Running With the Pack (23 page)

Prime tried to re-engage his brain to think through the logistics. Logistics could always ruin the most perfect pick up. He fumbled for his cell phone so she could put her number in.

“No, no, no,” she said. “I don’t have a phone. Just meet me tomorrow. You will be there, yes? Tell me.”

“Yes,” he said to her as she backed away from him, his head full of the raw feelings of passion of the last few minutes. “Yes.”

“Good,” she said.

Prime stood there steaming in the moonlight as Anastasia and her family walked away together.

His mind eventually fully kicked in and he remembered that he had students to supervise. Time to go to work.

Work . . . workshop . . . tomorrow . . . shit.

Prime looked at himself in the bathroom mirror the next morning.

Jesus Christ
, he thought.

Most of his neck was a bruised mess and where he didn’t have bruises he had scratches.

Anastasia had done a real number on him. How had she done that?

The thing was, he hadn’t had feelings like this for a girl in years. Rationally he knew he was thinking like your average frustrated chump. AFCs put pussy on a pedestal and gave women all the power in relationships, and ironically, while women liked that they did not find it attractive in a man.

Prime checked his watch and decided he didn’t have time to shave properly or do anything about the superhickeys. He didn’t even own a turtleneck.

So be it.

He finished dressing and went downstairs to eat breakfast before the boot camp recommenced at 10
am
in the mansion’s living room.

Sage was already there, working on a bowl of Fruit Loops. “Wow, dude! She chewed you up, didn’t she?”

“I guess she did,” he said, smiling, as he went to make some bacon and eggs. “Not an impossible set, just a dangerous one.”

“Yeah, well, I guess so. The crazy chicks, you can have them. You should have at least gotten laid for your trouble.”

“I will,” said Prime.

“No way. You’re going to see a crazy chick like that again?”

Prime cracked a couple of eggs into a pan and started scrambling. “Sure. She’s super hot.”

“She was hot, but she wasn’t
that
hot. And did you see the guys in that group? I haven’t seen that many monobrows in the same place, ever. You said they were all family. She’s probably got it, too, and plucks daily.”

“So what? You get your chest waxed,” Prime said.

“Touche.”

What was real, what was fake, it all got blurry. Was Sage a hairy-chested man hiding, or a smooth-chested man making himself over to reflect his true self-image? Almost every pick-up artist made themselves over, down to going by names that were really just reworked CB handles. Sage was wise, spicy. Prime was number one. Go by a name for enough time and it becomes part of you.

Prime had been born Jonathan, but hadn’t ever seen himself as a Jonathan. Another artificial label, a name. Animals didn’t give them-selves names. They knew what they were.

Prime carried his food over to the table and joined his friend. “I’m going to have to miss a few hours this afternoon.”

“Got a doctor who will see you on a Saturday?” asked Sage.

“No. I’m going to a picnic.”

Sage noisily crunched on his cereal for a moment. “I don’t think so, Jon. This is a business. These guys aren’t paying for you to screw around with crazy chicks on their time.”

“It isn’t that big a deal. We move my sessions to late afternoon. Move the story telling stuff first.”

“We have it in the order we have it for a reason. The British guy, Nigel, he flew over here from London because he wanted body language lessons from the famous Prime. They pay us thousands of dollars because they want us, the Better Man Program, to give them our undivided attention for a few hours. There are a hundred other guys as good as us, just without the rep, ready to take our place if our graduates leave here without real changes in their lives.”

“I know.”

“So, be professional.”

It was his own damn fault, Prime knew. He’d double booked. He hated making promises he couldn’t keep, and if he hadn’t been so pussy-drunk he wouldn’t have done it in the first place.

“If I skip meeting Anastasia,” said Prime, “I may never see her again. I didn’t get her number.”

“Cripes, Jon. You got oneitis already? Go out and fuck ten other girls and you won’t remember this one at all. There’s always another girl.”

Too true, and that was their code. There’s more fish in the sea. No need to get needy. No need to compromise to score with any one particular girl. No need . . .

