The first Random Acts of Fantasy excerpt!

A first look at Random Acts of Fantasy, now available for pre-order on Amazon. Coming 4/15!

Darla

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Josie had sent me the link with a cryptic comment: Don’t get bird flu. 

What the hell did that mean? I clicked and read:

Hockenfield Times, May 3, 2013

Hockenfield, Mass.

By Janet Simkin

Naked Man Steals Chicken, Evades Local Police

Hockenfield Police Chief Bart Jansen has issued an alert for a white male, early twenties, with blond hair and blue eyes who stole a chicken from farmer Mike Kemper’s coop this morning at 2:33 a.m. The man is completely naked, and while unarmed, is considered a potential threat to public safety. 

“I heard rustling and figured it was a fox,” Kemper explained. “Instead, I got an eyeful. Naked guy, young, wearing a collar around his neck like a dog. And a guitar. Nothing else. He kept calling my laying hen ‘Mavis’ and hollered he was eloping with her.”

After a brief scuffle, during which the chicken scratched him, Kemper let go. The man shouted, “I wasted my only answered prayer!” and fled. 

Kemper called 911 immediately, though the cruiser was delayed as the operator struggled to understand the nature of the call, but local police arrived within eleven minutes. 

Too late. 

“The suspect escaped on foot with the allegedly stolen chicken under his arm, headed for the Mass Pike,” said Jansen. "Concerned citizens with any information are advised to contact the Hockenfield Police at our non-emergency number at 413-555-1000, and travelers on I-90 or any other interstate should not, as always, pick up naked hitchhikers by the side of the road.”

Bird flu. Haha. Motherfucker. 

Sitting here at the reception desk at work, I found myself wondering what I was supposed to do with that piece of information. Torture Trevor some more, sure—but, um… he stole Mavis? The man stole a chicken from a henhouse while naked and high? 

Random Acts of Crazy indeed. Living out here in the Boston area meant seeing him and Joe plenty enough, even though everyone—Uncle Mike, Mama, hell, even Aunt Marlene, the resident slut of Peters, Ohio (and it took a lot to earn that title, if you know what I mean…)—thought that moving out here meant I’d find myself chained to someone’s basement wall and erotically tortured within an inch of my life, then sold off into some underground of sexual slavery where cellulite was worshipped. 

Hey. Wait a minute. Maybe that would have been better that sitting here with a letter opener and an anti-virus program malfunctioning on my new computer. 

Me, Joe and Trevor had some talking to do. 

Tucking that into a dark corner of my mind to be dealt with later, I looked around the small office and marveled that I was getting paid to work somewhere that didn’t require a polyester vest and a pile of sawdust next to the mop bucket in case of vomiting customers (or their dogs). Office jobs that paid $40,000 per year just didn’t happen for people like me. What a life change these past three months. 

Meeting Trevor and Joe. Moving to Cambridge. Starting my job at Good Things Come in Threes. Enrolling at Harvard. That one had been at Joe’s urging—he’d so carefully walked me through how to take courses at Harvard’s super-secret night school (super-secret to me, at least—Harvard letting me take a class seemed like inviting Kanye West to ghostwrite for Jonathan Franzen), and now here I was, taking an English course and a math class, all on account of my stupidity in picking up a naked dude wearing a guitar back home. 

If it weren’t for stupid choices, I wouldn’t have made any choices. That this one turned out so well was either dumb luck or divine interference, and I didn’t see the hand of God anywhere near these days, so I leaned on the lucky side. Maybe I was part Irish. I’d have to ask Mama the next time we talked, which would be tonight, because lately Mama was so lonely she glommed on to whatever I would give her in terms of attention. Hours alone now what with Uncle Mike on the road meant Mama had been doing double-time on entering online sweepstakes, and the result had been, well… 

I reached back and plucked the ass floss that passed for underwear out of my butt crack. Mama had won me a complete set of underwear from a rust-proofing company that sprayed chemical coatings on car undercarriages. The giveaway slogan was “Don’t Let Rust Destroy What You Love Down Below.” The g-strings had rust spots on the tiny little postage-stamp front cloth and made me feel like I was looking at a medical textbook full of pictures of STDs, but hey—free underwear, right? The guys hadn’t seen them yet, and I did a mental check to groom the lady parts, because right now my muff must look like a dandelion covered in a rust-coated muzzle. 

With a little pink tongue. 

