Guilty Pleasures by Manuela Cardiga

response. The no-saliva rule applies here as well. In fact, take it as a given that trailing saliva anywhere is an absolute no-no. Let’s try to keep boobies dry, too.
    Never, ever slobber.
    —Sensual Secrets of a Sexual Surrogate

    “Oh, the silicone chip inside her head is switched to overload . . .”
    Lance’s radio alarm clock bounced the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” off his sensitive eardrums. He covered his head with his pillow and cringed farther down into the duvet. After George’s wedding announcement last night, he couldn’t remember getting home. He couldn’t remember anything much except for the noxious taste of the Loki. He didn’t know what went into one, but it tasted vicious coming out.
    Tattered bits of the evening flashed through his mind. George and a Frenchie. Marriage and sugar mice. Millie and cobwebs . . . the wedding at Guilty Pleasures!
    “Oh God, I am so fucked.” He moaned.
    How the hell was he going to get out of this bind? Lance and Will could not be at the same place at the same time.  
    His whole perfect plan for Awakening Millie Deafly was going pear-shaped. His head hurt, his stomach hurt, and a shameful ache in his heart told him his reaction last night had a large dose of envy mixed in with bile-black jealousy.  
    George was his . His friend. His only friend. The one true friend Lance had ever had. He couldn’t lose George. So, he’d have to bite the bullet and share.
    Lance winced. No more Lokis ever again . He’d have a cold shower, run a couple of miles, sweat a bit, and find a way around the pit that French bitch had dug right under his feet.  
    Stop thinking like this, Lance; that way leads to bitterest disappointment and lost friendship. The wise man accepts the curve balls life throws him and hits a home run. He took a deep breath, and groaned as nausea hit again. First, he’d head for the john and vomit up the last of that bile, then he’d take charge of his life with a cold shower and some friendly advice from Caroline, his oldest confidante.
    Lance cleared the mist from his bathroom mirror and took stock of the damage. His eyes were bloodshot, his lips dry and cracked, and his complexion was dull. He applied a refreshing skin tonic and a moisturizing lotion, dabbing carefully around the sensitive eye area with an anti-wrinkle cream.  
    With wet hair from the shower, and a towel wrapped around his waist, he walked barefoot to the lounge and reached for his cell. He closed his eyes. Should he? Even after all these years, she was still the first person he thought of when emotional disaster hit.
    His first lover, the woman who’d shaped his character and his life, and taught him everything he knew. He called up her number, and listened to her Ringback Tones song—Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”—while he waited for her to pick up.
    He smiled, remembering the slow lazy afternoon they’d first made love: Neil Diamond crooning “Longfellow Serenade” while Caroline reared above him, moaning his name, and a bumblebee buzzed stubbornly against the skylight above her head.  
    Caroline had been forty-two when she’d seduced him, and she had not only been his mother’s friend, but George’s mother as well. Somehow they’d managed to keep their love affair secret for three delirious years during which Caroline, after four unsatisfactory marriages and many failed amours, had created her own dream lover.  
    She’d trained a young Lance exhaustively in all the ways of pleasuring a woman, carefully expunging every ounce of sexual selfishness from him. Finally the idyll ended. His second stepfather, a kind—and wealthy—man Lance remembered with real affection, had sent him to college in the United States for three years—a coming of age gift that was to shape Lance’s future.
    The song abruptly cut off, and Caroline’s husky voice answered. “Hello?”
    “Caro, it’s Lance.”
    “Oh, darling, are you all right?” Caroline’s