“You getting tired, Marky? You want me to take over for a while?” I ask.
“Hell no! I didn’t fly all the way out to NC to get your ass to just ride all the way back to Texas. You coulda driven yourself if that was the case. Plus, Mom would kill me if I let you drive and something happened. It’s up to me to keep the princess safe.” He smirks at me. He loves to tease me about being the only girl in the family. “Not to mention, I’m more than a little afraid that your turtle would jump up and bite my legs. You don’t look comfortable at all.”
“I’m fine. All those years of dance class made me pretty bendy. I’ll make sure to walk around next time you stop for gas,” I say as I poke him in the ribs when he takes another swig of his Liquid Gold. “You’re gonna have to pee soon anyways the way you’re sucking those things down.”
Chapter 2
January 10, 2005
I’m finishing up putting my clothes on hangers in my new room in Mark’s house when my cell phone rings. I find it buried under a box of paperbacks on my bed just in time to answer. “What’s up, hooker?!” I ask excitedly.
“Nothing much, ho. Just missing my best friend and wondering if the next six months are going to crawl by as slowly as the past three days have since you’ve been gone,” Anni pouts.
“Awwww. I miss you too, boo. I’m almost finished unpacking. Haven’t really done much else. I’m going to the school tomorrow to get all registered,” I tell her.
Anni’s been my best friend for two years now. Funny to think we didn’t like each other when we first met. I worked at my cousin’s car dealership as a receptionist when she was hired for the same job. She was from Florida and kind of a bitch, and apparently, thought my always happy and perky personality was annoying. But during a random conversation, she found out I had never ridden a horse, and from that moment on, we were inseparable. The following weekend, she had dragged me to the stables on Ft. Bragg and forced me to ride a damn horse. It was the scariest experience of my entire life. That fucking beast had seriously tried to amputate my leg by running me into a fence, and here I am now…living in Texas. Kind of ironic to be deathly afraid of horses and move to the Lone Star State, right?
“Well, I started the new job at Wiley’s last night,” she reminded me.
“Oh, yeah! How did it go?” I braced myself for her answer. She’d been having a pretty long streak of bad luck with jobs in the past few months since she quit working at the car dealership. The latest one though, Wiley’s, is a restaurant and bar inside of a hotel. With a steady flow of customers, there was no need to worry about it shutting down like the last one she worked at.
“I think I’m really going to like it. My manager, Mike, said that it’s different working at a restaurant inside a hotel because not only do you get ‘regulars’ like a normal restaurant does, you can also get the same people in every single night, sometimes for weeks straight. They’ll be staying at the hotel for a contract job or whatnot and come down for dinner or just a drink before bed.”
“Well, put on that Anni charm and hopefully you’ll get some of them to request you each time they come in. Hike up those giant tatas and rack up them tips, biotch!” I tease her. We chat for a few more minutes before we say our ‘I love yous’ and ‘goodbyes’ and I finish up with my clothes and look around my room. All I have left is to go buy a new bookcase to hold all my beloved books since I couldn’t fit one in my car.
The next day, Mark rides shotgun as I drive to Kingwood College. We’re meeting our brother Tony there since he only lives five minutes from the campus. Mark is making me drive because it makes me physically ill to think about driving to the school on my own. Houston is made up of a ton of freaking highways. We don’t have highways where I’m from. We just have our regular old streets, seeing how Fayetteville is maybe thirty minutes across, and that’s only because of the traffic lights. My hands are cramping from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. After exiting his neighborhood onto the feeder road, the road that runs along the highways that you exit onto to get to the buildings, I panic. “Marky, don’t make me get on the highway. I will freak the fuck out if you make me get up there with all those semis going a million miles an hour right next to each other across six lanes.”
“Ok, Wench. Just take the feeder the whole way there. You’ll have to leave a few minutes earlier than you would if you actually took 59, but if it scares you that much, just stay on here.” Like the great big brother he is, he knows when to tease me and when to be supportive. This is one of those times picking on me would have made the situation dangerous for his appendages.
We arrive fifteen minutes later and I can finally relax. I see my big brother, Tony, standing outside his truck in the parking lot when we pull in. I hop out of the car, take off running, and throw myself at him. I haven’t seen him in almost a year. He’s a commercial diver; from what I understand, he finds oil under the ocean and his team goes in, drills, and sucks it out. He’s gone for weeks at a time with short amounts of time in between trips so it’s hard to plan a vacation to come see him. Maybe now that I live here, I’ll get to see him more often.
“Hey, kid!” he grunts as he catches me. He’s 6’5 and built like a linebacker…or a hockey player I guess he’d prefer, since he’s a diehard Flyers fan. Even now he’s wearing his John LeClair jersey.
