1 800 SEX ME UP, a romance fiction

1 800 SEX ME UP

By McQuinn

COPYRIGHT: According to the United States Copyright Office, a copyright is secured automatically when the work is created. I will have the ability (and certainly the desire) to take legal action against anyone who infringes upon the ownership of my work. I am in law school and have friends in high places. When I catch you (and I most definitely will), you will be sorry.

DISCLAIMER: As far as I know, "1 800 SEX ME UP" is not a real company. If it is, I am not affiliated with it. And please don't call this number just to see if it's real, okay? The last thing you need to contract is STDs through the phone.

WARNING: This story is rated M for a reason. I know it's gross. I know it's vulgar. Please don't complain about it.

SPECIAL THANKS: To Well-Versed, Carol and V.

PART ONE

"What's up with this Eli Vitelli kid? Anyone know? Anyone?"

It was the question on every student's mind the day after Vitelli returned from a three-day suspension for publicly berating and hurling a desk at Mrs. Henson, the school's detention proctor. And although word had it that Mrs. Henson was being a total bitch and completely deserved a table to the face, all the students and teachers knew that acting like an ass towards every Tom, Dick and Ho attending or teaching at Robert F. Kennedy High School was normal for Vitelli. It was practically his day job.

Vitelli's nightly activities, however—the kind of horrifying, illicit acts the delinquent must have committed between four in the afternoon and eight o'clock the next morning—were simply unknown. But there were rumors about him, thought-provoking rumors which kept RFK High abuzz and following his every move.

"A-according to three eyewitness reports, at approximately ten o'clock this morning, Vitelli pulled a Ziploc filled with white powder out of his bag and placed it onto the top shelf of his locker. While the reliability of these reports cannot be confirmed, I do not believe it is wise to rule out the possibility of him being a Colombian drug lord—the only hitch being that he is not of Colombian origin. Furthermore, uh, I hear he sells methamphetamines on street corners Downtown and snorts cocaine with his train-wreck mother."

"Oh, you're just being paranoid, Holl. Eli Vitelli is not a drug dealer. Though he does have that gigantic ankh tattooed on the inside of his arm, which makes him look extremely sexy. You know what? That underground Egyptian occult scene is pretty popular these days. I wouldn't be surprised if he's, like, majorly involved. He probably goes around hunting animals at night so he can sacrifice his prey to Akhenaten."

"Akhen-who-ten?"

"Akhenaten. The Egyptian sun-disk god."

"Jesus, Laura, you come back from a two-month Egyptian tour and all you do is talk about Pharaoh-This and Pharaoh-That, and 'Gee, guys, you should hump a camel if you ever get the chance to go to Egypt' and 'If I die, I'd like to be mummified.' God, want to know something? I vomit in the presence of your bullshit. And to set the record straight once and for all: Vitelli is a male prostitute. A gigolo."

"How dare you say that? You know what, Robby? You're just jealous of me because I get to go to—"

"I-I think we can all agree that if he does not sell methamphetamines then he may have some sort of baby powder fetish. It is possible he is training for the Olympics and uses the powder to minimize chafing of the nipple area, which becomes very sensitive when—"

"And he probably gets paid to have sex by the hour so he can buy imported cigarettes and French mint-chocolate truffles—"

"Shut up!" Audrey Hart yelled, making her presence known to friends, enemies and anyone who was listening during the hour of lunch spent in the school cafeteria. Audrey Hart would be damned if she had to listen to any more of her friends' despicable guessing game, any more of this nonsense about Eli Vitelli. "Guys, I think it's shut-your-pie-holes time so that I can eat my gooey elbows-and-cheddar in peace. Please and thank you."

Sitting across from Audrey and Robby at their cafeteria table, Holly and Laura convulsed at the sudden outburst, as if Audrey had ruptured an important nerve in their brains. Robby just hung his head and hissed a good, "Someone must have a big tampon shoved up her—"

"Do not say 'ass.' It is not anatomically correct," Holly said. "It is preferable to say 'vagina.'"

"Uh, no," Laura said, "it is in no way preferable. I don't want you to say it. It's inappropriate—not to mention totally gross."

"Vagina!" Robby said with a small chuckle.

Audrey palmed her plastic fork and began squishing her cheesy macaroni until it oozed between the prongs.

