On the Loose

“Research—the journalist’s primary tool. As soon as the magazine office opens tomorrow I’m going to call and find out if he’s there.”

Michaela scraped pastry from her plate with the back of her fork. “I think you need a cooldown period before you go jumping into this.”

“I agree.” Emma drained her herb tea and got up to put the kettle on the stove for another pot, detouring out of habit around an eight-foot macrame sculpture that had hung from the beam that divided the open kitchen from the living room as long as any of them could remember. “If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.” Her sage-green linen skirt swirled around her ankles as she moved, and the tail of her long auburn braid, threaded now with strands of silver, brushed her hips. There was something very graceful about Emma Constable, as if every movement, every moment of living, were valuable and therefore should be made as beautiful as possible.

Emma made art out of living. Only one of the many, many reasons her foster kids loved her. One of the other reasons was her slightly unorthodox way of managing them. Lauren knew from experience that you hardly knew she was doing it until you found yourself doing the right thing in spite of yourself. Look how she and Michaela had turned out, after all. Now Mikki fought for other kids in the foster care system and Lauren had gone from being a silent, sullen teenager who viewed even a smile with mistrust to the most talked-about woman in San Francisco. Even if no one knew who she really was.

“If it’s meant to be, no one will mind me helping it along a little,” Lauren said.

“Yes, but what if things have changed in the light of day?” Rory speared a tomato in her salad and pointed it at Lauren. A drop of homemade dressing slid off it and back onto her plate. “That’s the problem with giving in to a moment of passion. You always have to deal with the morning after. It’s a cosmic rule.” She glanced at her mother with a fond smile.

“Tea?” Emma brought the kettle to the table and filled the teapot. The fragrance of smoked jasmine filled the air.

“No, thanks.” Michaela lifted a paper cup with a lid. “I’m still working on my venti latte.”

“You are so addicted to that stuff,” Emma said. “And check out the nonbiodegradable packaging.”

“But it tastes so go-o-o-d,” Michaela sighed, and winked at Lauren.

“I’ll have a refill.” The strong Indonesian tea wasn’t terribly high on Lauren’s list of faves, but she drank it because she loved Emma and she’d do almost anything to bring a smile to her face.

“So you guys think I should back away.” She brought the conversation back to ground. “Thanks a lot for your support.”

“We just don’t want to see you get hurt, honey,” Rory said. “After all, you only just met the guy, and he didn’t go out of his way to give you important details like his number. You don’t know anything about him. Well, except about the orgasm part.”

Lauren thought about Josh. About the sin in his eyes and the strength in his shoulders. About the sure way his fingers moved to bring her pleasure and the control in his body when they danced. About the way he smelled—clean and yet compelling. And yes, about the orgasm. She’d thought about that practically nonstop since the key party.

The fact was, she knew quite a lot about him. That was why, despite her sisters’ advice, she was going to come out of the bushes tomorrow and launch a full-scale attack.

WHEN SHE WASN’T IN CLASS, Vivien worked part time as a clerk/receptionist/minion at one of the venture capital firms in Palo Alto. Three weeks into her contract she’d discovered that Benjamin, Roy and Simons Company, or BrasCo for short, had masterminded the funding for Left Coast. As a courtesy, the magazine always sent over an early edition of that month’s issue. When Viv called as Lauren was driving back to their apartment on Monday after doing some research for an upcoming column, it was to tell Lauren she’d gotten her hands on the May edition.

“You’re not going to like it,” Vivien warned.

“Why not?”

“Because Vivien Li, girl detective, has solved the case of the mystery man.”

“Viv, if you confuse me any more I’m going to get dizzy and miss my exit. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about this two-page spread under a byline by Mr. Joshua McCrae, with a very nice picture, I might add. Speaking strictly from an aesthetic point of view.”

A pickup blared at her as she swerved onto her exit ramp in the nick of time. “Josh McCrae? The Josh McCrae? The one that got that award last year for his interview with George Lucas?”

She needed to pull over. Fast.

“Well, your guy’s name is Josh and this article happens to be about key parties, speed dating and other social disorders, so by using my highly developed skills of deduction, I would say yes, they’re one and the same.”

“Read it to me.”

“Sweetie, I have twenty trunks and four of them are ringing. I have to go. See you at supper. I’m making shui jao.”

“Vivien!” Lauren wailed, but the line went dead.

There was no point dashing to the nearest newsstand because the issue wouldn’t be there yet. And Palo Alto was half an hour away, not to mention the fact that she couldn’t very well bust in on Vivien in her professional capacity. There was nothing for it but to wait.

When Lauren was nervous, she cleaned. Cleaning was the ultimate therapy—it imposed order on chaos. Usually cleaning was like writing articles—she preferred having done it to actually doing it—but in times of crisis, cleansers and scrub brushes were what she turned to.

She didn’t know what the article said, but from Vivien’s tone, she’d better not expect castles in the clouds and happy-ever-afters. What had he done? Surely he wouldn’t mention…no. Impossible. A decent man wouldn’t air his personal laundry in public for the sake of selling copies.

Not even the famous Josh McCrae, who could take anybody’s dirty laundry and sell it for more money than she made in a year.

By the time Lauren heard Viv’s key in the lock at six o’clock, she’d vacuumed all the floors, dusted, cleaned the bathroom and taken out the garbage. The apartment had had order imposed on it with a vengeance and Viv’s eyes widened as she put the bag of groceries on the counter.

“What brought this on?” She peered into the sink. “Wow. You even polished the icky crap-catcher thing.”

“That is a drain trap. Nothing brought this on. I’ve already poured the last of Rory’s Chardonnay to prepare myself, so give me that magazine.”

