by Nella Tyler
“I think so,” he agreed.
“Especially Hot Hot Heat or Franz Ferdinand, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” I told him. “I remember her also saying she likes Radiohead, Muse, and OK Go.” Trevor wrote the list down.
“Other than concerts—movies maybe?”
I frowned. “We’ve already been on a movie date. If I took her to see a film again, I’d want it to be more special. Check and see if there are any good comedies that are scheduled for a premiere—any event-type movies.”
“I can absolutely do that,” he told me, nodding his head. “Should I look for movies in general, too?”
I shook my head. “Comedies and romances,” I told him. “Create a sub-list, too—horror movies. But nothing too gory.”
“Okay,” Trevor said, nodding again. “What else?”
I took a deep breath and considered. “Look at art openings: galleries, exhibits, things like that. Also check out events going on in the parks—festivals or meets.” I remembered that Natalie had mentioned taking Brady to the park often and how much she loved the events they had there.
As I continued on down the list, I was actually surprised at the amount I knew about Natalie. I’d put her tips and advice to work on our dates together—all two of them that we’d had since the first—but I hadn’t realized that I had actually filed away the bits and pieces of information she’d given me until just then. I knew that she liked going to poetry readings, even though I’d never really considered it a great use of my time. But I told Trevor to check those out, as well. I also added water parks, mini-golf courses, arcades, and other things that I would never have thought of unless Natalie had mentioned them to me as possibilities. I could remember with complete clarity the advice that had come along with that list of places where I could take women on dates: “The basic idea is that you want to have a list of places you can take someone to spontaneously. People in general love spontaneous, fun things. Be lighthearted. Don’t be so businesslike. You can get to know someone just as much on a bumper car as you can in a restaurant.”
By the time Trevor left to look for leads and begin to tentatively schedule the future dates, I thought that I might—might—just be letting Natalie’s advice affect me too much. I knew that her job was to get me ready for dating women that the matchmaker would set me up with, as well as anyone else I might meet and want to ask out, but I’d bought her flowers. I’d kissed her. I was looking for dates that she, specifically, would enjoy.
Face it, I thought wryly, trying to get back to a report that I had to finish by the end of the day, she’s in your head now. Every decision you make about dating is going to be informed by her. I shook my head, thinking of how that had come about. I had to admit that even above and beyond her expertise, she had a lot of knowledge in her mind. There was something about the way that she reacted, the way that she took a deep breath and made herself pause before saying something, and how she coached me, that told me that no matter how much education she’d gotten, a lot of her ability was pure talent.
She’s a mother. She’s got that mother’s instinct. I smiled to myself, thinking of the picture of her son that she’d sent me when she’d had to cancel our original second date. The three-year-old looked both completely like his mother and nothing like her at the same time and I wondered how it was that Natalie had become a single mom. I’d wanted to ask, but of course, I knew better. It was rude to ask a woman who was doing her best by her child how it was that she came to be parenting alone. If she wanted me to know about it, she would tell me. Until then, I would have to be content with knowing only that she was single and that she had a son.
The night that I’d kissed her, I’d gone home to my apartment alone. I had told myself that what I’d done was stupid and that I should put it out of my mind as quickly as possible. I’d acted on impulse. The fact that it had ended up with be being able to kiss her didn’t mean anything. She was my coach, not my girlfriend. She would never be my girlfriend.
But no matter how many times I tried to put it out of my mind completely, it rose to the top. Something about kissing Natalie had felt so good, so completely right. I’d gone to sleep the night of that date with the memory of it still bouncing around in my head and had the most intense sex dream that I’d had in years—maybe in my entire life. I had dreamed of waking up with Natalie in the bed next to me, already naked, curled up under the covers. In my dream, I woke her up with another kiss, and in a matter of moments, we were going at it, touching each other everywhere, teasing each other. I was hard as a rock and struggling to hold myself back. I kissed Natalie everywhere in my dream and went down on her for what seemed like forever, devouring her over and over again until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I woke up from that dream still hard, my cock aching and throbbing in my pajama pants. I took a long, hot shower and got myself off, trying to think of anything at all except for Natalie.
But it seemed like no matter what I did or how often I told myself that I couldn’t entertain an interest in her, that I had to direct my attention elsewhere, my thoughts kept circling around to that one kiss. I’d had sex with women; I had had sex plenty of times, even when I wasn’t dating anyone—one-night stands, most of them—but something as simple as a kiss had completely stuck in my brain. There had been a part of me that had wanted to take it farther; I had been right on the point of suggesting that she could let me walk her to her car, that we could kiss more there. I had been right on the point of suggesting that we could go home together.
I definitely wanted to. Natalie was gorgeous and easy to be myself around, pulling me out of my shell and teaching me in a way that I didn’t think anyone else I had ever met or dated could have taught me. God, she had to be absolutely, stunningly hot underneath those carefully professional clothes she wore. It was only too easy for me to picture what she had to look like naked. The clothes that she’d worn were tailored to her body—I had been with enough women to have an idea of what that silhouette would look like. But I knew that no matter how many times I pictured it, it wouldn’t ever happen.
