More snippets:
It was not as if she were bad-looking, really. She got over the whole ‘I’m terribly unattractive’ thing a long time ago. Seriously, right after her teens. Okay, so there were a few spurts of low self-esteem now and then, but those were easily rid by a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and those little tequila shots down at the Mexican restaurant down the street, a cure she tried to help herself to at least once a week, three times after finals were over. Looking at his mild sneer, she felt a stab of defensiveness. Her chest had remained stubbornly flat, despite her mother’s constant reassurances that, “they’ll come in soon enough, sweetie,”, and her stomach only had a bit of a bulge which, if she twisted just right, almost looked like muscle. In pictures, if she sucked her cheeks in a bit and held her arms out, she could almost pass as a size ten.
Besides, she had good teeth and no diseases, thank you very much, which she very much doubted this “Kathleen” could lay claim to.
She straightened to her full height, all 5’8” inches of it. “Excuse me?”
“I said that you look like a mangy sheep.”
“And I said excuse me, as in, what the hell gives you the right?”
He flapped a hand in a gesture which seemed to encompass her body, clothes, hair, and make-up-less face. “I was merely pointing out that in my day, women were proud of their looks.”
She glared. “And in my day, women don’t judge themselves by what men think of them.” Not strictly true, but he didn’t know any better. She would just keep him away from the sorority girls and magazine racks in supermarkets. And billboards. And diet pills. Oh, screw it, she might as well lock him in a closet if it came to that.
“Perhaps you might have a man if you did,” he shot back.
“Who wants one?” Bending down, she tugged on a decrepit old pair of sneakers she had bought years ago after promising herself she was going to become healthy and start exercising every day. One painful jog and two packs of Marlboro later, the sneakers had wound up in the back of her closet, hiding under a torture device cleverly disguised as a jump rope and a yoga mat with the packaging still intact. “I do quite fine on my own.”
A hand suddenly ran through her curls and she jerked back.
“Maybe if you just did something with your hair…”
She stared at him in shock. “Oh my god. What are you, Queer Eye? My hair’s fine!” He eyed her skeptically. “It’s sexy! Like, bed-head or sex-kitten or something. It’s in style, even.” His expression didn’t change. She pulled her shoelaces viciously tight and lectured angrily to the floor. “I don’t need to justify myself to you. I’m better than that. I am a modern woman. I have brains, and independence, and skills, and looks? Looks aren’t important. Beauty is only skin deep and all that. So screw you, Mister Highlander Fabio!”
With that, she stood and winced when the shoes rubbed against her arch. Oh, that was going to blister. Feeling exhausted and annoyed already, she snatched her keys from the bowl and beckoned for him to follow. Time to meet Marie.
*************
“Ooh, he’s gorgeous!” Maria cooed, staring at his pert ass encased in a pair of tight blue jeans.
“Yeah, I guess.” At Maria’s look, Jennifer amended, “Okay, yes, he’s gorgeous, fantastic—but he’s a total chauvinist.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maria!” Jennifer snapped her fingers in front of her friend’s face. “Take the glazed look out of your eyes and focus on helping me, please?”
“Have you had sex yet?”
Jennifer met Maria her sophomore year of college in a government class that neither ever recovered from. If there was such a thing as an anti-twin, Maria would be Jennifer’s: she loved pink frilly dresses, painted her toenails appalling shades of blue that could never be found in nature, and underneath it all, was one of the smartest people Jennifer had ever met. During class, she would lean over and whisper lewd things about their TA or her period, whichever was preoccupying her mind at the given moment, and had only a passing familiarity with the concept of TMI. Jennifer, of course, loved her immediately—except for times like these.
She blinked. “What?”
“Have you had sex yet?” Maria asked again, like Jennifer was the slow one. Maybe she was. Maybe she had missed the part where she had confessed a deep infatuation for the troglodyte currently flirting with the doe-eyed barista across the counter and Maria rightfully assumed she had torn his shirt off and thrown him on the bed to have her wicked way with him.
“I—what?” she repeated dumbly.
“It’s just like a romance novel,” Maria gushed, leaning forward over her double-mocha espresso latte with extra whipped cream and caramel syrup. “You know, the woman too preoccupied with her business slash academic life finds an enchanted mirror and voila! Out steps a gorgeous Scot clad only in a kilt that hides none of his fabulous physique, and on page twenty, they have sex.”
She sipped her drink calmly as Jennifer processed this.