"I'll have you all know that I am not menstruating. It's just that everyone is so obsessed with Vitelli, and," Audrey said, then paused. "And he's a goon. He's the type of guy who dreams of dead fluffy animals. Rabbits eaten by rattlesnakes. Squirrels run over by cars. The other day? I saw him mentally scarring the jocks by threatening to defecate inside their mouths. Who does that? And did you see what he did to Corny Sawyer?"

Corny Sawyer was a kid in Holly's advanced calculus class who had been mesmerized by the way the spirals in Vitelli's curly hair reminded him of the golden ratio. Fed up with the amount of staring, Vitelli dragged Corny off to the bathroom, shoved his face against porcelain and made him lap up toilet water. Audrey distinctly remembered Corny commenting on how the piss stains in the bowl swirled like they were tiny strings of irrational mathematical constants from heaven. (Corny was always a bit of a nut, even prior to the incident.)

Audrey shoveled another forkful of elbows-and-cheddar into her mouth and gave her friends a thoughtful glance. "So you see, after much consideration, I find there's really no reason why we should give that Eli D-bag Vitelli a second thought. He's a waste of the school's time, your time, and certainly mine."

"So what's your point?" Robby asked.

"Never mind what your point is. Why are you so against us solving the Vitelli Mystery, anyway? You do know the whole football team put up two grand as a reward for anyone who can dish dirt on what he's up to at night, right?" Laura said matter-of-factly before taking a sip of her Diet Pepsi. "It's like this whole conspiracy. If Vitelli has dirty dishes, the team can totally have him kicked out of school."

"D-do you know what I could do with five-hundred dollars, Aud—if we split the reward, that is?" Holly said, pushing her thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I-I can pay for, uh, a microscope, or one of those fish tanks that hangs on the wall like a plasma-screen TV!"

Audrey grumbled. "I don't really care for reward money. Or fish tanks. Or Eli Vitelli."

"Oh, I know why you've got your polka-dotted panties all bunched up in a wad," Robby said, slinging an arm over her shoulders. "Our little Aud-ball is still holding a massive grudge. What was the name Vitelli called you again? You know—when he humiliated you in front of the whole student body last year? During Spirit Week?"

"You mean when he called Audrey an ice queen bitch-prude who probably can't tell the difference between dicks and assholes?"

It was true. During Spirit Week, as the cheerleaders were ra-ra-raing in the school's auditorium, as Principal Hubbard clapped and smiled and pretended to enjoy the tawdry spectacle, Vitelli was sidling up to Audrey's thigh, Vitelli was blowing warm peppermint into her ear, Vitelli was asking—no, telling her—demanding that she meet him in the boiler room for his one PM quickie against the concrete floor. When Audrey had given him a curt yet very polite "No, but thanks for the offer," Vitelli slammed his fist against the wall, grabbed Audrey's face, gave her a mostly chaste kiss with a little tongue, and called her (and very loudly so) "an ice queen bitch-prude who probably can't tell the difference between dicks and assholes."

It wasn't true, of course. Audrey had gotten an A in Biology. She knew full well the difference between dicks and assholes.

Eight months later, the rumor mill had quieted down enough to allow Audrey to live a nice, normal teenage life, where she was seldom accosted by the school's male population and asked, "Hey, bitch-prude, want me to teach you how to bang?"

"Is that it? Is that why you're so upset with the rumors? With all this talk about the bully who kissed and picked on you?" Laura asked, and patted Audrey's hand for comfort. "Well, get over it, ho. I can buy two Prada bags with that reward money. And I swear to Gucci, Aud—your sore attitude will not cost me my bags!"

"She's serious about her bags," Robby said. "She's a bag hag."

Holly leaned in close to Audrey and whispered so that only she, Laura and Robby could hear. "And what better way to exact revenge on Eli Vitelli than to solve the Vitelli Mystery and possibly get him expelled from school? According to my sources, he is already on the brink of expulsion. If we decide to partake in investigating his whereabouts, there is a good chance we will discover things that will lead Principal Hubbard to sever all communication and activity between Vitelli and RFK."

Audrey was not a particularly vengeful person, but the thought of Vitelli—his broad chest, his provocatively mean ways, his possible expulsion—made her giddy inside. "Fine. It's no big deal to me anyway. Whatever. This is dumb."

"Goody! I'm so, so proud of your strength and character," Laura said, and clapped her hands in utter delight. "Where do we start?"

