“I’m so glad you took me up on getting together when I called you in Santa Barbara. I know all the magazines are saying that dating is making a return to traditional basics and women shouldn’t be pursuing men like we have been, but I totally wanted to get together with you after meeting you at that party in the hills.”

“Uh huh.”

“And for a while I debated whether you’d even call me back. I mean, in hindsight I know now, but I was totally questioning myself, going back and forth on it.”

I nodded. She took that to mean please continue.

“There was this voice in the back of my head that said ‘he won’t be interested, he won’t call.’ And I know that you should be easy going and all about the situation since you’re tight with Stephanie, but it still makes us girls wonder, you know. There’s always that stigma about people who work in adult entertainment. It scares away a lot of promising people you meet.”

“Guess I put that to rest,” I replied.

“And how, mister!” she exclaimed, adding punctuation with a little peck on my cheek. “I mean, I don’t want to come off like a total slut or anything just because I work on those productions. I’m on the other side of the camera. I’m not a performer, you know? But still, people think that just because you’re involved in the industry that automatically means you have daddy issues or were abused as a child, and that you regularly do orgies and double penetration like it’s just another day. It’s crazy the misconceptions some people have!”

Jesus, this girl talked way too much.

Stacy sensed by the look on my face that she was losing me.

“Am I boring you right now?”

“No,” I lied in response.

“Good!” she exclaimed as she climbed over my leg and resumed straddling me on the sofa. There was that weight again. What was she carrying in her ass? I did like having her heaving breast squarely planted in my face, however.

Stacy planted a deep kiss on my lips with a wide open mouth, slowly pulling away to grab on to my lower lip and hold it between hers as she sucked away at it.

“Well hello Mr. Tongue,” I said with a smile when she finished.

She giggled in return before rolling off me and hopping off the couch. She traipsed away into the kitchen, calling out over one shoulder “are you interested in any more wine.”

“No,” I replied loudly. I wanted to tell her she should stop as well but I didn’t want to sound preachy. I raised my arms shoulder high and rested them on the sofa’s back cushions. I took a cursory look around her living room as I heard the clanging in the kitchen from Stacy opening and closing her refrigerator door and later the tink of glass striking glass while she fished through her cabinets for a clean wine goblet with which to start anew.

Her living room was normal and every bit like an ordinary single girl’s apartment would be: Off-white walls sparsely decorated with art prints purchased on sale at Frames Plus, and a few artsy-veined things bought at a crafts fair or cobbled together from ingredients purchased at Michaels. There were some definitively girly things visible, too, like her well-worn copy of He’s Just Not That Into You on an end table next to some framed, dated photos of Stacy as a teen posing with a cat she’d owned. On the opposite wall there was a photo from her prom, and another of her parent’s wedding. Candles of varying scents from Party Lite littered all areas of the room as if she was expecting an oncoming blackout or a conversion to a monastery.

Stacy returned to the sofa and placed her wine glass on the chrome and glass tabletop before resuming her position on top of me. There was the weight again. I was convinced it was from her ass, though she didn’t have a disproportionately large one or any bubbling size that would have suggested the bonus weight. It was a mystery. But the weight was most definitely bottom heavy.

“Now, s-s-sexy, where were we?” She arched her back and flung her long hair to one side of her neck before lowering her mouth to within a few inches of my earlobe. “S-s-such a s-s-sa-weet piece of skin.” Great, now she was slurring from going Mario Andretti on the wine.

The truth was Stacy was right: I was having second thoughts about all of this. Much of her soliloquy about the stigma of those working in adult entertainment industry was on my mind, and had been since the moment I’d picked up the phone and called her to first go out. I wanted to think Stacy was a good girl and exhibited none of the baggage the women on the starring side of the camera were notorious for carrying, but I couldn’t be certain. As much as the little voice inside my head told me that she probably was not in the porn danger zone and that in time the facts would come out once she was comfortable sharing them, another voice asked if I was really going to stay around long enough to find out? Likely not. And it wasn’t as if I was some shining pillar of moral and sexual virtue, but in Stacy’s case I was thinking it took one to know one. Something wasn’t right, and I didn’t like it.

Before she could lower her lips to mine again, I held up a hand between us. “This is going to sound so strange, me being a guy with a woman on top of me three quarters naked and ready to go, but we should call it a night.”