I imagined the possibility of suggesting to Natalie that we could have practice sex as well as a practice kiss, but that sounded too much like I was trying to turn her into some kind of prostitute. I was already paying her—technically—for going on dates with me, through the company. I was paying for her to teach me how to be a better date, how to make things work with a woman I actually wanted to eventually marry. It was supposed to be strictly professional and I had already screwed that up a little bit by kissing her. I thought that if I suggested we have sex, Natalie would—rightfully—fire me as a client, maybe even report me to her boss, and I would end up not only missing out on what she could teach me, but also missing out on the possibility of using the service to find a woman I could love.
As I got ready to leave the office for the night, I tried to make myself imagine the kind of woman I would want to marry. She would have a lot of the same traits that Natalie had shown, but she would be a completely different person altogether. The woman I would eventually find for myself wouldn’t have any kids already; we would build our family together. She would be smart and funny, professional and insightful, and she would challenge me the way that Natalie did, but it would be more playful—less businesslike. We’d go on dates, but they’d be equally split between the things I liked to do and the things that she liked to do, instead of me investing time in figuring them all out.
No matter how hard I tried to picture my ideal woman in my head, though, the image of kissing Natalie swirled right back up to the surface of my brain. It was as if she had some kind of drug on her lips that would make me only think of her, although the fact that she hadn’t wanted to kiss me at all at first—in addition to her general professionalism—made that theory impossible. How was it that I could meet countless women every day that made no impact on me at all, but the one woman that I knew I couldn’t have stuck around in my head like a bad pop song, repeating over and over again? I decided
right then and there that I would get out of the coaching sessions as quickly as possible and put my energy towards something I knew would pay off eventually. There was no sense in dwelling on Natalie when she would probably forget me weeks after our sessions ended.
VOLUME II
Chapter Eleven
Natalie
Katie typed something on her computer quickly, nodding to herself as I waited. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “Let’s get this meeting underway.” I smiled. Every week, I met with my boss to discuss my progress with clients. Usually we used it as an excuse to grab a coffee, and this week was no different; Katie had gotten me my usual from Starbucks, and I took a sip of my mocha before setting it down and pulling my tablet onto my lap.
“It’s been a week of breakthroughs,” I said tartly, unlocking the screen and pulling up the first report. “Tanner Hodges has finally come to the conclusion that maybe—just maybe—he should actually listen to the things his date says, especially what she says she wants to order.”
“You have been working hard,” Katie told me with a grin. I laughed.
“It only took me, what, five dates with him to get him to accept the idea that women are human beings?” I shook my head. Some of the clients I was responsible for coaching were quicker than others and some were much, much slower.
“I appreciate your patience with him,” Katie said, giving me a sympathetic smile. “What do you think in terms of timeframe?” I considered that question.
“It’s going to take him a while to be date-ready,” I said, taking another sip of my mocha and looking over my notes. “He’s finally got that basic truth of women being human beings drilled through his thick skull, but I feel like it’s going to need lots of reinforcement before he can actually pull off a date without offending someone.” I thought about the question a little more. “Give it another five dates and re-evaluate from there.” She typed a note into her client form on her computer and nodded.
“Next one,” she prompted me. We went through the list of clients I was working with. Katie asked about specific issues with some—issues I had made note of either in their preliminary meetings or in subsequent practice dates—and for others, she just asked for my impressions. I almost never had fewer than eight clients at a time. When we’d been short of personnel, I had managed as many as twelve or thirteen coaching clients.
I sighed as I came to Asher’s name. “I feel like maybe it’s almost time to cut Asher loose.” I pressed my lips together in distaste, shaking my head slowly. I hated to admit defeat or give up on any of my clients, but sometimes it was just obvious—a client wasn’t going to actually do the work that they required to get the result they wanted. There was no point in wasting time with them.
“I know you’ve been working hard with him, but based on your reports, I’m…reluctantly going to side with you,” she said. If I hated giving up on a client, Katie—whose bonuses depended on getting clientele to the point of being ready to date their pre-screened matches—hated it even more. Usually if one coach couldn’t handle a particular man or woman, she’d rather just switch them out, as opposed to cutting anyone loose. She shifted in her seat, shaking her head.
“It sucks, but I think it’s likely he’s just not ready,” I told her, shrugging. “No matter how many times I go over it with him—or what I suggest—I get the same thing. It’s always like talking to a brick wall, and I’m not convinced that anyone else would be able to get through to him, either.” Katie nodded slowly.
“I think I’ll have a meeting with him and tell him that he’s going to be on a break for a couple of months—farm him out to a couple of the bigger seminars, see if he can’t absorb at least a little bit of information,” she said, typing something into the notes on Asher’s file. “There is no reason for him to be this hopeless—it’s not like he’s got any learning disabilities or anything like that.”
“My personal diagnosis is ego,” I said. “He’s so used to being labeled smart and clever and important that he doesn’t know how to take advice from anyone else period—especially someone who he views as potentially ‘lower’ than him.” I bit my bottom lip. “Put him in the speed dating seminar and give him some practice talking to people until he learns how to ask questions instead of answering ones that were never voiced.”
