Pretty Lethal. Joe Schreiber

      ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ – Duran Duran

       But hows the sex????

      I looked at my iPhone, knowing the message was from Norrie before I even got a look at the screen. He was the only one that texted me on a regular basis, even though we saw each other practically every day at practice. Everybody else – including Sasha, our lead singer, and Caleb, our guitarist – just called.

      It’s awesome, I typed.

       how awesme?

       Tantric.

      A long pause, and then:

       yr still not getting any, r u?

      ‘Who are you texting?’ Paula asked from the driver’s seat.

      I switched off the phone and stuffed it in my pocket. ‘Norrie.’

      ‘Did you tell him yet?’

      ‘I told him there’s a band meeting at my house in an hour. I want it to be a surprise. Unless Linus already talked to them.’ Linus Feldman was our manager, a five-foot-two, hundred-and-eight-pound Jewish tsunami who’d blown in sometime last summer from the wilds of Staten Island. He was old-school management, a scarred veteran of a dozen legendary management teams from back in the go-go eighties, when rock-and-roll was minting millionaires on what seemed like a weekly basis. From the moment he’d come out of semi-retirement to represent Inchworm, he’d been waiting for someone to try to take advantage of us so he could rip their head off. So far, to his great disappointment, we’d been treated with an unprecedented level of fairness and respect.

      ‘I’m not sure how crazy Linus is about the idea.’

      ‘A European tour? How could he not be thrilled?’

      ‘He’s got his own ideas about the band,’ Paula said. ‘We’ll see how it goes.’

      She signaled left and turned from the beach road onto the two-lane highway and I watched the ocean receding in my side-view mirror, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

      I checked my phone to see if I might have missed any more texts, but the last one was from Norrie, accusing me of not yet having sex with Paula. Unfortunately, he was right. Paula and I had spent hours on the couch, kissing until our lips were numb and tingling, and we’d done plenty of other stuff, basically everything you can do – but the Deed itself remained undone.

      It definitely wasn’t Paula’s fault. She’d made it pretty clear that she was ready whenever I was, which I guess made me one of the worst deal-closers of all time. Throughout junior high and high school, all I’d thought about was the day I’d finally get rid of the virginity problem. Now here was Paula with her knockout face and smoking body – an experienced woman, no less – patiently waiting to teach me so that I wouldn’t knee-and-elbow my way through the chicken dance of sexual initiation the way my parents’ generation had, decoding the lyrics of bad eighties hair-metal power ballads as our Kama Sutra. Exactly what did you say to a girl after she shook you all night long? And was pouring some sugar on someone as sticky as it sounded?

      We were an enlightened generation. Chow had lost his cherry to his girlfriend back in his sophomore year of high school, Sasha and Caleb had never had any problems scoring (‘Dude,’ Sasha once said, with absolute sincerity, ‘why do you think we even play in a band?’), and even Norrie sounded like he was at it pretty routinely with his current girlfriend. Here I was, paralyzed at the starting line, waiting. For what? True love? A sign from God? A long weekend in Paris?

      Therapy was what I needed, and a lot of it. Meanwhile, I wondered if there was a Virgins Anonymous program in some church basement somewhere, or at least a cult in southern Connecticut in need of one to sacrifice.

      Throughout it all, Paula remained super cool about the whole thing. She always said she’d wait until I was ready. But how long before her anticipation turned to exasperation?

      Meanwhile, I tried not to think about it.

      It was a great plan, and sometimes it almost worked.