There was even a #FrankenPhillyDate sub-hashtag, where each guy was rated by a polling group and then the guys who had the best score in each area—looks, career, family ties, interests, charisma—were re-mixed every week to make the perfect Franken-date.
When I clicked on the responses to the Liz Dates Mr. Perfect hashtag, though, I realized I was reading about myself.
Not in the sense that I looked like Mr. Franken-date—not even close. That guy was blond and muscular and working some job that made him six figures even though he was only twenty-five years old. He also was skilled in bed, but not so skilled that it made him cocky.
Yeah. Right.
As a bonus, the "Liz Dates Mr. Perfect" discussion had a whole, decently robust thread dedicated to the "Jackhole who fucked up our votes." AKA, me. There was a little bit of talk about whether I had managed to mess with the votes that much—after all, lots of people had still voted for the guys Liz eventually went out with, they imagined, and the dates hadn't been boring by any stretch. Just a nightmare for Liz. Those people thought that the "childhood friend" was probably one of the kids she'd spent her braces-wearing junior high years with, playing pranks involving each other's bras at sleepovers and giggling over celebrity spreads in teen magazines. Someone like Kiera, I realized, who was friends with her, who knew her well, and was close enough for Liz not to want to kill her at the end of it all, but not close enough that she'd feel any qualms about pulling such an elaborate prank.
That was how I'd started this whole thing, wasn't it? As Liz's roommate, her friend, someone who thought they'd have a good laugh at her expense?
Someone who also happened to be sleeping with her on the side, and falling more in love with her each time we did. God, I was an asshole.
That assessment was confirmed by most people responding to the Jackhole theory—a larger sub-group of hopeless romantics really and truly believed that Liz could have found love through the Liz Dates Philly column, if only she'd been allowed to. And that was where my gut started to twist and I hung my head with guilt. The voters who logged on to Philly Illustrated and voted in Liz Dates Philly every week knew something about the kind of guy she’d want to date. At least it seemed that way, from how cozy Liz and Mr. Perfect looked now that they'd landed at 30th Street Station for a Saxby’s latte and people-watching.
When Liz had originally gone to 30th Street Station for the first latte-and-people-watching date of the feature, it had been with some guy named Preston, whose head was shaped like a cabbage, wore a too-tight plaid button-down tucked into khakis, and could barely stop sneezing. Allergy season, Liz had explained through her laughter when she re-hashed the date with me.
That night, she'd smiled at me in exactly the same way she was smiling at Nate now—like he'd hung the moon. Deanna was posting pictures at a breakneck pace—one every few minutes—and they all showed things that made me feel escalating degrees of revulsion—Liz beaming while looking into his eyes, Liz laughing so hard she had to wipe under her eyes with a single manicured finger, Liz brushing Nate's knee with her hand to get his attention. (They were looking at a set of toddler triplets dressed identically for a family photo shoot, Deanna's photography breathlessly revealed.) That whole thing set off a frenzy of internet fans mashing together Liz and Nate's pictures and declaring they would make the most adorable babies, like, EVER.
The knot in my stomach twisted tighter. At the thought of Liz having another guy's babies, however fleeting it was. I was so far gone for her it wasn't even funny.
When Liz and Mr. Perfect—every time I even thought his name, I felt sick—parted ways, she breathlessly tweeted that the tag would pick up again when they met tomorrow for lunch.
It was the most miserable night I’d ever experienced. Possible coping mechanisms flashed through my mind in quick succession. I would go work out, but nobody liked to watch a dude lifting weights with tears welling out of his eyes. I could cook dinner in Ethan’s kitchen, but not having Liz fawning over how delicious it was would be too damn sad. Hell, I could drink, but that would be sadder than anything, especially with the likelihood that I’d end up passing out on Ethan’s floor.
To top it all off, I barely slept, opting instead to stare at the #LizDatesPhilly feeds on Twitter and Tumblr.
Was this rock bottom? I couldn’t imagine it getting any worse. That should have been my signal that it most certainly could—and would.
