ForArtsSake by Kai Lu Read Free Book Online Page B

so am I,” the voice rejoindered mildly. “A professional, I mean—who works only with other professionals. You see? I trust your honesty and good faith, so now you must trust me if we are to be successful. I’ll see you tomorrow at nine, if you’ll actually come. One twenty five Robertson.”
    “I will,” Amelia began, intrigued and a little scared, but the man on the other end had already hung up. She put her nearly wallet-sized cell phone in her purse, breathed a lungful of cold, night air, and wondered if she was crazy to actually want to go. Her latte had gone cold, she realized.
    If you’ll actually go…
    She laughed quietly at herself, gave a dollar to a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk, and, after a moment, gave him her latte, too.
    “I’ll find a way to make it taste better,” the smiling derelict had reassured her when she informed him it was cold. Taking a glance back a few strides later she saw him removing a small bottle from his grease-stained military parka.
    At least you’re honest, she thought, walking into the foyer of her apartment building.
    One twenty five Robertson Boulevard, she repeated to herself silently as the 1930s-vintage steel elevator doors closed around her and brought her to her third floor apartment. She decided to study and go to bed early, in order to make her appointment on time.
    But she couldn’t study, and she couldn’t sleep, either.
    All that night, lying naked on her fold-down bed in the dark, she found thousands of reasons why she shouldn’t go swimming intermittently through her thoughts, even though she had already called Cyril only minutes after speaking with the mysterious stranger to ask for the next morning off. Perhaps this artist was some sort of pervert, or predator… Maybe he was a kidnapper, or psycho, a million times worse than tiny little Cyril and his bad toupees.
    Cyril…that pompous little bastard. He claimed to be a native New Yorker — what was with the French accent, then? It wasn’t part of an overall theme for his restaurant, for he even went so far as to use the accent when he wasn’t around customers. Had he worn a beret, grown an eyebrow pencil mustache and carried baguettes, he could have carried the caricature to perfection. How he happened to manage such a popular restaurant in such a nice area was beyond Amelia’s powers of deduction. Amelia sighed, hints of guilty curiosity lacing her next thoughts—maybe he at least fucks like a Frenchman.
    It had been a hard day, and tired though she was, she still wished—more guilt—that someone would just come and fuck the living shit out of her.
    It certainly couldn’t hurt, and it had been a while. Far too long, in fact.
    She had to read Mrs. Dalloway, the shortest of the six novels her class had to read this quarter, by this time next week, along with writing a five-page analysis of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique, and its influence on modern-day women’s literature.
    Just thinking about it made her head hurt, but at least her teacher was easy on her eyes. Her lunch conversations with girlfriends from the same class confirmed that she wasn’t alone in stressing over the assignment, nor in daydreaming about their young, couldn’t-be-more-than-forty professor, who made Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings a bit more bearable.
    God, she thought to herself as she lay naked in the darkness of her tiny studio apartment—the walls were so thin she could hear her neighbor’s television—she could only vaguely remember the last time she had been with someone, though she exercised and kept herself waxed in a state of ready smoothness as if someone—not Cyril, of course—were making her cum all her problems away each night. Yeah, Cyril could have her—in his dreams.
    Let him have his dowdy, frumpy Janice.
    Janice, Amelia scoffed silently to herself. Too tall, too awkward, too skinny. Janice, who probably only faked being nice to Cyril, just like she only faked not