The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (32 page)

I pushed “Send,” and as soon as I did, all the story energy that had kept me going with minimal sleep and food for the last week seemed to drain
right out of me. I desperately needed a shower, but I couldn’t imagine standing in one. So I slept, and then I slept some more, and when I woke up, it was many hours later and nighttime.

The outside shower only emitted cold water, which was hard to put up with during the day when it was warm, and basically impossible to wrap your mind around at night when it was cold. So I crept into one of the downstairs bathrooms in the house and took the longest shower known to man, making sure to get my dreads, too, with a really fantastic-smelling shampoo that I had found unopened in the guest shower. I nearly sang, the shampoo and water felt so good on my itchy and dirty scalp. And I felt like a new woman when I climbed out of the shower and piled my wet dreads on top of my head in a messy bird’s nest of a bun. Glad that I had taken this risk to get clean, I pulled on a pair of socks and a robe and prepared to sneak back to the pool house …

 … and of course I found Mike waiting for me when I opened the bathroom door. I would have jumped, but why bother to act surprised? It now felt like I had known the entire time that Mike would be standing there when I opened the door, waiting.

We stared at each other.

“I read the screenplay,” he said. “As soon as I got it.”

“And …” I said. My heart surprised me by speeding up in anticipation of his feedback, even though I wasn’t supposed to care about the screenplay or what Mike Barker thought, only about the money that I would receive for writing it.

He said this next thing so slowly that there was no mistaking his sincerity. “It’s the best thing I have ever read.”

Now, it should be noted here that I did have a staunch policy against messing around with my friends’ exes. I really did. But the thing is, it goes against the laws of physics for a writer not to have sex with any pretty person who says something like, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever read.”

Listen, the narrator of
The Kite Runner married
the first girl that appreciated his writing. So after hearing a thing like that, in what universe would it have even been possible for me
not
to pull Mike Barker’s face down to mine and kiss the living daylights out of him? Was there really any other action that I could have taken other than pushing him to the floor and riding him with my robe open, not even questioning it when, before I got on top of him, he took a condom out of his pocket and put it on, like he had come down there expecting this reaction?

I had been struggling in Los Angeles for a long time. A very long time. And the truth was I had needed a win like a movie star simply saying he really liked what I wrote. Receiving a sincere compliment, one that came without caveats or a “but, sorry, it’s just not for us”—well, that just overwhelmed my senses. I could not be blamed for screwing Mike Barker a second time, even though I had promised myself (and Tammy, in my heart) that it would never happen again.

Mike came first, and I climaxed right after him, falling against his chest when I finished.

I rolled off of him and stared up at the ceiling. This time the wave of shame didn’t wait until the next morning. It suffused me in place of an afterglow. “I can’t believe I did that again.”

He turned over on his side to face me, his pants still around his ankles. “I thought we’d at least make it to a couch.”

I scrambled to my knees, tying my robe around my waist as tightly as I could. “You think this is funny? This isn’t funny.”

“Baby, we just had sex outside the guest bathroom on the hard tile floor. It’s definitely funny. I thought I was getting too old for stuff like that.”

“You really don’t get how bad this is, do you?”

He stood and pulled up his designer jeans in one smooth move. “It’s not bad. It’s extremely good. Come to bed with me. We’ll talk, we’ll figure this out, I promise.”

He reached out for me, and I certainly felt something in me being tugged toward something in him, but I held up my hands and stepped away.

“Tammy is my friend. And I’m not the type of person who sleeps with my friend’s exes. That’s not me.”

His face went from amused to annoyed. “Thursday,” he said, “Forget about Tammy. She was nothing. And it was a long time ago.”

I went completely still when he said that, and it felt like a cold front came over my heart. “She was nothing?” I said. “Tammy was nothing to you?”

“No, not nothing. ‘Nothing’ is obviously the wrong word.”

“Obviously.”

“But I wasn’t—it wasn’t as big of a deal as you think it was. Tammy and me are cool. Me and her have nothing to do with you and me.”

“Wow, you are just like my father. Leaving wreckage in your wake and never wanting to take responsibility for it.”

Mike rubbed his temples like this entire conversation was giving him an inconvenient headache. “I’m not responsible for Tammy—”

“You asked her to
marry you
, then you cheated on her and dumped her in an extremely callous way. And she was devastated. You left her unable to love again. Do you understand this? She hasn’t dated anyone since you, and guess what? Now she’s dying alone, because she was all messed up over you and never found anyone else—”

I cursed, realizing I had just said too much.

Mike stood there, stunned. “Tammy’s dying?”

“I shouldn’t have told you that. It’s a secret. Don’t tell anybody else.”

“I won’t, but …” Mike shook his head. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not the reason she’s dying alone.”

“Yeah, but you are, Mike, and I’m a really horrible person for sleeping with you. I mean, really horrible. The only real thing that I’ve ever had
going for me is my fierce sense of loyalty to the women I love. And now I don’t even have that anymore, because I let myself get tangled up with you.”

He reached for me again as if his movie-star touch could make what he did, what we had now both done, to Tammy just disappear.

“Seriously, don’t touch me,” I said. Then, I didn’t walk but ran back to the pool house.

Never put your life on hold for a guy. Your life is your biggest project and it should always be your number-one priority.

