Crazy, Stupid Sex

Excerpt

Chapter One

Acquire social lubricant. Check. Step three of this theoretical man-landing mission was complete. She’d already put on panties that would make her feel confident and sexy, then found a bar in the right part of town that was sure to contain the right sort of people.

Now she just needed to relax so she could engage a potential mate.

Evie James looked down into her pink drink and frowned. She didn’t feel particularly socially lubricated. Or lubricated in any fashion, really.

She was nervous. Shaky and neurotic and nervous. This was what years of hiding in her office had gotten her. What years of dating the same boring man who hogged the covers and treated the female orgasm like an elusive, nonexistent unicorn that didn’t bear hunting for had gotten her.

She didn’t know how to pick up men. She knew how to program apps. How to manage a team of creatives. How to sell and market what she created, to a whole roomful of people if necessary, and she had a few million dollars in her bank account that stood as a testament to that. On a personal note, she also knew how to find a moving service to get your rat-bastard ex’s shit out of your apartment and have it delivered to his mother’s house in boxes marked “things to clutter up your basement when your man-child returns.”

Yeah, she knew how to do that.

But picking up men? New men she had never talked to before? Men she wanted to do sexual things, not business things, with? Not so much.

Not that she was actually going to do any sexual things with a guy tonight. She just needed to see if she could get one to take her bait. So to speak.

She sucked up more pink drink through her straw and waited for some magic to happen. None.

She tugged her phone out of her purse and opened up the basic mock-up of the app she’d been using as a guide. Flirtmagazine had commissioned her to create this app that would be a field guide for fashion, flirting and hooking up. They were trying to modernize since print was dead for the ten millionth time in the last decade and they were trying to leap into the dating app space to try and do something to help flagging circulation.

Evie had never been into magazines like that because they confounded her.

Easy hair styling guide? Try impossible.

50 Breezy summer styles? Why not one comfy outfit?

Toe-Curling Orgasms? Never met her.

Working on it in code wasn’t really making it clearer to Evie. Of course, she had taken the assignment when she’d still been in a relationship. Now that she was single she felt a little more inspired to try and figure it out.

The app needed some beta testing. And she’d decided she ought to be the one testing it. Because the truth was, if it could work for her it could work for anyone.

She clicked on the “10 Dating Tips” article and skimmed to number four.

Put yourself out there! You don’t have to wait for a man to approach you. That went out with corsets and stays. The rules of the dating game are in your hands.

Her shaky, sweaty hands.

Sweet. Great. Approach a man.

Once, her friend had shown her an article and she’d glanced at the guy in it – bearded, flannel.

He’s hot.

He was arrested for chopping a woman into pieces, Evie.

She’d given thanks for Jason then.

How were supposed to know which man wanted to cut you into pieces and which one wanted to fuck you? And also how were you supposed to know if a guy was any good at it?

Fucking. Not cutting you into pieces.

She looked around the bar. It was so dim. She wasn’t sure how anyone was supposed to tell how attractive the people around them were. Though, maybe that would work in her favor. While she’d followed the “How to Get a Smokey Eye in Three Easy Steps” guide religiously while getting ready, she was privately afraid she looked like a baby raccoon.

So maybe the dim lighting would work in her favor.

Or maybe she could find a furry who liked that kind of thing.

The guy across the bar was actually pretty nice looking. He was wearing that standard blue business shirt, collar open, his tie probably ditched in whatever fleet car he drove. A company car, she was willing to bet. He had an eight-dollar haircut. That she was sure of. She could see the razor tracks from twenty feet away, but that wasn’t so bad.

He probably sold something. Insurance maybe.

So maybe she could get a little ego salve and a good rate on a policy for her motorcycle all in one night. Win win.

She stood up and started walking toward him before she could overthink it. Before she could think at all.

A wall of cheap body-spray scent greeted her when she got within five feet of him. She nearly gagged. They needed serving-sizes on that crap. She’d banned it in her offices. The young male interns completely believed the commercials that promised random ménages with strangers and seemed to bathe in the stuff before work. It gave her a headache.

It was giving her a headache now.

That didn’t bode well for the flirting.

She really would like it if she could manage to stun a guy with her witty repartee and stunning beauty. If she could get a guy to ask her to come back to his place. Partly because she was trying to figure out how successful her app was, and partly because she really needed the boost to her self-esteem.

