Ginny Blue's Boyfriends Read online

  “Jill’s boyfriend bought her an engagement ring,” I greeted her. “Thought you’d appreciate that.”

  Kristl snorted, plunked down in the open seat next to me and said a desultory hello to the table at large, finishing with, “God, I hate men.”

  This was so un-Kristl-like that I thought I’d heard wrong. No one else realized the magnitude of the statement. In fact, Daphne took offense.

  “I don’t,” she declared. “I want a man. I want a relationship. I’m not afraid to say it, even if it’s unpopular.”

  Jill sniffed. “Give me a break.”

  “Why do you hate men?” I asked Kristl. From the number of trips she’d made down the aisle you’d think she’d have felt a tad differently.

  “Because they’re thick-skulled, limited, and can’t keep their eyes on you when a pretty girl walks through the door even if they try, which they don’t.”

  “This isn’t news,” CeeCee drawled.

  “Yeah, but it sucks every time it happens,” Kristl observed, burying her nose in her just-arrived drink, a mo-hito—lime, rum, sugar, etcetera. I envied her as my stinger was placed in front of me.

  Daphne asked, “Doesn’t anybody want to hear about my bad day?”

  The table’s silence was answer enough, though none of us meant to be so obvious. It hurt Daphne’s feelings, however, so she subsided into silence for a while. Kristl, involved in her own world, ignored Daphne and launched into her own tale of woe, “I’ve been seeing this guy for a while. Brandon.”

  I nodded. I’d heard her speaking to him on the phone.

  “And we’ve been sleeping together. It was more than three dates,” she added as an explanation.

  That brought Daphne out of her funk. “You don’t have to sleep with someone just because you’ve been on more than three dates with them.”

  “One date’s enough if it’s right,” CeeCee inserted. “Even half a date.”

  “But three dates you have to fish or cut bait,” Kristl pointed out. “And Blue, you know how I feel about cutting bait.” My other friends’ eyes swung toward me, and I could read the question marks forming above their heads. I hadn’t really brought them up to speed on Kristl.

  “You don’t have to sleep with them ever,” Daphne argued.

  “Shut up and let her finish,” Jill ordered.

  Daphne straightened. “Well ... sorr–eee ...”

  Kristl tried to light up a cigarette and we all stopped her at once. Even though she works in a bar she can’t seem to remember that in California—there is no indoor smoking, period. It’s the law. Kristl’s from Oregon and hasn’t quite woken up yet.

  She swore without any real heat, put the cigarette away and picked up the thread of her story. “So, we’ve been having sex for a while, Brandon and I.”

  CeeCee asked, “Good sex, bad sex, or okay sex? Most sex is just okay sex. We know that. Don’t feel bad. Go on.”

  “It was pretty good sex,” Kristl related. “I was really getting into it. And I started thinking, you know, about marriage ...”

  “No,” I stated flatly.

  “And I can’t get married again. I mean, the ink’s barely dry on the last divorce settlement.”

  “The last?” Jill asked.

  “She’s been married trés times,” I said, adding, “Get anything good out of that one?”

  “No.”

  I grunted an acknowledgment. Three marriages and she always got screwed. One could not say Kristl was in it for the money.

  “So, to get my head straight, I went right out and tried to meet another guy,” Kristl finished, fiddling with her pack of cigarettes. “Just to be safe.”

  Daphne and Jill looked to me for elucidation and CeeCee asked the obvious question, “Safe from what?”

  Kristl didn’t immediately explain, so I said, “If she sleeps with a guy, she marries him. She slept with Brandon, ergo she’s worried she might be heading for the aisle again soon.”

  “They do have to ask, though,” Jill pointed out, as if Kristl were getting ahead of herself.

  “They ask,” I said.

  “Wow,” Daphne said, faintly admiring.

  CeeCee regarded Kristl with pity. “You’ve only slept with three guys?”

  “Oh, there were a few I managed to get away from after a quick night, but not many. Not enough,” Kristl admitted. “Basically, yes. I only count sleeping with three of them, and they’re the ones I married. Only now I really have to count Brandon, so it’s four.”

