All the Right Moves

by Taylor, Becca

  “Last one. ‘Number thirty, you’re the only guy on the planet who thinks it’s okay to be best friends with a female. Hashtag it’s not okay.’ Really? She’s still using hashtags?”

  “Hashtag it’s Chanel,” I joked because alcohol made me a funny drunk.

  “Hashtag is it okay I’m glad it’s over?” she asked me sincerely.

  “Hashtag ask me tomorrow.”

  “Hashtag I will.”

  “Hashtag thanks for answering the door tonight.”

  “Hashtag anytime.”

  “Hashtag I’m going to bed.” I put away the remaining vodka and grabbed my depressing box and list.

  “Hashtag remind me never to say hashtag again. Good night, Preston.”

  “Hashtag good night, Tenley.”

  She smiled but followed it with, “I’m sorry you had a shitty night and for your breakup.”

  Me too. “See you tomorrow.”

  2

  Preston

  Don't fear the manscape.

  I’D LIKE TO SAY AFTER CHANEL and I broke up, I picked myself up and dusted off the next day. But this is real life, and that didn’t happen. When Tenley showed up with a box full of donuts the next morning, she asked if it bothered me when she said she was glad my relationship ended. I knew if I needed her to be, she would be devastated with me.

  My reply was plain and simple. “Are they chocolate glazed with sprinkles?”

  She nodded. “Manly chocolate sprinkles. Not the rainbow girly kind because, you know, women suck.”

  She opened the box, waving it under my nose. Without hesitation, I relieved her of the box, knowing she wouldn’t eat any before her day of yoga instructing began. Besides, Tenley was a Boston cream girl.

  “And, no, it doesn’t bother me that you’re happy about my failed relationship. God knows I’ve been more than grateful for a few of the losers who dumped you.” I thanked her before biting into the soft cake that was about to help nurse my slight hangover along with the help of the coffee I had already poured. After I devoured one donut, I handed Tenley her to-go cup she kept in my apartment. It was part of our deal; I would always have coffee waiting in the morning, and she would make me a pasta dinner twice a week, so I didn’t die from lack of carbohydrates.

  She blew across the hole on the lid of her cup as she looked over at me. “Are you okay? I have a class to teach in an hour, but I could fake sick if you want.”

  I waved her off. She didn’t need to see me wallow in my self-pity. Besides, I had plans. I made my way to the couch with my half a dozen donuts and cream-filled coffee. “I’m good.”

  I wasn’t good. I was so far from good I was about to enter the slump zone. Sure, I went to my job every day, but considering my work was in the confines of my thousand-square-foot apartment, I didn’t need to get out of my uniform of baggy sweats and old T-shirts from vacations past with Chanel. I was my own boss. After college, I started a company where I compiled data for companies who wanted to stay in the now. Basically, they hired me to create surveys and gather data for their latest designs slash invention slash whatever they wanted people to buy.

  So showering wasn’t a requirement unless I had a meeting or if Tenley kindly told me I stunk like a boy. By the end of the month, I went through every article of clothing in my dresser—and closet—and I was always in desperate need of a shave as both my face and other parts were starting to get out of control.

  After checking inside my wallet for the appointment card my barber gave me, I came across a picture of Chanel and me at the frat party on the night we met. A friend of hers snapped the picture without us knowing while she was sitting on my lap at the beach looking stunning. Her face was free of all the normal layers of makeup she wore daily, her blond hair was blowing in the Gulf wind, and she was smiling at me.

  As for me, I was four years younger and thought I was king at the time. I had finally filled out from my boy bod and was on top of my baseball game. I wasn’t playing on the team, per se, but I was their stat person. In exchange for improving their game, they allowed me to train alongside the team.

  I tore up the picture as well as my appointment card because who did I need to look good for anymore.

  That’s right, I gave up giving a shit about my hygiene for another month until the day Chanel texted me a picture of herself bikini-clad on some beach, claiming Oops. I meant to send that to my new boyfriend. I guess I forgot to change your name on my phone to just Preston. How are you holding up?

  It didn’t surprise me she had a new boyfriend, but it also didn’t mean I wouldn’t feel a little sting when I read it. At least I was smart enough not to reply, I’ve been a walking mess since you handed me the box and the list of thirty reasons why I’m the worst. Instead, I walked into the bathroom to examine myself in the mirror. I was sporting a full-on beard. My normally silky blond hair was sticking up in places I didn’t know was possible. And when the heck did I get a belly?

  The day you decided donuts were the new diet of champions, dude.

  Jesus Christ, I was a mess over a girl who got over me in two seconds. Reality slapped me in the face, and I was about to make her regret the hell she put me through.

  From under the bathroom sink, I grabbed my razor and got down to business. Aka shaved the Wookie off my face first, the sides of my hair second, and lastly pulled the elastic of my sweats away from my body to get to examine what was beneath. It wasn’t pretty either. Not that a man’s body should be pretty, but at least I used to give a damn about keeping things neat and trim.

  What the hell happened to me? I was Preston Griffin, King of keeping it together.

  Chanel and her goddamn list happened, that’s what.

