Calamity Rayne
Gets a Life
Lydia Michaels
Romantic Comedy
www.LydiaMichaelsBooks.com
Lydia Michaels
Contemporary Romance
CALAMITY RAYNE: Gets A Life
Copyright © 2016 Lydia Michaels
First E-book Publication: © Lydia Michaels 2017
Editor: Elise Hepner
Cover Design by Lydia Michaels
Cover Photography by Ekaterina Molchanova
ISBN-13: 978-1542342414
ISBN-10: 1542342414
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. Distribution of this e-book, in whole or in part, online, offline, in print or in any way or any other method currently known or yet to be invented, is forbidden. If you do not want this book anymore, you must delete it from your computer. WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
All characters, companies and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual businesses, persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.
www.LydiaMichaelsBooks.com
Dedication
This book was written for Briana, a dorky hypochondriac who traded her chalk for a quill and discovered her calling by trusting a long line of accidental events. You jumped with a half-ass parachute, but what a blast the fall has been.
Bring on the calamities.
Chapter One
Somehow I’m Thirty
Sometimes adults do reckless things to prove they aren’t old. I might be approaching one of those moments. As a courtesy to myself, I rejected terms that started with mid-life anything, because those labels were for old guys with little dicks, buying flashy sports cars and investing in hair clubs.
I wasn’t old. Nope. I was a wobbling little calf fresh from the womb. I was veal—a rather aged, thirty-year-old veal—but still veal.
My twenties weren’t overly challenging, and I loved having the authority to decide my life, but as I entered this new decade of adulthood there came an unexpected and immense pressure to accomplish something. I, of course, had no clue what that something might be, so I was scared shitless about my future. This was a first.
I stared at my flickering birthday candle, wondering if other thirty-year olds still put this much thought into wishes at this stage of the game—or even blew out candles for that matter. Not that I cared what other people did, but everything I was, and planned to be, seemed to hang in the balance of this one little wish, so I needed to make it count.
Give me a sign, something that tells me what I should be doing with my life…
Breathing in, I held it for a moment then released the breath. A trail of smoke slithered from the cooling wick.
“Welcome to your thirties!” Elle cheered.
Coffee houses were our mecca, so I was ringing in this birthday with my best friend and a glorious chocolate muffin I intended to annihilate—guilt free—because there were no such things as calories on birthdays.
I plucked the candle out of my muffin and sucked off the crumbs. “Thanks.”
“You’re gonna have a great year, Rayne. I can feel it.”
Unlike me, Elle seemed to accept our aging with resigned grace that retained her sex appeal. I had no sex appeal. That wasn’t an age thing. It was a me thing.
Studying my friend, I broke off a piece of the muffin, a pinch of envy for her self-assuredness teasing my celebratory mood. My envy had nothing to do with the fact that she was prettier than me or had her career in order, but everything to do with her irrefutable happiness. It radiated from her in waves.
I’d never been overly content with my life. I sort of just floated on the cusp of acceptable behavior. Elle’s confidence was borne of milestones I’d yet to experience, and a big part of me feared I’d never again have the opportunity to make up for everything I skipped over in my twenties.
I was clearly being irrational and stupid. Thirty was just a number. So why did this number carry more weight than all the others? Bullshit concerns bogged down my everyday thinking. Would my boobs noticeably droop by next year, before I ever got the chance to use them as weapons of mass persuasion? Dumb crap like that was all I could think about now.
“You’re stressing. I can read you like a book,” Elle commented, well used to my irrational thought process.
“Doesn’t it get to you?”
“What, being thirty?” She laughed. “No. For all we know this could be the best decade of our lives. Stop acting like the crypt keeper and eat your muffin.”
Most days, I was easy like Sunday morning and as redundant as a slinky. My lack of major accomplishments didn’t typically faze me, being that I’d been living with myself for thirty-freaking years. But three decades was a long time and realizing so much time had passed made me wonder if I was doing something wrong with my life.
Here I was, living life as I always had, then—boom—I was suddenly squinting through what was once twenty-twenty vision trying to figure out how the fuck a rogue hair grew out of my neck overnight. Shit like that really pissed me off, because deep down I still felt young, but my age was proving otherwise.
“I don’t like it. Maybe I’ll just be twenty-nine again. Women do that, right?”
“Rayne,” Elle said with patience borne of a lifetime of knowing me. “You will continue to be you. Our age doesn’t mean anything.”
But it did. It meant everything was perhaps halfway over, and I had nothing to show for that first half of my life. “Maybe I’m depressed.”
“You’re not depressed.”
“I could be. The rest of the world is.”
Elle rolled her eyes. “You’re a hypochondriac, and you need to get over yourself and stay away from medical websites.”
Women in their thirties wore “mom jeans” and talked about grocery coupons. I’d live off dairy products if I could. I’m probably eating too much cheese.
