The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (35 page)

I let go of Tammy, deeply unsettled. “Seriously, what’s going on?” I asked.

Silence.

And then Mike said, “You know what? I guess I really am in love with you, Thursday, because I’d rather give up my money than let her game you like this.”

“No!” Tammy screamed. Then she ran away. Yes, just ran away, nearly tripping over her Snuggie a few times before her bedroom door slammed behind her.

“What the …” I said, watching her go.

“I’m assuming that she told you Davie Farrell bet me three thousand dollars to get with Tammy because she knew that I would eventually break her heart?”

“Yeah …”

“Well, it’s not exactly true. What really happened is, Davie bet me. I tracked down Tammy and did my best charm offensive, only to discover that she wasn’t interested. But I owed a guy a lot of money and I really needed the three thousand. It was either that or a broken arm, according to him. So I went to Tammy with a direct appeal. I told her about the bet with Davie and asked if she could at least pretend to be with me, so that I could collect on it.

“She agreed and did me one better. She told me I could move into her condo and have a room, I just had to pretend to be her boyfriend until further notice. So I dumped my then-girlfriend Chloe—not cool, I know, but we were already having major problems anyway. I moved in and I pretended to be Tammy’s boyfriend for the next year and a half.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why you would do that? Tammy could have had any guy she wanted. She doesn’t need someone to pretend to be her boyfriend.”

“Tammy could have had any guy she wanted, but she didn’t want any guy. She wanted Risa. So she hired me as cover. And she paid me extra to fake a proposal at her family’s Christmas dinner. Her idea was for us to be engaged for at least three more years—I have no idea what she planned to do after that. But then Risa started talking about Tammy coming out of the closet. That’s when Tammy dumped her and created our breakup cover story to explain why she wasn’t dating any guys. From what I can tell, she and Risa have been off and on ever since.”

“Wait,” I said the puzzle pieces finally all coming together to form one hell of a surprise picture. “Tammy’s ‘The One’? The girl that Risa’s been mooning over this entire time?”

Mike nodded. Then he said, “We should go.”

In a daze, I let Mike lead me out of Tammy’s condo.

And when we got back to his place, for the first time our sex wasn’t frenzied and awash with shame and guilt. That night, Mike took his time with me, turning me toward him and pumping into me, nice and slow, completely silent, except when he woke me up two times to do it again.

“You know, I used to sell drugs to the guys you dated in high school,” he said, as we were coming down from the third time.

“What?” I said, even though sleep was already calling me back to its dream-filled shores.

“People always talk about the fact that I used to be a drug dealer, but they never talk about who I would sell to. I wasn’t on the corner. The real money was delivering to the rich kids’ parties. Weed, coke, ecstasy, sometimes heroin. There were these two private high schools I serviced. I got fake school IDs made for both of them, told kids from one that I was on scholarship at the other one. That’s how I figured out I was good at acting. For real, that was my first role. These white guys I sold to, they always had these girlfriends, these smart girls in plaid skirts with rich daddies. Sometimes they’d want to get with me, but I’d have to say ‘naw’ because I didn’t want to mess up my business relationships with their boyfriends.”

I gave him a sleepy smile, too tired and sated to take my usual offense. “So this is all about your latent private schoolgirl fetish.”

He cupped my face in one hand, pressing his thumb into my left dimple. “No, I just wanted you to know something else about me, something you wouldn’t have guessed. I like telling you stuff. That’s all.”

“I’ll file it away for future reference.” Then I kissed his temple and said, “Good night,” before drifting back to sleep.

And when I opened my eyes on New Year’s Day, I rolled over and for once, wasn’t unhappy to see Mike Barker. Who always got what he wanted.

But then I remembered something else: “Oh no, Sharita!”

Sharita was the kind of person who had the numbers of all her close friends and relatives memorized, even though those were all collected in contact lists on phones these days. I, unfortunately, was not that kind of person. I had to use Mike’s landline to call my cell and get my messages. My mailbox was full—first with several messages from Sharita, asking where I was. I had thought Sharita sounded as mad as a person could possibly get … but then the messages from Risa came rolling in.

SHARITA

I
was not amused when I got to Thursday’s house on New Year’s Eve and she wasn’t there. I could hear an old Janet Jackson album playing behind the closed door of the little guesthouse, but no Thursday.

Thursday had an utter disregard for timeliness that had always irritated me, but this went above and beyond her usual hijinks. I hadn’t expected Thursday to be ready or anything, but I had at least expected her to be, you know—there. I sat on Thursday’s stoop and answered a few work e-mails on my BlackBerry. Then I called Thursday to get an ETA, but no answer.

Annoying. And the annoyance grew into out-and-out anger when an hour had gone by. The Janet Jackson album had long since stopped playing, and still no Thursday.

I checked my watch. It was ten o’clock, and I had two parties to hit before midnight. I’d just have to go without Thursday and deal with her tomorrow.

Risa called just as I was getting back into my car. “Happy New Year,” I said when I picked up the phone, since Risa was on the East Coast and three hours ahead.

“Do you know where the hell Thursday is? She’s not answering her phone.”

“No, we were supposed to meet at her place an hour ago, but she’s not here.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got to go,” Risa said.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you looking for Thursday?”

“I’m sure she’ll have told you everything by tomorrow,” Risa answered.

“What’s ‘everything’?” I asked.

“Gotta go.” And this time she hung up before I could ask any more questions.

Weird.

Obviously something was going down involving Risa and Thursday, but what could it be? For someone who ran her mouth the way Risa did, she had never been one for real fights. As far as I could tell, Thursday and Risa had never gotten into one.