“Uh-huh.” Viv pulled Left Coast out of her briefcase with a flourish. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just cook.”

Lauren had already found the pages—128 and 129—and yes, the formal photograph next to the byline was so damn fine there was no doubt that the author was Josh. How had she not connected the first name with the photograph as soon as he’d said where he worked? She’d been reading his articles for at least a year, probably more.

Chalk it up to lust. In person, Josh was much more touchable and yummy than he was in the black-and-white photo with the tie, and besides, his hair was at least four inches longer now.

She skimmed the lead, then the first couple of ’grafs.

Tiffany—a fake name—is a case in point. At twenty-five she has given up on meeting eligible men in the conventional ways—at work, at church, in a group of people with similar interests such as hang gliding or Victorian architecture. That takes too much time, she says. Time away from what? I wonder. “At a key party you don’t sit around waiting for someone to approach you,” she says, her eyes leaving mine once every minute or so to scope the field behind me with the attention of a general checking his troops before battle. “With the lock and key idea, you get straight to it.”

But what if you don’t like the person? Are you locked into the date for the evening? “Of course not,” Tiffany assures me. “You can turn in your lock and get another one. Meanwhile, you’ve already met six other people who are trying you out.”

I feel like a size-eleven shoe. This is not how I want to feel at a social event.

OKAY, SO THAT WASN’T SO BAD. A little negative, but not the stuff of which social nightmares were made. Lauren took a sip of wine, gave herself a moment to wonder who “Tiffany” had been, then read on.

Lacey—again, not a real name—seemed atypical of the demographic. A professional in her late twenties or early thirties, she wasn’t there to find a possible partner. A worthy cause needed support, so she’d turned out to support it. But when the opportunity presented itself, she wasn’t above grabbing it—in the fullest sense of the word.

Ever heard of flash fiction—the telling of a story by the shortest possible means? How about a flash relationship? In the span of about two hours the relationship progressed through all the stages—meet, attraction, commonality, courtship and sex—and was over.

Is this what Social A.D.D. has brought us to? Right back to wham, bam, thank you, ma’am? I hope not—but at the same time, you have to wonder if the need for speed is worth it.

A sound that Lauren hardly recognized erupted from her own throat and Vivien turned from the counter, where she was putting dumplings in a pot of boiling water, an expression of alarm in her eyes.

“You all right?”

“Flash relationship—wham, bam—he’s got some nerve! Flash this!” Lauren fired the magazine across the room, where it slapped the apartment door and fell on the floor like an exhausted bird.

Vivien held the pot’s stainless-steel lid in front of her face like a shield. “I take it there was someone you know in there?”

“You know perfectly well ‘Lacey’ was me. I could kill that man. Making it sound like I was the one—when it was he who made me—ooh!”

Viv lowered the lid. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Talk to Michaela.”

“Oh, there’s a good strategy. She’d just tell you to feed him into a wood chipper.”

“That’s a damn good strategy.”

“Effective in the short term, but fraught with consequences.”

“Don’t say that word!”

“What, fraught? I like it. It’s so Elizabethan.”

“No, short term!”

“Short term is two words. Come on. Think about this. I suppose it’s too late to get them to print a retraction.”

“Not gonna happen.” Lauren was silent for a moment. “But I can do the next best thing.”

“Which is…?”

“Get him to print an amendment. Another article, changing his tune.”

“And you’re going to do this how? Come on, these will be ready in a couple of minutes.”

While Lauren helped Vivien slice vegetables for the stir-fry a plan took form in her mind.

When dinner was on the table, she popped a dumpling into her mouth and took a breath to speak, then chewed instead. “Man, I wish I knew how to make these things the way you do. Anyone ever tell you you’d make a fine wife someday?”

“Yeah,” Viv said glumly. “My grandma. At least once a month. But we were talking about you. So you’re going to lambaste him publicly on your blog? That has possibilities.”

“No, I can’t do that. What if people put one and one together and figure out that Lorelei, who was going all dreamy in public, is actually Lacey the Flash Relationship? I can’t let someone get the better of Lorelei. The dope, at least he could have given me a better name.”

“It’s not our names that define us, it’s our behavior,” Vivien said philosophically, selecting a few more pieces of bok choy.

“Who said that? Confucius?”

“No. Li Ming-mei. Grandma.”

“She’s no dummy, your grandma. But that’s it. It’s the behavior I’ll change.”

“Whose? Yours?”

Lauren shook her head. “No. His. He doesn’t know I’ve seen the advance copy. But by the time it hits the stands next week I will guarantee you he’ll be in so deep with me he’ll never climb out again. And that will make him change his tune.”

“What about you? Are you going to get in deep, too? Actually do the dirty deed and fall in love?”

“With a guy who would stab me in the back like that in public? Not a chance. I’m going to teach him a lesson. Lorelei is definitely going to be on the loose.”

“God help us all,” Vivien said.

JOSH HAD BARELY hung up the phone from yet another voicemail to Maureen Baxter when the in-house Caller ID system told him the receptionist was on line one.

“Someone to see you, luv.”

The lunchtime relief went by the name of Jillian and affected an accent that was a weird mix of California and London. She also had a crush on Josh and made no bones about the fact that she’d like to jump his.

“Did they give you a name, Jillian?”

“What’ll you give me if I tell you?”

“Professionalism, Jill,” he reminded her with a private grimace. “Remember who you work for.”

With a put-upon sigh, she said, “It’s Lauren Massey.”

Josh ran through the list of people he had calls out to and requests for appointments with, and came up empty. “Ask her what she wants, will you?”

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