Below is a guest post that Marika graciously wrote for Books Etc. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!
Cheatin’ Hearts
Ah, the moral dilemmas of working on a 1-800 Nasty number, another thing I had to confront when I was doing research. I was a little concerned, I wanted to share some of the calls with my readers, but what about the married thing? A lot of the men I talked to were married, including the caller that I killed off in PHONE KITTEN. So is phone sex cheating? I was married once, and while it felt like 20 long years, it was really only a bad eighteen months. I call it my young, dumb marriage, so I’m not an expert on a lot of the whole husband/wife thing. I didn’t consider phone sex cheating. I was getting paid to do it, there was no intimate exchange of romantic notions, and absolutely no physical contact. The guy in question didn’t even know my real name. I got the credit card approval, and let “oh baby’s” begin.
Brian Thompson was one of my regulars and he was married. We exchanged a few pleasantries, he told me what was going on, and I did the same. Of course, my pleasantries were all made up. It was all very brief and in just a few moments he would get down to business, using his “sexy” voice to tell me exactly what he wanted to do. The calls weren’t anything special or even memorable. At least not at first.
At some point Brian told me he needed to change his credit card. Apparently Mrs. T. had found the charges and had grilled him about the exact nature of business he was paying Tatum and Associates for (Here’s a little tip, Tatum and Associates? Try T. n. A. If you find a strange twenty dollar charge, see what you can do with the name of the company. Phone services have a sense of humor. ) For some reason I asked about the wife, and he told me that they were really just waiting out an economic crunch till they could afford to get divorced. Neither one of them were happy. I believed him. See what I said about having no experience with the husband/wife thing?
We did a few more calls. All was well. Life was going on as usual. One evening we did our regular chit chat, he used his sexy voice and I went into kitten mode, telling him exactly how I was going to strip for him.
“DAMMIT BRIAN!!”
Jiminy Cricket! It was the infamous Mrs. Thompson! She hung up. He hung up. I hung up.
I was shaking, my stomach was flipping, and my guts were churning. It was like she walked in on us. I was shamed. I immediately called my boss. I’m sure my voice was shrill, and I was talking a million miles a minute. I knew she would know how to handle the situation. She’d had to have been through this before.
“That’s never happened to me.” Of course.
She laughed at me while I was telling her how humiliating the whole experience was. We were having this “intimate” moment and it really was like the wife threw open the door and fired a shotgun into the room. My cheeks were red, I could feel it. How do “other women” do it? It was horrible. It seems silly, but I was so rattled I had to quit for the night.
Word spread, and in the morning every girl I worked with was sending me email, or an instant message asking for details, forcing me to relive the whole debacle again. Apparently, I was the first and only phone kitten that was ever caught mid-nasty with another woman’s man.
The next week, like clockwork, Brian was on the phone giving Tatum and Associates another twenty dollars, only this time he was using a gift card. I explained that I hadn’t charged him for our last call since we were interrupted. I asked him what happened and he was very nonchalant about the whole thing.
I was still flabbergasted and embarrassed by the situation. “I can’t believe she was listening to us."
Brian went right into his “sexy” voice, “So Baby, did it turn you on?”
