The Reality O by Candy Sloane Cover Reveal

Behind the Scenes

Above you’ll find the joke “Casual

Encounters” post my best friend Allie put on Craigslist without my knowledge.

On the bright

side, she’d referred to me as busty. On the not so bright side, her bawdy prank

started a chain of crazier than crazy events that neither of us could have

predicted.

Her post was

true. I’d never had an orgasm during sex, or anything else I’d done with

someone else. Yes, even with tongues, fingers, and things stuck in places my

mother and your mother would not want to hear about things being stuck.

My lack of

orgasm without my trusty vibrator wasn’t something I bragged about, but I also

didn’t think it was that weird.

I mean, Allie

told me it was, but it was like rule number one of being friends with her to

never believe anything she said. Her self-described sex life rivaled the tips

in Cosmo magazine—the good parts that

revealed confidences you were pretty sure no human had ever actually

experienced, not the embarrassing anonymous stories that made you feel better

about your own boring sex life.

Or at least,

they’d made me feel better about mine.

I received the

first response to Allie’s post while I was at work shelving books in the

miniscule poetry section of the Bangor Public Library. I was using my recently

awarded Masters of Library Science degree to its fullest for sure.

My phone buzzed

in my back pocket. I picked it up with one hand and squeezed it between my ear

and shoulder, balancing a huge volume by E.E. Cummings in my other hand.

At the time I

didn’t notice, but now, yes, I see the irony.

“Hello,” I

whispered, glancing around to make sure I was alone among the shelves. We

weren’t supposed to take calls in the library, and that day I wished I would

have followed the rule I continually got reprimanded for breaking.

“I want to make

you come,” a breathy voice oozed from the receiver, “I’m going to suck on your

sweet, throbbing clit until…”

“Excuse me!?!” I

screamed. Well, as loudly as you can in the middle of a library. My heart was

pounding so chaotically the people using the free internet could probably hear

it anyway.

“I’ll start by

licking you nice and slow, all around your honey pot, till you’re begging for

it, desperate for more. Then I’ll—”

I hung up. My

throat ached. My face dimpled with sweat.

Honey

pot?

I was too freaked out to even appreciate the humor in a guy trying to talk

dirty while using Winnie the Pooh as his muse.  

Yes, freaked

out. I was not turned on. I was terrified. I studied the phone number in my

recent call list. It was local.

I tried to

gather myself, smoothing my tight ponytail as I went back to shelving, but I

couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I kept hearing him. The men I went out

with never talked to me that way. No one

had ever talked to me that way. I certainly didn’t like it, but I also couldn’t

deny the adrenaline shooting and pinging through each limb like my body was a

pinball machine.

I picked up a

slim Anne Sexton paperback—yet another irony in hindsight—and squatted down.

His voice still echoed. My thighs burned as I glided my fingers along the back

spines on the bottom shelf looking for its space.

My phone

vibrated again.

I glanced at the

number before I answered, not the breathy-voiced sicko, another local call. I

should have just let it go to voicemail. I should have, but I didn’t.

“Hello,” I

answered, hesitantly, rubbing one finger along the frame of my glasses—chunky

and bright red, a perfect contrast to my olive green eyes and the one style

decision that always made people wonder about me.

“Hey baby,” a

growl slithered over the line, “I hear you need a real man.”

“Who is this?” I

whispered.

“Your daddy.”

I held out the

phone and stared at it like it had come to life. I could still hear his voice

thrusting through the receiver.

“You want it,

don’t you? I’m going to bend you over a table and shove my twelve-inch-cock

into your dripping wet pussy again and again, my finger right—”

I clicked end

and threw my phone on the ground. My pulse was pounding so feverishly against

my neck it was choking me. What the hell was going on?

Also, who in

this world had a twelve-inch-cock? How did he walk with that thing unless he

used it as a cane?

My phone came to

life again, buzzing and lighting up from where it lay on the floor, like a

horror movie where you thought the monster was dead, but really he was

invincible.

I picked it up

with the tips of two fingers and looked at it, yet another local number I

didn’t recognize. I clicked for the call to go to voicemail.

It was 11:00

a.m., too early to take lunch, but I didn’t care. My phone vibrated in my hand

as yet another call lit up the screen. I forced it to voicemail and texted

Allie to drop everything and meet me at The Sundown.

If it was too

early to take lunch, it was definitely too early to have a drink, but I needed

one. It had to be five o’clock somewhere considering it was sex o’clock on my phone.