“This is real life, Maria. These things aren’t supposed to happen at all, and no, we have not had sex yet!” The people at the table next to her tittered then quickly went back to their biscotti at Jennifer’s annoyed glare.
Maria raised a delicately waxed eyebrow. “Yet?”
“Shut up. That was unintentional.”
“Freudian slip?” Maria’s grin managed to convey a knowing smugness and devilish glee simultaneously.
“No. The regular slip. The slip where I haven’t had sleep in three days—stop smirking like that—and am exhausted and want him gone.” She leaned across the table, capturing Maria’s hands in her own. “Please. Take him. I’ll pay you.”
“Like you could afford me,” Maria dismissed her casually, her eyes straying back to Keiron’s long legs. “And as much as I would want to, I doubt Steven would approve.”
“I’ll pay him too,” Jennifer insisted. “Really. Credit companies keep sending me pre-approved cards, I’ll give them all to you.”
“Jennifer, no, you have to discover the female inside of you who deep down, wants to be taken by a studly alpha male.”
“I don’t have time to be taken by a studly alpha male, Maria. I have class. I have exams to grade. I have an apartment to clean.” She paused. “Okay, that one was lame, but still. And who actually wants that?”
“Uh, every girl? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“I haven’t thought about it,” Jennifer said honestly. Mostly she had been thinking about whether or not she could kick him out without suffering from a guilty conscience and had finally come to the conclusion that if he called her ‘wench’ again, she could do so cheerfully and without reserve.
“You need help,” Maria said sincerely. “When was the last time you got laid?”
“We’re not having this discussion. We’re having that other discussion, the one I originally started, where you help me figure out how to get him back to where he came from.”
“Hello, lass,” Keiron purred as he slid in next to Maria, who visibly melted at the endearment. Jennifer could have slapped her.
“Don’t encourage him,” she hissed. She needed more coffee if she had to sit here and watch her friend make goo-goo eyes at a man who thought the definition of a “good woman” meant a fertile baby-making machine worth three ewes and a ram.
“I am Keiron,” he said proudly, doing the head-toss again. It reminded Jennifer of a stallion marking his territory—not going there, she thought savagely as she pushed the image aside. The last thing he needed was to know that she had actively compared him to a virile beast, emphasis on the beast.
“I’m Maria,” her traitorous friend said in a low-pitched voice that sounded like it had lost its panties an introduction ago. Keiron took her hand and brushed a kiss against the back of her knuckles with those sinful lips.
“She’s got a boyfriend!” she interjected desperately and somewhat indignantly.
“Kind of,” Maria said, not taking her eyes off of Keiron. “We’re practically strangers, really.”
“Maria, you’re engaged,” Jennifer reminded her viciously. She grabbed her friend’s hand and waved it in front of Keiron’s face. “See? See the pretty ring?”
“You are promised to a man already?” Keiron said with surprise in his voice. “Pity.”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Maria muttered darkly. She tore herself away from him to take a sip of her drink. Typical. A fiancé wasn’t enough to take her attention away, but apparently chocolate-laden-caffeine worked fine. She turned back to Jennifer and shrugged helplessly, admitting, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”
“Help!”
“With what? Does he need to know what stocks to invest in? This is more your area, honey, not mine,” Maria pointed out reasonably. To tell the truth, Jennifer had called her without any real plan, just a vague idea that a person who wouldn’t think she had crumpled under the pressure of impending oral exams would be a good person to talk to. It’s not like she had any previous experience to work with or anything, and so far her only solution included sending a relatively helpless Scottish sex-god into the streets of Boston and wishing him the best of luck. She heaved a sigh. He’d probably do better than her, she thought resentfully, and become some national TV star or something. Who Wants to Date an Ancient Scotsman? She could hear the strains of a techno bagpipe theme song already.
She felt like pulling out her day-timer and showing it to Maria. Graduate with a 4.0 (3.96, close enough), check. Get into the best graduate school, check. Work as an indentured servant for the next eight years and get her Ph.D., almost. Playing babysitter to a man who made male models look like Erkel (oh god, she was showing her age) and spoke with a delicious Scottish brogue that made her forget her name was not part of the plan. She was quite sure she would remember writing that one down, thank you very much. Burying her face in her hands, she gave a low moan. “What am I supposed to do?”
Maria avoided stating the obvious, though her leering gaze at Keiron practically screamed that any normal female would know exactly what to do with him. “Do what you do best, Jen.”
Jennifer stared at her blankly.
“Research.”
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