Chapter 26
Liz
"Liz! Watch it!" Nate - as he'd urged me to call him - wrapped my fingers with his. They were solid and strong when they tugged me away from some innocuous obstacle in the middle of the Philly sidewalk. I couldn't help but notice they were slightly sweaty, too.
A small smile ghosted over my lips. Was he nervous? That was so sweet.
"What? Was there an ROUS there or something?"
"A what?" He gave me a bemused smile.
"Uh...never mind." Jordan had assured me that everyone grew up watching The Princess Bride, that I wasn’t a freak for loving it so much.
Stop thinking about him.
"No,” Nate said, nudging me with his elbow, “there was just a fast food bag there. Didn't want you to trip."
I gave him a quizzical look before I realized—he was just looking for an excuse to hold my hand. Something I hadn't even thought of. I snuck a glance back at Deanna, who was following half a block behind us and across the street with her iPhone aimed at us like a creeper. I'd gotten so used to her paparazzi-like detachable-lens camera that it felt weird for her to be aiming her cell camera at me. But she'd attached some chunk of glass and plastic to the top of her phone and assured me it would help her get the shots she needed.
It had been part of my plan to have Deanna live-tweet, Tumble and Snapchat the whole day—to really spend the day maximizing my time with Mr. Perfect, for the paper's appearances, anyway. Of course, that meant that I was taking extra care with my hair and makeup, not to mention my outfit, since I needed something that would take me the distance of the whole day while still looking cute. It was a tall order, but I thought I'd managed it with some very stretchy skinny jeans, cute flats, and a lace-necked tank with a drapey cardigan over top of it.
From the way Nate's gaze occasionally flitted over my collarbone, and even once or twice below, I figured I did a good job.
Nate, who looked sheepish, squeezed my hand, which he still held in the most awkward of positions. Just like that, I snapped back into First Date Mode, the headspace that I'd learned to put on autopilot over the last few months. I was supposed to be interested, to be flirting, even a little encouraging.
I was expected, both by my boss and by my readers, to try with this one.
So I twisted my wrist, which pressed my palm into his, and intertwined our fingers, squeezing a little as I did.
Nate beamed, like I'd just handed him a million dollars or the Nobel peace prize.
"Thanks," I said. "That was sweet."
One thing I'd learned from the last two and a half hours with Mr. Perfect was that redheads—auburns, really—blushed easily. He was the attractive kind of redhead too, his hair ruddy and his skin just the right shade of tan so that it didn't look weird. I was sure he had freckles, somewhere, and the idea that maybe I'd want to go looking for them under his clothing at the end of the night didn't send me recoiling in horror.
Aside from his slightly sweaty hands and awkward first date step-stop behavior of pulling my chair out for me and guarding me from the horrors of stepping in errant trash, Mr. Nathaniel perfect was, well... perfect.
He'd graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University, where he'd had a full ride scholarship and earned a biology degree. Instead of using all his free time to study or make extra cash, he'd volunteered with organizations like CityYear and Doctors Without Borders. When Josh and his frat buddies had done community service, it had been in the name of adding something to their resume to aid their acceptance to the best law school or MBA program.
"I could
have gone to med school," Nate explained as we sipped our coffee and watched travelers stroll by at the train station, "but this one summer I volunteered in Malawi, I met a family whose baby could barely move. Not because she was starving or had some kind of malaria or something—she had a disorder. She never was able to really hold up her head or even grab things. Two of her siblings had died of the same thing. When I finally spoke with a visiting doctor, he guessed it was SMA-1—Spino-muscular atrophy."
"Genetic, I assume," I said sadly.
"Yep. It's a genetic mutation that keeps their body from producing a protein that lets their nerves control muscles. Kids who have it are weak, so weak they can’t breathe. They just... die. Before they turn one, usually. Anyway, I couldn't stop thinking about this kid, and the next semester in my bioethics class we learned about upcoming gene therapy studies. There was this one that was starting at CHOP in two years' time—"
"And it was for this disease?" I guessed, giving him a soft smile. Anyone who hung out with this guy could tell what a good heart he had. No wonder the Philly Illustrated voters had been so overwhelmingly for him. And all this time I'd been thinking they just wanted to screw me over.
