Chapter One
Naomi Grant knew that every superhero worth their salt had a secret identity. An alter ego that represented their humanity and kept them tethered to "the real world," usually by virtue of being unassuming-Bruce Wayne notwithstanding.
Naomi could relate, though her given name was dusty from disuse. Hannah Sturm, with her easy smiles and trusting eyes, hadn't made a public appearance in over a decade. And why would she? Naomi Grant was the one people wanted.
The one musicians invited to launch parties. The woman paparazzi followed to the drugstore. The shiny sexpot that tech moguls attempted to fuck when they wanted to feel edgy.
Of course, Naomi Grant wasn't a superhero.
She was a porn star. Well, former porn star turned co-CEO of an inclusive sex education start-up. Try fitting that on a business card.
Her superpowers, at least most of the marketable ones, were of the distinctly bedroom variety.
There wasn't much use for her lauded talents here, at the Los Angeles Convention Center for a national teaching conference full of harried, unappreciated, and underpaid people in sensible shoes.
At the registration desk this morning, bent over her blank name tag, a strange urge to write Hannah had flitted across her brain. The impulse was so strong, she had to stop her hand from moving, from clumsily following the long-dormant instinct to re-create a signature that no longer belonged to her. It would have been nice to slip on anonymity for a few hours. Hannah could blend in with a crowd, while Naomi, in unforgiving contrast, had been born, or rather made, to stand out.
Ever since her thirtieth birthday had come and gone last year, Naomi had spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the seams of her identity. Making sure no one found out that the line separating where Naomi Grant ended and Hannah Sturm began had grown wan and thin. Some days the current pulling her toward her past was an undertow that threatened to take her out at the knees.
It didn't help that her best friends and business partners, the people she spent the most time with, were normal-adjacent. Engaged. Homeowners.
Sure, Clara and Josh fucked more than average, but that hadn't stopped them from sending out a saccharine Christmas card this year. It was still hanging on her fridge in March. Yesterday, she'd caught herself smiling at it when she went to get cream for her coffee. Gross.
Hannah would have known better than to show up to an all-day teaching convention wearing vegan leather pants and a bra that left her trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. But at least Naomi wasn't the only one uncomfortable in this lecture hall. Behind his lectern at the front, the poor workshop instructor was sweating bullets.
"Thank you all for joining me today." A crack of piercing static cut through the room as he brought his mouth too close to the microphone.
Naomi winced.
"Let's kick off today's inclusive design workshop with some brief introductions. I'd like to get a sense of what and where you teach so I can tailor my materials to your collective use cases. Let's stand, shall we?"
Everyone got to their feet in the slow, grumbly way that stank of collective reluctance. This conference on the future of education had seemed like a good idea last month when Naomi had received yet another rejection on an application for an adjunct professorial position at the local community college. She figured the broad appeal of the programming would provide opportunities for her to network in expanded education circles, as well as the chance to learn new techniques for Shameless, the subscription web platform she ran. It was a stretch that adding conference attendance as a credentials line on her rŽsumŽ would convince higher ed to take her accomplishments in the analysis of human sexuality and relationship dynamics seriously, but she'd run out of better ideas.
To her left, a man in his midfifties introduced himself as a medieval literature professor from Green Bay. This wasn't exactly her usual crowd. She had a feeling her fellow educators weren't going to warm to her subject matter expertise in quite the same way they did to more benign departments. She braced herself for the impending impact of leers and jeers, but the shift in her normally fluid posture felt like overkill. Hadn't she faced worse crowds than this?
Back in her waitressing days, she'd once hosed down a pack of drunk frat boys on the Venice boardwalk.
The workshop attendees moved through the rows of participants at a rapid clip. Classics. Communications. Molecular biology. Naomi pressed her tongue against the back of her bottom teeth, an old habit from when she'd had it pierced and the sound of stainless steel meeting bone warded off strangers.
