her answer the stupid phone?
    Shoot. Now I have to answer it.
    “Hello?”
    “Psyche, hi, it’s Q.”
    Venus Dione’s son, the anointed one , People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” a few years ago, the dread prince of the petticoats who loiters around Aphrodite Inc. waiting to take over the company. Right now, he’s just Venus’s errand boy, probably with a message from Venus for my next shoot.
    I haven’t talked directly to Venus in years, and that’s fine by me. She scared me the first time I met her: “You ain’t nothin’ but a piece of meat, a piece of eye candy, girl, nothin’ but a Milk Dud,” she had told me. “So don’t you