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

THURSDAY

I
t should be noted that after my second round of sex with Mike Barker, I reset with the absolute best of intentions. The very next day, I looked up studio apartments on Craigslist and started e-mailing their landlords and leasers, making appointments to see them. Then I spent the rest of November looking for a reasonably priced apartment that I could afford even after the twenty thousand ran out. Part of me wanted to take the first thing that was available and decent, but Sharita advised me to rent practically, not emotionally.

“You want a place that you can stand living in for the next year or two,” she said. “Don’t move into anything because you want to get out of your friend’s hair.”

Though I had been spending way more time with Sharita lately, I still hadn’t figured out a way to admit that I was staying with Mike Barker without also admitting that I had sexed him two times, so I had lied about staying in a grad school friend’s spare room. I wanted to ignore Sharita’s advice and do anything to get out of Mike’s pool house, where, despite my better instincts, I still found myself tempted to go to him. I had woken up from a few dirty dreams so sick with lust that it made me miss the recurring farmers market dream—the one that had never come true, no matter how many L.A.-area farmers markets I had dragged Caleb to for reasons I could never quite explain to him without coming off like a psycho.

But Sharita did have a point. I wanted to get to a place where I was dependent on no one but myself, and the only person I knew like that was Sharita. I figured maybe I should start making decisions the way she would. So I took my housing search slow, asking questions, checking landlords’ names out online, and eventually I found a little green studio guesthouse in
Eagle Rock. It was tiny, with a shower that put me in mind of a coffin, but it was cheap and within walking distance of the main drag of Colorado. Most of all, when I looked at the bright yellow main room, I could see myself living there for a long time … and being happy.

Mike Barker, I admitted while surveying this space, had thrown me for a loop. He was pretty much everything I didn’t want in a guy, plus he was off-limits according to basic girlfriend code. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him and that deeply disturbed me. I’d always been a free spirit when it came to sex, but if that meant sleeping with someone I should despise, then maybe what I needed was some time alone to get my head right before I pursued any other relationships.

“I’ll take it,” I said to the landlord, who lived in the front house. Then I wrote him a check for the first and last months’ rent that just about wiped out what little money I had managed to hold onto since getting fired.

I needed the twenty thousand that Mike had promised me, so even though I’d been avoiding him for almost three weeks, I went looking for him the first week of December. He wasn’t in the kitchen, but he also wasn’t in his bedroom. I might not have found him in the large house if I hadn’t heard the muffled sound of his voice while walking past a closed door.

I could hear Mike on the other side of the door saying, “I don’t care what I signed. This is causing me huge problems. You’ve got to. No, you’ve got to. Don’t hang up on me. Seriously, don’t hang up on me—
goddammit!
”

I assumed whoever it was had hung up on him, despite his command not to do so. I knocked on the door, and there was a long pause before he said, “Mrs. Murphy?”

“No, it’s Thursday,” I said.

The sound of footsteps, and he opened the door himself, beaming down at me. “Hey, long time no see. Come in, come in.”

When I walked in, I saw that his office looked exactly like a rich person’s office would look … in the seventies. All dark woods and heavy but brightly colored furniture. The only things that indicated this space belonged to Mike were several framed movie posters from recent years lining the walls.

“I didn’t know you had an office,” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t use it much,” he said.

I took a seat in one of the two bright-orange chairs in front of his desk. “It doesn’t look like the rest of the house.”

“No,” he said. “I had an interior designer, but then my gambling debts ballooned and my checks started bouncing, so he never got around to this room. But you know what, it’s my favorite. Lately I’ve been thinking about redecorating the rest of the house to match the office.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I really like this room, too.”

He dropped into his high-backed leather desk chair. “So we have aesthetic tastes in common, too.” Then he leaned back and smiled at me. Just smiled at me. Like we were back on the steps outside Caleb’s apartment.

I had to remind myself that he acted for a living and he had been nominated for an Oscar, so he was very, very good at what he did. It was probably easy for him to radiate the kind of energy that made even women as cynical as me feel weak in the knees.

“Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” he asked.

“Not really,” I answered. “Usually I try to visit my sister, but I was super-broke this year, so I ended up making myself a microwave dinner. I really want to see her for Christmas, though.” I said, hoping he’d catch the hint and segue into the matter of my check.

“I’d always thought that would be nice,” he said. “Having a sibling. Makes it a little easier to be in the dead mothers club.”

“Oh,” I said, derailed from my hoped-for segue by this new information. “Your mom’s dead, too?” I had only seen the first ten minutes of his
E! True Hollywood Story.

“Yeah, she overdosed when I was a sophomore in college. Crack.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, remembering how it had felt to lose my own mom that early. “What was her name?”

Mike squinted at me, obviously confused by the question.

“No one ever asks me my mother’s name,” I explained. “It makes telling people she’s dead so vague. Like it’s this thing that happened, but …”

“… Maybe you just imagined it,” he said, filling in the gaps of my explanation. “I’m forty-one. My mom’s been dead for longer than I knew her alive. Sometimes it feels like she’s just a sentence in my biography. Like my publicist made her up.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You should tell people her name when you talk about her. It makes her more real.”

“I don’t talk about her. I mean, I never talk about her with women I’ve slept—” He didn’t finish that sentence. Just stopped and said, “Her name was Delores.”

“I’m sorry Delores died on you. That sucks,” I said.

“I’m sorry Valerie died on you,” he said. “She was my favorite part of your script.”

We looked at each other, me so unused to hearing my mother’s name come out of anyone’s mouth. Even Caleb and I hadn’t talked about her much. I had told him she had died in a car accident when I was twenty on our second official date and that was it.