Free Novel Experience (Sara Miles) by Dacia Quinn Page A

roll my eyes. “I’ll leave that up to you.” I pause a moment, processing. “What makes you think Danny would like it?”
    “See? A man.”
    I give a gesture of resignation.
    “Oh, come on, don’t most men secretly want that?”
    “Just like most women secretly want a man to blow his load on their face?”
    “It’s not the same thing.” Her face reddens. I don’t think I want to know what that means. “I don’t think.”
    “No, I don’t think most men want it. I think most men are more scared of that then just about anything else you can imagine. Threaten them with the draft, and they’ll take that over a dildo in the ass.”
    More customers look our way. My voice has now naturally crept back up to its normal volume, and this is not a lunchtime-at-Thornton’s conversation. Anal sex and dildos belonged … elsewhere. I don’t know where, exactly, but not here over twenty-dollar frou-frou salads.
    “Let’s can this for now, Gail. Please?”
    “Sure, whatever. You’ve just ruined my man, and I thought I’d get your help in fixing it.”
    “You never liked going down on him anyway. I’ve done you a favor.”
    “Some favor. If I don’t go there, he won’t go there,” she gazes downward toward her lap briefly and raises her eyebrows.
    “You’ve got such an enlightened sex life, dear.”
    “ Quid pro quo . The basis of all civilization. So unless you’ve got a different suggestion....”
    “Just give him a threesome. That’ll put him in your debt for, say, ever.”
    Gail wrinkles her nose. “He’d expect me to do things with her .”
    The thought warms me a bit. “Well, yeah .”
    “Would you do that?”
    “I might have to,” I say. Truth is, I’ve had a few experiences with women, though I keep that bit of information to myself. It’s not like I’m embarrassed by it, or that any of my family or friends are the type to raise anything but an eyebrow at it. I just like keeping it to myself.
    I’ve always loved how women looked, how they felt. Aside from some side-by-side wanking with Gail and other girl friends (of the platonic variety) over the years, those experiences have been few and far between. I squirm a moment thinking about it, then transform it into a shrug. “It’s one of the side-effects of writing about a woman who likes to sodomize her men. Author transference.”
    “What?”
    “Men assume that because my protagonist does it, that means I do it, too. Scares most of them off.”
    “You could always find a gay man. He’d like it. Probably. Or, maybe just not hate it.”
    “Yeah, but he wouldn’t be too keen on doing the other things I want.”
    “Well, it looks like you could always go fuck yourself,” Gail says. “Looks like you’ve done pretty well with that.”
    I raise a hand and wave down the waitress. “Check?”
    * * *
    MY DESK DOES NOT LOOK like a stereotypical writer’s desk. It’s clean. Organized. I write on a laptop which, oddly enough, I use on my lap. My desk is there mostly as a nod to tradition. Some days I try to write at it, but quickly end up back on the couch, lounging, typing. The desk is for business. Checks, contracts, bullshit. I avoid it at all costs.
    My office is a small corner of my studio apartment, itself a small corner of a building on a small corner in a small, Mid-Atlantic town. A town that now has very mixed feelings about its author of sodomy tales. Another side-effect: small towns don’t mind kinks, but only if you keep them to yourself. I wrote about them, then freakishly sold a million copies. It’s not like I could go up to them and say, “Hey, look, I don’t even own a strap-on!” It’s not the sort of thing they want to hear.
    I plug my five-year-old flip cell phone into the wall to charge. The battery only lasts a day now, if I don’t take too many calls. I may have sold a million copies of my book, but I haven’t seen much of the money from it yet. I have all the burdens of fame without any of the trappings. Woe