Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy Read online

  "I thought all English Majors had read it," he yelled in my ear, over the music.

  "Huh?"

  "I said 'I thought all English Majors had read it'. The main character is like an English Major."

  I was confused. "I thought he was a billionaire."

  "No. He is. But she's an English Major."

  "Oh. Okay."

  He leaned forward again. "So are you looking for a billionaire?"

  I felt amazing. He had wonderful brown eyes with spiked black lashes like starbursts. And he was flirting with me. I threw my head back as I laughed and that was when I saw it. My reflection.

  The short skirt and halter-necked top that had looked so good in my bedroom looked ridiculous, now that I was surrounded by the kind of bony beauties who made such outfits look amazing. I looked like a joke, like one of the tutu-clad hippos in Disney's Fantasia. I had been wandering around this bar like I belonged here and yet it was comically apparent that I didn't - a fat, frizzy haired mess laughing as if she were normal.

  I don't think I could have been embarrassed if I'd turned and seen myself naked. Oh my God, I had to get out of here. Where the hell was Courtney? I began to count the ways in which I'd kill her for making me over like this - cartoon deaths, the kind of deaths that only killed for an instant.

  "Did you see my friend anywhere?" I yelled at James. "Black dress, blonde hair."

  He looked blank.

  "She had like a chunky necklace on - gold. Egyptian kind of thing."

  "Oh, that girl," he said. "The HB-nine? Yeah - I think she went out to smoke."

  Great. She goes out to smoke and leaves me in here with the cast of American Psycho. Fucking awesome. And since when did she smoke so much? I knew she could go through a pack a night when we were drinking but she seemed to have spent most of tonight outdoors.

  I fought my way to the door. As I neared the door I dodged a waitress coming past with a tray of empties, and collided with him. He had dark hair. Probably. Maybe. Blue eyes. I think. The smile, though. That was the problem. That was the cause of all the later...mess. It wasn't a toothpaste commercial smile; no veneers here, but it had a sideways slant that made me pause where I would usually have plowed on towards the exit.

  "You look like someone who needs a drink," he said.

  I felt obscenely under-dressed. "Forget it," I said. "If I need anything right now I need a shirt."

  The next thing I knew he was undoing his buttons. Funny guy. I kept moving. I just wanted to go home. As I reached the door I felt a hand on my shoulder and the next thing I knew he was standing in front of me in nothing but his undershirt with his black button-up flourished before him like a bullfighter's cape.

  "You want to walk over it or wear it?" he said, making to lay his shirt in front of me in an exaggerated display of gallantry.

  "I'm sorry, I have to go," I said.

  "Go where? The party's getting started. Jeez, Louise - I give you the shirt off my back and you want more?"

  "I don't want your shirt," I said. "And my name's not Louise."

  His smile didn't falter. I think his eyes were green. Men with green eyes are always trouble. "So what is it?" he asked, his head cocked in a way that just made the slant of his smile all the more annoying.

  I thought of all the names I'd wanted in place of my own when I was a child - plain Jane, honest Anne. Anything ordinary to take away the taste of my absurd handle. Or something sporty and preppy - Stacey, Heather, Lindsay. The last one popped out of my mouth before I could stop myself and I consoled myself for the lie by telling myself that at least they both began with L.

  "Lindsay," he said. "Huh. Cute." He waggled the shirt at me. "Sure you don't want this? Because you look kind of cold."

  I was cold. I'd checked my jacket in at the club and the gooseflesh on my arms only served to remind me how stupid I'd looked in the mirror. I shook my head but I'd hit that stage of drunk where the tiniest kindness could tip me over into tears, and so it did. In that moment I lived up to my real name and began sniveling and shivering like the biggest loser on the planet.

  He put the shirt around my shoulders. It smelled of some kind of good cologne and I could tell right away that he kept the good stuff for special occasions and probably stuck to Old Spice or something on regular days; he didn't smell of money. He had one of those lousy tribal tattoos around the top of his arm, and a dent in the lobe of his ear where he had probably removed an earring, the better to fit in with this preppy crowd.