She liked to pretend she found average people boring. With their sitcoms and their mortgage payments and their shame over what made them hot. But the truth was, she knew better than anyone how quickly they could turn hostile, especially in groups as large as this one. Naomi swept her hair off her damp neck, snuffing her flight response before it could flicker fully to life.
She'd paid good money to be here and had just as much right to stand in this sweaty auditorium as anyone else.
Ever since she'd finished getting her master's in social psych last year, she'd missed classrooms. Not just the physical environment, but the energy. The exchange of knowledge. She loved testing hypotheses, which made sense when you considered the fact that her entire adult life was built on the principle of proving other people wrong.
Finally, every pair of inquisitive eyes in the room turned her way. Her throat went tight. She wished she'd bought a soda on her way in. Something cool and fizzy enough that the bubbles stung her nose. She knew soda was a nutritionist's nightmare, but that was half of the appeal on the rare occasion she indulged. It was like the way a drag on a cigarette made her feel like she'd been cast in a film noir for a moment, before she remembered she was taking years off her own life with each inhale. There was something about flirting, just a little-the tiniest sip-with her own destruction that appealed to the darkness in her.
"Hi there." Naomi's stage voice came out unbidden, husky and inviting. She shook it off. These people wouldn't appreciate her Jessica Rabbit impression. "I'm Naomi Grant and I'm a sex educator." A few participants bristled at the word sex. One woman's eyes popped wide like umbrellas. How predictably pedestrian.
The familiar pleasure of shocking sensibilities rushed over her and she cocked her hip. "I run a website, Shameless, focused on promoting healthy and satisfying emotional and physical intimacy through instructive videos, essays, and interactive tutorials."
Green Bay coughed hard enough to make an angry vein throb in his forehead.
"Our online platform features content that blends education and entertainment and has a monthly paid subscriber base of about five million global users." She recited the practiced sales pitch with as much bravado as she could muster in the face of so many furrowed brows. "I'm hoping to extend my classroom into face-to-face learning environments."
The instructor nodded, making a valiant attempt to look nonplussed. "And have you found success in that endeavor?"
She gave him a rueful smile. "I haven't"-she read off his name tag-"Howard." Poor guy, he never could have imagined when he woke up this morning that he'd accidentally trip the wire on her bruised pride. "I've reached out to a few colleges and community organizers, have even made it to final-round interviews for a few positions, but as it turns out, some people," she said with a pointed look around the room, "are resistant to hiring a lauded sex worker to join their faculty."
A low hum of conversation broke across the room as her words landed. Everyone else had just given their name and the subject they taught, but Naomi wasn't satisfied with the mixture of skepticism and confusion her introduction had received. A ridiculous urge to make these strangers understand her experience kept her talking, even when she knew they'd wave away her qualifications like everyone else.
"Look, I think we can all agree that pompousness and privilege rule academia. It's bullshit."
"Umm." A man raised his hand to interject.
Naomi ignored him.
"I've got an advanced degree from Cal State. My website collects over a billion data points about relationship dynamics and sex annually, and I have the unique lived experience of navigating intimacy as not only an adult performer but a public figure to boot. You'd think that would qualify me to teach people how to establish intimate connections, but apparently"-she threw her arms up-"you'd be wrong."
Enough people had told her no at this point that her mind had turned earning acceptance from a stuffy institution into a dare. She wanted the gravitas of an employer with an established name. Besides, she'd already built Shameless from the ground up, and while a start-up was rewarding, it was also exhausting.
"Don't you think, Howard, that the world would be a better place if we opened a dialogue that made people feel comfortable advocating for themselves in their relationships?"
"I suppose . . ." Howard had started to turn puce.
"Do you ever ask yourself why people are so afraid of sex?"
Naomi winked at the woman staring at her in open horror, in an effort to fight a sinking feeling of disappointment in her gut. For all her grand speeches, she'd finally hit a wall she couldn't swim under.
"I do. All the time. I've got theories. And maybe they could actually help people. But no one wants to hear it."