Prime took a bite of bacon. This girl had unleashed something inside him in a way no girl ever had. He knew not only what we wanted to do, he knew what his gut insisted that he do.

“There’s a difference between you and me, partner,” Prime said. “You make up your rules and follow them to the letter, like a computer, and I admire that. It makes you successful, and it has helped us develop our boot camps. You’re the brains here, no doubt, and you define professionalism.”

“Thanks, but you’re a professional, too,” said Sage.

“I am, but I’m not perfect. I have to listen to my heart, my gut. That’s who I am. That’s what I have to do.”

Sage finished his bowl, carried it to the kitchen, and tossed it into the sink with loud clanking. He gave Prime a look, but didn’t say anything.

Prime hated the passive aggressive shit. He could read Sage’s thoughts and his friend was just too chicken to voice them.

“I have a case of oneitis,” Prime said. “So what? That’s my problem. The students won’t even miss me. If they do, promise them I’ll give them each a free follow-up coaching call in a couple of weeks, Okay?”

Sage’s posture shifted ever so slightly. That was it. He really wasn’t worried about Prime. He was worried about the business.

“Okay. But just be careful out there and remember that she’s just a girl.”

Prime rubbed at his raw neck. Was she?

Muir Woods not only sported some giant wood, it wasn’t the smallest park in the world. Prime wondered how he was going to find Anastasia. Logistics could kill the best pick-up, and he didn’t even have a phone number for her.

He’d only been wandering around for a few minutes when
she
found
him.

“Jon? I knew you wouldn’t disappoint us.”

Us
? He turned and there she was, with her whole entire family.

Well. He only wanted to sleep with her, not the whole pack of them. Still, he had enjoyed their company and if that was how it was going to be, that was how it was going to be.

He walked over to her smiling and gave her a hug and peck on the cheek, then shook her dad’s hand and said hello to everyone else.

Sage was right. The guys did come awfully close to sporting mono-brows. If he and Anastasia had kids, he’d have to worry about that.

Prime stopped himself. Kids? Where were these thoughts coming from? He’d experienced an overwhelming physical attraction and connection with this girl, but that was not the stuff to make a pick-up artist marry. That was just an everyday occurrence in his life these days.

But he knew that the raw, instinctual feelings he’d had the night before ran deep in his hindbrain.

Normally on a day two meeting like this he’d plan to be alone with his girl and build comfort, rapport. The real thing, too. There was nothing fake about this part of pick-up. The artist just knew how to do it fast.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Anastasia said. “They can do without us for a while, don’t you think?”

“Is that all right with you guys?” Prime asked Yuri and Elena.

“Sure,” Yuri said. “You kids have fun.”

“And I’ll take that,” said Elena, reaching for the bottle of wine Prime had brought.

“Thanks,” he said, and off they went.

As soon as they were out of sight of the rest of her family, she jumped him again, and it was all he could do to make her stop.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Don’t you feel what I feel?”

Oh Lord, how he did. There was a palpable, raw lust arcing between them every time they touched.

“Yes,” he said. The first instant they’d touched again there was no doubt that they’d sleep together the moment the logistics allowed. The thing was he wanted more, some kind of relationship.

Most master pick-up artists managed a small and revolving harem of girls in non-exclusive relationships. There was always a girl available when he wanted, or new ones to hunt. Prime had three women in multiple long-term relationships at the moment. He just couldn’t envision Anastasia as one of these, assuming he could even see her without her extended family tagging along.

He wanted more. He wanted to consume her.

This was all irrational he knew, intellectually. He didn’t know this girl at all beyond the facts that she was hot and cool and liked him. That and the fact that the pure physical lust had been overpowering.

“There are a lot of pretty girls in the world,” he said. “Other than your looks, what are three things that make you special?”

She took hold of his face between her hands and looked deep in his eyes. “You’re still thinking too much, but I will humor you my Jon.”

Prime looked right back at her, triangular gazing, moving his focus between her two eyes and mouth.

“First, I am free. I see what I want and I take it, and I am responsible for my freedom.

