A Girl Like You Read online

  Joe put down the squeeze ball he’d been kneading and sighed heavily.

  “Ellen’s in Florida. Visiting her sister.”

  “Lucky her,” Paulie said. “How long’s she down there?”

  Joe sighed again, then dug in his drawer for a mint, which he unwrapped, sniffed, and threw away.

  “Don’t know, really. She said a month, but now it’s kinda open-ended.”

  Joe’s wife Ellen stopped into the office from time to time. She reminded me of Mrs. Claus, pink-cheeked and buxom. They’d been married for more than thirty years. I knew all about the low-carb diet she was trying to get Joe to follow, that they had a cat named Noodles, but never any children. They’d been on so many cruises Joe had lost track, but on one seven-day trip he’d gained fifteen pounds, which was what precipitated the diet. If she knew about the almost daily Brew Coffee baked goods, Ellen would probably cry.

  Joe stood up and walked around the counter to sit with the men. I picked up my cell to discreetly text Eddie to see if he wanted to go out for some bad karaoke Friday night. To everyone’s surprise, Joe folded his arms on the table and put his head down. Wes, Sal, Paulie and I looked at each other, waiting for someone to say something to him. Jerky came out from under the table and laid a paw on his leg.

  “Aw, what is it, buddy?” Sal asked.

  “I think she’s left me,” Joe said, suppressing a sob. “She wants to stay with her sister.”

  Thunder rumbled outside and the sky darkened. It was Farmers’ Market day, and it always rained on the vendors’ tents.

  “Well, shit,’course she wants to stay in Florida, the sunny state—who wouldn’t wanta?” Paulie said.

  Joe shrugged his shoulders but didn’t pick up his head.

  “I tell ya what,” Sal said. “You hop on a flight and go down there and fetch her. Bring her back home.”

  “How am I gonna do that?” Joe looked up briefly. His eyes were rimmed in red.

  Wes rubbed his hands together briskly. “Let’s think on this. Between the five of us, we can come up with something.”

  I realized the men were including me in the conversation, so I stowed away my cell.

  “How about you bring her flowers?” I said.

  “I dunno.”

  “What kind does she like? Roses are always good.”

  “Daisies,” Joe said glumly. “She carried them in her bouquet at our wedding.”

  “There ya go, that’s the spirit,” Sal said, patting Joe on the back. “What else you got?”

  “How about a Hallmark card?”

  “Or one of those edible arrangements? She likes fruit, doesn’t she?” Paulie offered.

  Joe sat back in his chair. “She does love her cantaloupe,” he said thoughtfully. “And that fresh sliced pineapple, that’s her favorite.”

  “You’re a woman,” Paulie said to me. “What would you do if your man flew down to surprise you with flowers and melon and asked you to come back home?”

  Melt, I thought.

  “Well, you can’t make her come back, but if you tell her you love her, you miss her, and life isn’t good without her, then she would have to listen,” I said.

  Joe pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “Goddammit, I’ll do it,” he said resolutely. “There’s gotta be an afternoon plane down to Fort Lauderdale. I’ll buy her gifts when I get down there. She loves those key lime chocolates too.”

  “Don’t forget about the diet,” I warned him before he got carried away.

  “Oh, hell, you’re right—she isn’t eating candy since the last cruise.”

  He clapped his hands together, grabbed his jacket and picked up his umbrella. Jerky was wagging his tail furiously.

  “Hold down the fort, Jess?”

  “Of course.”

  Joe stopped and turned back toward us.

  “Thanks, guys. I owe you big time.”

  “Cinnamon buns!” Paulie yelled at him, but he was already gone.

  Two days later, Joe and Ellen flew back home. She said the daisies had done the trick. She never knew her husband remembered her wedding bouquet. Within a month, they were planning their next cruise, this time on a ship offering healthy foods and plenty of activities on shore to keep Joe’s weight gain under a pound a day.

  36

  “I want you to meet someone,” Madd texted me while I was at the gym.

