Roger Grayson: The Two-Way Mirror

"Then, you feel you can sell it for me?"

"Oh, I don't doubt for a minute that I can sell it… once we've ironed out those weak points," he said, his small eyes scrutinizing her carefully. "But you must remember, my dear… first books are notoriously bad risks for publishers, and bring little remuneration to their authors other than satisfaction." He simpered. "I mean, without a name, who wants to read you?"

Karen tasted her martini. "Everyone has to start somewhere, Mr. Fletcher…"

Karl, he corrected again.

"Besides… Karl, I don't have to make a fortune from it… not did I hope to…"

"I don't believe you're grasping my full meaning, dear," he said with a shake of his head. Then, he raised his hand, gesturing to their waiter.

"Two martinis, Henry." To her: "Look at it this way… why not a best-seller right off the bat? It could be, you know, with just a little work, and no disrespect, darling… but with a little professional know-how… I mean, first book, best seller… what follows? Movie rights, of course… and from there, fame and fortune… are you with me?"

"You lost me right after two martinis, Henry," Karen said, smiling.

Karl Fletcher laughed warmly. "It's a business, Karen," he said, leaning closer onto the table. "A great big fat money business. When and if the publisher buys your book he is only concerned with how much money he is going to make from it. He has to be. When and if the agent takes you on as a client, he is only concerned in your remunerative power… his commission is how he makes his living. Look, every day I read first novels some of them damned good, too, but I won't waste my time with them. Why not? I can't afford to waste my time for the meager return…"

Henry brought their drinks. It gave her a moment to think. He was shill talking in big circles, but slowly centering in toward his point. Karen ran her tongue over the edge of her pretty lower lip. She was convinced that she already knew what he was getting to. She lifted her glass and cut deeply into its liquid content. The question was, how badly did she want this success she had been chasing since God knows when? How bad? Badly… that was how bad. Bad enough? Yes, she thought, looking around her at this pleasing, fulfilling, immediate representation of fame and fortune… bad enough… more than anything else she could possibly think of… and then, momentarily, she thought of Jeff…

"Darling, you're a big girl now, as they say." Karl Fletcher brought her back to the reality of the moment. "Who am I to try and kid you. There's a little old saying that hits the nail right on the head in this small and limited world of art… and it goes like this… it's not what you know… but who you sleep with."

So, there it was! "Whom," she corrected automatically.

"What's that?"

Karen laughed. The martinis had produced a pleasant glow that seemed to round off all the sharp edges. She felt the atmosphere keenly, as if she belonged. Music, the soft, singing lilt of violins in some romantic strain she could not place rained down over her like a snowfall of stardust. Even Karl Fletcher assumed imaginative proportions before her.

Suddenly, he said: "The question is, darling… how badly do you want success?"

Karen smiled beautifully, sensuously… almost seductively. "Badly," she replied in her soft, throaty voice. "Very badly, Karl… darling."

It was his birthday and Jeff Lewis had taken the day off. He had phoned in sick after Toni suggested it, the idea being that they would celebrate the occasion by driving down to one of the beaches after he kept his appointment with the Nathan Brendells. He hadn't cared much either was and would just as soon have gone in, but had agreed to please her. She was a sweet girl, a regular little live-wire who would gladly spend her life on the beach even though she never went near the water, and she was always trying to do thoughtful things to please him… such as the Brendell appointment.

How she had managed to get them to look at his plans was still quite vague in his mind, but he felt certain she had somehow managed it with that voluptuous little body of hers. Ever since he'd known her and they'd been sharing this apartment together she had been trying to sleep with the right people, furthering her career bed by bed, and successfully so he had to admit. She was a clever pixie, cute and lovable with sparkling dark eyes and short-cropped jet-black hair, plus a natural inborn acting ability that was being seen more and more on the screen as the beds grew plushier.

Right now she was lying on her back in their bed watching him dress, naked and sensuously squirming around to tease him with her usual mischievous antics, knowing that he was watching her in the mirror while he knotted his tie. He reflected a trace of a smile in the glass but his heart wasn't in it. He was thinking of the fruitlessness of this appointment with the wealthy Brendells. He entertained no great expectations from the meeting. People of their caliber preferred architect-builders with a reputation and money behind them, not some half-assed fly-by-night with nothing but ambition going for him. Nevertheless, he'd agreed to try after she'd gotten it all set up for him, and try he would…

"You act as if you were going to a funeral," Toni St. Clair remarked from the bed, raising both of her deeply tanned legs ceilingward, her feet together, then lifting her gently rounding hips onto elbow-braced hands, presenting her full, soft white buttocks to him as she pumped her legs in a bicycle exercise.

"Afraid I can't get enthused, Toni," he said, going to the closet for his lightweight summer jacket. "This is about the twentieth set of plans I've burned the midnight oil over, and got nothing but a thanks for letting us see them, Mr. Lewis. We'll call you when we decide…"

"Nothing good comes easy, darling… even me," she said, smiling impishly across the room at him as she continued her nude, provocative calisthenics, her feeling for the handsome, slender-faced, tall young man with the thin-lipped mouth and deep brown, almost ruthless, eyes, obvious in her every glance and gesture toward him.

Jeff grinned back at her as he ran a comb quickly through his long, wavy black hair. Damn her… she was a wild mite of a girl. He strode over and looked down at her, watching her erect, firm young breasts with their partially distended dark red nipples, quiver from the pumping movements of her upthrust lower body. He walked to the foot of the bed and caught at her ankles, spreading them apart so that he could look down at the dark peach of soft silky hair covering her lower belly and the fleshy lips of her narrow vaginal slit that trailed downward to join the split of her soft white buttocks.

"Like it?" she teased, her sprightly smile meant to taunt.

"Didn't you get enough this morning?"

"Do I ever?"

Jeff shook his head, then drew his fingertip tantalizingly through the silken hair, tracing the thin line of her cunt with the faintest of pressure until an obvious shudder rippled the soft flesh of her inner thighs and upward across her flat belly.

"Ooohhhh… you dog, you," she moaned. "I warn you, cut that out or you'll never get out of here…

Grinning, he repeated the torment, causing her to squirm and coo beneath him, until suddenly, she jerked her legs free and swung from the bed, chasing him to the door. In the hallway, he laughed back at her.

"You wait 'til you come home," she said, pretending at anger, the door cracked so that he could see only one of her pretty eyes and part of her smiling, impish mouth. Then: "Good luck, darling."

"Thanks," he said, shoving the rolled-up plans he had spent a week on up under his arm. "I'll need it, I'm thinking."

He took the elevator to the street level and the rear service door to the garage. The Brendells had an apartment out on Wilshire in Beverly Hills, a good ten miles or he would have caught a cab. He was not that flushed even though his present set-up paid him well and Toni split all expenses with him. But he was trying to save every nickel he could, hoping that when another birthday rolled around he would have enough to open his own office. Actually, all he needed was one good deal like this one to put him over the top, not only from the financial end of it, but the prestige gained from building a six-hundred-thousand-dollar home… and out in the valley at that, would be invaluable.