“Good to see you, Mister Hammer,” she says with a crisp, bright smile. “I’ll let Tyler know you’re here.”
“Thanks, Lily.”
Before I can even grab a seat on a plush cranberry-red couch in the lobby, the head of the firm opens the glass door. “Nick Hammer,” he says in his deep voice as he walks over and claps me on the back. I stand. The man is pure class. Clay Nichols wears a dark suit, a crisp white shirt, and a purple silk tie. “Tyler told me you were coming by. Couldn’t miss the chance to say hello and congratulate you on all your success.”
“And you as well. Love the new digs. And tell your wife she does not have to give me free liquor.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “Let me give you a piece of advice. The wife takes orders from exactly no one.”
He guides me down the hall to Tyler’s office.
“My favorite client!” Tyler says as he greets me. I met Tyler back in the day when I was at RISD studying animation, and he was a history major at Brown. He’s risen up quickly in entertainment law, and it’s not only because he has a mentor in Clay. He’s just really fucking good.
“I bet you say that to all your clients.”
He shoots me a grin. “Only the ones who make me laugh.”
“Then I’ve got a funny story for you,” I say. Both men take seats on the couch. I grab the comfy chair, lean forward, take a breath, and give this the pregnant pause of ridiculousness it deserves. “Gino wants me to make the show more wholesome.”
Tyler raises an eyebrow. The guy is the spitting image of his cousin—dark hair, brown eyes, square jawline. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was his younger brother. He’s suited up, too. “That’s insane. You don’t ask Seth MacFarlane to make American Dad less fucked up,” Tyler says, stretching his long legs in front of him.
“Look, I’m not a prima donna. I’m all about giving the viewers what they want. But I just can’t wrap my head around what he wants from me.”
“Leave it to us. It’s our job to figure out what he wants, and if that aligns with what you want,” Tyler says, and for the next thirty minutes we dive into their plan for how they want to handle the renegotiation at the end of this month, less than two weeks away. It all sounds reasonable to me, and frankly, that’s why I work with these guys. When we’re done, I ask what they’re up to tonight.
Clay goes first. “I have a date with my two favorite girls. My wife and daughter are meeting me at the playground in a few hours. This man,” he says, patting his cousin’s shoulder. “He’s trying to win back an old flame.”
Clay gives me a quick download on Tyler’s romantic situation, and it’s a tough one.
“Ouch,” I say, shuddering and then meeting my lawyer’s eyes. “Good luck with that, buddy. Negotiating with Gino might be more fun.”
Tyler laughs and shakes his head. “Believe you me, I know. What would Mister Orgasm do to win her back?”
I stroke my stubbled jaw. “Aside from sending in your place a rich, hot, successful, well-endowed cartoonist to win her over?”
Tyler narrows his dark eyes and shoots me a look.
I flash him a smile. “He’d probably just let her know how much she means to him, then make her feel like a queen.”
“Truer words,” Clay says, then I say good-bye, leave their office, and head into the crisp air of a late fall afternoon in New York City.
But as I slide into the next train downtown, I’m not thinking about Tyler’s woman anymore. I’m thinking about the text Harper just sent me. Actually, thinking is the wrong word. Feeling is the only one that fits. As I open her new message and scroll through the pictures, I hit one thousand degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
I sink onto the train’s plastic seat, and my eyes are hostage to these images. Someone says, “excuse me,” as he walks past, and I barely pay attention. I can’t look anyplace else. Not possible. Not feasible. There’s nothing else in the universe but these photos, and I can’t wipe the naughty grin off my face.
I’m cooked, roasted, and fried to a crisp. I’m seared all the way through. This text is the mother lode of Harper’s fantasies.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but maybe that should be revised. A photo is worth a thousand heartbeats, because that’s what mine skipped looking at this insanely sexy series she sent me.
The first shot is of a woman in black panties, which are tied with a tiny pink polka dot bow at the top of her ass. Her legs are smooth and sculpted. In the next one, a woman wears stockings with a vintage ruffled thing on the top of the thighs, and she’s bending, unsnapping a garter belt, her rear in view. I rub my hand across the back of my neck, and breathe out hard as the train rattles underground.
It only gets hotter from there, and I’m already an inferno, baking in public transportation, surrounded by guys in suits and moms with toddlers, by hipsters and tourists, by anyone and everyone, and I don’t care.
Because these photos are all I see. The shot that follows has a woman on her back, spread out across the bed, naked, her lips in an O, while the guy she’s with devours her pussy with his mouth. His hands are curled around her ass, squeezing it, as he buries his face between her legs. She is in some kind of wild bliss.
But the next woman is in unholy heaven. She stands in nothing but heels, bent over a kitchen counter, and her lover kneels, spreading her cheeks open and licking her pussy, his fingers digging into the flesh of her rear as he laps her up.