  "Don't you need this?" I said, trying to convince myself I wasn't stupidly grateful. It was amazing the difference that an extra layer between you and the world could make.

  "Nah," he said. "I'm used to going without. I'm a stripper."

  "Oh," I said. It was, on reflection, a pretty moronic thing to say but my mind went all kinds of obvious places. Was he the kind who went down to a G-string or did he do the full monty?

  I probably didn't make myself look much better by saying "Really?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I'm a stripper. I strip. What do you do? Because you don't belong here."

  Despite the chill in the air I felt my face turn hot. I drew a little closer to him, strangely pleased that someone had pointed it out. It was like being back in high school again - that moment where the goth kids or the art geeks make room for you at their table; the relief of their acceptance not only took the sting off being rejected by the alpha pack, but there was also a weird sense of pride in belonging.

  "Is it that obvious?" I said.

  "Very. Can you even walk in those shoes?"

  "Not really," I confessed. "I should probably go find my friend..."

  "Is she gonna miss you?"

  I glanced back through the doorway. I would rather have walked into the gates of Hell than gone back inside. All that bare, skinny flesh - it was like a Hieronymus Bosch drawing with added Jimmy Choos. And yet despite high school being years behind us, these were Courtney's 'people' - rich, famous, beautiful, thin. I felt bad for even thinking it but part of me wanted to text her and say I was going home.

  "I can't ditch her," I said.

  "You don't have to," he said. "Wanna go blaze one in the parking lot?"

  He pointed to a white Honda parked behind a clump of trees. My mother’s voice came back to haunt me – “Don’t get in cars with strangers,” – but I’d been seven years old at the time. What was the alternative? Finding Courtney and bursting into tears as I admitted I wanted to go home because I felt fat? What was I? Thirteen?

  “Okay,” I said.

  Chapter Two

  Clayton

  It was all Bog's fault. Every damn bit of it.

  Okay, so maybe not all. This morning wasn't directly his fault, although he'd been talking about MILFs and 'cougars' for weeks after he allegedly scored with some bored housewife whose hedge he was trimming. ("No pun intended - she didn't have a hedge, if you know what I mean.") We'd listened to this shit for all of about five minutes before Steve said "Bog, are you sure this wasn't a porno you watched?" since Bog and reality had swapped phone numbers back in maybe 2005, but reality had lost its phone or switched to a better plan and they'd since lost touch. One time he woke up with the munchies and swore blind that I'd eaten the last of the cheesecake in the fridge, even though our fridge had never contained much more than beer, mustard and some expired hot dogs that nobody dared touch because the package was getting kind of bloated.

  "It was there," he'd said. "I was eating it last night. It was cherry or something. And the base was just the right kind of crumbly and the cheese was the good kind - none of that gross lumpy cottage shit."

  He'd dreamed the whole damn thing; there was never any cheesecake. But that was Bog for you; he spent so much time rattling around inside his own weird little mind that the lines between dreams and reality were apt to get blurred. By some bizarre extension, the wild yabberings of his twisted Id were strangely contagious. Just like his description of the dream cake had made me crave cheesecake, his obsessiv
e MILF monologues had led me to wrong thoughts about thirtysomething wives who sublimated their sexual cravings with yoga until their thighs were fit to crack walnuts.

  That's how I wound up with Cadence. She said she was thirty-six but later let slip that she'd been born during the Nixon presidency, which put at least two extra years on her if my High School history served my correctly. She winced when I said Bush Senior had been president when I was born. "I guess it could have been worse," she said. "At least I wasn't old enough to vote in that election."

  She ordered up another couple of Cervezas.

  "So when did you?" I asked, after a while, long enough to catch her on the hop.

  "What?"

  "Lose your cherry?"

  She blinked at me. "That's kind of a personal question."

  "No, sorry - I mean your voting cherry. Which election?"

  "Oh, I see." She sighed and picked at the label of her beer bottle. "Nineteen ninety-two," she said, turning wistful. "I lost my voting virginity to one William Jefferson Clinton."

