By Blood Written

eyes seemed to quiver in their sockets.

“No!” she gasped.

Taylor nodded her head.

“It can’t be,” Brett whispered.

“It is, dear heart. Believe it.”

“You’re sleeping with a client?” Brett asked, aghast.

Taylor leaned forward, rested her forehead on the counter, and moaned.

“Oh my God, is it serious?”

Taylor raised her head. “He’s moving here after the tour.

And he wants to go on vacation together. The Caribbean …”

Brett walked around the counter and sat on a stool next to Taylor, then put an arm around her shoulder.

“I mean, Taylor-” she stammered. “How did it happen?”

Taylor wearily let her head fall onto Brett’s shoulder. “Oh, God, he was staying at my apartment. We’d been working so closely together for so long and we went out to celebrate the night he signed the contract and had that great signing at the Barnes amp; Noble. There was a lot of brandy and hand-holding, and then we went back to my place and one thing just kind of led to another.”

“But sweetie, that night of the party he had that blond bimbo up in the guest bedroom.”

Taylor sat up straight, reached for her wineglass. “I know,”

she said defensively. “I know. He apologized. Profusely …

He was so damn charming about it all.” She took another long sip of the wine, polishing off all but a few drops at the bottom. Then she turned and smiled weakly at Brett.

“At least we did the safe-sex thing.”

Brett smiled back at her sympathetically. “Well, thank God for small favors.” She got up, retrieved the wine bottle, and filled both their glasses.

“I’ve got to ask this, babe,” Brett said as she stuffed the cork back in the wine bottle. “I mean, do you like this guy?

Are you in love with him? Is this going anywhere?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor said, trying not to sound whiny and not at all sure she was succeeding. “But it’s been so long since I’ve been with anyone. I work a gazillion hours a week. You know how hard it is to meet anybody in Manhattan if you don’t do the bar scene?”

Brett shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never not done the bar scene.”

“It’s damn hard. And the men I work with are either disaffected grungemeisters or incredibly attractive, perfect men who also happen to be gay.”

“Okay,” Brett snapped. “You’re lonely, you’re horny, blah blah blah. But Michael Schiftmann? “

“Why not?” Taylor demanded. “I mean, he’s a good-looking guy, he’s intelligent-”

Brett turned, held up her index finger. “And he is rich.”

“Okay, that too. So what’s wrong with it?”

“Have you ever read his books?” Brett asked. “The guy’s a perv! Trust me, I edit him!”

“Of course I’ve read his books. His books aren’t him,”

Taylor insisted.

“Okay, grant you that. The main question is, do you like him?”

Taylor thought for a moment. “I like him. Yes, I like him.

Could I love him? I don’t know.”

Brett leaned down on the counter again, smiling, and lowering her voice to a conspiratorial level. “And there is one other thing … Is he any good?”

Taylor looked directly into her friend’s eyes and stared for a moment, then: “Un-fucking-believable. The best ever, Brett. I mean it, the Earth shook and I was fogged up the rest of the day.”

Brett straightened up quickly. “Whoa, girl! Okay, as your friend and spiritual advisor in matters of the heart, I recommend you go for it, ASAP. Ride that wave as far as it’ll go.”

Taylor smiled. “You think so?”

“Hey, what’s the downside? The worst that can happen is it doesn’t work out, then you have to suffer with great sex from a rich guy until he dumps you or you dump him.”

“It could be worse than that,” Taylor said. “I could lose him as a client.”

Brett took her hands in hers and squeezed them. “He’s a smart guy, Taylor. He knows who got him where he is. Business is business, no matter what.”

Taylor thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. At least I hope you are.”

“C’mon, the Empire Diner awaits. Let’s get down there before it gets too crowded.”

Brett Silverman always considered Saturdays her quiet time in the office; a chance to go through the mountain of paper in her in-box, stack up the phone calls that hadn’t yet been returned so she’d be ready to go first thing Monday morning, go through the e-mail messages she hadn’t had time to deal with.

Pull together the stack of rejected submissions for Marcie, her assistant, to get started on …

Brett had slept late this Saturday after a huge meal at the Empire Diner with Taylor the night before, followed by several more glasses of wine before bedtime after her friend grabbed a cab back to SoHo. She’d watched an old movie on cable, gotten more than a little drunk, then stayed under the covers until almost noon. She drank a pot of coffee and scrambled some eggs and read the Times before grabbing a cab to her office around three. There was no particular reason to move quickly on this Saturday afternoon; this was only the latest in a string of dateless Saturday nights she’d endured. She was beginning to wonder how long her dry spell was going to last.

Manhattan had chilled overnight; the afternoon temperatures back down into the low thirties. In line with the latest cost-saving measures, the heat in her building had been cut back. Brett threw off her parka but left her ski sweater on as she sat down at her desk.

At least, she thought, she was here alone: no meetings, no frantic phone calls, no juggling six projects at once.

An hour into her work, Brett Silverman began to get sleepy and to wonder if she shouldn’t just bag it and head back to her brownstone for a long nap before her solo dinner. She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, fighting the urge to indulge in self-pity at the prospect of eating dinner alone. She wondered if perhaps Taylor might be free again tonight. What the hell, with her new boyfriend thousands of miles away in Southern California, she was probably facing a dateless Saturday night as well.

Brett relaxed and put her feet up on her desk, contemplat-ing Michael Schiftmann and Taylor Robinson as an item.

She wanted her friend to be happy, but still there was something that made her profoundly uneasy at the news. She tried to put it out of her mind and leaned forward to grab another stack of correspondence to answer when her phone suddenly went off.

Brett fumbled for the phone, jolted out of what she realized had become a quite serious reverie. She also wondered who would be calling in on her direct line on a Saturday afternoon.

“Hello,” she said.

“Brett? Carol.”

Brett smiled. “Hello, Carol Gee! Welcome to your last day on the road for a long while.”

“Thank God,” Carol said. “I quite literally couldn’t take another day of this.”

Brett felt her grip on the handset tighten. “Has something happened?” She heard Carol Gee sigh loudly into the phone and then groan.

“Oh, I just can’t take any more,” Carol said.

“What did he do now?”

“Nothing. I shouldn’t say anything. I just wanted to call and blow off some steam. You’re the only person I can talk to at the office about this.”

“Look, it’s almost over,” Brett said. “I know this has been a rough trip. But after tonight, hey, you’re on vacation for a week.”