"We start where every good detective starts," Robby said, stroking his imaginary goatee.

"Where would that be, Sherlock?" Audrey asked, not particularly curious—and surprisingly so.

"I have no clue. I just know that a good detective would probably start there."

They grunted in acquiescence, sat at the cafeteria table a long while, twiddling their thumbs, whistling and glancing at their watches.

"Ah!" Holly snapped her fingers and went searching through her bag. After a few moments of rifling through papers, screwdrivers, glue sticks and bottles of nail polish remover, she pulled out a thin piece of tin—the size and shape of a small guitar pick. "This is it."

"What the hell is that?"

"This piece of metal can open any combination lock known to man."

Robby gasped and, grabbing the piece, held it up to the fluorescent lighting. "You are officially my hero, Holls. Where did you buy this?"

"I fashioned it out of a soda can and have utilized it for illegal purposes on multiple occasions. I'm one-hundred percent certain this will work on Vitelli's combination lock."

"Perfect!" Laura said.

"So you think we should pick Vitelli's locker and see what he's hiding in there? What are we going to find? Gym socks? Hallmark cards? An updated rap sheet describing all his juvenile criminal activity? Please!" Audrey said. "We're not going to find anything in there."

"It's worth a shot. Though I would totally be freaked out to actually go through with it. I mean, what if we get caught? Daddy would cut up all my credit cards."

"The horror!" Robby commented.

"We would not get caught." Holly pulled out a long sheet of paper from her bag. "According to my detailed schedule of Vitelli's whereabouts during school hours—"

"Okay, super stalker, you're starting to freak me out," Audrey said, grabbing the paper and glancing it over. "You're really jonesing for that plasma-screen fish tank, aren't you?"

"Indeed, I am. Which is why I believe we should search his locker now. Lunch ends in thirty minutes, but Vitelli goes out for food and has shown up twenty minutes late forty-four out of the fifty times I've observed him."

"Are you sure?" Audrey asked.

"Uh, well, there will always be a small percentage of error—"

"Of course she's sure!"

Audrey reviewed the schedule, looked at her friends' determined faces and sighed in defeat.

"Let's do this."

Robby was assigned to be on the look-out for Vitelli entering through the school's rear entrance. Holly was positioned down the hall, which was devoid of any student activity for now. Laura stood a few feet from Vitelli's locker, biting her long, manicured nails as the mission went down. And Audrey? Audrey was picking Vitelli's combination lock just as Holly showed her. When she jimmied the lock free and opened the locker door, the first thing that came into her line of vision was a paper bag sitting on the top shelf. It was oily-looking. Audrey unfurled the bag, poked her face inside.

It was a bag of…human excrement?

"Oh my god." The stench of it drifted into her mouth, and she gagged so violently, she thought she was going to vomit. "Oh my god."

"What is it?" Laura asked, approaching the locker. "Is it an ancient chalice?"

Down the hallway, Holly rolled her eyes, kept swinging her head back and forth and keeping watch. "H-hurry up, will you? Please? According to my calculations, at this point in time, it is forty-percent likely we're going to get caught."

Audrey showed the contents of the paper bag to Laura. "It's an ancient bag of shit. Someone shat in this bag!"

The bag, in fact, had not been shat in. Rather, Vitelli had been collecting, for the last several weeks, dog poop to light afire on his neighbor's porch.

"Doggy doo! Put it back!" Laura squealed.

Without a second glance, Audrey rolled the bag up, threw it into the locker, and started looking elsewhere. Among the items she found:

Sandwich (salami on rye, smelling of someone's bowels, with spots of greenish mold budding around the bread crust); a blue and white bronchodilator; a small plastic bag filled with weed (five or six joints worth); prescription pill bottles (empty); four sticks of peppermint gum; scattered plastic-wrapped toothpicks; three packs Marlboro, one pack almost empty; the four latest issues of Playboy; a fine-toothed black hair comb (flecked with dandruff); a box filled with dozens of tiny mints; a small cylindrical tin container—contents: a folded, wilted piece of paper (a page of poetry ripped out of Norton's Anthology, Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion"); a Polaroid picture of a woman, bald, emaciated, in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her arm, laughing; one diamond earring stud (possibly cubic zirconium); and finally, a rolled up strip of paper about three inches in length, with the following information scrawled across it:

1 800 SEX ME UP

Employment Office, ext. 699

"Giraffe-shit!" Robby said, bounding towards them. "He's coming! I just saw him pick-pocket Todd Stephenson in the parking lot. Hurry!"

