On the Loose. Shannon Hollis

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      “Vivien!” Lauren wailed, but the line went dead.

      There was no point dashing to the nearest newsstand because the issue wouldn’t be there yet. And Palo Alto was half an hour away, not to mention the fact that she couldn’t very well bust in on Vivien in her professional capacity. There was nothing for it but to wait.

      When Lauren was nervous, she cleaned. Cleaning was the ultimate therapy—it imposed order on chaos. Usually cleaning was like writing articles—she preferred having done it to actually doing it—but in times of crisis, cleansers and scrub brushes were what she turned to.

      She didn’t know what the article said, but from Vivien’s tone, she’d better not expect castles in the clouds and happy-ever-afters. What had he done? Surely he wouldn’t mention…no. Impossible. A decent man wouldn’t air his personal laundry in public for the sake of selling copies.

      Not even the famous Josh McCrae, who could take anybody’s dirty laundry and sell it for more money than she made in a year.

      By the time Lauren heard Viv’s key in the lock at six o’clock, she’d vacuumed all the floors, dusted, cleaned the bathroom and taken out the garbage. The apartment had had order imposed on it with a vengeance and Viv’s eyes widened as she put the bag of groceries on the counter.

      “What brought this on?” She peered into the sink. “Wow. You even polished the icky crap-catcher thing.”

      “That is a drain trap. Nothing brought this on. I’ve already poured the last of Rory’s Chardonnay to prepare myself, so give me that magazine.”

      “Uh-huh.” Viv pulled Left Coast out of her briefcase with a flourish. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just cook.”

      Lauren had already found the pages—128 and 129—and yes, the formal photograph next to the byline was so damn fine there was no doubt that the author was Josh. How had she not connected the first name with the photograph as soon as he’d said where he worked? She’d been reading his articles for at least a year, probably more.

      Chalk it up to lust. In person, Josh was much more touchable and yummy than he was in the black-and-white photo with the tie, and besides, his hair was at least four inches longer now.

      She skimmed the lead, then the first couple of ’grafs.

      Tiffany—a fake name—is a case in point. At twenty-five she has given up on meeting eligible men in the conventional ways—at work, at church, in a group of people with similar interests such as hang gliding or Victorian architecture. That takes too much time, she says. Time away from what? I wonder. “At a key party you don’t sit around waiting for someone to approach you,” she says, her eyes leaving mine once every minute or so to scope the field behind me with the attention of a general checking his troops before battle. “With the lock and key idea, you get straight to it.”

      But what if you don’t like the person? Are you locked into the date for the evening? “Of course not,” Tiffany assures me. “You can turn in your lock and get another one. Meanwhile, you’ve already met six other people who are trying you out.”

      I feel like a size-eleven shoe. This is not how I want to feel at a social event.

      OKAY, SO THAT WASN’T SO BAD. A little negative, but not the stuff of which social nightmares were made. Lauren took a sip of wine, gave herself a moment to wonder who “Tiffany” had been, then read on.

      Lacey—again, not a real name—seemed atypical of the demographic. A professional in her late twenties or early thirties, she wasn’t there to find a possible partner. A worthy cause needed support, so she’d turned out to support it. But when the opportunity presented itself, she wasn’t above grabbing it—in the fullest sense of the word.

      Ever heard of flash fiction—the telling of a story by the shortest possible means? How about a flash relationship? In the span of about two hours the relationship progressed through all the stages—meet, attraction, commonality, courtship and sex—and was over.

      Is this what Social A.D.D. has brought us to? Right back to wham, bam, thank you, ma’am? I hope not—but at the same time, you have to wonder if the need for speed is worth it.

      A sound that Lauren hardly recognized erupted from her own throat and Vivien turned from the counter, where she was putting dumplings in a pot of boiling water, an expression of alarm in her eyes.

      “You all right?”

      “Flash relationship—wham, bam—he’s got some nerve! Flash this!” Lauren fired the magazine across the room, where it slapped the apartment door and fell on the floor like an exhausted bird.

      Vivien held the pot’s stainless-steel lid in front of her face like a shield. “I take it there was someone you know in there?”

      “You know perfectly well ‘Lacey’ was me. I could kill that man. Making it sound like I was the one—when it was he who made me—ooh!”

      Viv lowered the lid. “So what are you going to do about it?”

      “Talk to Michaela.”

      “Oh, there’s a good strategy. She’d just tell you to feed him into a wood chipper.”

      “That’s a damn good strategy.”

      “Effective in the short term, but fraught with consequences.”

      “Don’t say that word!”

      “What, fraught? I like it. It’s so Elizabethan.”

      “No, short term!”

      “Short term is two words. Come on. Think about this. I suppose it’s too late to get them to print a retraction.”

      “Not gonna happen.” Lauren was silent for a moment. “But I can do the next best thing.”

      “Which is…?”

      “Get him to print an amendment. Another article, changing his tune.”

      “And you’re going to do this how? Come on, these will be ready in a couple of minutes.”

      While Lauren helped Vivien slice vegetables for the stir-fry a plan took form in her mind.

      When dinner was on the table, she popped a dumpling into her mouth and took a breath to speak, then chewed instead. “Man, I wish I knew how to make these things the way you do. Anyone ever tell you you’d make a fine wife someday?”

      “Yeah,” Viv said glumly. “My grandma. At least once a month. But we were talking about you. So you’re going to lambaste him publicly on your blog? That has possibilities.”

      “No, I can’t do that. What if people put one and one together and figure out that Lorelei, who was going all dreamy in public, is actually Lacey the Flash Relationship? I can’t let someone get the better of Lorelei. The dope, at least he could have given me a better name.”

      “It’s not our names that define us, it’s our behavior,” Vivien said philosophically, selecting a few more pieces of bok choy.

      “Who said that? Confucius?”

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