Un-Dateable

by Alice Bello

  Dana's love life is as bad as her green thumb... which is black as death itself. But maybe with enough effort, and a makeover, she can find Mr. Right.

  In Un-Dateable, physical therapist Dana Jamison comes to grips with her glaring lack of a love life. Her mother likens it to her ability to neglect a potted plant to death in less than two weeks. Her best friend thinks she needs to throw herself into the dating world and find herself an orgasm-buddy. Doggedly, she sets Dana up with one horrifically strange man after another with absolutely no success.

  Until she matches Dana up with Dean Coulter, a hot young doctor who treats her like gold, feeds her Chinese, and makes her body sizzle with lust. Dana and Dean move from dating, to sex-capades, to nearly being a couple.

  But there’s something missing--she’s not in love with Dean. Dana’s in love with Gus, the abrasive, though handsome, plant nursery owner who helps her in her hapless efforts to keep her potted plants alive, along with her hopes for a love life.

  With the good doctor suddenly proposing and Gus turning the sexual heat up on her, Dana must decide which man is the one for her, before she loses them both.

  Un-Dateable

  a novel

  ~*~

  Alice Bello

  Kindle Edition * 2012, 2014

  Cover Image: iStock.com

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 0.5

  The dream came, and so did those hands, strong and yet so gentle. I could feel the weight of the body they were attached to, sitting on the bed next to me. I could feel our bare hips touch.

  I lay there in mute ecstasy, unable to ask him who he was... or even to rub harder. Yet as if he could read my thoughts he indeed rub harder. Slowly he worked down my back, caressing my every curve and muscle. When he got to my butt he pressed into the muscles hard, making me squirm. His hands stroked my flesh as they gently pulled me over to lie on my back.

  I shivered and moaned as he moved himself atop me, his body, and his naked flesh sliding over my own. He looked deep into my eyes as I felt his manhood push against my hungry opening. I groaned as he pushed into me, and just as he leaned down to kiss me...

  I woke up.

  Chapter 1

  Running late for Sunday brunch with my Mother—our usual weekly date—I pulled my unruly red curls back into a ponytail, trying to stamp my feet into a pair of boots that had shrunk. I’d recklessly walked through the park during a rainstorm in them. They’d been cheap shoes, but leather was leather, and ultimately unforgiving. I’m not much for shopping, so I’d been stuffing my feet into them for three weeks running.

  Making a slow lap around my apartment, my Mother appraised me through what she saw. Like a general inspecting the troops, or Martha Stewart devising a plan of attack before redecorating.

  I was nothing like her. She was elegant and always, always dressed impeccably. Her shoulder length silver hair was never out of place—she’d long ago stopped dying it, enjoying the contradiction between her hair and her smooth, wrinkle-free face—her makeup flawless.

  I, on the other hand, was unconcerned with clothes and fashion, and I never wore makeup. It always felt like wearing a mask.

  Mother had been trying to make a lovely young lady out of me since I was six, and finally seemed to give up when I graduated high school. But as soon as I graduated from college she started trying again, in earnest.

  Hearing her cluck her tongue, I knew she’d found something that was an assault to her finer nature. I didn’t look to see; I knew she’d bring it to my attention sooner or later. Mother walked up to me with something in her hand—half brown and half an unhealthy looking green—hanging limply over the sides of a brightly decorated clay pot.

  “You spend the same amount of time and effort on your love life,” she said with a bluntness that wasn’t at all like her usual polite, tactful self. She shook her head and pitched the half-dead plant into the nearest wastebasket, brushing her fingers clean of the unsightly mess. “No wonder they’re both DOA. “

  I hardly remembered even owning the plant, but her words somehow inextricably connected that forgotten and neglected thing to me. The thunk it made against the metal bottom of the basket echoed sickeningly through my chest.

  “Mother, that’s... that’s just silly.” I could hear the doubt in my voice. Something old crept out of a dark corner of my mind, something I’d pushed there long ago—something that made my skin prickle and my breath catch. So I didn’t look at it, just pushed the damn thing back in its corner. “Plants are a tester for whether or not to get a pet, not for—”

  “Yes, yes,” Mother cut me off. “If you can’t keep a plant alive, then you can’t take care of a pet... and the same goes for the pet versus baby thing too.” She tapped out a long thin cigarette and lit it up, knowing full well that I detested smoking. She saw the look on my face and gave me one of her pitch perfect exasperated looks that always said, Why do I even bother?

  I never got her; she never understood me.

  “For god’s sake, Dana, I bought that thing for you just two weeks ago!”

  I looked down into the wastebasket—nothing could turn that brown in two weeks.

  Mother started for the door. “Never heard of anyone killing a spider plant before.” She pulled open the door, checked her watch then rolled her eyes at me. “I haven’t all day. Our reservation is in twenty minutes.”

  ~*~

  After lunch at Bergdorf’s we fell into our usual pace as we strode through the store and Mother shopped. She moved swiftly through departments, scanning everything and only stopping when something new and desirable came into sight. She made her decisions quickly, no matter what the item cost. I tried never to think too hard about how much money she spent each outing.