I never quite mastered “adulting”. While all my friends discovered their purpose in their early twenties, I avoided any hint to mine, lacking that elusive focus factor that gave them the diligence to follow through. There was a very high chance my mother forgot to fill out the paperwork diagnosing me with some sort of attention deficit disorder because my focus never stuck on one goal for too long. That included things like relationships, possessing my own shelter, or having a savings account.
“You need a boyfriend,” Elle reiterated for the ten thousandth time.
As always, I treated her statement as a rhetorical one. There was nothing wrong with me. I could be girlfriend material. But boyfriends weren’t my material. They didn’t do for me what they apparently did for the rest of the heterosexual, female population.
A backdated issue of Rolling Stone was wedged between the bench and the window of the booth. Pulling it out of the crease, I tossed it on the table and paged through. My attention snagged on an advertisement for tequila. A sunny beach and a dewy shot of liquor filled the page as an unrequited longing to escape my life took hold.
Sighing, I bit into my muffin. “I need a vacation.”
Elle glanced at the magazine. “So take one.”
I snorted. “Oh, okay. Where did I leave my trimming sheers for the money tree?” Waitressing was a paycheck-to-paycheck job.
Elle turned the magazine and ga
ve the advertisement a second glance. “You could book a flight and spend a weekend at a resort for under a thousand dollars. Don’t act like it’s impossible.”
Maybe finding a boyfriend would be easier. Two women walked by our booth holding hands, laughing and looking totally at ease. “Do you think lesbians have it easier than straight women? I could be gay.”
“You’re not gay. You just sleep with the wrong men.”
“Yeah. I’m not gonna do that anymore.”
She laughed. “You haven’t done anything in two years.”
Rolling my eyes, I once again wondered if I’d ever view sex the way my friends did. Elle loved the sex. Me not so much. Maybe I was non-sexual. Was there an acronym for that? It really didn’t matter. This was the pointless shit my life had whittled down to, worries about my nonexistent sex life I had no interest in resurrecting.
I swallowed the last of my muffin. “I think I could date a woman. People act like dicks are the main event. I could go without. No one even noticed when I gave up penises for Lent.”
Elle sipped her coffee and silently chuckled. “You’re not Catholic.”
“I still support the cause.”
She shook her head. “You’re an idiot. You just need to find the right guy, someone to distract you from the monotony of life.”
“Blah. Who am I going to date? We see the same people all the time.” That was a definite drawback of living in a small town. “And I don’t feel like worrying what someone else thinks.”
Elle folded her arms on the table. “Rayne, you know I love you, but you’ve been in this funk for a month. I want to see you happy, but you’re the only person in charge of your happiness. Sometimes you have to face your fears to reap the rewards. You need to switch things up in your life.”
“I think I’m just overdue for a vacation. I need to figure out my finances.”
“Good.” Elle nodded. “Start planning and make it happen.”
Digging my phone out of my pocket, I signed into my bank account app. “Ugh, someone definitely forgot to water the money tree. Jesus, my finances are pathetic. We should be at a bar.” I flashed the screen to Elle and she grimaced.
“You can’t afford drinks,” she joked. “You just have to think outside of the box. Maybe you could get a summer job near water or something.”
“Like as a camp counselor?” Visions of swatting away mosquitos and children screaming filled my head.
She shrugged. “Or maybe working for someone rich who would let you stay in their big, fancy guest house.”
My brow quirked. “Like a personal assistant?”
I’d never thought of doing that for a living, and I’d thought of many different careers over the years. Waiting on people or following directions wasn’t something I excelled at, but I did like money and being the personal assistant to the right person could pay off in more than cash, especially if that person was rich and wanted to put me up in a nice bungalow overlooking a golf course or a beautifully landscaped heated pool. Totally unrealistic, but that fantasy was much more pleasant than the camp counselor scenario.
My smile grew as I imagined basking in golden rays of sunshine while an oiled up pool boy fanned me with a palm leaf, but the vision shifted, and I was suddenly holding the palm leaf, my arms tired, an annoying bead of sweat working its way down the center of my back as a the soft buzz of cicadas grew to an overwhelming roar. Erase.
Living with my mom and waitressing at the same place since college didn’t scream big prospects. I definitely had financial limits. I guess you could say I was ordinary, living one week to the next.
My degree in education loomed in the back of my mind like an unclaimed opportunity to make a decent living, but it turned out I wasn’t a huge fan of teaching. I was more of an office supply hoarder who got turned on by Sharpies in every color and various sized sticky notes. But my quasi-organization skills had to be worth something.
“You should think about it,” Elle pushed. “Dust off your resume and see what’s out there. A change would be good for you.”
“I’ll think about it.”
When I got home that night, I figured what the hell. I updated my resume, put it out on a few of those nifty job search sites, and left the filters pretty wide open. Two days later my inbox was overflowing.
“Holy shit,” I muttered, scrolling down the page of emails. Did I accidentally lie about my qualifications? This was going to be easier than I thought.
