The Hinky Bearskin Rug by Jennifer Stevenson Page A

of arousal all the time,
like, all the time. It was like
owning a dog who could hear you think the
word ‘suppertime.’ From across town.
    “This is not
an appropriate moment for you to be tuning in to my state, buddyboy.” She
didn’t want to think about sex with Randy here.
    “Can we have
it quiet?” said a guy plastered up against the window with headphones on his
head.
    “Sorry,” she
whispered. She moved away from Randy.
    Clay sidled up
to her other side. “Uh, think I’ll run downstairs to the printing plant, give
it a quick sweep.”
    She squinted. “Why?
You don’t have hinky radar.”
    Clay pecked
her lips lightly with his. And out he went.
    She felt
abandoned. I’m on my last nerve here and
my team is playing hooky.
    o0o
    Clay felt that
things were moving along nicely. Randy thought he was so smart, flaunting his
ability to read her mind, talking about it right there in front of strangers.
He didn’t know Jewel, even if he could see into her deepest sexual desires.
    Clay knew
Jewel. This was a woman who liked skaggy old men’s porn better than the
touchy-feely stuff going on at Hot Pink Studios. Sex for Jewel was an athletic
event.
    And
relationship was her four-letter word.
    It might take
Clay longer to get where he was going, but he would stay there longer than
Randy ever could. Because Clay knew how and when to back off.
    Randy would
never get that. He’d spent too many years wading around hip-deep in the sexual
swamps of women’s minds. He was bad at consent. And the thing Jewel hated most
was being crowded.
    Clay had set
Randy up to push too hard. If he’d done it right, Randy would even now be
digging his grave.
    And Clay
wouldn’t even be there. She couldn’t know he had made it happen.
    Sweet.
    As he
descended the basement stairs he heard the presses thundering. He went through
a set of scarred plexi doors and the noise increased tenfold. A friendly young
man with snaggly front teeth asked him if he needed help.
    Clay thanked
him. “Just checking the noise level!” he shouted, holding up the back of his
cell phone and peering at it. “You ought to be wearing ear protection!”
    The kid pshawed
visibly and wandered off. Second quickest
way to get someone to ignore you — fuss over them.
    Clay wandered,
holding his phone in his palm by his waist.
    Yep, this was
still a porn company. Photos of bare flesh flashed through the old-fashioned
presses every half-second. The press room’s lower walls had centerfolds taped
against them, and the upper walls bore porn posters from bygone decades. These
posters were raunchier than the stuff in Girls,
Giggles, and Garters, but there were plenty of Wilmas on the walls, too.
    It was
fascinating, how much effort had gone into varying Wilma’s pose and costume,
and yet how carefully the artists of succeeding decades had preserved her
wholesomeness. She could have been Miss Idaho Potato of 1900 or the Daisy Queen
of 2000. From every wall Wilma beckoned, promising everything he’d ever wanted.
    Everywhere,
printers with happy grins greeted him. They seemed to love their work.
    Clay checked
out the men’s room. The smell hit him first, so bad that he tripped over the
cracked black-and-white tile floor. More pin-ups covered the walls, one over
each urinal. And — he stepped into a wooden stall — yep, the stall had its own
fleshy wanton taped against the inside of the door, with a suspicious and
unsavory stickiness coating the lower half of the poster. For some reason he
didn’t feel like sitting down.
    Jewel’s lucky she didn’t draw this
duty.
    He wandered
out into the press room and kept moving, following the walls to stay out of the
way of men clambering around the greasy presses, loading huge paper rolls, or
grabbing handfuls of naked pictures off huge stacks and snapping them in the
air, for all the world as if they were making a bed with sheets of porn.
    “Why do you do
that?” he shouted, fascinated.
    “So they won’t
stick together!”