"Excellent," Elena said. "Come on in, get your health status verified, and sign the paperwork. You have to get your things together too. She's moving you into her house. Today."
"What if she doesn't like me?" I asked, but it was a purely rhetorical question. Getting women to like me had never been a problem.
I had a lot of problems, but that wasn't one of them.
Elena snorted. "As long as you keep your mouth shut, she'll like you just fine. They always do."
* * *
"So… who is it?" I asked later.
Elena and I were in the bright, immaculate, and minimalist Los Angeles branch of AccommoDating. She had started the escort service back on the East Coast, in Boston; she'd done so well that she expanded her operations out here.
"I'm not going to tell you right now, because I want you to meet her without any preconceived ideas about what she's like." Elena smoothed the button-down shirt she'd picked out for me and held up different ties next to it. "Just treat her like the nice, gorgeous, successful starlet that she is."
"What's wrong with her?" I asked. Elena shot me a dirty look, and I scoffed. "There's gotta be something wrong with her. Why's she hiring me?"
"I told you"—she frowned and held up another tie—"she's had some trouble with the paparazzi lately. She needs to feed them a story starring her new love interest. That's where you come in."
"Right, I get that—but why doesn't she actually have a love interest?"
"I think she's been busy with work," she said and shrugged dismissively. "It doesn't matter why. You don't actually have to be her boyfriend. You just have to act like her boyfriend. And follow any other rules she might throw at you. She sounded pretty Type-A, so I have a feeling there might be a few."
That a Type-A, gorgeous starlet had hired a male escort to help her out with the press seemed a little strange. "So I'm just going to drive to her house, meet her, move in with her, and pretend that I'm in love with her. In front of the paparazzi," I said, watching Elena warily.
"That's right—in front of the paparazzi and everyone else. And she said she doesn't want to sleep with you. So think of it as a vacation from your real job."
"What the hell? She doesn't want to sleep with her hot male escort? That's what I'm for. That's what I do." I looked down at myself. "Seems like a waste." Secretly, I was pleased. A break from sex-for-hire would be a real vacation for me right now.
I could rest the salami.
"This is an emergency hire." Elena selected one of the ties and continued packing for me. "She couldn't find an actor to do it on such short notice. Besides, we have all the appropriate paperwork at the ready: a criminal background check, confidentiality agreement, clean bill of health, non-disclosure agreement, and I have insurance for you. She's in a tough spot, but she's a bright young woman. She knows what she's doing."
"If she's in so much trouble that she's hiring an escort to be her insta-boyfriend, it sounds like she might not know what she's doing."
Elena frowned at me. "You are advised to keep that, and any other hypotheses you might have, to yourself."
I sighed, feeling nervous, confused, and resigned. "So what am I going to do? Rattle around her house and do exactly what she says?"
Elena beamed at me. "Young man, that might be the smartest thing you've said to me yet." She zipped up my suitcase and stepped back to look at me. "You look good, Kyle. Healthy, muscular—a strapping, red-blooded American. The press will love you two together. I hope." She considered me for a moment. "And if she eventually decides she wants to sleep with you, count your blessings. You could do a lot worse."
"I don't doubt it," I said, thinking of Mrs. Plastic Housewife and her powerful thigh vise-grip. "I'm sure a change of pace will suit me just fine."
Lowell
While I was waiting for the escort to arrive, I paced around the house, cold sweat dripping down my back.
Just when I was absolutely sure my day couldn't get any worse, my mother called from the latest stop on her spiritual junket—somewhere deep in Japan.
"I'm in Kobe, Lowell. I told you I was coming here!" she said, her voice crackling through my cell phone. "It's the Paris of Japan—very fashionable! It's exotic, darling. Hot springs and street fairs. All of the men are very short, of course, so I haven't met anyone—"
"Mother!" I desperately reached for my Advil. "Don't be so racist!"
"I'm not being racist, darling, I'm being honest, which is one of the things I'm supposed to focus on during this trip. It's a spiritual journey, darling. I told you. I'm drinking the tea and doing the poses, and I'm going to come back totally clear!"
She rattled on for what seemed like forever about the weather and the food and her yoga practice while I paced and counted backward from one thousand so that I wouldn't snap.
"So how are you, darling? How's it going?" she finally asked.