  “You can’t not count times,” Daphne said.

  “Oh, yes, you can,” I said. “I don’t count Charlie.”

  Jill snorted. “Who would?”

  “Why don’t you count him?” Daphne asked.

  “Because he was so godawful in bed.” It wasn’t completely the truth but close enough to count.

  “Who’s Charlie?” Kristl asked.

  “My first relationship of any consequence. Don’t make me think about him. It was my last year of high school.” Though we were from the same area, Kristl and I had attended different high schools and I’d managed to keep some things to myself. Not so with my college friends. They’d squeezed almost every bit of worthwhile, or even mildly interesting, information on my life out of me.

  “High school. All right, I stand corrected,” Daphne said. “High school doesn’t really count.”

  CeeCee said, “ I want to hear the rest of this.”

  Kristl settled in. “About a week ago this fabulous-looking guy comes to the Pink Elephant and we strike up a conversation and I end up telling him my dilemma.”

  I was interested. “You really told this new guy about Brandon? And all the ex-husbands?”

  “Okay, okay,” Daphne interrupted. “All right. I was wrong. This is when you definitely don’t count them all! Never say how many men you’ve slept with to another man. It doesn’t matter if it’s only four. They can’t hear about anybody else. It makes them insane.”

  CeeCee agreed tiredly, “It’s a male thing.” She shrank further into her chair. A guy wearing chains hanging from his pockets cruised by and they locked eyes but neither made a move. “So, what happened?”

  I was intrigued and worried at the same time. Kristl wasn’t known for her plodding, thoughtful nature. She was rash, impulsive, and swept away at the least provocation.

  “I really liked this guy,” she continued. “He was so amazing. Just kind of straightforward and smart and listening to me. Not like most guys, y’know? And being with him practically knocked Brandon out of my head, which is amazing that it could happen that quickly.”

  “I once fell in love over a bowl of edamame,” CeeCee revealed. “He was a poet.”

  We all paused for a moment, visualizing. With effort, I pulled my attention back to Kristl. “So, it sounds like Brandon’s out.”

  “That’s what I thought. So what if he possesses this big dick and knows just how to use it? So what if he whispers all the right things—words of love and what I do to him in bed ... and how amazing I am. You know the kind.”

  We all remained silent, collectively wondering if we did.

  “Go on,” Jill insisted, intent on the story.

  Mr. Chains strolled by again and CeeCee climbed out of her chair to meet him. They went outside for a cigarette. I briefly thought of Nate and felt a pang.

  Kristl inhaled and exhaled. Leaning closer, she said, “All of a sudden I just wanted this other guy. Right there. It was wild. I couldn’t think about anything else. I swear, if he’d asked, I’d have stripped naked and gone for it on the bar.”

  “Isn’t Pink Elephant really crowded?” I asked.

  “Blue.” Jill closed her eyes, long-suffering.

  “And all these thoughts were just running around in my brain and I felt like Jell-O and I walked around the bar and sat beside him and I think I might have even slipped my hand onto his crotch.”

  “Bold,” I observed.

  Jill gazed hard at Kristl. She was hanging on every word.
I was, too, for that matter.

  “Were you drunk?” Daphne asked.

  Kristl said deliberately, “I’m a bartender there.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Yeah?” I pushed. I’d been at the Pink Elephant a time or two. When things got rocking, the rules got bent from time to time.

  “I was a little buzzed,” she admitted. “He kept buying me drinks.”

  “You were working?” Daphne asked, scandalized.

  Kristl gave her a look.

  “Then what happened?” Jill asked a bit breathlessly.

  Kristl’s lips tightened. “Then this beautiful—I mean beautiful —blonde sits down beside him. Long hair, you know, with those streaks and just so California-perfect and she said, ‘Hi, Jackson. Long time no see,’ and he looked at her and it was all over.”

  A prickle ran over my skin. “Jackson?”