  As we approached the shoe department I said I needed to look for some shoes. I thought, since I have to be here—attendance at Bergdorf’s on Sunday is as mandatory for Mother as church is to the rest of the planet—I might as well find something that I don’t have to work up a sweat getting my feet into.

  I caught the surprised, almost happy look on Mother’s face, but then she saw I was heading for sneakers and athletic wear instead of heels and Italian leather. She moved off to the cosmetics counters, acting like she didn’t even know me, which made me smile.

  “Look, I actually bought something!” I said seven minutes later, shaking my very first Bergdorf’s shopping bag at Mother.

  She gave me a wan smile and her eyes became slits as she looked down and saw I was already wearing the cross trainers. “I didn’t know they even carried such things here.”

  She turned to the pretty, enthusiastic young thing trying to sway her into buying the new Jennifer Lopez perfume. “First tennis shoes and now this celebrity toilet water.” She waved her hands dismissively at the girl and the perfume. “Maybe I should start going to Saks on Sunday.”

  She walked off to the jewelry counter, leaving the young sales girl looking on the verge of tears.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “She’s been coming here for thirty years.”

  This perked up the little sales girl.

  “Anyways, she does Saks on Tuesdays.” I walked after Mother, losing her momentarily in the sparkle and glitter of the diamonds. Half of them were in the display cases, half on the clientele.

  ~*~

  After Mother finally dismis
sed me I stopped for an impromptu jazz quartet playing on the corner of Bank and a hundred twenty-first street. The men were in their early sixties, their instruments looked even older, but their music was unquestionably lovely. I found myself losing track of time and just listening to them play and play, each song swinging right into the next seamlessly.

  When they finally packed up their instruments my feet were numb and the sun was going down. But their music played on in my head as I strolled without a care in the world through the streets of Manhattan.

  I stopped at my favorite pizza shop and got a large pepperoni and extra cheese, and then headed for home, where I ate the entire pie by myself, watching reruns of The Golden Girls.

  ~*~

  Late that night I lay in bed, the sheet jumbled at my feet. The air conditioning was on the fritz, so the intermittent sounds of passing cars wafted in with the wind through my bedroom window. I couldn’t sleep... couldn’t even close my eyes... I just couldn’t get that goddamn plant out of my head!

  I kept on seeing it, brown and crusty, lying at the bottom of that waste can.

  Next thing I knew I was stumbling through my apartment in the dark, tripping over the Bergdorf’s box my shrunken boots were still in, finally clicking a lamp on when I came to the wastebasket in question.

  I could just leave it in there, I thought. Out of sight out of mind... of course that was a freaking lie.

  Couldn’t see the blasted thing but it refused to leave my thoughts.

  I reached down and pulled the potted plant from the balled-up papers and the empty cardboard container my last take-out order of Sesame Chicken had come in. I blew out a disgusted breath when I saw a half burned cigarette butt snuffed out in the black soil, the filtered tip smudged in Mother’s favorite shade of lipstick.

  ~*~

  I remembered the plant again a few days later. All but two of its long fronds were brown and brittle. “Oh god,” I told myself, stifling the sudden urge to cry. “Get a hold of yourself!”

  I went to the kitchenette and turned on the tap, pulled a tall glass from the shelf and filled it. I poured the entire glass over the parched soil, watching air bubbles percolate from pockets in the earth, then decided I’d done all I could do.

  It was up to god now.

  ~*~

  The next day the two surviving fronds of the spider plant looked greener, thicker, and more alive. So I repeated the glass of water thing. Each day for a week I did the glass of water thing, not really looking at the plant that hard but knowing that it was on the mend. That was until the fifth day when I did actually look at the poor thing.

  It was all brown, only the slightest touch of green remained in the mushy looking fronds.

  This is stupid, I told myself. This means nothing.

  But ten minutes later I carried the rather heavy potted plant down the two flights of stairs to my apartment and hauled it down two blocks, past three florists—after all, they only dealt in dead plants—until I found the first botanical store.

  Gus’ Plantery.

  The door to the shop clanged with tiny, silvery bells as I pushed through it. Banks of potted flowers lined every wall. Every inch of counter space had a potted plant or fern or bush or vegetable on it. Even the walls were thick with lush vegetation. A man in his early thirties popped up from behind the checkout counter, a large plastic sack of soil perched on his shoulder. His hair was neat and straight and golden blond, his green eyes obscured by wire framed glasses—his face was sweet and boyish and he looked absolutely terrified at the sight of me.

  He stood there for a few very long, very awkward beats, then lowered the sack of soil to the floor and tried to shake off his shyness. “May I... may I help you?” His cheeks flushed.

  I held out the limp brown spider plant. “I think I killed it.”

