“Now is the perfect time to paint something. It’s not like I have anything else to do. It’s not like I’m on a date or enjoying a nice meal with my boyfriend or anything.”
He scowled and wrapped a hand around my wrist, his fingers easily overlapping each other.
We struggled over the paint chips. He won easily, prying them from my fingers and holding them out of my reach. “I’ll give these back to you when you’re calm and rational again. In fact, I’ll take them home with me tonight, and we can talk about this tomorrow. You need a good night’s sleep.”
He gave me a placating kiss on the forehead—still mindful of keeping the paint chips out of my reach.
“I’ll call you in the morning when I get a chance.”
He beat a hasty retreat out the front door. “Oh, so you do know how to work a phone!” I called after him as he shut the door.
The microwave beeped, telling me my sad cheese pizza was cooked. I carried the whole thing back to my room. If I couldn’t eat shrimp scampi, then I’d make do with a heavy carb load any way I could get it.
The greasy smell of fake cheese mingled with the softer smell of chamomile tea. Closest thing to heaven you could get without actually being there, in my opinion.
As I waited for the pizza to cool, I turned on a new podcast my friend Zoe had demanded I start listening to. She swore that it would revolutionize my life—I wasn’t sure I agreed at first since it was her friend that ran it, but I’d been hooked on it for the last few weeks. I was finally caught up to date. It was called Bee Best and it was all about self-improvement. Something everyone could use a little of. I took a deep breath, focusing on the podcast and determined to not let my anger at Fletcher ruin a perfectly horrible, greasy pizza.
I folded my legs under me and wrapped up in a fuzzy blanket while I listened to the podcast host interview a relationship specialist on today’s episode. I listened in righteous fury as they talked about the many ways boyfriends and husbands neglected their wives and girlfriends.
My word. If this wasn’t the icing on the proverbial cake of how my night is going.
“Choose yourself. Always choose you. Make everyone around you choose you. You can’t be the best version of you if you’re constantly bending over backward to please your significant other. You need to be treated like the queen that you are.” The guest being interviewed spoke with conviction. The guest was speaking directly to me, it seemed.
Bee hummed in agreement. “That’s right. Which leads us to another point. How many of you are currently second best?”
“Oh, Bee. I’m sure so many women are choosing second place. Or even worse, third or fourth place! Letting your significant other put their work, hobbies, friendships, whatever they put ahead of you, means you’re not important to them.”
“It’s so sad, but true. Which is why we are hosting a little contest. We need our listeners to participate. We want to hear how your relationships really are. Tell us exactly what your boyfriend is like. What kind of gifts does he buy, how does he prioritize your time together, where does he take you on dates? We’ll rate how he treats you, and based on the outcome, we’ll announce the winner—or, more aptly, the loser—on the next podcast, and even spotlight your story in our monthly magazine.” She added with a little laugh, “Anonymously, of course.”
Bee and the guest laughed gleefully together before Bee continued, “We want to know, who the World’s Worst Boyfriend is. Are you dating him? Or is your best friend dating him? Be sure to sign up at the link on our website. If you are deemed the winner of having the World’s Worst Boyfriend, we’ll send you a sympathy five-hundred-dollar gift card, our monthly magazine, and our relationship guide, Me First. And of course, a trophy to remind you to choose yourself. We are rooting for you, girl.”
They went on with instructions on how to enter the contest and reminded the listeners about what they’d get if they were awarded the title of having the World’s Worst Boyfriend.
Five-hundred-dollar gift card. That’s pretty tempting.
I set my mug down and opened their website up on my phone.
I really shouldn’t do it. I shouldn’t enter Fletcher into a World’s Worst Boyfriend contest.
It was petty.
Uncalled for.
And yet it called to me.
Spoke to me in ways that nothing else had lately.
But I shouldn’t. He was my boyfriend, after all.
On the other hand, it could be therapeutic and keep me from harboring any anger toward him. It was like an emotional outlet, if you will. It’s not as if anyone would know it was him, right? Or know it was me since it was anonymous.
I clicked ‘Enter’ and stared at the form.
No one needed to know.
Chapter Two
Saidy
A week had passed, and Fletcher was doing everything in his power to make up for hurting my feelings. He had sent me a sweet apology bouquet and even stopped by the house to fix my wobbly entry table. He cancelled a work meeting to bring me lunch during a weekday.
I still couldn’t believe I’d entered him into the World’s Worst Boyfriend contest. I was so glad he would never find out, because the guilt was slowly eating away at my conscience…well, at least it was until I discovered he’d also dropped off his dirty laundry at my house earlier that day when he’d brought me a box of donuts before work.
He told me he’d grab it when he picked me up before driving to my parents’ for dinner.
I guess I’m also his personal laundromat attendant too.
Today was my grandma’s eighty-first birthday. Fletcher was supposed to get off work and then meet me at my house. We were going to drive to my parents’ house together. They lived on the outskirts of town, so it took about thirty minutes to get there. Obviously, it didn’t make sense to drive separately.