“I missed you, Nony!” Yep, I’m twenty years old and still call him the name I gave him when I was three. I’m told I wasn’t able to pronounce the letter T for a while, but even after I could, the nickname just stuck. I drop back down to the ground from where I hung from his neck and the three of us made our way to the administrative office. I’m a total Virgo, super anal, organized crazy person. Tony once took me to The Container Store on a visit to Houston a couple of years ago and I almost wept with joy. As we go through the bustling hallway and enter the office, I have my planner out and ready, and I’m registered for my classes with all my books bought within the hour.
“Shit, sis, that was a lot more painless than I thought it was going to be,” Mark says. “As hard as it was to get you to choose between your fifty purses to bring to Texas, I thought it’d take hours for you to pick out your school crap.”
I tilt my head down and hide my smirk behind my curtain of long, dark hair. Little does he know I didn’t leave behind a single one.
“Want to walk around and find all your classrooms? I took a few classes here just for the shits and giggles so I know where everything is,” Tony suggests.
“You’re like a gajillionaire; why would you be taking college courses?” I ask him as we make our way to what will be my first class next week: American History I.
“I’m not a gajillionaire.” He shoves me playfully into Mark. “I took some classes here just for fun. A couple of history classes, a basic computer class, just random stuff. The cool thing about it is if you’re enrolled, you get free access to the on-campus gym. Why not come and check out the cute college girls on treadmills instead of what you get at a regular gym?” He wiggles his eyebrows at Mark over my head.
I smack him in the arm, “Ugh, you’re such a Chester .”
We walk around for about an hour, find all my classes, the cafeteria, even the gym. We stay at the gym a little longer than I personally thought was necessary to get my key card set up, but hey…not only were there cute girls for my brothers to check out…there were quite a few good-looking guys lifting weights and playing basketball on the indoor courts. Maybe Tony had the right idea after all.
Chapter 3
January 12th, 2005
After leaving the school yesterday, my brothers and I went and had some lunch and then Mark took me to Walmart to pick up a cheap bookcase. He helped me put it together and stand it up against an empty wall in my room, before he left me to my Virgo ways. I know I’m not the only person in the world who absolutely loves organizing her books. Or am I that weird? I opened up my boxes of paperbacks and carefully lined up each of my series in reading order. I keep a very neat lis
t of my books in a sparkly pink folder that I stand on one of the book shelves. It’s a checklist of all my favorite authors’ books in the correct reading order. I have almost all of them checked off, but there are those few that still evade me. I try to find most of my books at used book stores, but some I actually have to go buy at the retail stores because no one wants to get rid of their copy. Hey, I’m a college chick on a budget.
The rest of the day went by the same way it had all week. Mark, Kim, and I would eat some dinner, hang out in the living room and watch some TV, then I’d go upstairs to my room and read, until I passed out. I’d been so busy unpacking and getting ready to register for school that I hadn’t really had time to think about much else.
Now, sitting in my room by myself, I just finished the latest Sherrilyn Kenyon book. I’m filled with the usual sense of joy for the couple finally getting their happily ever after, quickly followed by a slight swell of jealousy that I haven’t found my own. With Mark and Kim both at work, the loneliness I felt in Fayetteville is starting to sink back in. Yes, I had my family and the best friend a girl could ask for, but goodness, how could one chick have so much bad luck in the dating department? The only way to deal with the direction of my thoughts is to hop on my blog and write a Chick Rant post before I write my review for the book I just read. Most definitely my perfect escape.
*~*~*
Kayla’s Chick Rant & Book Blog
Blog Post 1/12/2005
In a town full of soldiers, how the hell did I manage to only find the biggest douchebags out of the thousands of men there?
The latest one was David. Let me tell you about good ole David. He waltzed into the car dealership I worked at like he owned the place. He was friends with Ben, who was one of the salesmen, so when he walked in, he went to talk to him about a car he was interested in. He wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous or anything, but he had this really happy-go-lucky air about him that I was drawn to. He had light brown hair cut into the military style that is so common where I’m from, and the biggest smile I’d ever seen on a man. He was also wearing glasses with a thick black frame. He had the hot-nerd thing going on. After he talked to Ben, our salesman, the two of them walked up to my desk to grab the keys to the cherry-red Chevy Camaro with the T-top out front.
When I looked up at him to hand him the keys, our eyes connected; I felt my face heat as his eyes gave me the once over. There was instant chemistry. I could see his eyes were bright blue behind his glasses once he was so close. He slid his fingers against mine as I handed him the keys to the Camaro, letting them linger awhile before folding the keys into the palm of his hand. He gave me that big grin of his and handed me his driver’s license to sign out a dealer plate so he could take the car on a test drive. His name was David and according to his card, he was from Kentucky. This was an everyday occurrence there; hardly anyone was actually from Fayetteville. People were just stationed in Ft. Bragg, serving their time in Fayettenam.
In an adorable twang that I wasn’t used to he said, “Thank you, ma’am,” as I handed him back his license and Ben the dealer plate. It sounded different from the southern accent of North Carolinians. I couldn’t help but smile back at him since the butterflies in my stomach were tickling the shit out of me. Nope, I do not have that “play it cool” bone in my body.
