Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls by Rae Lawrence

it.”
    She took the tip of him in her mouth and swirled her tongue around him three times. She began to work the length of him, her tongue flicking from side to side, her fingers circling the base of him.
    He was all the way hard now. She took him out of her mouth and gave him a squeeze.
    “Don’t stop now,” he said.
    “Oh baby,” she said, teasing him with her fingers. “Don’t I always give you everything you want?” She began again, sucking harder, waiting for the low moans that meant he was about to come. Her tongue was everywhere, her fingers, too; it had been months since she’d blown him this way, since she’d let him come in her mouth.
    He was moments away from it. She stopped again and held him against her cheek.
    “Not yet,” she said. “Not just yet.”
    “You’re killing me.”
    “How bad do you want it?”
    “As bad as it gets.”
    “And what would you do for it?”
    “Anything you want. Anything.”
    She began again, first slowly, then quicker, then slowly again, and when his moaning started she pressed two fingers hard into him, all the way in the back, and she did not stop, and he realized now that she would not stop, that she was all his, that everything was his. He watched himself come, her lipstick all smeared, watched her inhale, exhale, swallow, inhale again.
    Afterward, in bed, he pulled at the edge of her nightgown.
    “You don’t have to,” she said. “Just hold me.”
    In a few minutes he was out. When he began to snore, she lifted his sleep-heavy arm from around her waist and went to the sitting room to make a cup of tea. She wasn’t tired at all. She got out the hotel stationery and began to make lists. A list of Dave’s friends, a list of her friends, a list of the people they owed invitations to, a list of the people who could help get her work.
    “Come Celebrate Neely O’Hara’s 34th Birthday!” she wrote across the top of one page.
    That didn’t look right at all.
    “Neely O’Hara Turns 34!” she tried again, but that looked even worse. Maybe the party consultant could help her with the wording. She could visualize the invitations, purple ink on heavy pink stock.
    She gave it one more try. “NEELY O’HARA HITS THE BIG THREE-OH!”
    Perfect.
    T he next night, they went downtown for dinner with some of Dave’s friends. It was the kind of restaurant Neely hated: the crowd was full of television people and models, and the food was bistro French, which made it nearly impossible to stick to the highprotein, no-carbs diet she had been on for the last five weeks. But Dave loved any place that was hard to get into, and right now this was the hardest table in New York City.
    The conversation was all about deals and numbers and network gossip. Dave’s friends both worked in television, the husband in news, the wife in sports. There wasn’t anything either of them would ever be able to do for Neely, so she let her mind wander and checked out what the models were wearing.
    There, just two tables away, sat Anne Burke and a man she didn’t recognize. Neely watched them talking or, rather, watched the man talk while Anne smiled.
    “Oh, my God, she’s on a date!” Neely cried.
    “What?” said the wife.
    “Someone I used to know. Long story.”
    The wife turned and looked. “Oh, I know him.”
    “Oh yeah, who is he?” Neely asked.
    She lowered her voice and nodded slightly toward her husband. “You first.”
    “Okay. Anne Burke, but I guess she’s back to being Anne Welles now. Up until a few months ago she was Mrs. Lyon Burke. Know him at all?”
    “A little, from parties. I’ve heard the stories, of course.”
    “Yeah, well, they’re all true. Guy couldn’t keep his pants zipped if you paid him a million dollars.” The men continued their separate conversation. Neely leaned over and whispered, “And she never knew about any of it.”
    “You mean she never wanted to know.”
    “Whatever. Little Miss Priss. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, or