  "He'd probably get a kick out of that."

  "True," she said, and giggled. "Is it sad that I look at him nowadays and think 'I still would'?"

  "Nah. Bill looks good for his age. Since he lost the weight and all."

  "He does. Although did you hear Monica Lewinsky turned forty this year? Talk about feeling ancient."

  "I wouldn't know," I said, trying not to look too smug as I tilted my beer bottle to my tips. "I was in kindergarten when all that stuff was going down."

  She laughed. "'Going down' is about right." She had a deep, smoky laugh and if she was pushing forty her lips didn't betray it. They were as lush as a girl's and all those bad thoughts that Bog had planted came back to haunt me, not helped by the dark, sidelong look in Cadence's eyes. I remember us talking about the sex lives of Democrat presidents and speculating on the remote possibility of an Obama sex scandal. I think we were pretty wasted by then because Cadence was sloppy drunk enough to shed a few tears when talking about how into each other the Obamas always looked.

  I had this weird sixth sense that the conversation was about to take a turn for the ex-husband, so just to keep us both smiling, I leaned over and kissed her.

  So I still don't know what MILF porn Bog had mistaken for reality, but even his fever dreams couldn't come close to Cadence.

  She was a beast, a sex-demon. I heard somewhere that women hit their sexual peak at thirty-five and I remember wondering if whoever said that had also fucked Cadence. Maybe I'd caught her after a long dry spell, or maybe she was just thinking happy thoughts about Bill Clinton - who knows? All I know is that by round four I was starting to learn (twenty-five years too late, some might say) that you could have too much of a good thing.

  "You like that, baby?" she said, as she rode me towards yet another orgasm. Hers, natch. By this point I think I was running on fumes. "Is that good?"

  It was getting light outside. I tried to think filthy thoughts but my mind kept returning to the last time I'd slept. When was that? Oh shit. I was going to yawn. I could feel it tugging at the hinges of my jaw. While I'm not exactly the Emily Post of casual sex I'm pretty sure it's bad manners to yawn like a hippo when a lady is riding cowgirl. I quickly converted the yawn into a moan of ecstasy and Cadence took up her cue and began to ride faster. "You close?" she panted, leaning forward.

  I nodded, seeing an end in sight. And with that end would come sleep. Sleeeeeeeeeeep. Oh God. Another yawn. This one came out as a weird kind of howl, so that Cadence said, "Oh, you like it loud, huh?" Yeah. Sure. Why not? I went along with it. It was all I could do to keep it up and not yawn, so I was happy to have another way to fake my enthusiasm. Cadence screamed her climax to the ceiling, while behind me the headboard banged against the wall. It was at that point I realized that the wall was banging back and whatsmore, it was talking.

  "Mo-om!" it said. "Some of us to have to work in the morning!"

  Yep. I was now officially the punch line of a 'your mom' joke. And if you thought the universe was done fucking with me you would be dead, dead wrong, let me tell you.

  I spent what was left of the night. I had no choice; I was out cold the moment I got the condom off. I vaguely remember stirring halfway out of sleep when I heard someone crashing plates around in Cadence's kitchen - presumably the daughter going out to work. When I surfaced around noon I staggered out to find Cadence perched behind a laptop on the couch. She was wearing glasses and sweats, but it was the off-hand, busy way that she said "Hey, Sweetie," that was just so momsy that I realized I'd made a huge mistake.

  I felt like a dirtbag as I made an exaggerated play of looking at the clock and exclaiming over the time. But then I saw something on the dresser that made me want to get all Oedipus Rex on my own eyeballs and get the ever-loving hell out of Dodge.

  "No, it's cool - I've gotta make a move. Thanks. I'll call you."

  "You won't," she said, with the wry little half-smile I'd found so adorable the night before.

  I felt scummy enough, so I said, "No, you're right. I won't. Sorry," and took off. Now that I knew where I was the neighborhood looked all too familiar. And no wonder. I'd done the walk of shame down these very streets only last week.