  I hit the stop button on the treadmill and jumped off while it was still moving, stumbling a little, but I didn’t think anyone around me noticed.

  “Ohhhh,” I texted back, already showing too much excitement. “Who is he?”

  “His name is Cameron. He’s a psych student at SUNY.”

  “I want all the details…how long have you known him?”

  I walked to the locker room, taking a quick look at my ass in the full-length mirror. Was it getting smaller, or was I imagining it? Maybe it was just a flattering mirror. Whatever. I’d take it.

  “We met two weeks ago.”

  “Two weeks?! And you haven’t said anything?”

  “I really like this one, Mombo.”

  A woman in the locker room got off the scale with a big smile on her face.

  “Five pounds down,” she told me happily.

  “Congratulations!”

  I knew the day was coming when I would be brave enough to weigh myself too. Soon.

  When Maddy brought Cameron over the next night after dinner, I liked him instantly.

  He was at least 6’ tall and had a cute mop of dark curly hair. Best of all, he never took his eyes off Madison.

  “Coffee?” I offered Cameron.

  “Do you have tea?”

  A tea drinker. I liked him even more.

  “So, you guys met online?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but we’ve been saying we need to make something up more interesting to tell people,” Cameron said, reaching across the table to take Maddy’s hand. “It’s not very romantic to say you met on Bumble.”

  Madison laughed, the high, musical laugh she’d had as a kid. When she was turning seven, a friend let us hold her birthday party on a long dock on Campbell Lake. It had been a quintessential summer day, bright sunshine, made all the more perfect by a Barbie Doll cake I’d had made by the best bakery in town. There was a real doll in the center; the cake had pink buttercream frosting that looked like a flowing skirt.

  The wind picked up out of nowhere, blowing fast across the water, and paper plates began flying off the dock like frisbees. Then a chair got knocked over, and to my horror, the table holding the cake began to wobble. It felt as if everything was moving in slow motion as I ran to grab it, narrowly missing it as the table crashed and the Barbie cake slid into the water, sinking.

  Horrified, I turned to Maddy to tell her we’d get another cake. But she was laughing so hard she had to hold her stomach, pointing at the water where the Barbie doll had floated back up to the surface, a glob of pink frosting in her blonde hair.

  We still joked about the capsized cake.

  “So, Cameron, you’re a psych major?”

  “Yeah,” he said, reluctantly taking his eyes off Madd to look at me. “Always wanted to be a school counselor.”

  “That’s really great. So, you live on campus?”

  “Nope, have a little apartment off Beacon Street.”

  “It’s a really tiny place,” Maddy said. “He calls it a safe house because it’s so small and out of the way.”

  “You can barely find it,” Cameron said. “I had to GPS it for a week just to get there.”

  “Cam has a chocolate lab named Ruby. He calls her ‘Rhubarb.’”

  “Cute.”

  “Cam also loves to cook.”

  “Grew up working in a Greek restaurant,” he said. “I’ll cook for you guys sometime. You like hummus?”

  I smiled. The last time I’d had Greek food was the lunch special with Michael. Michael, in whom I’d apparently shown too much interest. The company wasn’t great, but the food was
good. What had he said he needed to do to get away from me? Buy flowers? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was seeing my daughter and her very charming boyfriend holding hands at my kitchen table.

  37

  Ian was in Keene camping with his father, Madison was with Cameron, and I was incredibly bored. After giving it some thought, I realized I’d gone more than six months without sex. It was true; I’d set a personal record.

  Being horny was much different from being lonely. OK, yes, I was both, but somehow the urge for sex had taken precedence. I did what I always did when I was faced with a sexual predicament: I texted Eddie.

  “I told you to invest in a good vibrator weeks ago,” he replied.

  “I wasn’t that worked up then. But I am now.”

  Truth be told, I didn’t really want to get it on with a rubber-coated dildo, most of them purple for some reason. Nor did I want to straddle one suction-cupped to a chair.