Outside of her ego, Naomi believed sex ed and relationship discourse had a place in accessible, mainstream education. Her experience and theories would have the greatest impact if she could establish a wider audience. As much as she loved them, she didn't believe healthy resources for establishing intimacy should be restricted to society's rebels.
"And it's not like I didn't know that going in." Naomi huffed out a dramatic exhale. "But I guess, call it the naivety of youth, but I thought the world might get a little more open-minded by the time I retired from performing. But I was wrong. And you know why?" She pointed an accusatory finger at her startled audience.
"Because if anyone let me teach, they would have to address the toxic environments and toxic people they continue to uphold. And that would be really uncomfortable, wouldn't it? That would be really fucking inconvenient."
"Miss Grant," Howard tried to cut in, "perhaps we might move on to the next-"
"Don't you ever get mad, Howard?" She walked up and placed her hands on either side of the lectern. "The numbers are bleak. We're facing a dating epidemic, not to mention an orgasm deficit. The sooner we stop pretending the digital age hasn't changed the way we interact, the better we make our chance that entire generations don't die horny and alone."
"Right." The instructor tugged at his collar and raised his voice, trying to rein in the room. "Anyone else want to jump in here?"
Naomi sighed and returned to the circle, letting the new tension in the room roll off her back. Her shame sensor had run out of batteries a long time ago. She'd made her career out of being an outlier, and a safety net out of being an outcast. It was easy enough to tune out the rest of the intros. At least until they got to a man who was way too hot to be a teacher.
He looked like a Calvin Klein model, and she observed that with the authority of someone who had fucked more than her fair share of Calvin Klein models. The shadow cast by his bearded jawline was ridiculous. She could wait out a summer storm underneath that thing.
"Hey everyone. My name's Ethan Cohen," the model said, "and I used to teach high school physics."
Naomi immediately wanted a follow-up on that used to. Had he been cast as an extra? Those cheekbones deserved at least a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Her eyes traced his profile as he kept talking. On closer inspection he was too short and lean to be a model. In heels, she'd have the advantage. The chiseled sculpture of his face had distracted her inspection. That and the way he carried himself. His legs were spread wide enough that . . . damn. She couldn't tell in those khakis.
Still, she smiled, target acquired. He was the perfect distraction from her occupational woes.
It had been a while since she'd wanted to jump someone the way she wanted to slither all over this guy. She loved her job, but running a start-up regularly meant working eighty-hour weeks. The combination of stress and exhaustion was hell on her libido. How ironic that satisfying sex was her life's work and yet her last few months had been decidedly sexless. She smirked. Unless you counted solo sessions. Those were still A+.
What kind of underwear had she put on this morning? Certainly, if she'd known the day would present such delectable opportunities, she would have pulled out something set to stun.
Introductions wrapped and Howard released them back to their seats with a wave. As the familiar scratch of multiple pens moving over paper lulled her into a daze, she sifted through approach tactics. Usually when she wanted to get someone into bed, she just took off her top to save time. One cursory scan of the room confirmed that plan wouldn't fly in this environment. Oh well. She'd wing it.
But, as it turned out, she didn't have to. While she packed her bag at the end of the lecture, a pair of khakis stopped next to her desk.
"Excuse me. I'm sorry to bother you, but I wondered if I could make you a proposition?"
Naomi raised her eyes slowly. Above his leather belt he wore a perfectly pressed white button-down, open at the collar, though not enough to pay off the shadowed promise of chest hair. Once again, she lingered over his jawline. It was even better up close. She couldn't wait to feel that beard against the inside of her thighs.
"Sure," Naomi said, putting a little purr into the r. "Give me your best."
When he smiled his whole face went to work. Damn, this guy was trouble. It was a good thing she'd shown up as Naomi. Hannah Sturm wouldn't have stood a chance.
Hannah would have shown off to get his attention, dropped her pen so he'd have no choice but to bend down and find himself face to face with her legs, for example, but Naomi knew that moves like that were for rookies. The key to seduction was to make the other person think falling for you was their idea.
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