Let’s swing away from that image, because once I start comparing my lady bits to things that require muzzles I need to question my own sanity. Or sex life. 

Or both. 

Leaving Ohio had been the ballsiest move ever. Took even more ovarian fortitude than picking up Trevor that night, all tan and blond and muscled and just plain old yum. Moving away took even more courage than giving in to what I, Trevor, and Joe had turned out to actually want that night at the bar, after Trevor sang me the new song he’d written, just for me. No other man in the band had written a song for their lady…love? Crush? Booty call? Eh. Call me whatever you want. 

Just sing to me. And about me. Because when a naked soul finds you, you find them right back. 

Abandoning every preconceived notion I had about who I was and what I would turn out to be was like killing a piece of myself off and hoping against hope that it would grow back better and stronger. 

I smiled. 

It had. 

I caught a familiar set of golden-haired legs walking down the outside flight of stairs. Even through the thin sliver of window that slitted the main door, I could catch Jack’s approach. 

Jack. Deliverymen with hot legs were worth their weight in gold. Who else could make those brown shorts seem like something out of a GAP ad? 

And then there was that grin. “Hey, Darla,” he said as I put the phone down. Surfer dude mixed with a hint of hot porno actor. He was a pre-orgasm on legs. Toned, tanned legs that a woman could imagine bent at the knee with his head between— 

“Jack!” I gasped, looking straight into his eyes, doing that fake control thing where you will your mind to stop imagining his face buried between your thighs as you hope what you’re thinking isn’t written in three-inch letters in permanent red marker all over your face. 

Even if it feels like it. 

“Hooked up any threesomes?” he asked, waggling thick brown eyebrows that slanted down just a touch at the edges of his eyes, giving him the perpetual look of a hot Jake Ryan from that Sixteen Candles movie Mama made me watch every time it was on TBS.

Sure. How about you, me, and your tongue. That’s three. 

“Nope,” I said, looking away, wondering if my chest were as flushed as it felt. Like an Arizona forest fire combined with a Bessemer furnace. 

“I’m sure you will,” he crooned. “Something special came for you. Need your signature.” 

“Sure. I’ll take it.” Our fingertips brushed and it was like having a feather dragged across my clit. You’re probably wondering why I’m all drooly for Jack when I have rock-star gods I can have damn near any time I want, and I will join you in your confusion. Let’s sit at the bemused table for a round of WTF discussion. My best guess is that being turned on all the time by Trevor and Joe is like buying a white car. 

(Bear with me here. I do have a point). 

Until you own a white car, you don’t notice all the other white cars on the road. And then, suddenly, they’re everywhere. Invading the streets. Your neighbors own one, your boss drives one, and the ubiquity of it makes you a little dizzy. 

Like Jack. Being with two hot guys made me see hot guys with more acuity, and that meant my clit was at a libido-induced buffet of scrumptious masculine brunch. 

With a big old side of sausage. 

“It’s for you.” The nondescript envelope felt like a lead weight in my palm. 

“You said that.” 

“No. I mean for you. Darla Josephine Jennings. Certified, signature return, blah blah your firstborn baby and all that required. Not for Good Things Fuck in Threes.” Big grin. The joke had gotten old by the third time he said it a month or so ago, but a reflexive return grin stretched my mouth, one side curved up. 

Oh, honey, if only you knew. 

And the man talked about babies, which were conceived by sex, which made me think about his penis and…oh boy. There went my clit. Squirming in my chair, I stood, hoping it wasn’t obvious. Damn, Trevor was about to get rode hard when I got home. Too bad Joe was still in Philly. But he came home soon. Not soon enough.

“Me?” The package he handed over was your standard overnight mail envelope. Sure enough—my full name, with my title. “Operations Assistant.” Josie and Laura decided that was the best way to describe me. I recommended “Grunt” but they vetoed that one. 

“You.” He handed me a little plastic electronic machine thing with a stylus. I signed where he tapped. 

After ripping open the envelope, I found…another envelope. This one felt rich. Rich. The slide of the paper fiber against the pads of my fingers was so alien, as if there were materials on earth I didn’t know could be generated. The luxury spoke of a different world, far beyond the confines of my office, certainly way outta this world compared to my trailer back home. 

I wanted to lick the envelope just to know that some part of my DNA was on something so fine. 

Keep checking back for more excerpts of Random Acts of Fantasy. ;)