Free Naughty or Nice by Eric Jerome Dickey Page A

smell her perfume before I get to her. She waits at the bottom.
    She has on hip hugger jeans, Birkenstocks, a Dave Matthews Band sweatshirt. I doubt if she is five feet tall. Her blue eyes cut me up and down, and she flips her blond hair away and gives me an expression that makes me think that Sister Moon is tugging at her ovarian walls.
    I speak to her as I pass. “Assaluym alakiam.”
    She says nothing, just heads up the stairs.

L ivvy
    I was snowed in for two more days. For two days, I was online, chatting with the man who had created the cyber ad, the man who wanted to talk to a woman who had been betrayed.
    We didn’t exchange phone numbers, kept it online, and talked about hooking up.
    That excited and scared me.
    The airport in Philly opened at the crack of dawn, and I bundled up and rode a cold and crowded shuttle, then fought the madness at the ticket counter for three hours, only to get put on standby and waiting two more hours before finally getting on a cross-country flight to LAX. And of course I had to take what I could get, a three-hour layover. Seemed like the world was slipping back into the Ice Age. Flew over ice and snow for hours. Lots of turbulence, no sleep.
    The anxiety of my real life started to dampen my palms over San Bernadino County, not long after the windmills, sand, and palm trees in Palm Springs. The number of snow-covered mountains lessened long before then, but that was where the smog started to welcome me home.
    â€œYou sure are reading a lot of comic books.” The man next to me said that.
    I was crammed in the back row, the one right before the bathrooms, worst seats in the house because they didn’t recline and there was nonstop traffic. I was sitting with two men wholooked like retired linebackers, both too big for their seats. The guy next to me had snored the first hour, then woke up and started reading his paper; the other guy played his Walkman too loud. I had a window seat, so for that final leg of my journey back to reality, I was a lioness in a cage, mentally pacing back and forth, wanting to break free.
    I shifted and tried to stretch my back, said, “A few. Spider-Man, Daredevil, Superman. ”
    â€œUsed to read ’em when I was a kid.”
    â€œMe too. They’ve changed.”
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œProfanity. Pregnancies. Real people problems.”
    He went back to his paper.
    I went back to Daredevil .
    I wasn’t really focused, my mind drifting back to my late-night and all-day cyber exchanges with that stranger. Carpe Diem 0707. That was his screen name. We sat up and swapped emotions for hours. It was good. He told me that he was thirty-seven, a combination of black, white, and Cuban. In my mind, I saw a mature man with an extraordinary face. Funny thing about the Internet, you could be in Iowa and he could be in Alaska, but you felt like you were on a beach in the Virgin Islands having tropical drinks. We talked, in general terms, about life. Love. Marriage. Betrayal. I didn’t give him the specifics of what Tony had done, only let him know that it had fucked me up. We both had our televisions on CNN. We talked politics. Like reading a good book, it becomes real, you feel it, you see it, and the movie plays in your head. Close to sunrise, the conversation moved from politics to talking about sex in general, then about sex in specifics. It was so easy to type out your inner thoughts. It was nice. It was a new kind of freedom. I told Carpe Diem 0707 all the things I liked, how I loved being dominant, but at the same time I loved being in submissive positions, doggie style being at the top of the list. Guess I went with the flow and loved to mix it up, sometimes tender, sometimes rough. Loved for a man to take control, slap the ass and tell me whatto do. I loved the idea of being tied up with silk scarves, blindfolded, handcuffs, the whole nine. I’d been sucked into a zone and I told him things my best friends