I begrudgingly did Fletcher’s filthy laundry that smelled like it had made a few rounds through a middle school gym. How did he get his clothes so gross sitting at a desk all day? Was running an IT company startup really that stressful? That sweat inducing?
Fletcher texted me at five twenty, ten minutes before the time we were supposed to leave.
Fletcher: Running late with work stuff. I’ll meet you there, if that’s okay, sweetie? Can you bring my clean clothes with you too?
Saidy: OK. See you there. Don’t forget about it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he did forget about it. I slammed the dryer door shut on his wet clothes. I debated letting them sit there and grow some mildew, but I didn’t want to have to clean out my own dryer—and I refused to be that petty.
Why, oh, why was he not keeping his word on our plans lately? It was like he was starting to lose interest in me. And if he was, he needed to let me go instead of sabotaging all of our plans.
I swallowed the lump in my throat at that thought.
Maybe he was never into me as much as I was into him. Maybe it had been love at first sight on my part, but not his.
Or maybe I was reading into it too much. Shaking my head, I turned on the dryer, then went and grabbed my purse before heading out the door to my parents’. Wanting to get my mind off of things, I spent the drive there catching up on a past episode of Bee Best.
When I pulled down the gravel driveway, I tried to put behind all worries of Fletcher’s and my relationship. He said he would meet me here, and I was sure he would be only a little late after finishing up a work project.
However, he texted just as I stepped through the front door of my parents’ two-story colonial-style home. I assumed it was to tell me he was halfway to my parents’ or something. Color me shocked when I read what his message said.
Fletcher: Something came up. Rain check?
What? Was he the one about to turn eighty-one? I didn’t think so. Who used the term ‘rain check?’
Fletcher: Tell Glamma I love her.
That only made me madder. He was the only one allowed to call her Glamma. Glamma thought the sun rose and
set on Fletcher’s backside. Although, I had to admit, his backside was a nice one. He would be the only one who could skip her birthday dinner and still be forgiven.
“Whatever you’re angry about, you’re about to add a new wrinkle to that forehead of yours.”
I pocketed my phone and tried to iron out the wrinkle that Grandmother—that’s what us minions who were biologically related to her were required to call her—was talking about. She stood in the front hall, a glass of wine in her hand, looking down her nose at me. I was always impressed with her ability to do that since we were basically the same height. I truly hoped it was the only genetic thing I’d inherited from her.
“Something came up and Fletcher isn’t going to be able to make it.” I prepared for the reign of terror…
“Oh, that poor boy. I hope he’s all right,” she replied, as her face melted with concern. “I’ll go text him right now and make sure he doesn’t need me. And stop slouching!”
I straightened my shoulders until she left the room, then resumed my slouching pity party once more. She never texted me to see if I needed her. The only time she texted me was to tell me how she’d rearranged my entire life for me.
It turned out I spent the evening with my family. Alone. Without my boyfriend. I guess I should be grateful that I at least had company tonight, unlike my dinner date, party of one. But this was my family, and things were often tense around them.
My wonderful buffer of a boyfriend. It was something he’d done so well ever since we started dating. He was excellent at directing the conversation and standing up for me in a way that a family feud didn’t break out.
Without him there, however, I entertained questions about my “little decorating hobby.” Not a hobby, thank you very much. It covered my house payment and cost of a cheese pizza quite nicely.
My interior design business was a travesty to my grandmother. I hadn’t even gone to college for it. My Dad could care less since he was color blind, but he’d given me his blessing when he told me if it made me happy, I should do it. My mother…well, let’s just say she was my biggest supporter, and she’s the one who turned me into a design monster by handing me a paint brush at far too young of an age.
I could be around my parents all day long. It was the rest of the family that made it difficult.
Since Grandmother was horribly disappointed with my lack of “reach,” as she called it, she continually hounded me to expand my business. “Turn it into something real, with real employees,” she told me over and over again.
Her dreams of me getting into Juilliard had been crushed, so she’d set her eyes on making me a businesswoman extraordinaire. You would have thought she was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company with the way she pushed me to become a “real” business owner.
My brothers and I looked a lot more like our Dad, his Latino genes won out against my mom’s blonde hair and fair skin. But our similar looks were about all we had in common as siblings.
My oldest brother, Andre, was a professor at the nearby university. Grandmother dubbed him an intellectual. Which somehow ranked him higher on the familial totem pole. While he wasn’t married yet, he’d had the same girlfriend for ten years. We all figured he would propose sometime in the next five. He was not ever one to make a rash decision.
My younger brother, Marco, was pursuing a career as a hotel manager. He still wasn’t managing anything, I think he was a glorified desk clerk, but he did have a wife and a baby on the way, so that made him okay in my grandma’s eyes.
Unfortunately, none of them took my interior design company seriously. Ironically, I knew I made at least twice my brothers’ incomes. While my oldest brother’s girlfriend, Anna, made way more than I did each year, she would always be considered the “brilliant” one since she was a surgeon. Part of the reason they’d dated so long was that she didn’t want to be weighed down by the “burden of marriage” (her words) while she was finishing med school.
