Who's Crying Now

Her too-white shirt was pushed out wards by her sizeable bust. But the shirt was buttoned all the way up to the collar. She had a tie on as well, to complete her look. But the tie was made of some type of fashion jewelry and was thrown in just for fun.

Every step she took as she headed for us exuded sex appeal and genuine...fun. Heather was the latest incarnation of the perennial sex goddess. There's one for every age. In the past, we had Jayne Mansfield and Veronica Lake, or Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. In our day and age, most of the women like her ended up as porn stars or actresses. Heather apparently went into publishing.

Even as she stepped up to us, her head twitched and a waterfall of blond curls cascaded over her shoulders. Something about me obviously scared her or angered her because her already hardened expression turned even harder and icier in our presence. It was as if she was a mother bear defending her cub.

"What?" she said. The kid gloves were off. There was no pretense of civility here. There was instant on the spot animosity that shocked both Meg and me.

Meg, who was used to handling the business and organizational aspects of everything stepped forward.

"Hi, Heather, I'm Megan Caldwell," she began, extending her hand as she got close to the towering blond Goddess. Greg was tongue tied. I think his tongue was actually hanging out of his mouth as he stared open mouthed at her.

"This is..." continued Meg, before she was cut off.

"I know who she is," spat Heather, heatedly. "And I know what she did to him. I don't need to have any lingering personal issues ruining his book tour." She stared at me angrily and threw in. "Or his life."

"Uhm, this isn't a personal matter," said Megan quickly. "We just wanted an interview for the TV station we work for. Can that be arranged?"

"Is that all?" asked Heather. Her tone softened a bit. She gestured and another of her headset brigade ran over. This one was female and a real nerd, not a manufactured one, like Heather. The funny thing was that the girl apparently tried to copy Heather's fashion sense and obviously couldn't pull it off.

"They need an invitation to the next press session," she said to the girl in the headset. Then she turned and headed back to Kevin as if every second she spent away from him was agony.

"Well, you guys missed the press conference this morning," said the mousy little woman. He really doesn't have enough time to do individual interviews anymore. Our next presser is the day after tomorrow. That's New Year's Eve, at the Children's hospital downtown. He's giving them a huge donation. I can't guarantee it, but I can try to give you a few moments to ask him a few questions, but don't count on it."

Even as she spoke, Heather had her fucking hands back on my husband. It was even worse this time. As she pretended to massage his shoulders she leaned into him rubbing those huge boobs all over his back. Beside me Greg started rubbing his crotch.

"Are you going to jack off before or after you get your book signed?" I asked angrily. The entire experience had hurt me more than I wanted to let on. I had rushed into things because one of the deepest beliefs I still held was that Kevin and I were not done. I still loved Kevin with every beat of my heart and I was sure that he still loved me.

No matter what happened between us, no matter where we were or what we did, that love will survive somehow, someway. While Meg negotiated, Greg pre-masturbated and Heather in the distance, demonstrated, I took the chance and slipped out the back. I went back to our hotel and found that my room was finally ready. I went up to it and collapsed on my bed in a fit of tears.

They weren't the first tears I'd she'd for Kevin and I was sure they wouldn't be the last. But you'd think that somehow some spark, some sort of mystic universal energy would have at least let him know that the love of his life was in the room with him.

* * * * * *

Kevin

It was a strange day. Almost from the moment my eyes had opened that morning and I'd gone out for my run, I'd known that day was different somehow. I would almost say that I felt it. But it had been so long since I had allowed myself to feel anything that I wasn't sure I even knew what it meant to feel anymore.

There had been a time, long ago, when things were different. But that was so long ago and so far away from my current life, that it seemed like it was someone else who'd lived that life.

I was signing books at one of those hotel book fairs. The hotels love them because rabid readers plan their vacations around the chance to meet and speak to their favorite authors. I love interacting with the average person who reads my books. It's the so-called super fans who scare me. Some of those people know more about my stories and the characters in them than I do. The truly delusional ones think that I wrote a particular story about them personally or that we have some sort of connection. They're the ones who often have to be carted away by security after speaking to me. It's really frightening to have a grown man or woman screaming at me that I don't understand a certain character's true motivation or what it means, while the police are hauling them off to the nuthouse.

I wish that there was some safe way of telling them to get a life. Or to explain to them that all of the stories I write are pure fiction. I wish they understood that I made all of it up and that none of those people really existed. Then maybe they'd understand that any real or imagined similarities to them or their lives were purely coincidental and that we had no connections, mystical or other, because I don't really know them.

Most of the events in my books had actually been inspired by things that had happened to ME. That was especially true of that first book. Sure the names and the locales and the situations were changed to protect the guilty, and also to protect me from libel. But that first book was a way for me to work out my feelings about the collapse of my marriage.

I don't think about those days much anymore. Mostly because it still hurts to think about it. Unlike the fierce, decisive, prideful men in my books, I'd simply run away and retreated to another state. I'd gotten a job as a writer for a small newspaper in a different state. I wrote obits and human interest stories by day and slept the sleep of the damned every night. I didn't go out. I didn't socialize. I just kicked my wounds for the first few months while wondering how and why I'd been so stupid.