  “I don’t want one of those fake penis things,” I texted.

  “There are hundreds of sex toys out there. Google it.”

  I spent the next two hours scrolling through catalogs of every toy imaginable, in every size, shape and color (still predominately purple).

  I wasn’t crazy about the double dildo, butt plugs with racoon tails, or floggers for dominant women to use on submissive men. I’d always known if there was going to be a dom/sub episode in the bedroom, I’d be the one submitting. That had been my fantasy for years, but I’d never met anyone who wanted to play that particular game.

  I became frustratingly aroused looking at pictures of nipple clamps with chains like necklaces on them to tug on and keep the nipples hard. Equally interesting was a series of harnesses and buckles designed to hold a woman down, face up or face down. I’d never seen a leg-spreader but found it very intriguing.

  But I was flying solo. No leg-spreader for me. The wide array of vibrators surprised me, from the palm-sized butterflies to little pulsing ones to put over your finger, to the ones with attached dildos.

  Then I found the toy that would change my life: the wand.

  The one I liked best was an innocent-looking white one that ran on batteries, with a fat head to hold against any area you wanted. It had ten different speeds and a heating element.

  I placed my wand order and on impulse added a lightweight whip made with soft suede strips that didn’t look like it would actually hurt. It cost a ridiculous amount of money to expedite shipping, but I didn’t care. I was in dire need of an orgasm, and I was tired of rubbing them out by hand several times a week.

  My fantasies about submitting didn’t include being hurt or left with strap marks all over my ass and thighs. But I had a particular fantasy about a man instructing me to undress, then inspecting me, then telling me to rub one out for him. The right man hadn’t come along, so that fantasy stayed only in my mind. A dom/sub relationship didn’t exactly fit in a long-term vanilla relationship.

  I switched my cell screen to Tumblr, a pictorial site that let me choose how hardcore I wanted to go. I liked the images of public sex: a woman bent over on a hiking trail being taken from behind; a sex session in the back seat of a car, with the man pulling the woman’s long ponytail. Another, which appealed to me greatly, was a woman lying on a coffee table with her legs open, and a man in a business suit on the couch, watching. Just looking at her.

  When the wand arrived two days later, I locked myself in the bedroom to try all ten speeds. I quickly learned the continuous pressure setting was too much, the feather-light tickle was too light, but the pulsating speed, with its teasing up/down pulses, was just right. And the heat button helped enormously. Best of all, the wand was soundless. It quickly became my best friend several times a week, bringing on wrenching orgasms that made my entire body quake.

  I was satisfied, for the time being.

  Would there be lots of sex in my future? There’d better be.

  38

  “Let’s just meet and get it over with,” messaged BMyBuddy, whose photo showed a young-looking man in a black jacket and baseball cap with a NASCAR emblem.

  I had to give Buddy credit for straightforwardness. It was a rainy Thursday night with nothing going on. Ian was bent over his books in the way I always told him would result in a weak neck.

  “Sure,” I messaged Buddy back. “Why not?”

  We picked a bar right next to a mall with a brightly lit parking lot, so I knew I was safe. We decided on 8:00. I wrestled with the choice of mummy leggings or an army-green skirt, but the mummies glowed in the dark and might be too much for a dark bar.

  The bar turned out to be way too brightly lit. Every stool was taken, but a sympathetic server told me to go ahead and take a booth. I got a spritzer and slid into the orange vinyl booth, trying not to look as foolish as I felt alone at the big table.

  My cell chirped; it was Buddy, saying he was running late. I took a deep sip of the wine and club soda, pretending to study the menu.

  “Can I take your order?” asked a server with a pierced eyebrow.

  “I’m good. I’m waiting for someone.”

  “OK.” The server turned away.

  Ten minutes later, Buddy texted he would be there in five. At 8:40, just as I was getting out of the big orange booth to leave, he ran in—literally, running—with rain on his face. He was wearing the NASCAR baseball cap but looked at least ten years older than in his photo.