  “Yep,” he said, taking the potted plant from me and then sticking his thumb down into the dirt. “Almost killed the poor fella.” He moved toward a back counter, planting his hand on top of the surface of the soil and then tipped the pot over. A steady stream of brackish water drained out into a large stainless steel sink. “Nearly drowned it.”

  The man then broke off some of the brittle brown fronds. “Looks like dehydration played a hand too.”

  I was suddenly feeling stupid, and I was starting to hate this guy. The way he was saying how bad a person I was—not that technically he was saying that, but it sure sounded like he was!

  “Will it live?” I asked, pulling the clay pot from the man’s hands.

  “Ah, sure. Just remember to water it every week, just once a week, bottled water, not from the tap.”—Oops—“And do you have it sitting in direct sunlight?”

  I thought about where it had been the last week—on the coffee table by the couch. About twenty feet from the nearest window.

  “That would be a no.” I shook my head. Maybe I was stupid.

  “Well, plants like sunlight, so if you want this little guy to live I’d move him to a window, one that has an eastern exposure.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just because it’s a window doesn’t mean light comes through it. Morning sun is the best.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling my eyebrows knit. A sure sign I was getting rattled. “Makes sense.”

  He smiled, a brief flash of white teeth, and then it was gone. “If it bounces back it should start looking like this.” He held his hand up to a giant green plant, its fronds bright green and cascading over the sides of its pot like an emerald waterfall. “If not, I can sell you another one.”

  Back came the smile, he looked happy to help me either way things turned out.

  I decided I really did hate him.

  Chapter 2

  “She’s wrong!” I peered down at the still brown spider plant. My best friend Bess was laughing at me. “And it’s not funny, so knock it off!”

  One manicured hand held Bess from falling over, the other held her Prada clad, flat as hell belly. “Your mom’s a real trip!”

  “No, she’s not. She’s a menace.” I glared at Bess, silently hoping she’d chip one of her nails on my crummy stucco wall. “And she’s not right. I don’t date because I don’t want to.”

  “Face it, cupcake.” Jesus, she’s calling me cupcake! This is really bad. She only calls me that when I call her about getting dumped, or on my birthday. “That woman has you down cold.”

  “But I’m not unhappy...” Even to my ears there was a questioning to my voice. “And anyways, don’t all the experts on TV say that love will find you when you least expect it?” Bess’ eyes shot open wide with shock. Why the hell had I said the L word!

  Bess’ phone rang, Donna Summer’s Last Dance, but she didn’t answer it, just read the text message on the screen. As her deep burgundy nails clicked out a text message in answer, she started in on me.

  “First of all, you don’t go out looking for love. Love comes after having great sex—”

  “I’m not listening to this!” I held my hands over my ears.

  “Great sex only comes after you’ve gone out and met a guy. And you, my dear, don’t go out.” Bess’ right thumb thumped out a succession of the same key—probably exclamation points—and then a thump to send her message. “If you’re thinking religiously, or fate wise, God helps those who help themselves.” She smiled wickedly. “So your mom is right. You give your love life the effort you put into keeping your plants alive.”

  “They have nothing to do with each other.”

  Bess gave me a level stare. She knew I didn’t believe that bit myself—she waved the thought away with a dismissive swat of her hand.

  “I know for a fact that no man has passed through that door of yours in over a year. Not since the UPS guy, what’s-his-name?”

  “Thomas.” I hadn’t thought of him in forever.

  “Yeah, him, and you were always telling me how lousy he was in bed, yet week after week you kept sleeping with him. He didn’t even take you out for a date or anything, just kept coming over
for what he passed-off for sex and then he’d leave.”

  “He was nice enough.”

  Bess scoffed. “He was you settling. He made it easier to not go out and find someone decent.”

  Bess was right. I had felt that entire time like I was a success, even though he wasn’t my boyfriend, didn’t sleep over, didn’t take me out. At least he’d been there… and sometimes he’d come close to getting me off.

  “And if that isn’t directly related to this whole dead plant thing—”

  “It’s not dead... yet,” I mumbled.

  “Then just give up and go live in a convent somewhere... just make sure you don’t have to grow your own food.”

  “Very funny,” I said, sliding a reproachful glare her way.

  Bess looked at her watch and sighed. “Sorry, honey, but I’ve got an apartment to show in fifteen, so I’ve got to go.”

  She kissed me on the cheek and retrieved her Gucci purse from my thrift shop sofa. “Just remember I meet more single men in a week than I can possibly go through. Just say the word and I’ll send one your way.”

  “I don’t need a man,” I lied. “But thanks.”

  Bess gave the spider plant another long look, her eyes turning to dark slits. “And get rid of this thing—it’s depressing.” A moment later she was gone, but her words were floating through the air still, like a rancid fart.

  No man has passed through that door... Just say the word... Your mom is right...

  I looked down at the spider plant. Something green had poked its head through the dirt.

  It’s alive!

  It’s alive!

  It’s alive...

  I was suddenly gripped by the fear that I’d end up killing the thing again. What if I forgot him again and he just died all the way this time. I didn’t think I could bear that.