“Second, I understand the natural order of things and accept it.

“Third,” and she paused to smile, showing her perfect teeth, “I can recognize a strong man when I find him, a man with potential to be more.”

Wow, what an answer. Most hot girls had to stop and think hard about that question. He’d once seen a pick-up artist on a talk show leave Jessica Alba initially flummoxed, as the question alone had removed her beauty from the attraction question.

Anastasia’s response made him think of something that had happened to him. It was not a story he shared often, although it was a true story and important to him.

“I went hunting once, when I was a teenager. I wanted to know what it was like to be responsible for killing one’s own food. I’m a carnivore, as you already know, and anyone who eats meat should know first hand what that means.”

He paused, thinking about how to articulate the next part, then stopped worrying. It would come out.

“My dad had a friend who hunted, who taught me about guns, and took me. He told me about buck fever, how he’d get so excited before shooting a deer that he almost couldn’t pick up his rifle let alone aim it. It made me imagine a housewife at the grocery store pissing herself with excitement as she reached for a pound of ground beef.”

He was quiet again, remembering that daydream and the first time.

Anastasia rested her head in the nape of his neck, listening.

“When I had the deer in my sights,” he continued, “it wasn’t like I was shopping at a grocery store, but it wasn’t like I had buck fever either. I’m not religious especially, but it was a holy thing. A beautiful and natural thing that I’d been too ignorant to realize existed every day, everywhere around the world. It wasn’t just about eating, and it wasn’t just about dying. It was about being part of the world, and understanding you place.

“After I shot the deer and it went down, I cried.”

“Why?” she whispered.

Maybe she did understand. The other times he’d tried to tell girls this story they had been near crying themselves and the obvious explanation was not what had moved him. He wasn’t sorry he had taken the animal’s life or that he found Bambi’s mother delicious.

“It was the first time I ever felt truly alive, and glimpsed the responsibility.”

She said something then that surprised him with its depth of insight. “That was because you saw the world as it is, but not yet fully your own place in it.”

Or was it insightful? Maybe she was just spouting bullshit the way schools trained kids to do.

He held her tighter as he realized it wasn’t bullshit. She wasn’t a bullshitter, and he was ashamed there was as much bullshit in his life as there was.

Because of the rain they had their picnic in the family’s RVs, with Prime, Anastasia, and her parents in one and the rest in the second. The group had two and were touring the west coast on vacation.

The logistics suddenly seemed nearly impossible, but Prime was committed to making more of this strange, blossoming relationship.

“And what do you do for a living?” Yuri asked over a bite of chicken leg.

“Yes,” said Anastasia’s mother. “Last night you told us you repaired disposable lighters, and while that was a very funny answer, I don’t think it is true.”

There was a short answer to the question, and a long answer that was more obscure but no less true. Unlike some pick-up artists, he was not shy or ashamed about how he made his very good living. He told it the way he saw it.

“I take nerds,” he began, “and guys broken by divorce, and socially stunted Silicon Valley executives, and fellows whose fathers were either clueless in the first place or failed to pass on their wisdom, I take them all, and I help them make themselves better men.”

“Sounds like the army,” Yuri said.

Prime grinned. “We do call our workshops ‘boot camps,’ and some of the same principles apply. Men are resistant to change, even when the change is good for them. Even when it is about them realizing their every dream and becoming responsible for their own power.”

This was the long answer, and truer, at least to him, than any trite answer about teaching guys to get laid. The term pick-up artist conjured up negative connotations to so many who thought the trade was all a bag of tricks about how to manipulate women out of their panties. Well, he admitted, some of it was. But the core of it to Prime had always been about helping men realize themselves and their personal power. He liked the army analogy better than the self-help guru image that he knew Sage preferred.

“That sounds like a fine thing,” Yuri said. “Is that what you always want to do with your life?”

He didn’t know if Anastasia’s father realized it, but that was a loaded question. To Prime, it sounded like he was asking if he intended to spend the rest of his life fucking around. Well . . . did he? Was there the immediate alternative of cruising around the country with this girl and her family?