The blood dropped out of her face. “Why? What’s-s-s wrong? What did I do?”

I started to roll my weight under her and placed my hands on her thighs, shifting her weight to one side to indicate she could get off me now. She flopped over to the right and sat on the couch beside me, looking straight ahead with crossed arms and one leg tightly crossed over the other.

“It’s the porn thing, isn’t it?” she said in monotone, never taking her gaze away from the wall on the other side of the living room. She called it porn, not adult entertainment. Perhaps she was trying to make a point. Either that or there was no room for political correctness at a time like this.

Sidestepping that issue I opted to cover another, one that was bothering me almost as much.

“I think you’ve had too much to drink.”

“What?” she took her eyes away from the wall and turned to me.

“It’s like this: I have a difficult time respecting somebody who is drunk. It’s the way I’ve been for as long as I can remember. It’s a non-gender, non-sexual thing. Doesn’t matter who you are; if you can’t hold your liquor it repels me.”

“So, what – you think because you don’t get drunk you’re better than everybody?” she fumed.

“I know, it’s incredibly judgmental, but let’s face it – we live in a judgmental world. It’s not you.”

Stacy shot me a cold, steely look.

“Okay, point taken, in this case it is about you. But what I mean is, it’s more about what the inebriation says to me. It tells me that person has an issue with self control. If they can’t say no to a couple of extra drinks and deal with the damage done, what does that say for their self control and decision making when it comes to bigger things?”

Stacy paused, and then curled some hair behind her ear. “Oh. That's awfully big picture, don't you think? I just got caught up in the fun we were having.” She gave me a playful punch in the shoulder. “You don’t have to be a stick in the mud.”

“I know. It’s just one of my things.” I got up and put my shirt back on, smoothing it out along the sides before tucking it into my pants.

“So you won’t reconsider?” Stacy asked, biting her bottom lip.

"Right. So you're telling me you're not sleeping with Sunrise Adams."

She giggled. "That sounds lovely.”

I pulled my jacket from its spot on the couch, folded it over one arm, and turned to go. As I reached for the door I felt a tug on my shirt sleeve.

“I’m sorry I let you down.”

“If you let me down I wouldn’t want to see you again,” I replied.

A bittersweet smile slowly appeared on her face. She knew she’d have to take her lumps tonight.

I’d barely made it down to street level before my phone rang. “Sure I can’t coax you to come back up?” she asked.

“No,” I sighed. “We’ll just try it again this weekend, okay?”

“All right. I’m not going to push you. I don’t want to do anything to drive you away,” she replied.

That damage may have already been done, I thought. “I’ll call you later. Good night, Stacy.” I clicked the phone off and slipped it back into my coat pocket.

Five minutes later it went off again. She wasn’t going to push me, eh? I clicked the talk button and, perturbed, said “Now what?”

There was a pause and then the voice on the other end cleared his throat. “Oh,” he began, slightly startled, “I was looking for Reed Becker. Did I get the wrong number?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “Sorry about that, I was expecting it to be somebody else. This is Reed; what can I do for you?”

“This is Kevin Kelly. I am the editorial operations manager for Wired Magazine.”

I shifted my phone to the other hand as I continued driving. “Cool magazine,” I replied.

He ignored the assessment. “You know, for a while I’ve been reading bits of that dog thing you write, and the whole time I’m thinking to myself that this can’t be the only thing he’s ever written. He must have done this for something or somebody else. Maybe he's on somebody's payroll. So I started sleuthing around, and I finally figured out who you are.”

“Oh?” I replied, half expecting him to tell me I was John Grisham or Tom Clancy.

“Once I traced you to All Music I thought I’d find a way to get to the next stepping stone, but you don’t write for them regularly, do you?”

There was a garble of frequency noise over the phone as he said something and once it was gone he was still talking. It sounded like he wasn’t looking for an answer.

“Then I found the hockey stuff, but that only led me back to All Music. Luckily their supervising editor told me how I could get in touch with you, so here we are.”

“Here we are,” I repeated while turning on to Highland Avenue. I still had no idea what this phone call was about.

“You write for anybody else, anyone I’m leaving out?” he asked. He sounded very pleased with himself over solving whatever case he thought he had solved.

“I’ve written off and on for Go Fug Yourself,” I replied nonchalantly.