The loss of Jason the Ass, and the fact that he’d been sleeping with another woman, had dented her confidence. A little male interest would go a long way in fixing that. Not all the way to the bedroom, mind you.

She couldn’t even imagine that being worth it. In her memory, sex had never been so hot, in spite of rumors to the contrary.

It had been a long time for her. Even longer since sex had thrilled her in any capacity.

Jason had been the cardboard in bed. Stiff. Dull. Boring.

And yes, she was probably a little bit boring in bed, too. But she hadn’t been inspired. Evie was nothing if not creative in many other aspects of her life, but she needed a spark of something.  Once upon a time, the novelty of Jason being interested in her at all had been enough. She was over that now. Having a man just to have him didn’t do anything for her.

Her sexual resume was so grim.

Until proven otherwise, Evie was convinced toe-curling orgasms were a myth. She was open to being convinced otherwise. She’d love to know if they were real, in fact. If the panting and sweating and things that her friends always talked about, that the magazines said were possible, were in fact possible.

Her entire sexual career boiled down to one man who seemed to think foreplay was a golf term.

Nintendo golf. Not even real golf.

It was partly her fault. Because she’d been seventeen and a virgin the first time she’d been with him, and she’d basically just kept being with him because she hadn’t known what else to do. They’d followed each other through life. Through college and their first apartment. Their first jobs. And then her quitting her job to develop apps. And her ensuing success.

Success, which had, apparently, made him feel neutered and had forced him to seek greener pastures. And by greener pastures, she meant another woman’s vagina.

Bastard.

The thing that sucked, really sucked, was that when she’d come home from her office to find him with his head between another woman’s legs she’d been pissed about two things.

The first being that he’d said he didn’t like that. Always. He’d tried it on her once, and said he hated it. And he’d never done it again. So, there he was after ten years with her, doing it for another woman with an enthusiasm she’d never seen from him before.

Yeah, that had pissed her off.

The second thing was that she wasn’t brokenhearted.

The realization that she didn’t love him anymore either was a hard one to swallow. Because in some ways, even though she was angry, she just felt free.

Free to move his things out. Free to tell him to leave. To tell him to enjoy life without his meal ticket. Free to put on music he hated and dance in her panties and go to bars to pick up men who got her much more excited than Freaking Jason.

It had made her angry because it was ten years of her life, poured out on a guy she couldn’t even cry over.

Her most righteous and frightening anger was at herself. Six months she’d had it stewing on the back burner. She hadn’t wanted to date. She’d barely wanted to look a guy in the eye because it just made her a little stabby.

Her poor interns.

Then she’d gotten the offer to do this app for Flirt. And that had plunged her into research on dating, hookups and sex. Which was why she had sex, and toe curling, on the brain when she’d successfully ignored the concept for quite a few months.

She’d already compiled a profile for herself in the app. The things she would need, with her personality and experience level, to pick up a guy.

Now, it was time to see how it worked. In theory, at least. All she needed was for him to indicate he wanted to hook up, and then she’d know that her app was a success. And that she actually had a snowball’s chance in hell of having another relationship someday.

“Hello,” she said, moving to where the guy was sitting. “Evie, Evie James.” She stuck out her hand and stood, waiting for him to reciprocate.

He did eventually, but he had that look in his eyes that her sisters usually got whenever Evie was trying to explain something techie to them.

“Brent.”

“Nice to meet you, Brent,” she said, smiling broadly. She mentally went through the list again. “A drink,” she said. “I’d like to buy you one.”

“Okay,” he said.

Jee-zus this was awkward.

But she was pressing on. She had her Flirt profile all set. She had “10 Tips to Land a Guy,” and she was going to do just that.

* * *

Caleb Anderson had been watching the thin, awkward redhead out of the corner of his eye for the past half hour. She’d approach sx different men and had struck out each time. After her strike out, she’d go to her corner and hyper herself up, scrolling through her phone, then go right back out there.

It was like watching an overeager puppy try to make friends with cat people. Sad. It was sad.

Of course, he was a thirty-five-year-old man in a bar on a Friday night hoping to pick up a stranger for sex, so he imagined he was a little sad, too.

But his chances for success were much higher than hers. So there was that.

