Too nosy for my own good, I followed him inside and closed the door behind me. The blinds had been dropped to shade against the sun but there was still plenty of light coming in from the glass roof, more than enough to illuminate the circle of half a dozen or so chairs, each of them occupied by one of my parents’ literary luminary friends. Jericka was back, along with several other writers and editors I recognised, every single one of them a prize winner or critical darling or both, and they were all beaming at Joe.
The only person who wasn’t smiling was CJ.
‘What is this?’ I asked on Joe’s behalf since he hadn’t moved a muscle since he came inside and seemed to have lost the ability to speak.
‘Sophie!’ Mum looked up at me with surprise as though she’d suddenly remembered I existed. ‘Just a small gathering of pals. Every couple of months we throw together something of an informal salon and since everyone was coming for the party anyway I thought it might be fun to have a little lunchtime get-together and chat with Joseph about his beautiful book.’
‘His beautiful book … you meanButterflies?’ I cast an eye around the room to see they were all clutching the same pink paperback. How things had changed in the last twenty-four hours.
‘You’re welcome to join us,’ she replied, searching for a spare chair but finding only a floor cushion that had seen much better days and pointing me towards it.‘But I must ask you not to bring a negative energy to this space. We’re all entitled to our opinions and, while I believe artists can only grow from constructive criticism, this is not a critiquing session. Joseph is an invited guest and we want him to feel this is a safe space for him to discuss the work.’
‘Discuss the work?’
This time Joe was the echo. Springing into life, diaphanous blue blouse floating around her like a Marks & Spencer’s Finest forcefield, Mum directed Joe into the only empty chair left in the room, reaching up to her full five feet of height to push down on his shoulders until he sat, facing the crowd. Not knowing what else to do, I obediently trailed over to the floor cushion, and circled it before settling down, tail between my legs like a bad dog.
‘I know it’s your first time, so we’ll be gentle,’ Mum said with a sly smile I did not care for one bit. ‘Everyone here has been sworn to secrecy so there’s no need to worry about your identity getting out. If only because Charlotte would murder me in my bed if it did.’
The pain I’d seen in Joe’s eyes slowly transformed into panic as he realised what was happening.
‘Mrs Taylor, I’d love to discuss the book with you but now isn’t a great time—’
‘Now is a perfect time,’ she replied. ‘Now, who wants to start us off?’
‘But it’s Hugh’s day.’ Joe stood so quickly he bumped his head on the slanted ceiling. ‘We should be celebrating him, not banging on about a book. The book. My book. And please call me Joe.’
‘Hugh’s gone to the train station to pick up that ingrate, Nelson Allen,’ Mum said as she coaxed himback into his seat. ‘We’re all here, we’ve all read the book and we’ve all got questions.’
His bottom lip quivered as he took in all the eager faces. ‘You’ve all read it. All of you?’
‘Some of us more recently than others.’ Jericka made a show of holding up her copy, making sure everyone could see the cracked spine, even though I was fairly sure she hadn’t even glanced at it until last night, as she shot CJ and his pristine book a filthy look. ‘Writing can be such lonely work, especially when one is operating under a pseudonym. We want you to know we’re here for you.’
‘That’s very kind.’
With woeful surrender, Joe tucked his feet under his chair and slipped his hands between his tightly squeezed thighs as though trying to make himself invisible.
‘Shall we start with an easy one?’ Mum suggested and Joe nodded readily. ‘Your book approaches female sexuality with such vulnerability, always tying the sex to Jenna’s emotional growth, even in her most daring and graphic encounters. I would love to get some insight into your process when it comes to putting yourself so squarely in a woman’s position.’
A hush fell over the room and I rested my back against the wall, unable to stop a tiny little smirk from appearing. What was it he said? He could play author, how hard could it be? We were about to find out.
‘That’s an easy one, is it?’ He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and slowly, studiously rolled them up to the elbow. Damn a man who knew the power of a nicely turned forearm. ‘In all honesty, Mrs Taylor, I don’t know. I didn’t really think that much about it.’
It was, to be fair, the same answer I would’ve given.
‘An instinctive writer,’ Mum breathed. ‘The naturalistic approach certainly comes through in the dialogue.’
Incapable of holding her question back a second longer, Jericka jumped in. ‘It’s such a powerful gift, to be able to translate a woman’s desire into words. What made you want to explore the female experience in this way rather than the man’s?’
A murmur of approval ran around the room but Joe only stared at them all with his mouth open, a six-foot-five goldfish floundering in the bowl of my mother’s conservatory.
‘Sophie was telling me, I mean, I was telling Sophie about my inspiration earlier on,’ he said, stumbling over his words and looking to me for help I wasn’t quite ready to give. ‘It was a fantasy. That’s right, a fantasy inspired by an ex-boyfriend. I mean ex-girlfriend. I mean, an unfulfilling relationship.’
‘No one in this group is here to judge a person’s sexual experimentation or identity,’ replied a frail older gentleman who had to be ninety if he was a day. ‘We’re very open-minded. As you must be, considering the content of chapter five.’
‘It was a girlfriend,’ Joe insisted, deepening his voice and glancing in CJ’s general direction. ‘A pretentious, boring girlfriend who didn’t know a good thing when she had it.’
‘Was she the one who gave you such insight into the female orgasm?’ asked Jericka, her book falling open easily to the page she was looking for. ‘Here, in chapter twenty-nine for example,I felt dizzy as he filled me up, stretching me to meet his needs, to make me his and claim me as his own. The rhythmic movements of my hips surrendering to his more frenetic pace as thatexquisite sensation, a whisper that started far away began to sing sweet and clear, threatening to overwhelm me as his thick, heavy cock drove—’
‘Yes. No. Well, it’s very hard to say,’ Joe spluttered, cutting her off as everyone else in the room scoured the book for the relevant section. ‘I think too many people get caught up in the sex. Don’t you think the overall story is more important than the shagg – sorry, the sex?’