I’d never been to surgeon school—was that even what they called it? I was pretty sure it had a special name. And since I didn’t even know what the school was called, I had no room to comment. It was one of those jobs where I hoped the school was incredibly hard. I didn’t want just anyone off the street operating on me. I hoped they had to pass rigorous exams. Maybe hike Kilimanjaro before donning that white jacket. Some type of great feat—not just picking the right answer on a test, for example—to prove their worthiness.
Even though Anna was condescending and difficult to be around, I could still admire the fact that she probably was a great surgeon. She didn’t bother with human emotions very much, and I’ve heard the good surgeons have zero bedside manners and all.
“I interviewed some potential employees this week,” Grandmother announced.
“Are you starting a business?” Dad asked.
“No, I was interviewing employees for Saidy’s little business.”
My fork clattered to the plate loudly. Mom’s eyes met mine in a wide-eyed panic. My jaw clenched, and I had to work on breathing in a regular pattern before I answered her. I kept my voice deceptively calm, even though I felt like throwing a plate at the wall. The wall right behind Grandma’s head…
“That’s nice of you to take an interest, but I’m not expanding my business and will not be hiring any employees.”
Dad gave me a wink, helping me calm down and making me remember that not everyone in my family was a controlling narcissist.
“You won’t become anything if you don’t begin to expand,” Grandmother said in exasperation.
“That’s nice,” I replied as I picked up another piece of bread and spread some butter on it.
“I’m going to find the right employees for your design business. It will take you to the next level.”
“You’ll have to start your own design business, then, because I’m not taking on any employees this year,” I said through gritted teeth.
Grandmother clicked her tongue. “Fine. These initial candidates weren’t right anyway. I’ll keep interviewing until I find a good crew for you.”
I didn’t want a crew. I wanted to run my own design business while hiring out occasional contract workers. I loved my work the way it was, and I definitely did not need my grandma coming in and messing with the way my business was run.
Mom jumped into the fray in an attempt to shift the conversation to neutral territory with a question about Grandma’s devil dog, who had been a bit under the weather. She then went on to tell all of us in great detail about the cough her Basenji was suffering through.
In my heart I knew that dog wasn’t suffering half as much as I was at the moment…
By some miracle, I made it through the rest of dinner, kissed Mom and Dad goodbye, handed Grandmother her birthday present, and ran out the door.
I climbed into my car and began the drive home. Alone. This was getting ridiculous.
My phone chimed, so I checked my text when I stopped at a deserted four-way.
Fletcher: Love you, pumpkin. I’m going to make tonight up to you.
If he loved me, why didn’t he ever want to spend time with me? I mean, I know he was busy with his IT company start up. He’d only recently started it when we first met.
I know starting a company wasn’t easy. I’d done it myself. I wasn’t unsympathetic to his plight. But what bothered me the most was he always told me he’d be somewhere, and then something always came up. I was beginning to think I was dating the world’s biggest flake.
A handsome, curl your toes, good-looking flake.
A flake that I’d caught changing the lightbulbs in my kitchen two days earlier. All this time and I’d thought I’d finally found magic lightbulbs that never needed to be replaced. Turns out, I had a little fairy who went around my house checking the lumen and wattage situation regularly.
Times like that, when I’d catch him doing sweet things for me without being asked, I thought there was no one better in the world. And then there were times like tonight, when he b
acked out on a commitment that made me think I couldn’t rely on him.
I ignored the text and turned onto the road that would lead me around the back of town toward my little neighborhood. I loved driving the back roads home. Even at night it was more peaceful. And it definitely strained my eyes less. Headlights coming toward me always blinded me. It seemed like the lights were shooting off in all directions making it hard to focus on the road. Fletcher had been hounding me to get my eyes checked out. He was convinced I needed glasses.
Just then, my car chugged and made a lurching movement. That was strange. I’d had it serviced recently, and the mechanic had said everything looked great and that I’d be good for at least a hundred-thousand miles.
The car lurched forward again, then stalled. The engine shut off.
That mechanic had lied.
I coasted to the side of the road without incident as I stared at the dashboard of my car.
This thing was still under warranty. It shouldn’t be dying like this. I popped the hood and stepped out of the car.
The country road was dark and deserted. I shivered, though not from the cold.
I pulled out my phone. I tried calling Fletcher. No answer. I would be shocked if I were any other girlfriend. So I called Dad. His phone was already off. He was probably asleep in his recliner. Oh well, that was probably for the best. If he’d answered, he would then give me a long lecture about why I should have bought the reliable Toyota he recommended.
I texted Fletcher. Still no answer.
I really needed some help right now. The peaceful country road was eerily silent. Even the bright moon wasn’t helping me feel at ease. Instead it seemed to cast an eery glow over everything.
I texted my friend Zoe. No answer.
I called Fletcher again. And again. I would have tried calling my friends Andrea and Milo, but I knew they were out of town for a couple days.
World's Worst Boyfriend: A Romantic Comedy Adventure (Fake It Book 3) Page 2