  As I hopped in the shower to wash off the remainder of the person I’d been for the past month, I had an epiphany.

  I was a numbers guy. Graphs, data, charts, and surveys made sense to me. So why not go straight to the source and find out what women wanted? Then I could put those answers to the test. I was about to change my title from worst boyfriend to oh God, Preston, you’re the best boyfriend ever to whoever my future she was. I was going to learn all the right moves to make her swoon during the day and purr all night long.

  With my body loofahed clean and my hair back to its silky goodness, I reached for my phone and texted Chanel back in her lingo. #Imfanfuckingtastic Do me a favor and delete my number. I even added a picture of my perfectly crooked smiling face to go along with it.

  Three dots appeared on my screen followed by the words. #Youremean.

  No, Nelly bear. I was going to be the opposite of the less than attentive, vile, nasty, insensitive, unsexy man you thought I was.

  Deciding to be productive, I made use of my gym membership for the first time. For a month straight, I worked out four hours a day. Or at least an hour or two. The rest of the time, I gathered information. I talked to women about what they wanted in the opposite sex and men about what they thought their women wanted from them. I walked the busy streets of Naples, observing the body language of couples while out on dates. I studied body language at the bars, both positive and negative, as men approached a woman they were hoping to hook up with for the night. This was a key component because I wasn’t looking for casual. Doing the opposite of what they were would be essential when the time came to test the theories.

  Uploading all my data on a spreadsheet, I rated everything by response, then listed them by importance based on the number of times the same answer was given.

  Number one. Communication was really important. More so, men needed to listen to what their partner was saying. Go figure. Woman didn’t want cheesy one-liners; they wanted the real deal. A man they could have a conversation with after they broke the ice with, “I seem to have lost my phone number; can I have yours?”

  I think Chanel and I stopped talking about, well, anything serious after college. I didn’t even notice when it happened. It just did.

  By the way, that line was used twenty-six percent of the tim
e at the bar and five percent at restaurants to unsuspecting waitresses.

  Number two I at least tackled after the text from my ex. Hygiene mattered. Especially in the Southern hemisphere. The greasy look was out, and eighty-nine percent of the women in Naples, FL—at least the ones I interviewed—wanted a cleaned-up man for the most part.

  Scruff, good.

  Hairy arms and chest, bad.

  Happy trail, hot.

  Man bush, eew.

  Manicures, yes.

  Sculpted eyebrows, fifty-fifty.

  Women were willing to divulge a lot of other information, but they were minor details. Besides, I got the gist of it. Shower once a day, brush your hair, always carry around breath mints, and never fall back to dad bod Preston again. Even when I became a dad.

  I called my barber and got that trim I needed months ago. It had finally grown back to the point I could run my fingers through the top and tie it back when necessary. And since I was taking what these women said to heart, I went next door and treated myself to the deluxe mani-pedi experience. Not realizing it came with a complimentary arm and leg massage while doing your nails was just a bonus.

  After an hour in one of those chairs, I thought about purchasing one for my living room because I hadn’t felt so relaxed in years.

  With my nails trimmed and buffed to a shine, I felt like a new man. My feet were buttery soft from some dip they did, my hands even softer. I made an appointment every month. I would have to add on more hours to my workday—and a few new clients—but it would be one hundred percent worth it.

  Freshly pampered, I swung by the local library to check out the self-help section, which was not much help at all. Apparently, the adult section was limited to PG-13, and I needed the NC-17 version. So, at home I broke out my gift cards from Christmas, knowing Mom and Dad would be so proud that their son was continuing to learn even after college. Books, movies, and magazines—I bought them all, the useful ones anyway, and I soaked it all in. I was determined to learn how to be the ultimate guy, the ultimate intellect in all things women, and the ultimate in delivering the big O.

  Watch out women of the world, Preston Ryder Griffin was getting his game back.

  3

  Preston

  Brush up on oral skills.

  “RINSE,” MY DENTAL HYGIENIST said for the last time while pulling the mask from her face.

  Did you know oral skills was number three on the list for women between the ages of twenty-five and, well, above? I know they didn’t mean actual oral care, but I was ninety-nine percent positive that having white teeth and a great smile wouldn’t hurt when the time came for taking a magic carpet ride.

  After I took a sip from the paper cup, I swished the water around, then spit it into the bowl on my left. I ran my tongue along my teeth, which felt squeaky clean.

  “Great job, as usual, Beth.” I threw in a wink at the woman who’d been cleaning my teeth for the past six years. Back then, she was fresh out of dental hygienist school, and I was her first.

  “You make my job easy. You floss regularly. Never had a cavity.”

  “I take oral care very seriously.”

  Beth blushed as she unclipped the paper napkin from my chest. “I’ll see you in six months.”

  “It’s a date.” I walked out of the office, feeling ready to tackle phase two of my plan.

  The tricky part.

  Part two included a different type of oral skill. Not that one just yet. It was the kind where I had to convince my best friend to test the findings I had collected with me. I was one hundred and ten percent positive she would say no—at first—but if I worded it in a way where she couldn’t say no, I was sure I could sway her decision.