  “Jackson Wright,” Kristl elucidated, shaking a gasp out of the rest of us.

  I couldn’t believe it! The universe is just full of these nasty little surprises! Jackson Wright seemed to be floating around on the air waves, hovering over me at all times. My friends looked shell-shocked. I know my lips curled in an imitation of Liam Engleston’s. Wouldn’t you know it. Wouldn’t you just know it!

  But Kristl was momentarily oblivious. “So, I took my sorry self back to Brandon and now he’s talking about moving to Seattle—he’s been offered a position at some Microsoft subsidiary in the area—and he wants me to go with him and you know what that means.”

  A funereal rendition of Here Comes the Bride circled inside my brain. “You’re not thinking of going, are you?”

  “I don’t know ... I think I hate him,” she answered, reaching for her raspberry Cosmo and dropping it down her throat.

  “Brandon?” Daphne asked.

  Jill groaned. “No. Pay attention. Jackson Wright. She hates Jackson Wright.”

  “We all do,” I pointed out, tipping up the remains of my stinger—which hadn’t been half-bad and gently shaking the last, reluctant drops of alcohol into my mouth.

  I am so very classy.

  It was strange coming home to an empty apartment. Kristl had gone off to her job at Pink Elephant, and Nate had packed up enough items for his temporary move-in with Tara to make me feel forgotten and discarded despite my earlier resolve to sweep him from my life. Oh, there were still a lot of his belongings lying around, and I knew his chair—my favorite chair—would be one of the first things to go once he got permanently resettled. I sat down in it and leaned my head back.

  I felt ... well, blue. Endings aren’t fun. I wondered how long it would take before I experienced what I’d briefly felt this morning in the bathroom: the euphoria of being alone. Now that I’d had solitude thrust on me, it didn’t seem quite so great.

  I sighed and considered having a glass of wine, but I was about drinked-out at this point. The cocktail hour had started deteriorating the instant Jackson Wright’s name was invoked. Kristl had looked around perplexed, waiting for an explanation. None of us jumped in to tell her, so she turned to me.

  “You know him? Jackson Wright?” she demanded.

  “Jackson and I went to high school together,” I explained. Someone else I had neglected to mention from good old Carriage Hill High.

  “We all know him,” Jill added repressively.

  Daphne sighed. “Blue tried to warn us about him, but we didn’t listen. CeeCee actually slept with him.”

  “So she says.” Jill wasn’t about to let that one go by without a challenge. “But CeeCee isn’t totally honest when it comes to men.”

  “Yes, she is,” Daphne disagreed. “She’s just ...”

  “Skewed in her perception,” I finished. CeeCee didn’t look at relationships, sex, or even friendship quite the same way the rest of us did. Someone had once asked her if she was from a different planet and I swear she’s made a point of proving that theory correct ever since.

  Kristl looked in the direction CeeCee had gone, and I could tell she really wanted to quiz her about Jackson. I set my empty glass down and glanced around for our waiter.

  “You’re probably lucky Jackson took off with the blonde,” Jill stated. “You could be in a worse mess than with Brandon.”

  “I don’t want to move to Seattle,” Kristl said.

  “Don’t,” I said. Then I asked, because I had a feeling she might be heading north despite her words, “When’s he leaving?”

  “Soon.” She twisted her fingers around the stem of her glass.

  “Why not try a long-distance relationship?” Daphne suggested. “Seattle’s not that far. A quick two-hour plane ride or so.”

  “Two of my marriages ended because they became long-distance relationships,” Kristl revealed. “I’m not good at ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ It’s more like ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ ”

  We collectively nodded. Who among us hadn’t cheated on an out-of-town boyfriend? No one at our table.

  “Brandon was out of sight for ten minutes and look what happened. Now I can’t get Jackson out of my head.”

  “Jackson Daniels and Coke,” Jill called to the waiter as he cruised by. Kristl gave her a sharp look. I yelled my own order, “Ketel One vodka martini!”

  “Think he heard us?” Jill asked.

