TWT: PING Adult Women's Fiction

Query:

Olivia’s trying. She goes to therapy, she prods Tony into a sexy, boudoir photo shoot, her girlfriends bring her to an adult toy party and she consults Cosmo. But her twenty-plus year marriage continues cooling. Then one dull night, poking around on the Internet, Jake pokes back. Olivia fondly remembers him from a lovely, long-ago summer evening. Jake remains charming and attentive, and like Olivia, his marriage is also discouraging. “The sex could be more frequent,” he tells her. “The nagging less so.”

PING brings you inside Olivia’s honest, funny and increasingly restless and reckless approach to life. The things she used to focus on—family, including a high school son; a less than challenging job at a second-tier ad agency; and writing a middle-grade time travel novel are succumbing to time spent on tantalizing late-night chat sessions with Jake.

If Olivia and Jake dare to take their flirtation offline, will Olivia find the excitement she craves, or will it begin the implosion of everything she holds dear?

250:

On the morning of her forty-fourth birthday, Olivia lay in that lovely post-orgasmic bliss, her right hand rested gently on her naked chest feeling her slowly stilling breaths. She flicked her tongue across her lips, enjoying the flood of sensations, even as they lessened. Turning her head slightly to look at her husband’s profile, she removed the other hand from the moist spot between her legs. She reached to stroke Tony’s sleeping face and thought, not for the first time, Why the hell can’t you do that to me?

ONE

Olivia protested, but not terribly hard, when Nancy pushed the small, brightly wrapped package across the tiny wrought-iron table. “You didn’t have to buy me anything,” Olivia said, reaching for it.

“Of course I did. You would have been disappointed if I hadn’t.”

Olivia laughed, “True.”

The friends sat outside at a fashionable uptown café enjoying the last heat of Indian summer. Potted sweet potato vines, oversized from several warm, rainy weeks cascaded out of planters, and pooled at their feet.

Olivia unwrapped the present carefully, commenting on the charming pastel buttons Nancy had attached to the Kraft Paper wrap.

“Anyway,” Nancy said, watching Olivia, “I always buy you a birthday gift, and routine is good for me. And obviously for my therapist, since she tells me that every week.”

“Then this is therapeutic for both of us.” Olivia lifted the delicate gold hoop earrings from the box. “They’re lovely, thank you.” She half stood and reached across the table to hug Nancy.