44 Chapters About 4 Men (25 page)

Ken offered to buy the tickets, but by buy, what he really meant was,
I will physically purchase the tickets and allow you to pay me back for your half.

He’s lucky I came from a home in which I had absolutely no model for male monetary provision or chivalry. My mom was the cook, maid, greenskeeper, primary breadwinner, primary caregiver, and CFO. My father was the chain-smoking, pill-popping, perpetually unemployed, former garage-band guitarist, and very entitled white male. A typical evening in our household would involve my mother coming home from her full-time job, cooking us a lovely meal—which my father always managed to roll out of bed in time to enjoy—and then recruiting me to help her do the dishes. Meanwhile, my father would sit on his ass in the living room, drinking, smoking, and otherwise fueling his depression and generalized anxiety disorder with a steady stream of doom and despair (CNN) until the wee hours of the morning.

Ken should really send them a thank-you card.

After I hung up the phone and floated into my art history class, it slowly began to dawn on me that I had a date scheduled with a guy I really liked in a
month
. That’s like a decade in single college girl years. I could be pregnant with a senator’s baby by then. I could be getting matching salt-and-pepper shaker tattoos with a waiter I had fallen in love with at Waffle House. I could be in prison for “accidentally” rolling all my parents’ incense sticks in arsenic.

Luckily, Jason was having another get-together that weekend.

Ken looked fucking adorable. He wasn’t wearing the black that I so loved, but his light-blue button-down shirt made his eyes sparkle, and his dark gray pants were made out of something soft that hung from his hips, à la Christian Grey. It wasn’t edgy. It wasn’t punk or emo or rockabilly or biker. It was what a grown-ass man with good taste (and a very nice body) wore to a party after work. And I was surprisingly into it.

We talked all night. It was so weird hanging out with someone I was “dating” but had never even touched. So, I touched him—a lot.

If I went outside to smoke, I’d drag Ken by the hand into the cold March night with me. If I needed another beer, I’d tug him by the pinkie over to the mini fridge in the corner of Jason’s basement. I’d clutch his arm and whisper in his ear whenever I was talking shit about somebody at the party. And he let me, all the while smiling and making eye contact and leaning in to tell me his own funny stories about people at the party that I didn’t know.

It was a fascinating dynamic. I was obviously the alpha, but Ken held his own and carried himself with a strong, quiet confidence. I could totally picture him in his crisp shirt and tie, sitting behind the desk in his office, stoically firing people like it ain’t no thang.

Boom. You’re fired.

Boom. Collect your belongings.

This man was a boss. And he was
letting
me dominate him.

When it was time for me to leave, I didn’t drag Ken out to my car (even though it looked that way). He chose to let me pull him. And when I lunged at him and threw my arms around his neck in an overzealous good-bye hug, the intensity with which he held me took my breath away. I had expected to peck him on the cheek and scamper off in a cute little tee-hee-hug-kiss-see-you-around kind of way, but instead, I found myself caught against the length of his body, like an unsuspecting stick that had just been tossed into an electric fence.

I don’t even remember if my feet were touching the ground. I just know that Ken’s strong arms clutched me to his body for what felt like an entire courtship.

The sizzle was almost audible. Just as I was about to thrust my hands into his hair, wrap my legs around his waist, and invade his beautiful, sculpted mouth with my tongue, Ken released me and turned to go.

NO!

Before he could make it out of arm’s reach, I caught his hand and tugged as hard as I could. I tugged as if I were Patrick Swayze, and he were Jennifer Grey. When I successfully spun him all the way back around to face me, I grabbed two fistfuls of his sable-brown leather jacket—and, instead of lifting him over my head to the musical stylings of Bill Medley—I attacked him with a bizarrely aggressive closed-mouth kiss. It was like the worst TV kiss you’ve ever seen, or when a
ten- (make that twenty)-year-old girl kisses the back of her hand pretending like it’s Ryan Gosling.

WHY was my mouth closed? WHY did I have to do the arm-pull-spin move from
Dirty Dancing
??

I still want to die when I think about the awkwardness of that first kiss.

Thankfully, Ken must not have been completely deterred by my enthusiasm because he stopped by Macy’s the next day to have lunch with me (which in those days consisted of a smoothie and three Camel Lights). It was the best…surprise…ever.

Unfortunately, I was so excited to see him that my now patented overzealous hug made a second appearance, prompting Jamal—the body-building, customized-Honda-Civic-driving, cologne-wearing slut of a sales associate I shared the cash stand with—to pull me aside and whisper-lecture me about “needing to slow my roll.”

Lunch was fucking delightful, and it was over all too soon. As Ken walked me back to my register, I dragged my feet and valiantly fought the urge to cling to him like a spider monkey. Probably sensing that he was about to be bound and gagged, Ken threw me a bone and asked what I was doing the next day.

Um, making your babies. Duh.

After making some quick dinner plans, our lunch date ended exactly the way it had begun—with me plastered to Ken’s chest and Jamal shaking his head in disappointment.

The next day, at six o’clock sharp, I whipped the old ’stang into a prime parking spot in front of the aging local movie theater that Ken presided over. As soon as I swung open the heavy theater door, time stood still, and Sugar Ray launched into a serenade about halos and four-post beds that only I could hear.

He does exist.

Mark McKen was standing in the lobby, like a fucking Pegasus in a skinny tie, directing a handful of zit-faced employees. And he looked every bit as delicious as I remembered from Jason’s “Big Game” party—sexily mussed sandy-brown hair, hands casually tucked inside the pockets of those memorable black slacks, biceps straining against the rolled-up sleeves of his black button-up shirt, and that goddamn matte black tie. For weeks, I’d been fantasizing about tying Ken’s wrists to my headboard with that silken strip of fabric.