Or not. As I clicked open the first few messages I was disappointed to find they were not for resorts, but cubicles—otherwise known as soul sucking death traps. The starting pay was barely above minimum wage. The rest were spam.
And why were so many emails offering me Viagra? “Damn it. I don’t have a penis, people!”
After sending half the emails to spam, I scrutinized the remaining job offers. There were no positions overlooking the coast of Greece or boasting sandy beaches and cerulean seas. So unfair. Stupid adulthood.
The erectile dysfunction spam kept coming, along with several invitations to online dating sites. Giving Elle’s dating advice some consideration, I uploaded a picture of myself to one of the match sites and made a very generic profile. My information came down the next day after a member sent me a close up picture of his penis.
I nearly ruined my laptop when I spit coffee all over the screen. What the fuck was wrong with people? It seemed like everyone was trying to shove a metaphorical dick down my throat. No, thank you.
I wasn’t some miraculous thirty-year-old virgin on anything so dramatic. That shit only happened in romance novels. I had the sex. It was unremarkable. Elle said I did it wrong, and I probably did the first time because all I remembered was the guy’s crushing weight and things slipping around. But my partner seemed to enjoy it, so I had the sex again.
I made sure guy number two rounded all the necessary bases. He felt me up, got his hand down my pants, and even did some things that almost felt good, but switched gears too fast for any true pleasure to register. Then I was being stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey, and it was over. Leaving me, once again, wondering why the fuck people were so obsessed with sex.
Me and the sex simply didn’t mix. And I was fine with that. If donuts tasted like dog shit, I wouldn’t eat them just because they had the reputation of being donuts. Sex had a reputation of being this incredible thing, but it wasn’t. A big part of me assumed most females were lying about how good it was as part of some women’s lib aftermath.
So after the online dating penis pic fiasco, I took dating back off the table and invited Elle over to help with my ongoing job search. Something was wrong with my resume because I was only getting spam and offers for telemarketing positions.
Sitting on my couch with a notebook and wine, we brainstormed. “Maybe I could volunteer for some research professor who’s studying in the Congo.”
Elle tipped her head, not ruling out the possibility. “If you could find something like that, but do you really want to risk catching some funky flesh eating bacteria or waking up with spiders in your tent?”
I shivered and gagged. “You’re right. Screw that.”
“Don’t rule out personal assistant yet. I’m sure we can find someone looking for a live in. Maybe you could be an au pair. Your education degree would definitely help with that.”
“Blah, taking care of a kid twenty-four seven? I don’t think so. If I ever saw a beach, I’d be lugging a hundred pounds of sand toys and sunblock. And there would be no tequila on the job.” Plus, kids made me nervous.
“So we need to find a rich adult looking for an assistant—preferably one with a guesthouse who lives somewhere exotic.”
I pointed at her with my pen. “Yes. That is what I want. Now, where does one find such a job?”
“I dunno.” She shrugged.
I carefully wrote the words Assist Rich Person on the center of my page that had penises doodled in the margin and a pretty decent sketch of Snoopy.
My ob
session with doodling dicks was probably part of the reason I couldn’t take sex seriously. Penises were funny, especially when one doodled mustaches and hats on them.
I tapped my pen on the spine of my notebook. “I wish there was a special classified section for jobs like that.”
The chances of me getting on Oprah’s payroll were unrealistic, but maybe I could find a fresh, rich person to hire me. I wasn’t rich, so I knew nothing about the places such people hung out or what sort of activities they might need assistance doing.
We wasted a great deal of time searching the Internet for Leonardo Dicaprio’s address. He wasn’t listed. After calling it a night I debated if I should stop chasing clouds and start living with both feet on the ground—maybe even put in for a teaching job.
In the days that followed I didn’t remove my resume from the Internet, nor did I apply for any jobs in classrooms. I just sort of stayed exactly where I was, because making no decision was always easier than making a difficult one.
I stayed stuck in that stagnant place for days, falling into my ordinary routine of working and passing time after my shifts with our friend Tyler who frequented the bar.
I’d come to accept I’d likely retire at that bar after another thirty years slipped by, and somehow I told myself that didn’t sting. But it did, so I stole Tyler’s fries and consoled myself with food. Food was my drug, my sexual pleasure, my… I just really liked food.
Elle barreled into my work with a shit-eating grin on her face and bustled over to our usual area. “I have the best news!”
She stole my cup and finished my draft as I frowned. That beer and Tyler’s fries were all I had going for me in my life at the moment.
“You’re buying the next round?” I asked. I’d wanted that last sip.
“Nope. Remington Davenport had a heart attack!”
Remington Davenport was an old silver fox that had more money than Midas. He was always being interviewed on television and getting politicians to bend to his will. Not the sort of celebrity Elle typically kept on her radar.
Calamity Rayne: Gets A Life Page 1