His Mouth Watered at the Sight of Her Navel
The teasing scent made her turn and look. He sat at the bus stop with her, his Stetson pulled low, his thumbs digging in deep, splitting the orange he held. Leaning back, he crushed one half in a strong hand, sending a trickle of gold liquid into his mouth. . . .
The columnist’s mouth watered as he read the press release. He had found it in his mail slot, looking so innocent, just black type against white paper.
In one corner he spied a name, the name of a woman, a name so lyrical, so magical, so Irish, it could have been conjured by a leprechaun.
Shannon Donnelly.
She was a mystery, this Shannon Donnelly. A sorceress of prose so sensual, so yearning.
She ran her tongue over her own parched lips, almost tasting the sweetness explode across her tongue, the tart pulp filling her mouth, the wet tang sliding down her throat as bittersweet as a first love. . . .
He swallowed hard. Never had a press release been so stirring, so seductive. Oh, Shannon, my Shannon, he thought. Wherefore art thou, Shannon?
Then he noticed the name of a city, a city famous for its discreet charms, a city that had been conjured by a dentist.
Burbank.
The more the columnist read, the more he fell under Shannon Donnelly’s spell.
He felt a craving--a craving for orange juice. Whether Valencia or navel, it mattered not.
And he felt a craving for Shannon.
Whether her eyes shone like emeralds or sapphires, he knew not. Whether the thick mane that fell about her shoulders was the color of midnight or strawberries, he cared not. What mattered was that her heart was aflame with desire. She too had a passion for the rich meat of a fruit abundant in vitamin C.
He glanced up, met her hungry stare. Then he smiled and held out the other half, still plump and begging. “I’ve got more.”
And Shannon Donnelly indeed had more, but he read slowly, trying to make the pleasure last.
He noticed a phone number--Shannon’s number. She had not sent him this fax, yet now he held a key to unlock the mystery. He stared at the number, marveling at the transcendent forces that bring strangers together. For Shannon and him, destiny had come in the form of the Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer Contest.
The press release told him that nearly 4,000 people had entered the contest that called for up to 125 words of purplish-orange prose, and best-selling romance writer Nora Roberts had selected Shannon’s as the winner.
Had Shannon not entered, had she not written so well, had Roberts not recognized her brilliance, had Shannon not lived in the Valley Edition’s circulation area--well, the stars had to align just so to have provided him with her phone number.
With two strong hands he lifted and donned the telephone headset, gently guiding the slender mouthpiece to his ready lips. As he thought of Shannon’s prose, he inhaled a remembered whiff of orange blossoms, a scent that had him thinking of his childhood and the neglected orange grove beyond the back fence.
He thought of how the neighborhood kids would choose sides, arming themselves with missiles picked from trees or lifted off the ground. Hard, unripened greenies would sting and bruise. Fat, old, moldy ordnance would explode on impact, leaving the human target smeared in sticky, smelly pulp.
He remembered how his heart broke when the bulldozers came, uprooting the trees so that another housing tract could grow. The way she wrote, Shannon must have known the pleasure and pain and regret of her own orange grove.
“I’ve got more,” the man in the Stetson said. Now the columnist beheld her climactic paragraph:
As she took the orange, their fingers brushed. She smiled back. “I’ll just bet you do.”
And that was it; that was all she wrote.
His hand trembled slightly as he dialed. One ring, then a voice--fresh and vibrant.
“Hello, this is Shannon.”
He introduced himself and asked her a few questions. Yes, she told him, she had grown up amid orange groves. She would ride her horse through the orange groves.
He learned more about her--that she makes her living designing computer games and that she has written a couple of romance novels, as yet unpublished. He learned that she has had six young adult thrillers published under Waldman Publishing’s Fright Time line with such titles as “The Terror-Go-Round” and “Something’s in the Sewer.”
He steered the conversation back to romance.
“I don’t know if it’s escapism,” Shannon said. “That implies you’re getting away from something. I think romance is about getting back to something real and basic.”
This sounded promising. And the columnist liked her fiery objections to the phrase bodice-ripper.
“That’s a silly term,” she said. “I haven’t yet ripped a bodice. . . . I might rip a man’s shirt, however.”
Yeah, he thought, I’ll just bet you would.
Then Shannon Donnelly told him about her grand prize.
“We’re doing Paris in April! Which worked out nice, because it’s our fourth wedding anniversary.” And the 14th anniversary, she added, that she and Sam Palahnuk, a fellow computer jockey, have been together. “You might call it a long engagement.”
With that, the columnist had heard enough.
That was, you might say, all he wrote.
Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.