He could hear her voice carrying over the music. She was loud. Everything about her. From her steps in her stilettos to her laugh, was damned loud. He had to give her credit. She didn’t seem dented by her lack of success. If anything, she was more determined, more bright.

He should be working on his own happy ending, so to speak, and not worrying about hers. But every time he tried to take his attention off of her, and onto his own needs, he found himself drawn back in.

She was putting on a hell of a show, if nothing else.

“These heels are making me blister,” she said to her current target, who looked like he both didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to scare her away at the same time.

Goddamn. She was so awkward.

“Really, I never wear shoes like this.” She was still talking about her feet. And now bending down to pull a shoe off. She was wobbling, but caught herself on the bar before she face-planted onto the glossy marble floor.

The guy she was talking to seemed willing to overlook the awkward. At least for now. Probably because the girl had a fine rack on her, at least it seemed that way from his vantage point.

Might be one of those lying gel bras. False advertising at its most insidious.

Not that he truly gave a shit one way or the other.

Big or small, tits were tits.

He was a fan.

And now Awkward Girl’s shoe was off. And her weirdness officially trumped her rack. The guy she was talking to was zoned out now, his gaze on the blonde across the room.

Caleb had assessed the blonde already. She was his counterpart. His narcissistic twin flame. Here to hook up just like he was. He could see exactly how the night would go. He could take her back to his place, take her to his room. She’d wrap those legs around him and they’d both work their way to orgasm. They wouldn’t want to exchange numbers. They wouldn’t want to see each other again.

They’d both be hungry for someone else, something else, the next day.

He looked at her, and he couldn’t see how beautiful she was because all he saw was the same thing he saw in himself that he was just so bored by.

He liked the ending, but the journey just didn’t excite him much.

Damn. Sex was starting to get boring. That made him feel hollow inside. He knew he was hollow inside, but he didn’t like to feel it.

The Awkward Girl wasn’t boring. She was weird. But she wasn’t boring. Sex with her? He couldn’t predict that.

What would she do? What would she say?

He couldn’t even guess.

Caleb got up from his table and walked across the bar, his eyes on her. She was trying to get her shoe back on now, and she was oblivious to the fact that she’d lost her audience.

She looked up, her hair spilling over her shoulders, all glossy and sexy, her lips drawn into a pout.

For the first time since he’d seen her, hot surpassed weird as his primary descriptor. Her eyes were still on the guy who was now very much trying not to look at her. He’d never seen a woman as pretty as her strike out so hard so many times in a row.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

She looked up and her eyes went wide. “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“I had one.”

“Only one?” he asked. He’d sort of imagined she was a little tipsy. If she was sober then she was extra weird.

“Yeah, just the one. I didn’t want to get drunk.”

“No, I can see why you wouldn’t,” he said.

“I was talking to Jeff here,” she said, looking back at the man who was no longer looking at her.

“You were done talking to Jeff,” Caleb said. “Or rather, I think he was done talking to you.”

“I think he’s playing hard to get,” she said, arching a brow.

“I think he can hear you,” Caleb said.

The woman stepped away from the bar and lowered her voice. “Well, he was.”

“People like him don’t play hard to get,” Caleb said.

“People like him?”

“Yes. There is a certain kind of person in here who wants one thing. Jeff is one of those people. That woman over there,” he gestured to the blonde he’d noticed earlier, “is one of those people. What they want is to have sex. They came here to hook up, so playing hard to get is antithetical to that goal.”

“You think so?”

“I know so, Evie.”

She frowned. “How do you know my name?”

“Evie, Evie James, you’ve introduced yourself very loudly to several men in here since I walked in. I observed.”

“Well…I…I…that’s just annoying,” she said. “Eavesdropping, I mean. Eavesdropping is annoying.”

“This is where you ask my name,” he said.

She squinted. “I’m not sure it is.”

“Yes, it’s polite. Caleb Anderson. And your pickup techniques aren’t working.”

“I don’t actually care. I mean on an emotional level.”

He didn’t believe her. “Me either. About anything. But why are you working so hard to pick up a guy if you don’t care?”

“I’m doing research,” she said, her tone sharp. “For an app.”

“An app?” he asked, interested now.

“I’m an app developer, that’s what I do.”

“See? That’s interesting. Your heel blisters aren’t.”

Freckled cheeks turned deep red. “But they hurt.”