“Yeah? I didn’t catch that one."

“Well, when one of their founders is a girl you dated in college and you want to help them get their site going with content, you do what you can. I did those for free. I guess it didn’t pop up on the grid.”

“Suppose so,” he replied. “So...you ever ghostwrite anything for your uncle?"

I changed hands between the wheel and the phone and switched over to the other ear. "No. Well, no comment."

"Fair enough. So, have you done anything that's gone to print?” he asked.

“Nope, it’s all web stuff. Nothing like Wired.”

“Well, funny thing about that. What I represent isn’t Wired as the general public knows it, it’s Wired’s Online News page. It’s still part of the Conde Naste empire, but it’s a smaller entity called Conde Net Enterprises. We contract regularly with lots of writers from all over the U.S. to write stories for the page. The very best ones even make it in some distilled form into the magazine under the 'Dispatches from the Wired Frontier' section.”

“That I’ve heard of.” I made a right on Sunset and began the long straightaway that would take me towards Brentwood.

“So, Mr. Kelly, you want me to write for the Wired Frontier?” I asked.

“No, to be clear, we want to pick you up as a correspondent for an event that you’ll cover for Wired Online News. I could dangle the carrot that your story might make it into the pages of Wired as well, but with so many writers vying for so little space, you can do the math.”

He paused and I could hear him writing some notes on a pad. “Should I be discussing details with your agent, Becker?”

I laughed. “There’s no agent. Like you just said, I don’t have any demand.”

“Touché. Here’s the nitty gritty: There’s a science fiction show that goes on every year in Philadelphia. It’s called Philcon and it’s from the ninth to the twelfth of this month.”

“That’s this weekend,” I interrupted.

“Right. Anyway, it consists of a couple of sub headers like anime, gaming, writing – anything under the banner of science fiction. So the gig is you get out there, cover it, and turn in a 1000 word piece summarizing the vibe and topics of the event. It needs to be littered with some quotes from the public or a key speaker.”

“Sounds like a nerd fest,” I said.

He laughed. “It is, but they also represent a sizable portion of our readership. We’ll pay for the plane ticket and expenses – within reason – as well as $1,500 to write the piece. It’s late notice I realize, but are you available to do it?”

I hadn’t been working for the past few months so scheduling wasn’t a problem. Going meant I’d have to postpone things with Stacy, which would make it look even more like I was being driven away from her, or sleeping with Stephanie.

I slowed the car to a stop at a red light. “Sorry to sound like a dick, but why not get somebody who already lives in Philly to do the gig?”

“We already tried that, but our guy canceled on us earlier today. Thus the reason I’m talking to you. Plus, I like the undercurrent of sarcasm you bring to your stuff, something I’m hoping you can incorporate it into this piece. Nothing too heavy, just that magic you do so well.”

“The phrase is ‘the voodoo that you do so well,’” I replied, correcting him. I thought quietly for a moment.

“I suppose you need an answer now,” I said.

“You’ve done this before,” Kevin laughed.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want the job. It had been nearly six months since I’d had a job – any job – so the prospect of working again albeit briefly came as a shock. The little voice inside my head told me I was being lazy. It was moving me to action.

“Okay,” I told Kevin, “I’m in.”

I heard a quick exhale through the phone. “Fantastic. I need to send you a bunch of forms to fill out: Independent contractor stuff, indemnification, deal memo, et cetera. Give me your email address and it will be in your inbox in five minutes.”

I gave him my address, spelling it out for him three times before he got it right.

“Oh, looking at it on paper now, I get it. Ha. Once you’ve filled out the forms I need them faxed back to my attention at the number I’ll list in the email. Also, I’m going to forward along a number for Jenna Wortham. She’s one of my intern assistants. Call her in the morning and she can take care of all your travel details – flight, hotel, and so on. I’ll let her know to expect your call.”

It hit me then that I was going to have to fly. In an airplane. I hated that.

“Got it. Jenna Wortham,” I repeated.

I pulled to the gate of the community where my mother lived and lowered the window to wave to the guard before he raised the reflective candy cane striped entry arm.

“Good, good, we’re all set,” Kevin said, glad he’d found his last-minute fill in.

“And Becker?”

“Yeah?”

“Have fun at the nerd fest.”