The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
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Authors: Ernessa T. Carter
ALSO BY ERNESSA T. CARTER
32
Candles
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Ernessa T. Carter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Amazon Publishing
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612182827
ISBN-10: 1612182828
To Monique King-Viehland, the first person I met at BRIDGE. Sorry darlin’, if I’d known we were going to be best friends forever, I would have been a lot nicer.
Augus
t 2
010
If you say you want to find an extraordinary man, and you’ve got a habit of turning down social invitations, I mean any social invitation at all, then I just plain don’t believe you’re serious in this endeavor. When you’re searching for true love, you had best take every invitation you get, because for all you know, somebody’s handing you an Invitation to Extraordinary.
—The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell
THURSDAY
H
i, my name is Thursday. You don’t think you know me, but trust me, you do. Maybe you’ve talked about me behind my back or maybe you’ve said, “Nice to meet you” at the party of a mutual acquaintance. Maybe you’ve heard a lot about me, but you wouldn’t go as far as to say you know me. Semantics. I get it.
But technically you know me. And by me, I mean somebody just like me. Because though women like me come off as enigmatic, we’re all pretty much the same. I’m going to give you a list of my qualities, and then I’m going to let you flip through your mental contact list until you find the person in your friend or friend-of-friends group who’s just like me. This person you know is:
- Neurotic.
- Constantly sabotaging herself.
- From a privileged background, but because of #2, broke now that she’s an adult.
- The victim of some really sad pre-adulthood experience. Boo-hoo-hoo, something tragic happened to her or someone very close to her before she turned twenty-one. Cue the fucked-upness for life.
- Attractive—not gorgeous, mind you—just attractive. Easy on the eyes, easy to like at first glance. In my case, I have a set of killer dimples and a lion’s mane of long dreadlocks.
- A complete screwup.
And most baffling of all:
- Really good at boys. I mean, really good at them. Like if she was taking a class in getting boys to like her, she’d have an A+, and you’d
be hissing at her for throwing off the curve. He’s just not that into you, but for whatever reason, he’s into her.
Well, that woman you all know, the one who has a different guy in tow every time you run into her—that’s me—or I guess I should say now, that was me.
“What’s your secret?” I’m sure you’ve always wanted to ask the version of me that you know. “Hey Thursday-like person? You’re a screwup, you sabotage everything you touch, and you’re not exceedingly hot. How do you attract so many guys?”
I have two words for you: Ridiculous Honesty. When I’m out and about at a club, event, or party, I simply walk up to whatever guy I would like to sleep with that night and introduce myself. A couple of drinks later, I’ll say something like, “You’re a really nice guy, but I’ve got so many reasons not to date you.”
Then he’ll get mad, saying, “But I haven’t even asked you out.”
And I’ll yell over whatever loud music is blasting, “But you will. I’m fucked up and emotionally unavailable. Guys love me.”
And he’ll say, “But … ”
And I’ll say, “But you will.”
And it’ll go on like that until he does in fact ask for my number. Because (here’s the big secret) if you have the mammaries to pull it off, there’s nothing like announcing to a guy that you’re completely fucked up and a challenge. They should walk away, but they never do. After that it’s an all-access pass to thirty days or so of mutually satisfying sex, until that month’s guy realizes that I was totally serious about being fucked up and emotionally unavailable. Then comes the breakup in a flood of angry recriminations, in which the guy of the month accuses me of being exactly who I told him I was.
So yeah, the breakup part’s not so great, but I’m not going to lie to you about the rest of it. Being that woman was a lot of fun. I never got bored with guys, because I never stayed with them that long. In fact, Risa, one of
my best friends, came up with the perfect term for the way I dated: “one-month stands.” I dated guys, and then I ditched them when they caught feelings. No love, just leave. That was my standard MO. And I
loved
this MO. I was a struggling comedian with a career to attend to, so one-month stands were perfect for me.
But then came the summer of 2010, when I started having The Dream. At least once, sometimes two or three times a month, I’d find myself walking through a crowded farmers market I didn’t recognize, feeling bad for reasons I didn’t understand. There was a man, standing a few yards in front of me, but I could only see the back of his head, which was covered with some kind of hat. A fedora maybe. I was pushing through the thick crowd, trying to get to him.
Then I’d yell, “Okay, okay, I’ll marry you.”
He stopped. And I stopped, too, until finally, he turns around, and—
Bam! Then the alarm would go off.
Every single freaking time
.
“I keep on having this dream and it’s driving me crazy,” I told Risa, Sharita, and Tammy the only time all of us managed to get together for brunch that entire summer. “Basically, I’m following some guy I can’t really see through a farmers market, and then I’m all like, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll marry you.’ And he’s about to turn around so I can see his face, but then I wake up. What do you think that means?”
“Maybe it’s a vision from the future,” Tammy, the dreamy, light-skinned model with perfectly dyed honey-blonde hair, answered.
“Maybe you saw a movie and it’s replaying in your dreams,” Sharita, the adorably chubby and super-practical accountant, said.
But Risa glared at me as if I had been taken over by a body snatcher. “You want to get married,” she said. “You have the itch.”
“No,” I said, feeling like I had just been accused of having an STD. “I love being single. I want to be single forever.”
“What’s wrong with wanting to get married?” Sharita, who wanted nothing more than to get married, asked.
But Risa just shook her head at me, her face mournful like I had just told her I had a terminal disease. “Dude, I thought you were different. I thought you wouldn’t lose your mind and want to get married as soon as you turned thirty. But turns out, you’re just like all the other single ladies, living the stereotype.”
“I’m not living the stereotype,” I said. “It’s just a dream, I swear.”
“Why are you acting like it’s against the law to want to settle down?” Sharita asked Risa. “Day can’t sleep around forever. And, you know, marriage to the right person would probably improve her financial picture. You should see how many of my clients have jumped to higher income brackets within a few years after getting married. As an institution, marriage really is good for your wallet.”
Sharita gave me a nod of approval. “I think this decision to get married is probably the best one you’ve made since moving out here to L.A.”
Risa folded her arms and pouted. “So now I’ve got two friends living the stereotype.”
“I’m not living the stereotype,” I said, trying to rein them back in. “It’s just a dream.”