Katie snorted. “I’ll schedule him for the active listening workshop, too, while I’m at it,” she told me. “Along with ‘How to Connect’ and ‘First Date Topics.’” I giggled. I knew I probably should struggle to feel some empathy for Asher, but I couldn’t make myself feel too terribly bad for the wealthy, self-important man, not after weeks of going to restaurants with him only to be a captive audience for his long recitals.
“Head’s up, he’s starting to consider a mail-order option,” I said.
Katie groaned. “I’ll talk to him about that,” she said, rolling her eyes. The few clients we had who started to talk about green card wives or mail order brides typically were—in the agency’s experience—going down an irredeemable path. We had a few informers at the larger mail order bride agencies in the country who would let us know if any of our “red flag” names came up in applications; it was mutually beneficial because the mail order agencies lost money on those clients when a “perfect match” didn’t meet the pedestal-raised criteria that the clientele looked for. Katie did try to reason with those few men and women who went down the path of what they thought would be instant gratification, but it was the first step towards them no longer being our clientele, and we both knew it.
“That brings us to the newest addition to my roster,” I said, taking a deep breath and a sip of my mocha to remove the bad taste of Asher from my mouth. “Zeke Baxter.”
“He seemed pretty promising in his interviews,” Katie said, sitting back in her chair. “I’ve got your initial reports, of course. What are your current thoughts?” I considered that question carefully. I’d been thinking a lot about Zeke ever since our most recent date when he’d kissed me. That had been a major mistake—and one that I definitely wasn’t going to divulge to Katie, no matter how good of a working relationship I had with her.
“I think he’s a lot less hopeless than Asher,” I said tartly.
“That’s not a very promising start,” Katie joked. I grinned.
“In seriousness, I think he mostly just needs some rough edges smoothed out. He’s not…” I shrugged. “He’s not a bad guy, just a little out of touch. Too much the businessman.”
“I did get a bit of a brisk vibe from him,” she admitted. “But he does seem to have a certain native charm.”
“He does,” I agreed, thinking about the way that Zeke had been at our first meeting. “He’s a quick learner.” I told her about the first official date, when Zeke had bought and given me roses—and how he’d reacted to my feedback by bringing me flowers I actually liked the next time we had a date in person.
“What kinds of dates is he arranging?”
I shrugged again. “So far, the basic things. Dinner, a movie, that kind of deal. I do suspect that he has more ambitious ideas that he’s having his PA put together, but we’ll see how he carries those off.”
“What is your opinion of him more generally?” Katie added a couple of notes on Zeke’s file on her computer and turned her attention back onto me more fully. I felt weirdly self-conscious for the first time, and I wondered if she had somehow detected something amiss in my reports about the businessman—if she thought I was hiding something. Don’t be ridiculous. She’s always more intensive in the beginning stages of a coaching project. She just wants to have a good picture to start with so she can monitor his progress better. I took a quick, deep breath.
“I think his biggest problem is that he’s over-confident,” I told her, remembering the interactions I’d had with Zeke. “He came into it thinking that he’d have a couple of practice dates, charm me to bits, and then he’d be onto the ‘real’ stuff.” I shook my head, unable to keep myself from chuckling. It was
an attitude I’d seen more than once from clients; in that sense, Zeke wasn’t in any way unique. “I think it’s going to take some work for him to get over this sort of—transactional feeling in his mind, to get him to actually engage with his dating partners as real people instead of as business associates.”
“But otherwise he seems promising? How’s that charm of his working on you?”
I snorted. “I have known plenty of charming men in my time,” I told Katie blandly. “I’m not worried about him overwhelming me with that superficial bull.” I looked at one of my early notes about Zeke. “I think that he’s a pretty promising client, overall. I think he learns quickly; and if I can bust him out of that routine, shake-hands-and-make-the-deal mindset, I can prepare him for someone really special.” Katie’s eyes widened with mild surprise.
“That’s a pretty strong accolade,” she told me. I dismissed the idea that I was in any way praising Zeke unusually.
“He’s smart. He’s quick on the uptake, and he’s willing to learn from feedback—from a professional perspective, it’s easy to see how he got to where he is,” I explained. I swallowed against the convulsive tight feeling in my throat as I thought about just how much Zeke had already learned from feedback, and just how far he had come—and how easily he had gotten where he wanted with me, at least in terms of the “goodnight kiss practice” idea he’d had.
“Good to hear,” Katie said, turning back to her computer to type in a few more things. “I guess they can’t all be lumps of coal, right?” I laughed.
“Some of them have to be diamonds in the rough, after all,” I agreed. She finished off her notes and turned back to me.
“So let’s get to talking about the next couple of clients that I’m giving you,” she said. I nodded and pulled up a new document on my tablet to take notes. I had graduated two of my clientele the week before, and I had been expecting two—maybe three—new coaching clients to introduce myself to. Hopefully, one or more of them will help me get my mind off of Zeke for a while, I thought optimistically. I knew that not telling Katie about the goodnight kiss was a fine line away from lying to her. I needed new clients. I needed to delve into my work more generally. I was definitely in danger of putting too much thought into Zeke Baxter if I didn’t, and that was one of the things I most wanted to avoid.