  “Doubtful,” I said.

  Daphne asked, “What happened to the third marriage?”

  Kristl made that “bombs-away” explosion noise, the kind young boys seem to learn through osmosis but which I’ve never been able to master, no matter how hard I try. I regarded Kristl with true admiration. “It blew up,” she added unnecessarily. “One day we just lost it with each other and neither of us looked back.”

  I nodded sagely, but inside I was asking myself why things never worked that way for me. I always looked back. To my detriment, to be sure. I was half-looking back at Nate already and somehow a pair of rose-colored glasses were perched on my nose. I would have to be careful or I’d be begging for a second chance before the week was out.

  “Leo started dating someone else at work,” Daphne blurted out. “We’d barely kissed goodbye and he was flirting and making goo-goo eyes and it was all I could do to keep from crying. That’s my bad day. That’s what I’ve been waiting to say!”

  “Goo-goo eyes?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t get all semantic on us, Blue,” Jill said. “Don’t tell me Leo was goo-gooing that mousy-looking blonde.”

  Daphne looked miserable. “How’d you guess?”

  Jill made a strangled noise in her throat. “Don’t you wish they’d go for brains over beauty just once?”

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  “You have a brain,” Jill pointed out. “That’s all I meant.”

  “Maybe he’s an equal opportunity dater and he’s already filled his quota for cute brunettes,” I said.

  “Nice try.” Daphne wasn’t about to be consoled.

  We lapsed into silence.

  Kristl dug through her purse, pulled out some money and laid a few bills on the table before climbing to her feet. “I need a cigarette,” she explained, exiting quickly. I watched her hunt down CeeCee, who was deep into conversation with Mr. Chains. CeeCee accepted Kristl’s arrival, but I could see her expression cloud over at whatever Kristl was saying. Had to be about Jackson.

  After that, everything kind of broke up. I had wanted to tell them about Nate, but the words stuck in my throat like a fish bone. Now, as I climbed out of Nate’s chair and looked around the empty apartment I felt like I might do something rash, like throw things or cry or call him on his cell phone and demand, “Why? Why? Why?” when I knew I didn’t want to be with him. I just wanted the last word.

  “And Dr. Dick thinks I’m frightfully well adjusted,” I said aloud. My voice echoed throughout the empty condo. I didn’t like it one bit. Switching off the lights, I locked the door and determinedly marched up to bed and to the suddenly wide-open spaces of the king-size mattress.
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  I lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling. The jacaranda tree outside my window was dancing in a stiff breeze. Bathed by the riot light from the building next door, its leaves flittered across my ceiling in tiny, darting shadows between the stripes made by my jalousie blinds.

  I drifted into a troubled sleep.

  I would have expected to dream about Nate, or Jackson, but instead I found myself back in high school with Charlie Carruthers. Only it was kind of like college in the dream, as I was living on my own. I was freaked out the whole time because I’d missed the cutoff date to drop chemistry, the reason being I was banging Charlie under a blanket in a little garret-style attic room while his roommates smoked dope in the corner and totally ignored us. Charlie and I were trying to keep things quiet, as if his stoned friends would even notice. Between fretting about chemistry class and keeping quiet during sex, I worked myself into an all-out nightmare, and I woke suddenly at the sound of my own hoarse yell—which had been me crying out in the dream when Dr. Dick suddenly entered the room and caught me in the sex act.

  My heart was pounding wildly in fear. Half asleep, I searched my feelings for what had scared me so badly and was surprised and a bit worried to realize it was Dr. Dick’s disappointment in me. Frightfully well adjusted? I feared it was all an act that he, as my shrink, might well discover some day.

  I punched my pillow and buried my face in it.

  Sleep eluded me. Charlie hung in my thoughts. Persistent. I wondered if his sexual technique had improved with age. He was the quickest, most self-centered lover I’d ever encountered—and that’s saying a lot. But it was high school, after all, and the jury was out on whether that counted or not.

  My vote was for not ... because otherwise Charlie was Ex-File Number One.