I often dreamed of striking out against my pain, but being a rational man, I realized that going back there and kicking Jerry's ass wouldn't help me. I turned to the one thing I knew how to do. Besides if the pen is mightier than the sword, then the word processor has to superior to the drive by shooting. So I started writing. Surprisingly the writing went quickly. It took me only six months to write the first one. But then, I had absolutely no life. Once it was finished, I had no idea what to do with it.

Pure chance led to my meeting a small local publisher. He was advertising his publishing company in our newspaper, hoping to drum up business. While I was writing the copy for his ad, we started talking about writing in general and ended up talking about my book. He was the first person I let read it. We didn't have any kind of contract or agreement, but he took it with him to read while he was at a publisher's convention.

He ended up misplacing it and a man from another publishing company, a much bigger one, tracked him down to get on touch with me. He wanted very much to publish my book. He told me to get a lawyer right away. The lawyer helped very much with the contracts but that was all he did. He told me that I needed a manager and suggested his son who was in college majoring in business.

I took on the son as my manager. He was inept. With almost every situation that arose, he went to seek advice from people who taught classes at his school. One of those people was Heather. She had graduated a few years prior and was working as a teaching assistant in the business program at night, while she interned at a publishing company by day.

With her foot in the door in the publishing industry, Heather proved to be an invaluable asset. My erstwhile manager was turning to her so often that it just seemed appropriate for the two of us to meet. Heather read the manuscript and with a lot of shouting and bad feelings took over from my first manager. I haven't looked back since.

Over the past few years, she's become the one person I can always trust. When I had those disastrous flings, trying to put my feelings for Karla in the past, it was always Heather who told me when it was time for them to end.

The first was a definite mistake. She was a woman I met at one of the earliest book fairs. She was older than I was and like me, she had been married once before. In my emotional weakness, I saw us helping each other to get over our shared misery.

But I was wrong. She had no misery. The only things we had in common were that we'd both been married before and we both no longer were. The only thing I remember about the early days of the relationship was the sex. I remember her flailing under me, with her breasts jiggling in every direction, while she screamed out her pleasure.

The problem was that sex was all we did. I soon discovered, or Heather did that she was the one who had cheated in her marriage. Her voracious appetite for sex that had threatened to wear me out had been what had led her to seek sex outside of her marriage.

Heather booked a European book tour and off we went. It was about that time that the movie rights to the first book were sold. I was also hired as a technical advisor for the movie. It was a busy time since I had begun writing the second book. But not so busy that one of the actresses on the movie set, a beautiful young Italian woman, didn't catch my eye.

That one was another disaster. She was so intent on marrying me that she distracted me from writing by spending all of our time together. Heather would not allow that, so beautiful Elena was sent packing.

There were one or two others but I had noticed something about all of them. No matter how worldly and experienced or beautiful and young they were, not a single one of them actually touched me. Not one of them made me feel anything. It was sex and nothing more.

I had everything I dreamed of and more coming in. I had cars. I had money. I had the career I'd always dreamed of. But I had no one to share it with. I decided that I preferred to be alone. Karla had spoiled all women for me. I found myself unable to feel anything.

But that day signing the books, I felt something for the first time in forever. Heather stood behind me, massaging my shoulders as I signed. We had a system. It was relaxed and easy. We pretty much free-styled the whole thing. I said different things to each person but in actuality I spent no more than forty-five seconds with each person. I do remember Heather stepping away to do something.

At the time, I was in the zone. My thoughts were all centered on where I was going after the signing. I smiled, asked a name, listened to a question about some aspect of one of my books, then smiled again and started with the next one. It took only a few moments for Heather to return. And when she did, she went right back to massaging my shoulders.

This time as she massaged, she stood directly behind me. She leaned over to hear what the people I was signing for were saying and in doing so brought her torso in contact with my back. I could feel her nipples raking my back and it felt really good. I grabbed her hand and pulled her away from me before either one of us got to a point that might make us do something stupid.

Heather was probably doing it innocently, but she had a fiancé somewhere in the area and I didn't want to put any kind of strain on their relationship. Even as I pulled her away from me and kept signing, I felt something. I looked towards the door and one of the staff was talking to a small woman and a nerdy looking guy. I caught the tail end of someone leaving the room. All I saw was a slice of blond hair as the person left the hall. If people were leaving without even having their books signed, I was moving too slow.

Luckily Heather gestured and one of the staff closed the door. It would take me another hour to sign all of the books that were already in the room. But at least no one else would be allowed in.

An hour later, the last of them, a smiling woman stepped up to the table in front of me. Heather stretched her arms out and told me that she'd be back in a few minutes. She had to go and check the count of people and how many books had been sold.

"She's a pretty one," said the woman holding out her book. "But they were wrong. She's nothing like your other one. That one hasn't got the desperation or the drive, but I think she loves you more." I just looked at her and smiled. I had no idea what she was talking about. I figured that she was just crazy and talking about a character from one of my books.

