Champagne Rules. Susan Lyons
committed it made her feel sick.
“Okay, okay, we all understand that our Suzie was temporarily insane, drunk and sunstroked,” Jenny said. “Let’s get back to the letters.”
A busboy came to clear away the now-empty platter. They ordered coffee and baklava, then went back to reading—skimming now—aloud.
After another dozen losers, Ann held up the next. “This is from ‘caveman.’ What do you think, folks? Another cute and corny?”
Jenny turned to Suzanne. “How about it, did he whack you over the head with a ten-inch dick and drag you off to that cave?”
“No, Eros sprinkled us with magic dust and set our feet on the path.”
Ann began to read. “‘I was underneath you, hard inside you, as you stared out of the cave, describing the scene below.’”
Suzanne felt as if the cave had kissed her with its cool breath. Goose bumps pricked her arms.
“‘Do you remember the gay lovers?’” Ann read.
“Yes,” Suzanne breathed. “One was reading to the other.”
“‘One was reading to the other,’” Ann read, her voice trembling. “‘It was Lord Chatterley’s Lover.’” Ann glanced at Suzanne. “He must mean Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Suzanne shook her head. “I said that the man who was reading was switching it, making it Lord Chatterley with the gamekeeper. Because they were gay, you know?” She put her hands to her cheeks. They were burning, though cold shivers made her whole body tremble. “It’s him. My God, it’s really him.”
Ann thrust the piece of paper toward her. “There’s more. You read it.”
For a moment Suzanne couldn’t force herself to reach out and take the paper. When she did, it rustled in her shaking hand. She glanced first at the top part. “It came in on Saturday night.” Had he been thinking of her when she was dreaming of him?
The waiter began to set coffee cups on their table, and Suzanne was glad of the excuse to scan the message before she read it aloud. It was so incredible, knowing her lover really existed, and had typed these words to her.
When the waiter left, she took a quick sip of coffee, almost scalding her mouth, yet needing the moisture before she could speak. Then she took up from where Ann had left off. “‘I’ve thought of you so many times. Yes, my outrageous lover, if you do want to meet again, tell me where and when. I’ll walk toward you and you’ll walk toward me, and we’ll see what fate has in store for us this time.’”
Suzanne put the paper down, realizing she’d gripped it so tightly she’d crumpled the edge. She tried to smooth it out, pressing repeatedly against the paper until Ann said, “You can print another, Suze.”
She gave a little laugh. “Of course. I wasn’t thinking.” Then she laughed again, louder, hearing a note of hysteria. “He’s real. What am I going to do?”
“See him!” Jenny yelped, thumping her fist on the table.
Their waiter, approaching with plates of baklava, leaped backward and nearly dropped their dessert on the floor.
Jenny rolled her eyes. “Be careful with that.”
He came forward in a timid rush, almost threw the plates on the table and took off again.
Rina leaned across the table and touched Suzanne’s hand. “You wanted to know if you were dreaming. Now you do. So think, Suzie, will you be happier if you see him, or if you leave it like this?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to be the party pooper here,” Ann said, “but you took a serious risk that afternoon, Suze, and you’ve got a hole in your memory. You say it was sunstroke, but what if this ‘caveman’ drugged you?”
Suzanne shook her head. “We didn’t eat or drink anything.”
“The next thing you remember is being in your room the next day, feeling awful. Could you have fallen, hit your head?”
“Or maybe he bashed me over the head with that ten-inch dick? No, Ann, I don’t think so.”
“Then why don’t you remember? You must have repressed it. But why, if it was this idyllic, erotic afternoon, and the two of you made a sensible decision to leave it at that?”
“She got sunstroke and fried some brain cells,” Jenny said. “Don’t make such a big deal of it.”
Suzanne realized her head was throbbing, full of her friends’ words, and her own worries and fears. She closed her eyes and tried to focus, to remember. After a moment, she said slowly, “You know what I think? Now that I know he’s real, that I really did it—did all those things that were utterly out of character—I think my brain, my conscience, tried to forget. Sex with a stranger, not knowing if he was single, not using a condom.” She shivered. “I couldn’t come to terms with what I’d done, yet I couldn’t manage to forget.”
“You remembered the sex but not the conversation?” Ann said.
Suzanne shrugged helplessly.
“If you got so angsty about it the first time, then maybe you shouldn’t repeat it,” Rina commented, and Ann nodded her head firmly.
Jenny clapped her hands to her cheeks. “I can’t believe this! You can’t let this guy slip away again. God knows where he lives, and he’s offering to come here and meet you. That’s absolutely awesome. Come on, Suze, what’s there to get angsty about? Just make sure he’s not married, and then go for it. With a condom. Sex is a perfectly natural bodily function, so why not have great sex and just enjoy it? Without agonizing over it, for Christ’s sake!”
“Ssh,” Ann warned Jen, as Suzanne pressed both hands to her aching head.
Jenny took a long, noisy breath and continued in a quieter voice. “We all agreed to write the ad, and now everyone wants to bail out? No way. Look, here’s what we’re going to do.”
“We?” Suzanne said.
“Yeah, we’re in this together.” Jenny giggled. “I mean, not the actual sex, but getting you together with this guy. So, Suze, you reply to caveman, ask him if he’s single, and set up a meeting in some nice safe public place. And the rest of us’ll be there when you meet, to blow the whistle if something goes wrong.” She thrust her face toward Suzanne’s. “What do you say, Suzie Q?”
Suzanne sucked in a long breath. Across the table, Rina’s eyes were wide with concern. To her left, Jenny’s impatient scowl challenged her to action. To her right, Ann’s crinkled brow counseled caution.
She took another deep breath and her headache began to lift. How wonderful that these women all cared. They’d never let anything bad happen to her.
“I’m torn,” she admitted. “I’m busy, I enjoy my life, I have my long-term plan to eventually find and marry—yeah, Jenny, Mr. Cleaver. This…caveman is definitely not Mr. Cleaver.”
“But you’re torn?” Rina prompted.
She sighed. “I sound so middle-aged and boring. Like Jen says, what’s wrong with one more afternoon or evening of fabulous sex? This time I wouldn’t drink too much. I’d know the memories I was creating were real.”
Jenny, who was systematically demolishing her baklava, nodded vigorously.
“I’d go into it with my eyes open, and take a bunch of precautions,” Suzanne went on. “Besides, we might meet and not even be attracted to each other this time.”
Or she might be attracted to him, but he’d see plain old boring Suze. Now there was a dismal thought. She gripped her head with her hands, realizing her headache wasn’t gone after all. “Oh, I don’t know. I have to sleep on it.”
“Of