EXCERPT
Searching for an escort was not the same as searching for porn.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I hit enter on my keyboard. Holding my breath, I waited as the list of results—Elite Males, Premium Gigolos, Stags R Us—populated my laptop screen. I perched on the edge of my black leather desk chair in my home office overlooking the Seattle harbor. All the entries sounded like adult films. Each one screamed precisely what to expect, which made choosing any one in particular impossible.
With one eye shut and a tentative finger, I clicked on the top entry, Elite Males. An obscene amount of oiled flesh filled most of my monitor—a close-up photo of a smooth-chested guy flexing his defined muscles while lying on his back. The shot highlighted his torso and prominent tattoos, capturing only his lips and chin; he was clean-shaven, and his jaw was also, for some reason, shiny. Ugh! Too much! The home page wasn’t quite as bad as I’d expected but still cringe-worthy: almost laughable. The guy in the image provided what was supposed to be an enticing, yet exaggerated, display, which I assumed—combined with his other “talents” listed in the reviews that read like porn—must have earned him his five-star rating. To each his own.
The parts of the man I could see on my screen were considered conventionally hot. However, after reading the list of customers’ erotic comments, I swallowed back the bitter tang filling my mouth. I felt dirty just looking at his image—and desperate. But I guess, for all intents and purposes, I was. My deadline from my publisher loomed overhead, and I had no manuscript to submit. My stomach rolled.
“It’s been a year, Molly,” Renee had said last week after huffing into the phone. “The editors expect something after that advance. Your reputation will only buy you so much time. Can you at least give me the first fifty pages so I can appease them? Try to barter an extension?”
Picturing Renee’s scowl was easy—an otherwise non-existent crinkle above the bridge of her button nose, with her perpetual bold lips in full pout mode.
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