CHAPTER ONE

HARPER

“Cold?” laughs James, his eyes rolling around like he has a pinball machine for a head. “You’re a fucking refrigerator. My balls are shriveling up into raisins here.”

Proportionally correct, if you ask me.

I lean against the back of the sofa with my arms crossed and hands clenched. My boyfriend thinks I’m frigid. I think he’s being an asshole.

He’s speaking, raving on about how he has ‘needs,’ something about wandering around in a desert without water. He’s talking up his friends’ girlfriends, all of who apparently act like Playboy bunnies behind closed doors complete with mouths like Hoovers and lingerie drawers made up entirely of dental floss. ‘Why are you even discussing your sex life with your friends?’ I want to ask, but I remain silent… as always.

This has been coming for a while. It’s no big loss. Whatever we had once, that spark, is all but ash. I’m hunting around in blackened muck for an ember, but all I’m getting are the remnants of something long since extinguished.

He has his hands on his heads now. “Are you going to sit there like a statue or actually contribute to this conversation?”

I want to contribute something alright—my foot, up his ass. I go with, “It’s over,” instead, adding, “I think we’re adult enough to admit that.”

“Good, fine.” He nods, looking around for his car keys. “Guess now I can go out and find a girl who’s actually going to put out more than once a month.”

Ouch. Once upon a time I’d be looking for the burn ointment after lines like that, but these days I’m too tired to care. “They’re behind the fruit bowl.”

At least this is my apartment. I don’t think I could handle the whole ‘wandering around packing his things’ situation. I can barely look at him anymore. When I do, all I see is an immature, childish, pin-dick of a human being who’s become nothing but toxic. Sorry, Britney, but a poison paradise this man is not. He’s not even a cheap Hawaiian cruise with fishbowl cocktails and diarrhea served daily. He’s bottom of the freakin’ barrel, which is saying a lot given the playing field here in Branton.

The worst part? He’s never even gotten me off, not once. Twenty-six years old and here I am running through every trick in the book trying to please him (Read: dog-eared Cosmos I inherited from my mother), and do I get anything in return? No. Not. A. Single. Orgasm. Not even the tiniest of deaths. I’m starting to think I’m not even capable of one, doomed to live out life as a forever grumpy spinster. Even finger painting in my own ménage a moi, I can’t get it happening.

James pulls the front door open and stands there like a lost little boy. For a moment I actually think he might apologize, but alas, it’s not to be. “I pity the next guy’s prick who falls for you, Harper. I really do.” He pauses again. “Oh, and you better not tell anyone about this relationship.”

“Because you’re tenured and I’m not, right?”

He points his finger at me. “Bingo,” he says, before slamming the door closed, the framed family picture beside dancing on the wall.

“Sorry, Mom, Dad,” I tell it.

I breathe out, concentrate on the sensation of air leaving my lungs. Contrary to the cliché, no great weight is lifted from my shoulders now I’m single. If anything, it’s dragging me down even further into the abyss, AKA DTBSFS—Doomed To Be Single Forever Syndrome.

But if I’m honest, this breakup is no big deal. He’s a colleague, a professor—women’s studies for irony, like he’d have a cold clue in hell of what a woman wants, feels, or needs.

Strangely, there’s a part of me that wants to run after him because maybe, just maybe, he’s as good as I’m ever going to get. I don’t know if I deserve any better. I don’t know if there is better, that the perfect man isn’t a construct of mainstream media, crappy romance novels and boy-band rejects.

Can you even hear yourself? my head interjects.

“Loud and clear,” I reply, speaking to the closed door and quite aware my last lifeline to sanity is being severed.

I retrieve my medicine from the fridge—five squares of Pacari seventy-percent chocolate—and slump onto the sofa with my laptop.

There’s the usual flutter of nervousness as I open up my inbox.

Come on. Come on. Come on.

I’ve got several applications out for better teaching positions, but I doubt anyone’s going to save me from all this, from the gosh-darn mundane drabness that is my life. If I were a book, no one would get past the first page.

I whisper to my empty inbox, flirting with it, my fondness for speaking to inanimate objects starting to concern me just a touch. “And what do you think? What do I need?”

“You. Need. A. Proper. Man.” I reply like the Lost in Space robot, my arms flapping wildly.

Do I? I hardly think a rebound man (boy?) with a big dick and bigger ego is going to give me more than five minutes of fun, and probably no better than James given the way he hammered away at me like I was a block of ice. A two-pump chump with personalized condoms and CK undies won’t do it.

That’s if you could find a man in the first place…

Damn, you are depressing, Head.

I snap the laptop closed and toss it aside. Enough of this gloom.

I take out my cell and dial Mindy, my high-school bud, my emergency contact and forever bubbly bestie, not to mention my flat mate. If she can’t dredge me out of Misery Creek, no one can. But it’s going to take more chocolate—a lot more.

She answers on the first ring. “Mindy’s mule barn. Head ass speaking.”

I’m smiling already. “Hey, I’d kill for an ass like yours.”

“Oh? Because all my ass does is mope around the backyard twenty-four seven with a giant hard-on.”

I laugh. “You talkin’ about your ass or the gym junkie in number twenty-four?”

“Mmm,” she purrs, “why do the best bodies always come with the smallest brains?”

“More room for muscle, clearly,” I suggest.

“Honey, if Mr. Twenty-Four had any more muscle, he’d be a sasquatch… or Dwayne Johnson.”

“I really don’t want to hear about your weird bigfoot fetish.”

“Hey!” she stammers, outraged. “Don’t talk about my ex like that.”

“He did have big feet.”

“And that was where the ‘big’ ended, I’m afraid.”

We laugh together. I’ve been on the line with Mindy for less than thirty seconds and already the shackles are starting to slip off.

I breathe in. “I broke up with James. Or, he broke up with me. I’m not sure, but end result’s the same—he’s out.”

“About fucking time,” Mindy replies. “I was starting to think you were leaving your brain at campus staying the way you stuck with that fossil.”

“You didn’t think to tell me your opinion of him while we were dating?”

“I know you, Harpie, but answer me this: Would you really have listened?”

She’s got a point. You can give me all the advice in the world, but acting on it? That’s a different beast entirely.

“You’re probably right.”

“Sooo,” says Mindy, drawing out the ‘o’, “who’s next?”

“What do you mean?” Because I literally have no idea.

“I mean who’s your next catch, fuck, bum-buddy, partner in slime, whatever. Who are you hitting on now?”

“I’m not hitting on anyone or anything, thank you very much. I was actually considering joining a nunnery.”

She really laughs at that, basically hyperventilating down the line. “I’d be taking a vow of celibacy too after, what was his name?”

James and I have been dating for a year, but Mindy’s never been great with names, or faces. In what is surely the crime of the century, she mistook Gerard Butler for Clive Owen last week. “James,” I reply, face-palming, “Junior.”

“Ah, yes, the ol’ ‘ name-your-son-after-yourself’ routine. I think that’s half the problem right there.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “but I could use a drink, and I’m not talking about a Shirley Temple.”

I can practically see her nodding her approval. “Leave it me, honey. Leave it to Ms. Mindy.”