The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (17 page)

He took back his arm. “Look, girl, I like you, but you can’t spring your friends on me then get mad when I say ‘No, I don’t want to meet them ’cuz I got stuff to do.’ This isn’t how you treat a hardworking brother if you want to see him again. I haven’t cheated on you, I’m with you all the time. If that ain’t enough, I don’t know what is.”

I don’t know what is.
Those five words peeled the shutters off my eyes. The Crystal Ball Vision of the two little boys in our future and the home we could make together fell away. Suddenly I could see through Marcus’s chocolate skin and straight white teeth and twinkling brown eyes to who he really was. And I did not like what I saw.

“You know I’m a hardworking sister, right?” I asked.

He shook his head, confused. “What?”

“I said I’m a hardworking sister. Technically I work longer hours than you, but I still find time to cook when you come over here and wash your clothes when you bring them by and then I put on pretty lingerie before we go to bed. I do that because I like you and I appreciate you. But every time I ask you to do anything, you act like I’ve lost my dang mind. Why can’t I have any expectations when it comes to you? That’s not how you treat
a hardworking sister
if you want to see her again.”

Marcus went back to looking bemused. “Yeah, but good black men, ones without kids or records, are hard to find. Like Kanye said, there’s a thousand yous. There’s only one of me.”

I blinked. “Fool, you think I should be grateful for any scraps you throw me, because you don’t have kids or a jail record?”

“You don’t have to be grateful, but maybe you need to work a little harder to recognize.”

The worst feeling came over me as I realized out loud, “You’re a straight-up idiot.”

“What?” he said.

“You’re an idiot. I’m caring, I cook, I clean, I’m smart, I make a lot of money. I’m a great catch. YOU are barely decent. And I can’t believe I let you waste my time like this.”

Marcus shook his head, looking almost childish in his confusion. “What you talking about? There are a million sisters in this city exactly like you. I can have another one of you in a second, but no real black man is going to put up with your uppity act.”

I went and opened the door. “No real black man would call me uppity because I asked him to take me out to dinner, fix one shelf, and meet my girlfriends. You know what, just get out. I’m feeling too stupid now for putting up with your bullwinkle as long as I did.”

Marcus hesitated, like he was trying to think of a strong comeback. And as he walked out the door I was holding open for him, he said, “You know what? You a fat BITCH!”

I slammed the door closed as if I were shoving his words out of my house with him. How had I not seen what a horrible guy he was? How could I have let him use me like that for so long? A feeling of such terribleness washed over me that it nearly knocked me to my knees and, without warning, a sob rose up in the back of my throat. I was too old for this, too old to still be getting used by guys who didn’t even really like me. Too old to be called a fat bitch like I was still in high school and had refused to pay attention to the guys catcalling me as I walked home.

I had skipped church that morning to start cooking for my bracket party, but now I went to the couch that Marcus had abandoned and fell to my knees.

“Oh Lord,” I prayed. “Please make this awful feeling go away. Please …”

I prayed this same thing over and over again, my eyes squeezed shut for long minutes. And when I opened them again, my heart no longer felt shriveled and defeated inside my chest. Something in me lifted and I felt
lighter—good. Better than good. Just ten minutes ago, I had been thinking of calling Tammy and Risa and telling them that I needed to call the party off, but now I felt strong, like I could do anything and I couldn’t wait to see my friends and co-workers.

Oh, God was good. God was so, so, so good. I got out my BlackBerry and updated my Facebook page to say, “I am grateful to my Lord and Savior. I got down on my knees and He raised me up.”

Within twenty minutes I had twelve “Likes” from other friends, including Risa, who showed up at my door a few minutes later.

“You weren’t looking at Facebook on your motorcycle, were you?” I asked.

“Long light,” she said, handing me a bottle of Yellow Tail. “Open that shit up right now.”

Tammy rang the doorbell a few minutes later and she also handed me a bottle of wine—one with a name I didn’t recognize, but it was French and looked expensive. I put Tammy’s wine on display in an empty part of my bookshelf. Really good wine was an investment that could often be sold for even more money later. I typed a note into my BlackBerry to research the bottle’s lineage further and then opened the cheap-but-good-enough Yellow Tail for my guests.

As I led Tammy and Risa into the kitchen where I had been preparing food all morning and early afternoon, I thanked God again for having such good friends. I might not have a man anymore, I thought, but there was no one who could tell me I wasn’t truly blessed.

THURSDAY

U
sually I loved having the apartment to myself. I could watch whatever I wanted on TV, without anyone asking why I would “watch that crap.” Benny wasn’t too judgmental (from the little I could understand), but Abigail got particularly snotty when it came to television, sticking to a steady diet of BBC News Programming. So when I got the rare moment alone with our shared television, I adored lying on the couch with a bag of Veggie Pirate Booty, watching whatever cheesy program I happened upon. But tonight, I couldn’t get in the mood.

First of all, Caleb still hadn’t called, even though he had said he would and, according to Davie Farrell, you weren’t supposed to stay with guys who didn’t call when they said they would. Second of all, I had dumped enough guys to know the score. Caleb suddenly going cool like that and then rushing out meant that he was already in the process of re-evaluating our relationship, deciding whether or not to dump me. And since he hadn’t called yet, he was probably leaning toward getting rid of me as opposed to putting up with me asking to see his apartment, which in all fairness, he had told me from the beginning was off-limits.