The question of what was going on between my two best friends nagged at me even as I hit my first party in Burbank. This one was being thrown by a guy that I had gone to USC with, and apparently kids had been invited, which made me feel out of place in my strapless, sparkly red dress with its bosom-enhancing sweetheart neckline. The dress wasn’t quite my style. I was more of an elegant, bosom-cloaking black dress sort of woman. But when Thursday and I had gone shopping at the Beverly Center the day before, she had persuaded me to buy it, insisting that we would look so cute if we both wore sparkly red dresses on New Year’s Eve.

When I’d gone off character and agreed to buy it, I had felt like I was a part of an adventurous duo. But now, as children ran around a party of jean-clad moms and dads, I felt silly. I had to hightail it to make it to the next party, which was being thrown by one of the partners at his house in Hancock Park, by eleven-thirty.

I got to the party on time, but when I entered the partner’s Greek Revivalist mansion, I felt even more out of place, because everyone here was dressed up in evening gowns and tuxedos. That was the problem with L.A. It was way too easy to over- or under-dress for parties. It only took a few glimpses of other senior accountants in long, tasteful black evening gowns to let me know that I’d need a drink to summon up the courage to face anyone at this party.

I was putting a dollar in the bar’s tip jar when someone said to me, “Nice dress.”

I turned around to see a tall, brown-haired guy with a mustache and full beard. He had an odd accent that made it sound like he was rolling his
“Rs” when he said “dress.” Also, he was wearing jeans and a nice shirt, so he, like me, seemed very out of place at the party.

“Are you Welsh?” I asked him, thinking that he sort of sounded like the gap-toothed Gwen from
Torchwood
.

“Close, but not quite. Scottish.”

“Oh,” I said. “My girlfriend used to have a Scottish roommate, but she couldn’t understand a thing he said.”

The Scot chuckled. “I’ve heard tell that’s a problem for you Yanks, and I’ve been told meself that my own accent is a bit of a bear.”

“No,” I said. “You’re easy to understand, not like my girlfriend’s roommate at all.”

“So I’ve noticed this odd phrasing in the States, and I wouldn’t bring it up, except I don’t want to find myself barking up the wrong tree here. When you say ‘girlfriend,’ do you mean your lover or do you mean your friend?”

“I mean my friend,” I said, laughing. “That’s kind of how black women refer to their friends here. I went to an all-women’s college and I was so confused the first year about which of the black women were lesbians and which ones were just referring to their friends.”

He laughed. “I imagine that would be rather confusing.”

“Yeah, it was,” I said.

Then I waited to get struck with a Crystal Ball Vision of my dismal future with this guy. And waited … but nothing.

“So, are you an accountant?” I asked, stalling while I waited for my vision.

“Not exactly,” he answered. “I did a degree in business studies at uni, and I thought I might do something with it when I came to the States, but then I got a production assistant job and found I’ve a knack for organizing people. So now I’m an AD on the show that Tracey directs. She invited me at the last minute, though I’m sure she’s regretting it now that I’ve shown up in my Steve McQueens to her posh party.”

Tracey was the name of the partner’s wife, but … “Steve McQueens?”

“That’s slang for jeans.”

“Oh, an AD?”

“That’s short for assistant director.”

“And what does an assistant director do?” I asked, feeling like we were having a conversation in a different language, even though we were both speaking English.

“If you’re familiar with the theater, we’re somewhat like stage managers—just bossier.”

I found myself smiling again. “I always said that if I were going to go into the entertainment business I would want to be some sort of stage manager. My sister’s always accusing me of trying to stage-manage her life.”

“So’s mine. I think she’s glad I moved here and now have other people to boss. AD’ing is a nice gig if you like loads of organizing and telling tedious people what to do.”

“That’s kind of like accounting, except we’re telling people what they can and can’t do with their money.”

He nodded. “I suppose it is. What did you say your name was again?”

I was about to tell him my name when the office manager, Rhonda, came running over with two silver noisemakers in her hand. “There you are, girl. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. We’re all over here.”

If Rhonda saw the Scot, she didn’t put it together that we’d been talking. Before I could protest, the audience was counting down and I was being pulled away to where Rhonda and three other black accountants were standing with their girlfriends and wives.

The Scot got swallowed up by the crowd, and even though I looked for him after the countdown, I didn’t see him again in the whole hour that I spent at the party. Maybe that was why I hadn’t gotten a vision, I thought. The meeting must have been a nonstarter. People from two very different worlds colliding for a curious-but-brief moment in time, never to be repeated.

However, the next morning I came out of the shower to the sound of the
Dr. Who
TARDIS landing, which was my ringtone. I picked up my BlackBerry to see an 818 number that I didn’t know. “Hello, this is Sharita Anderson,” I said.

“Sharita, this is the Scot you met at Tracey’s party last night.”

“Hi,” I said, unable to keep the shock out of my voice. “How did you get my number?”

“I couldn’t find you again after the midnight toast, could I? So I asked Tracey about the beautiful woman in the red dress, saying that I wanted to ring you to ask you out. Lucky you wore that dress, hey, because Tracey knew of whom I was speaking right away.”

“Yeah, lucky,” I said, amazed because I had never heard the word “lucky” and my dating life referenced in the same conversation.

“I’ve not dated an American before, but from what I’ve been given to understand, you lassies like formal dates in which the man pays, correct? You’re not ones for a meet-up at the local and a bit of a hangout, am I right?”

If by “right” he meant utterly charming, then I agreed. “Yeah, that’s a pretty good assessment of American dating habits.”

“Alright then, in that case would you care to have brunch with me?”

Again I waited for some kind of Crystal Ball Vision—anything. But my mind remained stubbornly blank, so I had to wing it and say, “Okay, when?”

“Ah, well, it’s ten o’clock now, so how about eleven? I’m in Burbank, where are you?”