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numbers into his phone, receiver clenched in his hand, as tea dripped from a puddle over the edge of the desk. Three rings. It took the president of his public relations firm three rings to answer his goddamned phone.
    “Donner,” Carl Donner mumbled.
    “Have you seen the paper this morning?” Peter knew very well he’d just woken the man on a Sunday, but a perverse need to make someone else’s morning as fucked-up as his own prodded him into asking the question anyway.
    The shifting of covers and murmur of his girlfriend’s voice preceded Carl’s “No Peter. I haven’t. What’s up?”
    Peter paced behind the desk. The phone cord brought him up short. “Fuck. I should’ve called you on my cell.”
    “Let me get the—which paper is it?”
    He glanced at the top of the page. “ The Daily Dispatch .”
    “I’ll call you back on your cell.” Carl’s resigned sigh ended the conversation, and Peter hung up.
    Unmuting the television, he backed up to his chair but didn’t sit. Rather, he stood in frozen horror, watching as news vans circled his block like sharks. Six long minutes and several creative television renditions of his biography later, Peter’s phone vibrated in a puddle of tea. He snatched it up and wiped it on his robe. “Wells.”
    “Good God, Peter.” Carl sounded flummoxed. Flummoxed couldn’t be good. Not from a PR professional who’d won all the top industry awards.
    “I’m suing the paper.” The cell creaked as Peter clenched it harder. “Do you hear me?”
    “Calm down. We’ll handle it.”
    “Calm down?” The chair met his backside as he sat hard, then immediately stood to pace. “How am I supposed to calm down when I’ve got—” He paused, hand in his hair midrake, and eyed the television. “When I’ve got reporters camped outside my building, and a scandal sheet burning a hole in my life? What are my parents going to think?”
    The rustle of newspaper and the sound of coffee pouring into a cup said Carl wasn’t taking this close to seriously enough.
    “Carl!”
    “Sorry, Peter. I didn’t know you were finished.”
    “I’m finished all right.” Finished with the whole damned female sex.
    “Peter?”
    “What?” He rubbed his temple with two fingers and squeezed his eyes shut.
    “It’s just a news story. It’ll blow over.” Carl ostensibly slurped his coffee, and Peter pictured him gesticulating with the cup when he continued. “We’ll get you on Leno and let him poke fun at you. People will feel they’ve laughed with you instead of at you, and it’ll all blow over.”
    Panic spiked through his middle. “My parents watch Leno.”
    God, how was he going to explain this to his mother? And his brothers? They were going to have a field day at his expense. He’d be lucky if they didn’t fill his stocking with flavored condoms. No. Ma would kill them if they did that. He sat on the leather love seat and flicked off the television.
    “Peter, it’s really no big deal. It’s free press. A blip on the radar. Here, then gone.”
    “Tell me, Carl?” Peter asked, his voice going deadly calm. “What do I pay you for?”
    Carl cleared his throat. “To make you look good.”
    “Do I look good right now?”
    A long pause ensued. Peter pulled the cell away from his ear and glared at it.
    “Well, no, but…” Carl finally answered.
    Peter put the phone back to his ear. “Are you going to make me look good?”
    “If you don’t want to make a statement—and believe me, you don’t—and you don’t want to go on Leno to make a joke of it, I’m not sure what we can do, to be honest.”
    He couldn’t have heard that right. “You’re telling me I have to just wait for this to blow over?”
    “If it’s true? Then, yes.” Carl’s toaster dinged, and a knife clinked against a glass jar.
    “We can’t create some other news to overshadow it?”
    “To overshadow a story that suggests the last however many women you’ve been photographed with have been, well,