All this time, it had been my own roommate screwing me. In more ways than one.
A guy I couldn't stop thinking about for more than five minutes at a time, dammit.
"—and then once we attach the protein to the virus, it just sort of goes through the kid's body and arrests muscular deterioration at that point in their development. We've seen kids who should have been dead at one start to walk by that time."
"That's... wow. That's incredible." I was sure there were girls who would be absolutely salivating to get into Nate’s pants after this declaration of medical valor. I thought it was interesting, but not sexy.
"Yeah, maybe once we publish the results of this trial, the rest of the world will agree, and renew our funding. And then maybe I could keep doing this the rest of my life, instead of selling out for med school."
"The rest of our lives isn't that far away, I guess," I mused, letting my eyes fall on a woman pushing a stroller with a baby in front and a preschooler standing on a platform behind his sibling.
"No, but it's not like right now, either," Nate chuckled. "Still, I guess my dad was getting worried enough about my future happiness to sign me up for a very public dating experiment. "
"Well, you don't seem to mind very much. You've been a very good sport about all this, is what I mean," I rushed to explain when his expression softened.
"No, I don't," he said, staring at nothing in the distance with a soft smile. "Can I be honest with you, Liz?"
"Sure," I managed, suddenly stressed about what would come out of his mouth next.
"I was kind of pissed when I found out that I got signed up for this. You know, my dad has no business meddling like that, even if he means well. “Now... I don't know." He shrugged. "I’m glad You're cute. You’re fun to be around." His smile was shaky, his eyes sparkling.
But instead of the butterflies I would have expected to feel at hearing those words, the one fairy tales and rom-com movies prescribed for this moment, all I felt was a twisting pit forming in my stomach.
"Aw," I managed. "Likewise."
And he was. Cute. Cute, and smart, and selfless, and open. Emotionally honest. Certainly not the kind of guy who would manipulate a city-wide poll in order to obfuscate any happiness I might have gotten from going on normal dates, screw me once in a while in the meantime, and then bring another girl home, snuggle with her on the couch where I'd had some of the most amazing sex of my life with him just weeks earlier, and pretend that he'd done nothing wrong.
No, Nate Perfect wasn't a manipulative, selfish asshole like Jordan was.
So why couldn't I stop thinking about him and start focusing on Mr. Perfect, who had been served up to me on a silver platter by the blessed readers of Philly Illustrated for the perfect weekend-long date?
Because I was stupid, that's why. Maybe it was our similar taste in movies, or the way he made my coffee, or the way he knew exactly how to tease my body into oblivion with his hands and tongue and cock. Maybe it was the fact that I'd known him forever, that I felt safe with him, that he made me laugh.
For all I knew, Mr. Perfect had those same qualities. Maybe even more so. And I'd never be able to see them if I didn't open up my damn eyes.
So that was why I twisted my hand toward his and let our fingers twine together. Because I wanted to see. I wanted Nate to actually be Mr. Perfect. I wanted him to prove to me that Jordan was really Mr. Mediocre and Slightly-disturbingly-possessive.
Never mind that I loved "possessive" in the bedroom—something Jordan had taught me.
Dammit. There my mind went again. I sighed heavily, making Nate's fingers twitch in mine. "You okay?"
I forced a wide grin on my face, making sure it reached my eyes, too, and turned my gaze straight to his. Try, Elizabeth. Don’t fuck this up. For yourself or for Philly Illustrated.
Chapter 27
Jordan
The next day I was so exhausted I could barely move. I stood in front of my Engineering Mathematics students, watching their faces blur together. I mumbled my way through their assignment and asked if they had any questions. Thank God they didn’t, because I honestly don’t know how I would have answered them. As soon as the first student filtered out the door after I’d dismissed them twenty minutes early, I was back to scrolling through my phone.