  So I was not in the greatest of moods when I got back to the doublewide I currently called home, shit home. We all make sacrifices for our families and this was mine; I could - if you'll pardon the expression - stand on my own two feet, and so I did, or as much as you can when the floor is rotting through and you never know if the next step is going to see you falling clean through onto the ground below. I had the tools to fix it but not the materials or the money, since seasonal yard work was beginning to dry up.

  I had my hand on the door when Bog jerked it open. He looked red-eyed and paranoid, but then he always did; the place was dank as hell. "What?" I said. "Don't be acting all freaky on me, Bog - I've had a fucking weirdass night as it is."

  "Um, okay," he said, and pulled across the curtain in front of the living area. At this point I probably should have realized something was up, but I was too busy wallowing in self-disgust.

  "You remember Heather?" I said.

  "Heather?"

  "Yeah. Heather. That little brunette with the teeth."

  Bog frowned. Something was going on in there - you could tell by the way his eyes moved - but you could never be sure if his thought processes would take the logical path or just kind of go sideways. Ten years at the business end of a bong will do that to a guy. He'd never quite gone full-on crazy and started claiming that aliens sexually molested him, or that the Queen of England was some kind of transdimensional gila-monster - at least, not yet, although last summer he'd developed a worrying obsession with Monsanto and bees.

  "Wait - did she have a wooden leg?" he asked.

  "No. She didn't. Where do you get this shit, Bog? Who even has wooden legs any more? Heather. You know? Heather. She'd just got veneers and kept showing us her teeth. Remember?"

  I swear I heard cogs grinding. "Oh," he said. "Yeah." A big dumb grin spread across his face. "Dude, you totally banged her."

  "Yes, dude. I totally did. And guess what? I think I just did her mom."

  It took him a moment to digest this, but when he did he raised a hand in anticipation of a high five and said, "You the man, man."

  "No, Bog. I'm the man-skank. Mom and daughter? I'm dangerously close to passing some kind of slutty event horizon." I opened the fridge, in the vain hope of finding some juice. I don't know what I expected. There was nothing but beer, so I settled for beer.

  "How do you know it was her mom?" he said. "It might not have been."

  "It was. She definitely had a grown-up daughter because her daughter banged on the wall and told us to keep it down."

  "Yeah, but did you see her?"

  "No..."

  "So how do you know it was Heather?"

  "She had a photograph of Heather on her dresser."

  "So? Maybe it was her sister?"


  I took a long swill of beer and sighed. "A sister who called her Mom?"

  "Maybe it was a nickname? Like a soubriquet. You know. Like Caligula."

  I narrowed my eyes. Bog was an eternal mystery. He had gone to high school in the next town over from me and Steve, but we'd heard rumors that he'd once been Nerd King of Nerd Mountain - president of the Chess Club and Lord High Goblin or whatever of his D&D chapter. Nothing of this former brilliance remained, except for his penchant for busty warrior lady 'art' and these occasional idiot savant flashes where he'd use ten-dollar words like 'soubriquet' or talk in great detail about the campaigns of Genghis Khan. Unfortunately he kind of blew it when he claimed that Genghis Khan was his great, great etc grandfather.

  "Bog, there was a photo of them together," I explained, desperate to put this to rest. I know he was trying to make me feel better, but there was no getting around it. "In a pink, sparkly frame that said 'Mom and Daughter - BFFs Forever!' Got it?"

  Bog nodded. "That's kind of twisted," he said, sounding impressed.

  "It's not twisted. It's gross. It's like incest. Heather came out of that vagina."

  "You don't know that," he said. "It could have been a c-section."

  "She wasn't a c-section. Trust me." I leaned back against the kitchen counter. "I fucked Heather and once upon a time Heather was inside Cadence. It's like one of those Babushka doll things."

  "Matryoshka," said Bog. "They're called Matryoshka dolls."

  "Babushka, matryoshka - let's call the whole thing off." I finished the beer.

  The trash was full, so I figured I should clean up. On reflection I should have known something was up by the way Bog started to panic when I moved towards the living area. When I drew back the curtain I figured out exactly what was up.