After spending the last few days with Ken McKhaki, I was beginning to doubt that his black-clad alter ego had ever really existed. Maybe he was just a figment of my imagination, the product of a hazardous combination of breakup and beer goggles.

But there he stood, in the flesh, and he was breathtaking.

When Ken finally made his way over to the doorway with my immobilized body in it (which took him about an hour, what with the wind machine and all), he leaned down and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me to him in another one of his now familiar electrifying embraces. Barely letting me go, he held the door open with one hand while ushering me into the brisk March evening with the other.

Once we were in the parking lot, Mark McKen released me—
no!
—and asked where I’d like to go to dinner.

I really, really wanted to come across as easygoing and cool, but after the short-circuiting my brain had just experienced, I simply defaulted to being myself and blurted out, “I love Italian!”

I immediately cringed, embarrassed that I was showing my only-child ass so soon.

Ken simply replied with a twinkly-eyed smile, “Really? Italian is my favorite.”

We went to a place neither of us had ever been before, and I don’t know if it was the food or the company, but to this day it remains our favorite restaurant.

During the course of that evening, I came to realize that, in addition to our taste in food, Ken and I had
everything
in common. We liked the same music. We had even been to some of the same concerts. We had the exact same favorite movie (
Braveheart
). Ken was completely apolitical and atheistic, so my counterculture political and religious beliefs, which had stemmed from being raised by hippies and Oprah Winfrey, weren’t even an issue.

Just when I had begun to mourn the end of the best dinner of all time, Ken asked if I wanted to come hang out at his house.

Now, in my experience, when a man asks you to come back to “his house,” what he means is, his mom’s basement, bonus room, or garage. That’s it—basement, bonus room, or garage, where he lives rent-free and still can’t afford to pay for his own cigarettes.

So, you can understand my confusion when I followed Ken’s little red sports car into the driveway of a sprawling white two-story traditional, dripping with charm and encircled by dozens of blooming azalea bushes. We’re talking window boxes, plantation shutters, and a covered front porch that spanned the entire width of the first floor and culminated in a fucking gazebo with a bench swing on the far corner of the house. This place was what dreams were made of—at least for a girl who had moved around a lot and grown up overhearing her parents whisper-shout words like
bankruptcy
and
apocalyptic tick infestation
in the middle of the night.

With a surprising amount of animosity, I followed Ken inside the estate, racking my brain for a polite way to ask him who owned it. This was not a single man’s house. This was my house, goddamn it, and I needed to know who lived there!

The interior was equally charming and immaculate. The front door opened into a living room with stairs immediately to the right. Straight ahead, through the main room, was an entryway into the kitchen. And to the left, the living room was painted a cozy shade of sage green. A stacked stone fireplace took up almost the entire far left wall, and the centralized camel-colored suede-like couch was an inviting overstuffed marshmallow surrounded by contemporary espresso furniture, satin-nickel light fixtures, and an eclectic collection of original paintings and pen-and-ink sketches of the Eiffel Tower.

No, seriously. Who the fuck lives here??

It was too sparsely decorated to be his parents’ house. This place looked like an Ashley Furniture showroom, and there were exactly zero family photos or personal mementos anywhere. No, this was definitely somebody’s first home, and I wanted it to be
mine
!

When I finally choked back my envious rage and complimented Ken on the decor, he simply said, “Thanks. My dad helped me with the crown molding.”

Aha!
“Oh, does he live here, too?”

“No, but my sister rents a room from me. She agreed to pay me extra if I gave her the master bedroom and a spot in the garage.”

So, a woman does live here. That explains all the Eiffel Towers pictures.
“Did she help you decorate?”

“No. I did all the painting and decorating. She just moved in a few months ago.”

“Really? You did all this yourself? It’s beautiful! Where did these paintings come from?”

“Oh, I got those in Paris. There are these street artists on every corner there who just draw and paint the Eiffel Tower all day long. Their work is amazing, and it’s really cheap.”

So, not only was he hot and smart and employed and fit, but he also owned his own home and had decorated it personally with paintings from Paris. It was as if he had known I was coming. My reverie was quickly shattered when I realized that, if I
were
to move in one day, Ken and I would probably be sharing a twin-sized bed in one of the tiny secondary bedrooms since his asshole sister had gone and snatched up the master.

Trying to feel out the sleeping arrangements, I probed, “I can’t believe you own your own home, and you don’t even sleep in the master bedroom.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I just had the bonus room finished, so I sleep in there.”

And there it was.
Boom. Basement, bonus room, or garage.
I fucking knew it!

Just as I was beginning to get a handle on Ken’s living situation, a tiny Asian girl emerged from the kitchen
—for real.
She looked like she was around my age, maybe younger, and was no more than five feet tall. When she noticed that Ken had company, she sheepishly averted her eyes and scurried up the stairs.

Okay, seriously, who the fuck lives here??

Noticing my horror, Ken explained, “That’s Robin. She works at the theater and needed a place to stay, so I’m renting out one of the other bedrooms to her.”

This motherfucker was savvy. He probably had these bitches paying his whole mortgage for him AND doing his housework. Ken
was
a boss!

And here he was, letting me call the shots and fling him around like a rag doll. It didn’t make sense. Why would someone who exercised so much control over every aspect of his life surrender all that power so willingly? It wasn’t even necessary. I was just a twenty-year-old college girl who worked at Macy’s and lived with her parents. Ken, on the other hand, was a twenty-three-year-old
man
who owned multiple neckties and a house big enough to board a small army of female indentured servants.