Audrey shoved the number, photo and poem back into the tin can, popped the cap back on, put the can back into the locker, placed Vitelli's comb, cigarettes, pot, magazines, toothpicks, prescription bottles, inhaler, sandwich back in their rightful places, closed the locker door, started locking the locker door—

"Audrey! You forgot the mints!"

Lying on the floor, next to her feet, was the small box of forgotten mints. She could hear Robby trying to stall Big Bad Vitelli around the corner with a few senseless knock-knock jokes. With shaking hands, she opened the locker again, grabbed the box of mints, flung the box into the locker—all to have the box explode in a fit of joy, little mints raining all over Vitelli's locker and across the floor.

"Shit! No no no no no."

Audrey would have bent down to pick the mints up, but someone had tapped her on the shoulder and shoved her against the row of lockers, her head slamming against the hard metal.

"Find something interesting?" It was Eli D-bag Vitelli and he had Audrey effectively pinned between his ankh-tattooed arms. He exuded sex and coolness, wearing a ripped, white T-shirt that stretched over his broad shoulders, faded jeans that hugged his waist, and boots with Swiss Army knives hidden deep within their confines. Vitelli calmly evaluated the scene of the crime—locker door opened, mints scattered across the floor, two chicks and a potential gay dude hovering ten feet away, and a girl with a hell of a lot of moxie inches away, trembling in his arms. "Did you want some breath mints?"

"Haha, no. I was—uh, looking for some speed. I heard you dealt." Audrey put a hand over half her nose and snorted air into one of her nostrils. "See? Such an addict."

"Hey, leave her alone, ass-face!" Scrawny, lanky Robby strode over to the scene to defend Audrey, only to have Holly hold him back from making a fool of himself.

Vitelli stared at Audrey and whispered in her ear, "Tell your friends to back off before I pummel them, too, yeah?"

"It's okay—it's okay, guys. I can handle this myself. I think." And as an afterthought: "Go get the nurse," she hissed to Laura, who vigorously nodded and scurried off in the absolute wrong direction.

"Is there any reason why I shouldn't hack you open and shove your head up your abdominal cavity?" Vitelli rumbled in his sultry voice. "So you can slurp and get high off your own dope-diluted blood?"

Liquid diarrhea had begun to form in Audrey's pants. But she smiled at Vitelli and gave him a quick tap on the chest. "You would ruin this absolutely wonderful shirt of yours. I mean, what is it anyway? One-hundred percent cotton? Do you know how difficult it is to get blood out of cotton?"

"Blood-stains appeal to me. They memorialize tragic occurrences. But keep talking, Beautiful. The movement of your lips mesmerizes me," Vitelli said, and pushed his body against hers.

"They do?" Audrey asked, blood rushing to her cheeks as she felt something long and hard brush against her inner thigh. "Get help!" she mouthed to Robby, who couldn't decipher what Audrey was saying.

"Let's make a deal. You meet me in the boiler room in the next fifteen minutes to show me more of those incredible, pleasure-giving lip movements, Beautiful, and I'll forget any of this ever hap—"

"Excuse me, Mr. Vitelli," Principal Hubbard said, approaching the scene with Laura in tow. "Do we have a problem here? Or has your suspension finally taught you how to control and manage your anger issues?"

With a growl, Vitelli released Audrey and gave her a rough pinch on the cheek. "Next time, you won't be so lucky. Get those lips ready for sucking, Beautiful." With that, he locked his locker and walked away from the scene with a confident, wolf-like stride.

Audrey's stomach was Jell-O.

"Those better not be drugs. Get rid of them!" Principal Hubbard said, assessing the mess of mints.

"Oh, no! Mr. Hubbard, they're just—"

"I don't care what they are. Just get rid of them before I confiscate and test them."

As the principal walked away, they got down on their knees and began to clean up.

"So?" Robby asked, popping a bunch of mints into his mouth. "Did you find anything or what?"

Audrey remembered the number, thought about sharing with her friends but decided against it. "Other than the fact that Vitelli definitely does not suffer from erectile dysfunction? Nothing of much use, no. Although he does collect shit."

"What kind of shit?"

"The normal kind. Brown and smelly."

