Free Novel Experience (Sara Miles) by Dacia Quinn

[One] Rules
    “THIS BREAKS ONE OF THE rules, doesn’t it?”
    “What do you mean?” I ask, sipping coffee.
    “You know. That one where women always end up talking about men.”
    “Test. The Bechdel Test,” I correct her, like a smart-ass. Of course, I don’t think about it until the words are out of my mouth. I sigh. “Two women have to talk about something other than a man to pass it.”
    “But that’s all we do lately. Talk about men.”
    “This isn’t a book.”
    “Might as well be. I see this whole conversation winding up in one of your books.”
    I sneer. “I don’t do that.”
    “The hell you don’t.” Gail lifts her fingers up to her lips, reaching for a phantom cigarette. She’s quit (or, says she’s quit) smoking, but it’s only been a week. I have my doubts. “That whole conversation about Aaron’s shaved wiener made it into Thirty Hour Day. ”
    “Not the whole conversation. A snippet.”
    “Two pages worth! How the hell did you remember it all? You record our conversations, don’t you?”
    “It was funny as hell,” I say. “How could I not remember it?”
    “I didn’t. Until I read it,” she says, biting a nail and smirking. “Danny read it the other day.”
    “He read Thirty Hour Day ?” I have a difficult time believing it. Danny can barely make it through the plot description of a porn flick. Reading isn’t his thing.
    “Just that part.”
    “That part?”
    “Stop repeating back what I say as a question.” She glares at me. “You know the part.”
    “Oh, that part,” I say, knowingly. I try not to grimace. Everyone knows that part of the book. Look, being (relatively) famous hasn’t turned out as bad as I thought it might, but when that fame came from a popular reduction of a five-hundred page novel to an incident that happened over the course of a few pages, well, it’s easy to be a bit disappointed. “What, did he want you to do that to him?”
    “Are you kidding? He’s paranoid about me even going down on him now—he’s afraid I’ll slip him the finger,” she says, waving around her index finger. Nearby customers glance over at us, and one woman smirks conspicuously. She has no doubt recognized me—goddamned life-sized cardboard images in Barnes & Noble!—and made a guess as to Gail's reference. “Or, you know, an eight-inch strap-on.”
    The last she says a bit too loudly for comfort, and I long to hide myself in a corner.
    “It wasn’t my idea,” I say. Whine, actually. I whine now about things most people would kill to suffer. That much was true, though—I’d been going for something edgy in that scene, something that would push most normal people’s boundaries. I’d been happy with just the finger. My editor, Andrea Walker, had pushed me into going a bit more extreme and I’d caved. She suggested a dildo, and I upgraded it to a strap-on. More primal, I’d thought at the time. Little did I know I’d turned down a path indelibly marking my book as something it was not—erotic. Well, clearly some people got off on those few pages, but they’d had to cruise through a few hundred pages of plot to get there. The worst thought was that they’d treated it like porn and just skipped to the “good” part, like Danny had done. Hell, it still counted as a payday for me—but the stubborn, egotistical writer in me wants people to actually read the book . I began to understand my own naivete in a novel way.
    “Truth is, I bet Danny would like it,” Gail says, with a mischievous twist of the lip. “You know. Up the ass. Where do you go to buy one of those?”
    I peer around nervously and lower my voice, hoping she’d get the message. “Look online, Gail. It can’t be that hard.”
    “That’s what she...”
    “Don’t go there.”
    “Fine. But see? We’re failing the test. We’re talking about a guy.”
    “You’re talking about a guy. I’m talking about a dildo.”
    “Does that qualify? Or would that still be considered a man?”
    I