The Sex Was Great But... by Tyne O’Connell Read Free Book Online Page B

you could sink a comedy club in, accompanied by a self-deprecating eye-roll.“I think it sounds fake. You know—Holly, as in Little Miss Hollywood?”
    I nodded seriously, to show I understood such things, but suddenly I couldn’t get Kev’s last words to me out of my head.
    â€œHey, man, she’s dying to shag you!” he’d hissed in my ear as I left him outside the liquor store. “Believe me, Leo, I can tell these things.”
    I wished he were right. Unfortunately Kev’s sixth sense, especially in matters sexual, is utter bollocks.
    â€œIt is my real name,” she added. “Not the Klein part—my agent thought of that. My real name is Holly O’Reilly, but Larry said it was better to go with a Jewish name.”
    â€œYeah, course. Yeah, I see what you mean. My name’s real too. Leo Monroe—actually, even the Monroe’s real.” She didn’t laugh, as I expected, instead she nodded, like we were relating on some higher level, but I suspect she was just concentrating on her driving. I was aware that the palm trees seemed to be flying at us rather than past us.
    To make myself seem even more of a dickhead, I added, “My agent said I can keep both my names.”
    It must have sounded dumb, but maybe not to her, because she laughed. I liked the feeling that I could make her laugh without even really trying. Also, I really did like the name Holly. I’ve never shagged—I mean known—anyone called Holly before.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a total idiot. I knew I was out of my depth here. I knew I was never likely to be invited to shag a girl like Holly, but it was hard not to wonder what it would be like just the same. Especially when she turned to me and smiled—not a polite, “how nice ofyou to say” smile, but a big goofy grin. I’d never seen such perfect teeth in my life.
    I smiled back at her, and in the normal course of events I would have been self-consciously aware of how National Health my own smile was, but as it was I had to grab the wheel and save us from driving into a big Mercedes.
    â€œGod, sorry.” She giggled, and took her eyes off the wheel again to smile at me. Yeah, Holly Klein was a babe. Apart from her driving—that was crap. She drove like this speed-head my mum dated once—Keith, I think his name was.
    But the similarities to Keith stopped there. Holly had a face shaped like a cherub’s, porcelain skin and a figure that screamed Health Regime. Keith had looked like a stoat recently rear-ended by a bus. Actually, even for my mum, Keith had been a mess. She’s a bit of a hopeless romantic, my mum—hopeless in that the men she dates are never the romantic types.
    Holly said that she didn’t usually drive herself around L.A. much, and I believed her. Even getting off from stationary had been a near-death operation. I was pretty sure she’d hit the car behind, but she didn’t seem to notice and I didn’t want to put any more pressure on her after the bag snatch and all.
    â€œOkay?” she asked, arching one perfectly sculptured brow as the other car’s alarm started squealing. She fixed me with one of her killer smiles and explained how she hated “all those alarms that are everywhere these days” and didn’t I think they were so pretentious?
    As we drove along and she pointed out landmarks along the L.A. boulevards, I realized that she thought a lot of stuff was pretentious, which seemed at odds with the designer items littered around her car. Her car was all leather, witha wood trim, tinted windows and an expensive-looking stereo, car phone and other gadgets that I didn’t know the name of. Apart from the gadgets it was the same sort of car that Dave had back in London, though.
    Thinking of Dave brought back a lot of memories I would rather forget. Dave is this geezer I’ve known since school, who’d made a fair whack of