I was a crazy obsessed person, and I knew it. I just couldn’t get a grip on a good enough reason to stop. I was in love with the girl, and watching her slip through my fingers into Mr. Perfect arm’s was going to kill me whether I kept up with every detail or not.
I couldn’t stand it when Liz and Mr. Perfect held hands. Their intertwined fingers swung between their bodies as they walked, according to the gleeful caption on Deanna’s tweeted photo.
By lunchtime at Nam Phuong Vietnamese I couldn't handle it any more. My brain screamed a hundred responses to each increasingly ridiculous online speculation thread, and I'd started to become more familiar with every person tweeting and Tumbling and whatever the fuck else about Liz Dates Mr. Fucking Perfect than I was with the college students I TA’d. I had to do something.
No, asshole. Back down. "I have to do something" is exactly the attitude that got you here, remember? She likes him. She's having a good time. Maybe he really is Mr. Perfect-for-her.
A much smaller voice told me that that couldn't be true, because of what I knew deep down - I was Mr. Perfect. Or, at least, Liz was Miss Perfect-for-me. I wanted to be with her more than anything, all the time, and it wasn't just because she was on a date with someone else. Over the last few weeks, there'd hardly been a moment when I hadn't thought to myself that it would be more fun or at least more bearable if Liz was there next to me.
I absolutely had to do something. Even though I had no idea what.
Chapter 28
Liz
After an incredible lunch of spring rolls and crispy tofu, I was grateful for the short walk to digest a bit. The next stop, it turned out, was Joseph Fox Bookshop, a sweet little indie store. Monica text-reminded me that it would be highly encouraged for us to make a book stack of our top ten favorites of all time and take a cute pic for Deanna with them, and for the book shop. The book store had been one of the more forgiving sponsors, and we were trying to strike a better distribution deal for our print magazine, so extra cutesy antics were in order, apparently.
I loved the book store. Any book store, really, because the smell of the pages and the quiet looks of contemplation on the shoppers' faces always made me feel peaceful, happy. A sense that I was among intellectual equals.
But there was nothing like a good rare book store, or even just one of those eccentric ones with a million rooms you could literally get lost in. Which was a good description of Joseph Fox I'd been so happy the first time I'd been on a date here for Philly Illustrated, and then disappointed when t
he guy, Hank, just sort of hung back while I looked around. The next week, when Jordan had mentioned stumbling into it and spending way too much time and money there, I'd felt a whole new rush of butterflies in my stomach, and had a particularly hot dream about him that night.
There my thoughts went again, right after fucking Jordan. I wondered if he was trying to find a new apartment. Maybe he already had. My heart twinged at the thought.
Even though it shouldn't have.
Nate squeezed my hand. "Penny for your thoughts."
"Oh, nothing. Just how excited I am to come here. You ever been?"
He shrugged. "I haven't. I love book stores, though."
That made me smile. I added it to the small mental list of reasons to try with Nate. Books. "I don't read, like, ever. But I like being surrounded by books."
Damn. He had to go and keep talking. "You don't read? So what do you do on a quiet weekend morning? Like, after pancakes and before naptime?"
He shrugged. "Watch the news? Clean the house? I guess reading is one of your things, huh?"
It's a human thing. I pressed my lips together. Try, Liz. "Definitely."
"Well, you know," he said, leaning in close. "I wouldn't mind watching you read." His breath was hot on my ear, curling around it and making it buzz with his soft, low words.
It made me shiver, but not in a good way. More like there were ants crawling up my neck.
I stood my ground, though, and didn't flinch away from him. He seemed to take it as a positive sign, and let his arm drift around my back, his fingers lightly brushing at my waist just above the hip.
"Lead the way. Show me what you like." His voice was still low, but he'd given my poor neck some space. He was, however, shooting me some very obvious bedroom eyes.
"Um...lately I've been reading young adult," I chattered. "See, in middle school, we always had summer reading assignments. I read the books without really questioning, but once I got to college I realized they were giving us adult literature to read."
Just Down the Hall Page 23
