So they’d done the shopping—she bought a couple of those vintage T-shirts that the kids are so crazy for these days and a nice little skirt and a pair of pink Pumas—and had the dinner—made it all the way through coffee-slash-dessert without seeing anyone he knew, thank God—and then, as expected, headed back over to his house. His home was tucked away in a fashionable part of the hills, not up off Sunset but a touch farther down, closer to Griffith Park. She jumped out of his car right when they got there, didn’t even wait for him to get the door but acted like she owned the place. Smiled over at him as he fished for his keys, and put on that “I’m so used to this lifestyle already” face that he’d seen a dozen times before on girls-slash-women and had hated each time. Who was she kidding? She’d probably never even cleaned a house this size, let alone had the run of the joint. Oh well. Let her have her fun. Twenty minutes later they were in the pool, naked and drinking martinis out of big plastic glasses that he’d picked up from a publicity person on one of his junkets. They had liquid trapped inside them and the name of a film he’d done last summer emblazoned across them in cherry red. She really did have a nice body, this girl-slash-woman—the walking up and down that canyon had to be good for something—and she wasn’t exactly shy about showing herself off, which was one nice thing. She had an exceptional ass, one of those storybook cans that make men spend good money on cheap magazines. Perfect shape and as taut as fine material stretched over a wooden frame. Lovely. Her breasts—he never called them “tits” unless they’d been augmented by surgery; it was a personal quirk of his—were OK, but just that. Nothing to write home about, even if you were already in the middle of a letter. They were big enough, just about right, actually, but one seemed to be a touch larger than the other and the nipples bothered him a bit. Here in the pool they were fine, but when they were relaxed—“at bay,” he liked to say to himself—the nipples were inverted and that was something that creeped him out. There were just these sort of slits where the tips would normally be and no way of coaxing them out unless the girl-slash-woman got excited about something. That didn’t seem normal. Bobbing up and down in the water, though, he forgot about that and just enjoyed the feeling of her rubbing up against him as they listened to the crickets and watched a couple of spotlights trace lazy lines across the evening sky. Somewhere down in town was a premiere-slash-gala that he hadn’t been invited to—heads would roll tomorrow for that one—and people were running around seeing movies or going to parties or having dinner. But instead of being a part of all that, that normal progression of the night, he had a naked girl-slash-woman in his pool and she had her hand wrapped firmly around his cock-slash-balls. It was a moment like this—not the awards shows or the photo shoots or an interview with Barbara Walters—that made him feel different from everyone else. He turned away from the view and decided to let her get down to it, as it were, splashing some water on her nipples to jumpstart the proceedings.