2. Lawless

   The handsome one in the pinstriped suit was Sue Lawless. An aggressive corporate lawyer, Lawless had earned her first one hundred million dollars by the age of thirty in the cutthroat field of Acquisitions and Mergers. The field had by and large become obsolete by then as most major companies had already been merged into brobdingnagoes, or what über-conglomerates were known as. 95% of the world’s pharmaceuticals, for example, was produced by the drugs brobdingnago Johnson & GlaxoSmithKlinePfizer; 70% of the sportswear market was dominated by a sports apparel brobdingnago of Addidas, Puma, Under Armour, Wilson, and Nike that had been cobbled together over the years. The remaining share was controlled by a Japanese brobdingnago that made everything from pencils to missiles, running shoes to jet aircraft engines.

   At thirty-eight, though, Lawless was beginning to suffer something exhibiting all the hallmarks of a mid-life’s crisis. While she had already achieved in monetary terms what any woman of her day could ever hope to achieve, something was still missing. Until she found what it was, she filled the hole by racking up a tally of sexual conquests that was the envy of her friends.

   “Did you check out the nuts on that guy?” Lawless said as Sam and Martin walked out the front door of the bar. “Oh, how I’d love to get my hands on those!”

   “They’re fake, you know,” Marcy, Lawless’s bookish assistant observed.

   “Of course, I know they’re fake! What kind of chump you take me for?”

   “I’m just saying.”

   “You’re ‘just saying’,” Lawless mocked. “The less you say, the better.”

   Her assistant slumped down in her seat and began licking the salt off the rim of her greyhound.

   “I love big nuts as much as the next gal,” the eminent game designer Pam Marker interjected, “but I once had a guy a couple of years back with the smallest testicles. Looked just like walnuts dangling there, but boy could he come! My breasts were covered in jism. Felt like I was in one of those Japanese bukake films.”

   “Sounds wonderful,” Lawless said, biting her lower lip.

   “Oh, it was,” Marker assured the other women at the table.

   “So, did you hook up again?”

   “Hell no! The dog wouldn’t return my calls. You get one of these guys so hot and hard, you think they’d appreciate it, but, no, they turn all stuffy on you and say silly things like they were always hoping to ‘save’ themselves for ‘someone special’.”

   The women all rolled their eyes in disdain.

   “And to think,” Lawless said, “they used to call us the fairer sex! Hah!”

   “I was reading an old book by the author Philip Roth called Portnoy’s Complaint. . . ,” another friend by the name of Penny Wiseman began. She was a crack literary agent with a multinational panmedia talent agency.

   “Porky’s Complaint?” Lawless asked.

   “Not Porky, Portnoy. Portnoy’s Complaint. It was so dated, I could barely finish the novel, but one thing that struck me was how the main character is just driven by lust, chasing after and seducing—seducing women if can you believe it. And, oy gevalt, the masturbation! This Portnoy is masturbating all the time. When was the last time you heard of a man masturbating?”

   Lawless’s assistant looked up from her greyhound and said with surprise, “Men masturbate?”

   “Of course, they do,” Lawless shot back. “They won’t admit it, though.

   “Speaking of books,” Marker cut in. “I’m reading a great book right now about how to pick up guys, you know, how to read their body language.”

   Wiseman said she had heard of it but hadn’t read it yet.

   “No need to,” Lawless boasted. “I can teach you everything.”

   “Oh, I’m sure you can!” Wiseman said, laughing.

   “The first thing you need to know,” Lawless said, leaning in as if to share a secret, “is that they’re all sexually frustrated as hell and just dying for the release.”

   “Even those two guys?” Lawless’s assistant asked.

   “Even those two. Especially, the prude in the harlequin codpiece,” Lawless replied, speaking of Sam. “He’s interested. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

© Aonghas Crowe, 2011-12. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.