  I shook his wet hand.

  “Buddy?”

  “Harold,” he said, sitting down but not taking off his hat.

  The server appeared and Harold ordered Captain and Coke.

  “So.”

  “Yeah, so.” Harold laughed weakly. “You new to the Fish site?”

  “Relatively.” I polished off the wine and considered a second one. “You?”

  “Three years,” Harold said, tossing the stirrer in his drink onto the table, then sloshing the ice in his glass around with his thumb in a way that made me think of monkeys.

  “Really? That’s a long time. And you haven’t met anyone?”

  Harold shrugged. “Well I was talking to a few gals, but then I got the cancer .…”

  “Cancer?” I instantly felt awful for thinking he looked way older than his photo.

  “Yeah, skin. Had this spot on my arm, thought it was a callous or something, you know. Never got it checked until it turned blue and started bleeding.”

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

  Harold went through three drinks as he told me in excruciating detail about the radiation and chemo and how his dog sniffed him and howled as if he knew about the cancer. I tried not to look at his long hair but couldn’t help it. It was a bit stringy, but enough to cover his ears from underneath the baseball cap.

  “You’re wondering if I lost my hair, right?”

  “I— I’m sorry,” I stuttered.

  “Well, have a look.” Harold took off his hat and the lights reflected off his starkly bald head. The long strands of hair extended like sideburns.

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the third time.

  Harold glanced at his watch. “Listen, doll, it’s late and I gotta meet my brother at his house.”

  I waved to the server for the check.

  He stood up and fished around in the pockets of his jeans. He turned them inside out.

  “Geez, I left my wallet at home,” he said.

  “I’ve got it,” I said, laying down $40.

  It had stopped raining but billowing fog had set in, blanketing the parking lot. I stood uncertainly under the canopy.

  “Good night,” I said at last, holding out my hand to shake his.

  “Aw, come here,” Harold said, throwing his arms around me with such force he nearly knocked me over.

  “Well. OK there,” I said, steadying myself.

  “Are we good?” he asked.

  “We are good. Where’s your car? Mine’s this way,” I pointed to the left.

  “Oh, I don’t drive. My brother’s picking me up.
”

  “OK, well, good night. I had a nice time,” I said, searching for my car keys.

  “Hey, thanks for the drinks, doll.”

  We both knew it was a one-time meeting.

  I looked in the rearview mirror as I drove away, at Harold in the pools of fog, baseball cap tipped a little too far back, hands in his empty pockets, waiting for his brother.

  You just never know. People have all kinds of private battles that no one else can see. I knew I was blessed, and I was thankful for the reminder.

  39

  I could see something was wrong the minute Maddy came through my front door, even though she was doing her best to hide her tear-streaked face.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Cam. It’s over.”

  “What? Cameron? No.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “What happened?”

  “He dumped me, out of the blue, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Sit down and tell me what happened.”

  Madd pulled out a chair and sat down heavily at the kitchen table, reaching down to scoop up Pen.

  “First he didn’t return my texts, then my phone calls.”

  “Is he OK? Maybe something’s wrong.” I was worried he’d fallen, gotten into an accident, left college and went home, wherever home was. I’d forgotten to ask him that.

  “Nothing is wrong except he doesn’t want to see me anymore. He dumped me,” she said, pulling on her hair to look for split ends.

  “OK, you said that—how do you know this?”

  “I drove over to the safe house,” she sobbed. “He was out on the driveway with Ruby and the look on his face when I pulled in—he treated me like a stranger, Mom, like he didn’t even know—or care—who I was.”

  I put my arms around Madd and pulled her close until her sobbing calmed down to light sniffles and the occasional hiccup.

  “So, what happened? What did he say?”

  “He said I was pushing him for something he wasn’t ready to give.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Oh, Mom, I made a huge mistake.”

  “He wasn’t a mistake, sweetie. I thought he was a really nice guy.”