A couple of hours later, David bought the Camaro and was shaking hands with Ben when I saw him make his way over to me. He crossed his forearms as he leaned on to the high front of my receptionist’s desk. “Kayla, right?” he asked. I simply answered in the affirmative.
“I have this new car, you see. I’m thinking you should help me celebrate buying my dream car by going out with me Friday evening. Would that be something you’d be interested in?” he asked with that smile.
“Well, that depends. What would we do to celebrate your new purchase?” I asked him.
“I was thinking we’d go get some dinner, maybe go see a movie since there’s not much else to do in this town. But this new car I just got, it has T-tops. What I’d really like to do is just cruise around and see that long gorgeous hair of yours blowing around that pretty face.”
Wow. Thinking back, that was actually a pretty good pick up line. Definitely creative. After my brain stopped stuttering, I finally told him it sounded like fun and we made plans for Friday.
The date had been super fun. I had never been in a convertible before; it was kind of exhilarating. My hair was all blown to hell and back but I’d had the mind to put my hairbrush in my purse. After a dinner with conversation that came easily and lots of laughs—David was ridiculously funny—we went and saw The Day After Tomorrow. He took me home at the end of the night and gave me a sweet kiss that definitely left me wanting more. David had game.
We dated for a couple of more weeks before we became intimate. But something was…off. Then one Sunday, we had dinner and went back to his barracks room. We cuddled up in his bed to watch a DVD and I did the international girl sign of ‘time to get it on’ by pressing my butt up against his front. He tensed up and actually scrambled out of the bed. Turning off the movie, he told me it was probably best if we called it a night. I was so confused I kind of just looked at him with a dumbstruck face. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
He looked sheepish as he reached behind him and rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t have sex on Sundays.”
“Excuse me?” I was thrown off guard.
“I don’t have sex on Sundays. Pre-marital sex is bad enough; I’m not going to have sex on the Lord’s Day,” he told me, completely straight-faced . Somehow I knew this wasn’t some kind of joke. I didn’t want to disrespect his beliefs or anything, but damn! Way to make me feel like a tramp! I told him we didn’t have to have sex, that I’d like to just cuddle up and finish the movie we started, and he said that was fine. I ended up going home afterwards without even a goodbye kiss.
Things weren’t the same after that. Before our ‘no sex Sunday’ incident, he used to be super funny and make me feel like the prettiest girl on the planet, but since then, he seemed condescending, like he looked down on me. He no longer flirted with me, or made the effort to make me laugh. Shit, he didn’t even open doors for me anymore. Apparently, even though it took two to tango, it was me who was the sinner for wanting to have sex out of wedlock .
Needless to say, we broke up soon after. But wait! That’s not the end of the story about Saintly David. A few months later, after I made plans to move to Texas for my semester of school, he found out from Ben, the salesman, that I’d be moving soon. I received a call from David after not having spoken to him for months, asking if maybe we could date until I left.
“Wait. You’re asking me to date you until I leave? As in, you want to break up before I move; you don’t want to continue a relationship long distance?” I ask incredulously.
“Well, yeah…” he answered stupidly.
“So in other words, Mr. I-Freak-For-Jesus, you want to have me around to fuck whenever you want EXCEPT FOR ON SUNDAYS, knowing I’ll just be moving in a couple of months. Fuck you, David. Look up the word hypocrite, you asshat. Don’t call me again.” I hung up furious and immediately called Anni for a girls’ night out. We went to It’z Nightclub. It was a pretty epic night, filled with accepting many drinks from various cute guys, straight from the bartender of course: I’m not stupid. Well, I say that until I ended up going back to hottie number 5’s barracks’ room. It wasn’t bad though. I was woken up with his head between my legs the next morning…it was Sunday .
End Rant ;-)
I snap out of the memory with a chuckle. I click Publish and log out of my blog. I’ll write my book review later. I wander around the house for a little while, look at all the pictures Mark and Kim have framed in the living room, pour myself a glass of milk and grab my package of Double Stuf Oreos—dinner of champions—and make my way back upstairs.
David was just the latest in the long string of dickheads I had dated. Am I ever going to find my soulmate? Am I ever goi
ng to find the kind of love like the ones written in the books I obsess over? Surely there’s gotta be a guy out there who will think the world of me. I always treat the guys I date like gold, but you see, I’m starting to think that’s the problem. I treat them the way I’d like to be treated, and then they end up taking advantage of me. I show how much I care about them, really listen when they talk so I can pick up on little things about them, small things they may mention they want or like so I can surprise them with it.
I lie in my bed for a while daydreaming. Maybe it’s me who’s the problem. I was a pageant girl when I was younger. It’s like I was living two different lives. In the pageant world I was kind of a big deal. I was North Carolina’s Miss USA. I sang for talent and almost always won that portion of the competition. I won scholarships and savings bonds, along with the trophies, crowns, and sashes. I had all the best dresses, had a modeling coach everyone wanted who also did my hair and makeup flawlessly.
Mine Would Be You Page 21