  Since it was a non-yoga class day, I stopped by our favorite donut shop and picked up two Boston creams for Tenley. Thankfully, I resisted since only rainbow sprinkles greeted me from behind the glass. I wasn’t sure I could restrain myself just yet. When it came to donuts, I was a weak man.

  Stop two was the local grocery store. It was my turn to restock the supplies for movie night at her apartment. By the time I was ready to check out, popcorn, Cheetos, Milk Duds, and all things apple flavored filled the cart. There wasn’t a green thing in the cart if you didn’t count the green on the label of the bottle of vodka and the hard candies she liked to toss in her drinks.

  The lady at the checkout counter, who I guessed was in her late seventies, commented on my selections. “Oh, to have a young person's metabolism again.”

  As if it was a secret, I leaned in to tell her, “Between you and me, it’s for my girl. I have a serious question to ask her tonight.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, how serious?” she asked as she ran the items over the scanner.

  “Ten.”

  “She’s lucky to have a handsome man like you. I hope she says yes.”

  “Believe me, I’m the lucky one,” I said while I handed her the cash.

  The pause moment hit me when I took my change along with my bags. Calling Tenley my girl was normal, but when did I start calling her that instead of my best friend? I think it first happened after she had a difficult breakup. It took a week for me to get her out of her ice cream-induced coma, and when I did, it wasn’t pretty. We walked into our favorite breakfast joint only to find her ex attached to the lips of some other chick who didn’t hold a candle to Tenley. She froze, leaving me to take charge of the situation. I gave the dick a piece of my mind only with a face full of fist, claiming, “That’s for fucking around behind my girl’s back.” And a second for good measure. “That one was for me.”

  Violence probably wasn’t the best way to handle the situation, but he deserved it.

  I headed back to the apartments with the memory fresh in my mind and a full-blown smile on my face. Good times.

  I knocked on my best friend’s door with my hands loaded. I was focused on one thing—getting her to say yes.

  “What’s all this?” Tenley pointed at my hands as I placed the bags on her kitchen countertop.

  Once I unloaded the contents and put everything in its rightful place, I mixed us a drink. “It’s movie night.”

  She blinked and looked shocked. To make sure I had the date right, I checked my watch. It was, in fact, Thursday.

  “I didn’t think you’d show up since we haven’t had movie night since … you know.”

  I fell into the hell of thinking I wasn’t good enough. All my fault. Then, I was so absorbed in gathering data and working extra hours in my office that I had to flake for a bit. “Didn’t you get my text? I said I would be here tonight and every Thursday from now on. There was this project I was working on.”

  “What project?”

  Those words were the opening I was looking for. “Here,” I said, handing Tenley the glass. “Drink this. I need you to have an open mind.”

  She looked at the glass in front of her, then brought it to her lips. “How open-minded do I need to be, Preston? Are we talking half a glass or all of it? Because the look on your face is kind of freaking me out.”

  Freaking Tenley out was not what I wanted. If anything, I wanted to appear slightly, though not overly, desperate. “It’s nothing bad. I promise.”

  She followed me to the couch and took her usual seat on my right side, crossing her legs in the same lotus position she always did. It was cute. Everything about her was cute. The way she always twisted her chestnut-colored hair into these cute ponytails or pigtails. How her big brown doe eyes were constantly getting her out of speeding tickets. Pouty, heart-shaped lips with a tiny scar on the left side from the time she fell off her skateboard. Her perfectly straight nose turned up slightly at the tip. And her curves… when the hell did she get so many of them?

  “You’re looking at me funny again,” she commented as if she read my mind. Not good, Preston. Back to cute.

  “Shit. I’m sorry. I had a flashback on some things from our past.” And not about your lips or curves.

  “Okay.”

&n
bsp; I cleared my throat to focus. Talk now, curves way later. “So here’s the thing. Remember that list Chanel wrote about me?”

  “It’s not easy to forget. It was all lies, Preston. You know that, right?”

  No, I didn’t know. “It got me thinking.”

  “That’s never a good thing.”

  She was right. She knew I tended to overanalyze. “Yeah. I did this survey.”

  I explained how I gathered all the information. I told Tenley when and where I thought I went wrong in my relationship with Chanel. I ran through each item on the list I wanted to test to see if there was any truth to it. More than that, I wanted to see if I was a complete failure as a boyfriend.

  I laid it all out there. Tenley didn’t blink the entire time, and I took it as a bad sign. Was my speech boring, or did she think I was out of my ever-loving mind?

  Probably the latter. Right then, I thought I sounded a bit crazy too.

  I stopped to take a drink. In fact, I chugged the whole glass. She hadn’t finished hers, but I still took it from her hand and refilled our glasses. From over the counter, I watched. She didn’t move a muscle. Even her hand was in the same position as it was when she was holding the glass.

  What now?

  Think, Preston, think.

  I collected myself as I walked back into the living room. Tenley took the drink I handed her and swallowed it down. “What you’re saying is this was a two-glass conversation?”

  I assumed she asked me a rhetorical question. At least she was talking to me. I took it as a good sign. I came up with a plan B, knowing I’d most likely have to pull out plan C and possibly even D. There was no plan D.

  “We’ve known each other for a long time.”