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It always just kinda glanced off me. I mean she wasn’t mean to me. Just most everybody else. But the thing I appreciated is that at least she was open about it. Usually with Southern women you get smiles to the front and daggers to the back. But my mom has always been good about stabbing people right in the eye. God love her.
It doesn’t take a lot of digging in my brain to realize that the women I’ve been with before now were some sort of version of my mom. Like I’ve always said about me and Pierce. Our Oedipal wounds run deep. It also doesn’t take a Carl Jung to figure out that’s why I’m so smitten with Eden. She is, in every way possible, the opposite of that.
She’s one of the only genuinely kind people I’ve met in my life. Not like Cheryl the leasing agent who’s “polite” and “nice.” Eden is a legitimately and deeply kind person.
I hope, hope, hope she hasn’t been lying to me and that I’m wrong about this Sexpert thing. Because with the women in my life before now, I at least knew that I was going to be disappointed right from the start. It would suck to feel this good, trust this much, and go in this hard to have the rug fucking pulled out.
But hell, I’ve chosen to stand dead in the middle of that carpet, so if and when it happens, it’s nobody’s fault but my own.
It’s so goddamn stupid anyway. If the magazine is failing, this Sexpert idea is not going to save it. The whole thing is now so far out of proportion to its actual value that it’s almost laughable.
Except.
It’s not to Pierce.
And it’s probably not to whoever this Sexpert girl is (please don’t be Eden, please don’t be Eden, please don’t be Eden…).
Jesus. If the government knew I was using their secret spying app to figure out the identity of a pair of talking boobies on the internet…
Like I said. Laughable.
Ha. Ha.
“Wow,” I say looking over at Zoey’s home computer setup. “That’s no joke.” She’s got a twenty-seven-inch screen, a stand-alone processing tower, and what looks like a supermicro personal cloud server.
“Oh, yeah, Zoey’s a nerd too,” says Eden.
“Clearly. Is she, like, a gamer? Because all that video game violence is gonna have a real deleterious effect on young master Stevie.” I glance over at baby Stevie in his cowboy hat, throwing Cheerios all over the place. “If it hasn’t already.”
“No, no.” Eden laughs. “She’s not a gamer. She’s a…”
She stops short and trails off.
“She’s what?”
“Nothing.”
“Eden? What? Is she … a hacker? A day trader? Is she running a Ponzi scheme? What?”
“No. Nothing. She just. She does, like, web design and like… video production. And stuff.”
She takes a deep breath, bites her lip, and looks at me through the top rims of her glasses like she does when she’s nervous. And it strikes me that we’ve now spent enough time together that I can officially tell when she looks at me in a way that’s recognizable. I think it’s cool as hell that that’s happened so fast. But it makes me really uneasy that it seems to have a negative and surreptitious undertone.
And then a series of thoughts begin ricocheting around my brain the way they do when I’ve solved a problem or cracked a code. The same way they used to when I would stare at a canvas and suddenly what I wanted to create would just appear there in front of my eyes. Or the way I can stare at a pitch on a rock wall and suddenly see the route to the top.
Zoey is a web designer and does video production.
She likely understands how to maximize production values and mise en scène.
She’d also have the tools at her disposal to create content.
Eden would have reservations about telling me this stuff if she, in any way, was engaged with her friend in the process of creating content that might run afoul of my current raison d’être with Pierce.
And speaking of Pierce, how is it that I’ve been around the guy again for less than a month and I’m already using a shitload of French phrases in my internal musings?
“Andrew?” Eden’s voice pulls me back.
“Yeah, sorry, what?”
“Is… Is everything…?”
“Oh. Oh, uh, yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. I just got distracted for a second.”
She gets a look of resignation on her face. “About what?”
“Nothing. Seriously, nothing. Hey, look at me.” She does. “OK. Honestly?” She nods. “I was just… You said video production and that started me thinking about videos and that started me thinking about Sexpert and Pierce and… That’s all.”
She lets out a long breath and looks at the ground.
“But,” I continue. “So what? We’ve already established that it’s not you, right?” She doesn’t say anything. “Right?” I ask, a little more forcefully. She looks up at me, makes eye contact and says…