"She should have stayed in line with me. If she had she'd be here talking to you with me," she said. "But I guess she thought that since she'd once been married to you, she could just..." Even as she spoke the pen fell from my fingers and I looked at her in shock.

"Whah...?" I mumbled. "Karla was..."

"She was here with me only an hour ago. She seemed to be really excited to see you and...Oh!" she sighed noticing that I had ruined the signature on her book in my shock.

"Well," she said. "I suppose that this way it will be worth much more to a collector."

"I'll replace your book and sign the new one," I said. "We are in a book store."

"I think I'll keep this one," she smiled. "This almost seems like a story from one of your books. It reminds me that true love doesn't always run a straight path."

As she walked off she turned around and smiled at me again. "Wait until my husband hears about this," she said nodding. I realized then what I had been feeling all day. Apparently in exchange for giving me the ability to write stories that touched people, the fates had taken a part of my soul in exchange. It seemed that I was only able to experience one emotion at a time. And since my pain had faded over the past six years, I was now subjected to loneliness.

The woman walking away from me, clutching a book that I had written and signed, as if it were a rare treasure was far richer than I. She has someone to tell her thoughts to. I had only people who worked for me.

I looked at my watch and realized that it was far later than I'd thought. It was nearly nine p.m. There was a place I wanted to go and I wanted to be there alone. Heather would never understand where I wanted to go and she wouldn't feel it or appreciate it the way I did. It was simply one of those things that you had to be there to understand. I got up from the table and simply walked out of the room.

I was still shocked that Karla had been in the same room with me and I hadn't noticed. I'd always felt that we had some sort of connection, but perhaps that was the stuff of romance novels and didn't really exist in the real world.

Perhaps it was just the fact that she had never been very far from my thoughts since the first day I met her. For the past six years I'd been trying to get over her. The problem was the very act of forcing myself not to think about her only made me think about her more. Trying to convince myself that I no longer loved her only made me realize that I would probably always love her. My greatest feat this far had been the realization that just because you love someone, it doesn't mean that you have to be with that person. It also doesn't mean that you can't live without that person in your life.

I have a great life. I have my career. I have my fans. I have everything I want, including a stable of Mustangs. Perhaps having everything I want, or almost everything, only makes me long for the one thing that I can't have even more.

I changed my mind. Suddenly the walk had no appeal. I needed the comfort of the familiar. I walked towards the rear of the hotel and the parking structure. I walked through the door and immediately saw the familiar lines. For this trip, I'd chosen an oldie but a goody. My red '96 Mustang GT. When I bought the car it had been a mess. I'd had it gutted and completely redone. The car was better than new. It even had one of the new 5.0 Coyote engines. The engine had a Whipple twin screw supercharger. It made well over six hundred horsepower in a platform that was smaller and lighter than the last two generations or the next that would start in 2015.

I have a lot of Mustangs, but this one is special. I bought it with the money I got for the movie rights to the first book. Every single piece on the car is custom made. I spared no expense because in my delirium, I somehow thought that having this car would make me feel better. I somehow thought that if I poured all of the love I had into the car, I'd forget about Karla. When that didn't work, I started that ill- fated series of doomed romances.

After it was all over and some measure of sanity had returned, I realized how foolish it had all been. The women were all adults and fully functioning human beings. None of them were innocents. They all had their own schemes and plans for our relationships. Some wanted sex, others wanted money, and still others wanted a share of my burgeoning fame.

And like most women, all of them thought that they could change me somehow. None of them did. In the end the women are all gone, but the car remains. And though I have others, this one will probably always be my favorite. In a way it's fitting. Most people don't see it. But the thing they don't is the most important.

I guess that I expected the women to make me feel the way that Karla did. She always made me feel like I was surrounded by love, or like I was the most important thing in the world. Those women made me feel many things but not that. I felt like I was part of a Ken and Barbie pairing. One of those made for TV things, where two good looking people are paired together to provide entertainment for all of the housewives out there to dream about.

The problem is that those things are never meant to last. Real love is never perfect. Real love is painful and messy and ugly. It's full of jealousy and arguments and people laying their hearts and souls open, only to be disappointed because their partners are humans instead of mind-readers.

I guess I expected those women to love me and I didn't feel it from them. At least not the way I wanted to. The car, on the other hand, was incapable of giving me love. But it gave me everything it was capable of and that was far more than the women ever had.

Starting the engine, as usual made me feel free. It made me feel as if I could just go. I could go anywhere I wanted to. It was all open to me. Anywhere from sea to shining sea was mine for the taking. To me, the running pony, the symbol on the front of my mustang stood for freedom. But I suppose people who drive Camaros and Corvettes think the same thing. To be truthful those poor deluded people who drive Civics and the Prius probably think it too.

I stepped on the gas and four hundred wild horses screamed into the night. With the windows down and the radio on, I was free. I was totally unencumbered. No friends, no family, no responsibilities, I had nothing to hold me back...for a full city block. Then I parked the car outside of another huge building. The guards all knew me and just nodded as I walked past them into the canyon-like building.