Sex, Murder and a Double Latte

CHAPTER 1
"If Alicia Bright had learned one lesson in life it was that the more settled things seemed to be, the more likely they were to get messed up."

--- Sex, Drugs, and Murder
The downside of writing sex scenes is that my mother reads my books.

Until I die I will be haunted by the memory of my mother confronting me after reading my first novel. She stood in the living room of my San Francisco apartment with one slightly arthritic hand resting on her robust hip and the other waving my book in front of my face. "I ask you," she said, "how can a nice Jewish girl write such a thing? It's not bad enough you should give me ulcers with all this talk of killing, but now you have to write about naked people too? I thought only shiksas wrote such things."

I somehow resisted the impulse to run and made the stupid mistake of trying to reason with her. "No, Mama," I said, "smut is nondenominational." But my mother wasn't satisfied with that, so she highlighted the scenes, took the book to her rabbi and asked him for his opinion of her daughter, the sex fiend. The rabbi, who in all likelihood was just slightly less mortified than I was, assured her that writing about sex between two consenting adults within a loving, albeit edgy relationship was in no way a violation of the Torah. After that my mother approached almost every member of the congregation, proudly showed them my book and said things like, "Can you believe this? My daughter the author. And you should read the sex scenes. Now if she would just do some of the things she writes about, I could be a grandmother already."

I don't go to that synagogue anymore.

Finding a new congregation was really the only way to avoid embarrassment, since blending into the background was not an option for me. With the exception of my father, I am the only black temple member that Sinai has ever had, which makes me pretty easy to spot. My nationality is an endless source of entertainment for the public. My skin is the color of a well-brewed latte (double shot), and while the mass of textured hair that hangs to my shoulders is frizzy, it's not exactly 'fro material, so people are constantly mistaking me for Brazilian, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Egyptian, Israeli--you name it. I am spokeswoman for all people. Or at least all people with a slutty imagination.

I finished typing the details of my hero's and heroine's erogenous zones and switched scenes to the apartment of the gourmet chef who was about to be bludgeoned to death with a large toaster oven. How long would it take him to die? Ten minutes, fifteen...

I started at the sound of my buzzer going off and checked the time on the bottom right of my computer screen. Shit. My hands balled up into two tight fists. There's nothing worse than walking away from a keyboard while on a roll. I tapped ctrl S and walked to the entryway to buzz in my guests. I listened as the sound of heavy heels trailed by rubber soles pounded up three stories' worth of stairs.