She didn't know what gave her the urge to buy a sixty-dollar calling card that afternoon and dial that naughty number. But Audrey Hart was a curious cat who stretched herself across her mattress, propped her head up with some pillows, and punched those numbers into her cell phone without a second thought.

She was going to find out the truth about Eli Vitelli once and for all.

"1 800 SEX ME UP, where all your sexual fantasies come true with the curl of a finger." It was a woman, probably around sixty-five years old, exhaling a raspy New Jersey accent through her nostrils with every word. Audrey was rather taken aback by the woman's bored, exhausted tone—wasn't she supposed to be gasping in pleasure, describing to Audrey how a simple shampoo bottle could satisfy all her heart's desires? "Are you eighteen years of age or older?"

"Eighteen?"—just a few months away—"Uh, yes. I am. I'm eighteen." She cleared her throat, hoping that the woman believed her. Probably didn't. "Why? Is there a problem?"

"Should there be a problem, girly? Which way do you swing—male or female?"

"I'm—um. I'm looking for a male. His name is—"

"Please hold."

"Wait, wait!"

"Jeez, Louise," the woman said, exhaling a ragged breath. "You know how many calls I got on hold? How many people are dying to choke their chickens? Burp their worms? Now I don't know what your intentions are, girly, but I ain't no goddamn operator, all right?"

"Please?" Audrey didn't know why she sounded so desperate, why she had reduced herself to the likes of her officious friends. Why did she want to know the truth behind the Vitelli Mystery? Why was this so important to her now, when just hours ago she could care less? Was it because he frightened her, and like a little kid who felt at ease after poking around his dark closet with a flashlight, she'd be less afraid if she knew the truth? Was it because she could sense that, hidden underneath Vitelli's hard exterior, there existed emotion—feelings about Dylan Thomas poetry, that diamond earring stud, and the poor woman laughing in that Polaroid? What were these things, and who was Eli Vitelli?

Or was it because Audrey Hart knew deep down that she was, in fact, an "ice queen bitch-prude," an inexperienced little girl who wanted someone as dangerous and as sexually practiced as Vitelli to teach her all there was to know about the horizontal hula?

"Please," Audrey whined, her knuckles turning white as she grasped her cell phone. "It's very, very important. I just need to get in touch with this one guy—this one particular guy, who I had lots of—um, lots of intimate fun with. Because we were talking about sex and different kinds of positions and fruits you could use to stimulate the—"

"Listen, girly, I don't need to know those sick details, okay?"

"I'm sorry. Look, I forgot his extension and I'd really like to find him. His real name is—"

"His real name? Who is this guy, anyways? Stupid enough to give out his real name?"

"His name? His name is Eli Vitelli."

A pause. Some slow typing on a computer keyboard. A few mouse clicks. Some more slow typing.

"Sorry, girly. No Eli here."

Audrey practically deflated. How stupid she was to think Vitelli actually worked for a phone sex company.

"There is a Vitelli, though. A Woodcock Johnson-Vitelli. Steep rates—must be very good. Is that who you're looking for?"

Woodcock Johnson? Audrey panted into the phone, thought about Woodcock Johnson, thought about Woodcock Johnson brushing against her inner thigh. "Uh. Um. Yes. Yes!"

"Can't wait even a minute, can you? I'll just patch you through."

Audrey waited, adjusted her position on the bed, pressed the phone against her ear until her jaw hurt.

And then:

"Evening, Sugar Tits." It was him—the sound of his voice. It made Audrey feel as if she was downing a double-shot of hard liquor—so warm and potent, it made her want to lick her lips and hiss in pain at the same time. The feeling of it surged through her cheeks first, then crawled ever-so slowly down her long neck, between her so-called "sugar tits," across her abdomen, over her round hips, to that one special pleasure point where she could just feel him—

Her index finger punctured the cell phone's "End Call" button so forcefully, the red key popped out after she'd flung it across her mattress. Cell phones were completely unsuitable for phone sex calls. Especially ones that didn't get past the pseudo-pornographic greetings stage.

But Audrey had found out the truth about the Vitelli Mystery, had uncovered the school's number one secret: on weekdays between the hours of four PM and one AM, Eli Vitelli was no crystal meth dealer. He was no Egyptian occultist. He didn't sell dick.

It was very simple. Eli Vitelli (alias, "Woodcock Johnson-Vitelli") was a grade-A phone sex operator.

To be continued...