“Sorry. Want me to rub ointment on them?”

“Having a man rub ointment on your feet is nowhere in the guidelines.”

“Guidelines?”

“I have these guidelines. I’m using them to make the app. For Flirt magazine. It’s a companion app to your favorite dating app. The whipped cream for your pie, so to speak.”

“Jesus.”

“No, no, it’s smart, because sure you can swipe…right or left or whatever.” She frowned. “Which way do you swipe?”

“I don’t know,” he said, blandly.

He knew.

“Anyway, this is to help add some quality to the experience. Some…flare. Some…sexual…spice.”

Now, that was a twist he couldn’t have foreseen. Granted it wasn’t the world’s biggest coincidence. This bar was right in the middle of the tech nexus in the city and adjacent to a lot of media companies. This bar was the go-to for professionals looking for fuck around after hours.

He’d been in a meeting with his dad before coming here, which had him on edge. That he was getting assigned to Flirt’s operations made this meeting with Evie feel like fate. Except he didn’t believe in fate, God or anything adjacent to it because the world wasn’t magic. Far from it.

But that she was doing a job for a magazine that was part of his father’s towering media empire was weird. Not that Flirt was a huge part of it anymore, which was likely why his dad was shuffling him there. It wasn’t what it had once been. And apparently this was an attempt at fixing that. An app. Telling women they needed to be prettier or bolder or able to swallow a whole banana.

In fairness, he had a soft spot for Flirt. If he thought his father was at all observant of him as a human being he’d have thought perhaps that’s why he was being given oversight on the magazine.

It had been enlightening to him as a teenage boy discovering women. He’d read all of it. Tips for earth shattering orgasms and different sexual technique. Only a very, very stupid man would turn away from information like that. He’d never understood the psychology at sneering at traditionally female media, when there was so much to be gleaned from it.

Though when he was a douchey teenage boy what he’d really liked to do with the magazine was read embarrassing parts out loud to his sister.

It never failed.

He couldn’t think of his dad, the company, any of it, without it leading back to Jill.

He and Jill should have been in line to share running the company. Now it would be his someday as the sole surviving heir.

The connection almost sent him walking back the other way. But it wasn’t like Evie worked directly for Flirt. It didn’t have to come up at all.

He didn’t need any emotional baggage; he just needed a little fun.

But Evie James was interesting. And the desire to be interested was stronger than the desire to turn away.

“The women’s magazine with all the sex tips?” he asked, like he didn’t know.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the one.” She leaned in, one eyebrow arching. “And I’ve been reading up.”

 

 

Evie was starting to wonder if she really was drunk. A feeling of desperation was making her behave like an ass, and she knew it, and now this guy was talking to her. This guy who didn’t even look like he could possibly be real.

He looked like he’d stepped off the pages of some business magazine. Perfectly cut suit, expensive watch and shoes. And his haircut had not cost eight dollars.

No, his dark hair was perfection. She wanted to run her fingers through it. Or pull it. That was one of the sex tips she’d read. Some guys were into that.

And now he was talking to her. She wished she were in a business meeting. Then it wouldn’t matter how hot the guy was, she would know what to say. She would know what to do with her hands.

She wouldn’t be so sweaty.

She was beyond competent in every other area of her life and she just didn’t know how to do this.

The damn app needed to be able to flirt for her. Give a command, and it would do her bidding. But that was asking a bit much of artificial intelligence.

Siri, I’d like to get laid…

There are ten horny, sexy men in your area.

Not likely.

“So, what’s in your app?” he asked, leaning on the bar.

“Nothing finalized yet. I mean, I’m not writing all the content, I’m programming it. Though I am taking some things straight from articles. You can create a profile that helps customize your fashion and flirt type. It has…hot spots, to help you find the right kind of guy for you. You know, athletes, businessmen. You can send messages. There’s quick dating tips and…sex tips.”

“Sex tips?”

“Yeah,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Sex tips. Fifty of them.”

“Fifty? I’m going to have to hear about those.”

Evie took a deep breath and leaned in a little, ignoring the fact that she wobbled on her heels a bit. Ignoring the fact that she was so nervous she could hardly breathe. She had nothing to lose. Three unsuccessful attempts already and she was starting to feel like a failure.

It was time to lay it all on the line.

“What if I showed you instead?”

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