And third of all, when I had tried to
not be pathetic
about Caleb and had called Risa to see if we could hang out, Risa had said that both she and Tammy were going over to Sharita’s March Madness party. That smarted, because Sharita was like a really good cook. At her last bracket party, she’d made a fake-meat version of these buffalo-wing chicken/cream cheese phyllo-dough appetizers that had made my vegetarian stomach stand up and clap.

But as much as I was tempted, delicious hors d’ouerves were not a good enough reason to resume talking to someone who didn’t deserve my friendship anymore. “Well, I guess I’ll hang out here alone then,” I said.

“Oh, are you guys still not talking?” Risa asked, like she hadn’t gotten the newsletter about Sharita and me remaining on the outs. “She’s making those cream cheese things you like.”

My stomach let out a mutinous grumble, but I gritted my teeth and said, “I’m sick of getting stood up all the time. I wouldn’t put up with that behavior from a man, why should I put up with it from her?”

“Because Sharita ain’t your man, she’s our best friend,” Risa answered in a tone that insinuated my stance on this matter was dumb as opposed to principled.

“It’s still about basic respect, so call me if you want to do something afterwards.”

“Okeydokey fanoke,” Risa said before getting off the phone.

And that’s when I got to thinking about jumping off the MTS roof again. This would be a good night for it. I seriously had no idea what to do with the rest of my life career-wise. I was about to get dumped by my first real boyfriend. Sharita and I had already broken up. And Risa and Tammy obviously felt no particular loyalty to me whatsoever. For a moment, my brain zoned out as I watched the mesmerizing image of my own body falling through the air.

Then my phone rang, interrupting the fantasy. I came back to the real world and looked at the caller ID. It was Caleb.

“Hello?” I said, bracing myself to get dumped.

“Hey,” he said. “This project is out of control, but I can break for a minute. Can you come downtown? I’ll meet you outside Drake’s.”

Oh, I had forgotten that you can’t dump someone over the phone when you’ve been together for over a month. This was going to be an in-person, I realized.

Drake’s was a bar that had been refurbished into a speakeasy about two years ago, complete with a password that you had to know to get in for overpriced drinks. It was housed within one of those mixed-use buildings, with shops on the first floor and loft apartments on the top. I had never been, but
Risa had swung by with a few of her hipster musician friends and declared it “cool enough for a minute, until we move on to the next thing.”

When I arrived downtown, I found Caleb waiting for me outside.

“Hi,” he said. He didn’t lean over to give me a peck on the lips as he usually did, and I wondered if he would dump me outside on the curb or wait until we’d had a couple of drinks.

But then he took me by the hand and said, “C’mon,” leading me around the building to a set of metal stairs in the back.

“I thought we were going to Drake’s,” I said.

“We are,” he answered, letting go of my hand and climbing the stairs. “But first I wanted to show you something.”

I followed him up to the second floor where he pulled open a steel door, revealing a thousand square feet of dark hardwood floors, huge warehouse windows, high vaulted ceilings, and brick walls with an assortment of vintage album covers and framed concert posters hanging on them. A keyboard sat in one corner of the room and a DJ booth posed in another. In the middle room sat a black-and-red carpet with an impressionist-style image of a seventies-era James Brown on it.

The chorus to “It’s a Man’s World” echoed in my head as I took in the apartment. “Is this … ?” I asked.

“Yeah, this is where I live.” He pointed to a black partition that separated an unseen space from the rest of the loft. “That’s where I work.”

“Oh …”

“See, it’s not that great,” he said.

“Are you kidding? This apartment is insane. I can’t believe you spent all those nights in my tiny bedroom when you had this to come back to.”

He laughed. “You like it?”

I shook my head and walked over to the window, which showcased a view of a slivered crescent moon made blurry by the smoggy L.A. night sky. “No,” I answered. “I love it.”

He put an arm around my shoulders, and drew me to his side. “More than you love me?”

I turned away from the moon and looked him in the eye, my previous thoughts of suicide retreating to their secret place behind my heart. “No, I love you more,” I said.

“I love you more than I love this apartment, too,” he said. “That’s why I brought you here. Sorry it took so long.”

I beamed at him, so very happy that he wasn’t about to dump me. “You’re not afraid my sexual energy is going to disturb your work energy?”

Caleb took off his glasses and set them on the nightstand. “I’m not going to lie. I was scared about that, but then I got to thinking about it, and I decided I really like your sexual energy.” He kissed me before adding, “I mean, I really like it.”

He then gave me a gentle push and I fell back onto his soft bed. “My work energy would be honored to share the same space …” He bent over me and slipped his hands underneath my loose peasant top. “… the same hot space as your sexual energy.”

Then, as if the Universe decided to prove that it was definitely on my side, he said, “Oh, and before we get too far into this, do you want to move in with me?”

Don’t change your hair. Don’t change your personality. Don’t change the way you dress. Don’t lose weight for anything other than health reasons. And, listen to me well now, don’t worry about whether this will affect the number of guys that are attracted to you. For all the guys that reject you because your hair isn’t straight, because you laugh too loud, because you prefer flats to heels, because you have hips, there’s one guy who’s going to adore that about you. And that’s the guy you’re looking for. So help him find you by staying just the way you are.

—
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell