“I like it that you don’t smoke,” he said. “Makes a woman’s mouth taste like an ashtray.”
“I could never,” she said, smiling. Her green eyes glinted in the moonlight. “Hurts your sense of smell.”
“You smell good,” said Prime. He leaned in, brushed her hair aside, and sniffed her slowly from shoulder to ear. “Mmmmm, really good.”
She smiled and made no effort to stop him.
“Smokers or not, so many people have lost their sense of smell in this modern world,” he said. “We’re so artificial now, like machines, not the animals we really are. Animals, you’ll notice before they mate, will always smell each other. We’re hardwired by evolution to respond to certain, fundamental things, in the nose and in the gut. Our noses know, so to speak, and tell us things we need to know about the world.”
“That’s so true,” she said. She started to say something else, but stopped as his hand slid up the back of the neck into her hair.
“There are a lot of things like that that we humans have forgotten. You’ll notice how lions, when they mate, bite and pull and claw at each other. Here,” he said, pulling her hair downward so her face was tilted up toward his. “Like this.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“The best, most sensitive places on the body are hidden places, like the nape of the neck where your hair starts, and like the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee . . . ”
Prime traced his fingers along some of those places as he spoke. “Places like those have millions of little nerve endings, sensitive little guys, all signaling for the release of endorphins when properly stimulated.”
Anastasia seemed entranced, giving him what the community called doggy dinner bowl eyes, just the way she was supposed to be at this stage in the game.
He took her arm, bent it a little, and erotically bit Anastasia on the inside of her elbow, slowly closing his mouth and bringing his teeth together.
She shivered.
“Right?”
“Yes,” she said. “You understand very well.”
“But do you know what I love best?” Prime asked. He pointed at the side of his neck. “A bite right here. This is where the jugular vein is most exposed, and since so many sexual fantasies involve submission and vulnerability, it just floods the brain with endorphins.”
He waited. About half the time the girls didn’t do anything and he would have to instigate. The other half of the time they were game, but usually the first attempt was lame and he would insist on showing them how it was done.
In either case, a passionate make-out usually ensued with minimal effort.
Anastasia reacted more positively than most.
She jumped him, wrapping her legs around his waist, grabbing his hair, and devouring his lips and neck with her hungry mouth.
Prime staggered back a step against the brick wall, pleasantly overwhelmed.
And then there was no thought, only lust and passion.
Eventually Prime realized that they weren’t kissing or biting each other any more, that he was thinking again. At least a little. In the cool night air their breath formed little wisps of mist around their faces. Hell, Anastasia’s upper chest was flat out steaming.
“Anastasia!” came a voice calling from the front door of the Den. Her family was leaving.
It took Prime a moment to process that something was going on, so lost in the moment he had been.
That hadn’t happened in a while.
“I must go now,” she said to him. “Meet me at Muir Woods tomorrow at 1 pm. We will have a picnic, yes?”
Prime tried to re-engage his brain to think through the logistics. Logistics could always ruin the most perfect pick up. He fumbled for his cell phone so she could put her number in.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I don’t have a phone. Just meet me tomorrow. You will be there, yes? Tell me.”
“Yes,” he said to her as she backed away from him, his head full of the raw feelings of passion of the last few minutes. “Yes.”
“Good,” she said.
Prime stood there steaming in the moonlight as Anastasia and her family walked away together.
His mind eventually fully kicked in and he remembered that he had students to supervise. Time to go to work.
Work . . . workshop . . . tomorrow . . . shit.
Prime looked at himself in the bathroom mirror the next morning.
Jesus Christ, he thought.
Most of his neck was a bruised mess and where he didn’t have bruises he had scratches.
Anastasia had done a real number on him. How had she done that?
The thing was, he hadn’t had feelings like this for a girl in years. Rationally he knew he was thinking like your average frustrated chump. AFCs put pussy on a pedestal and gave women all the power in relationships, and ironically, while women liked that they did not find it attractive in a man.
Prime checked his watch and decided he didn’t have time to shave properly or do anything about the superhickeys. He didn’t even own a turtleneck.
So be it.
He finished dressing and went downstairs to eat breakfast before the boot camp recommenced at 10 am in the mansion’s living room.
Sage was already there, working on a bowl of Fruit Loops. “Wow, dude! She chewed you up, didn’t she?”
“I guess she did,” he said, smiling, as he went to make some bacon and eggs. “Not an impossible set, just a dangerous one.”
“Yeah, well, I guess so. The crazy chicks, you can have them. You should have at least gotten laid for your trouble.”
“I will,” said Prime.
“No way. You’re going to see a crazy chick like that again?”
Prime cracked a couple of eggs into a pan and started scrambling. “Sure. She’s super hot.”
“She was hot, but she wasn’t that hot. And did you see the guys in that group? I haven’t seen that many monobrows in the same place, ever. You said they were all family. She’s probably got it, too, and plucks daily.”
“So what? You get your chest waxed,” Prime said.
“Touche.”
What was real, what was fake, it all got blurry. Was Sage a hairy-chested man hiding, or a smooth-chested man making himself over to reflect his true self-image? Almost every pick-up artist made themselves over, down to going by names that were really just reworked CB handles. Sage was wise, spicy. Prime was number one. Go by a name for enough time and it becomes part of you.
Prime had been born Jonathan, but hadn’t ever seen himself as a Jonathan. Another artificial label, a name. Animals didn’t give them-selves names. They knew what they were.
Prime carried his food over to the table and joined his friend. “I’m going to have to miss a few hours this afternoon.”
“Got a doctor who will see you on a Saturday?” asked Sage.
“No. I’m going to a picnic.”
Sage noisily crunched on his cereal for a moment. “I don’t think so, Jon. This is a business. These guys aren’t paying for you to screw around with crazy chicks on their time.”
“It isn’t that big a deal. We move my sessions to late afternoon. Move the story telling stuff first.”
“We have it in the order we have it for a reason. The British guy, Nigel, he flew over here from London because he wanted body language lessons from the famous Prime. They pay us thousands of dollars because they want us, the Better Man Program, to give them our undivided attention for a few hours. There are a hundred other guys as good as us, just without the rep, ready to take our place if our graduates leave here without real changes in their lives.”
“I know.”
“So, be professional.”
It was his own damn fault, Prime knew. He’d double booked. He hated making promises he couldn’t keep, and if he hadn’t been so pussy-drunk he wouldn’t have done it in the first place.
“If I skip meeting Anastasia,” said Prime, “I may never see her again. I didn’t get her number.”
“Cripes, Jon. You got oneitis already? Go out and fuck ten other girls and you won’t remember this one at all. There’s always another girl.”