Impractically Perfect: A Romantic Comedy

by Genevieve Lerner

  I could have asked him the same thing, but I was having trouble stringing my thoughts together. “Oooooh, you knowwww, just here to, um, see Tahira Jackson with Gillian...you remember Gillian, don’t you? Nope you haven’t um, met her. She’s myyyyyy um. Frieeeeend. Also roommate type thing.” It would have been very helpful if someone could have explained to me which way was up and which was way was down.

  Toby cocked his head at me. “Anyway, I was supposed to DJ tonight…but when Tahira got here, she decided she didn’t like my music, and she had her own DJ take over. So I’m just kind of…hanging.”

  This sounded like the exact kind of behavior I expected from someone like Tahira Jackson, but I made sure to act very surprised and disgusted. At least as well as I could with my eyes insisting on crossing every time I closed them and the walls spinning around me.

  “I…erm, didn’t know you did that. DJ-ing. You like music?” Wow, Penny. Of course he likes music, you complete moron.

  “Yeah, I’ve been doing it for several years, now. When Chloe I got engaged, I had this crazy idea that I would DJ the wedding myself…well, stupid idea. Didn’t work out so well, but it ended up being a good way to make some money during the off-season. As it turns out, there isn’t a whole lot of outdoor education work to be done in the dead of winter.”

  “Very…erm…smart. Well, maybe you can DJ for us, because my boyfriend w-will definitely be porpoising—I mean, proposing to me soon,” I interjected, aware of how desperate I sounded but unable to stop myself. “He’s just waiting for the right moment.” Wasn’t he?

  Suddenly, I was shoved forward off of the bench onto the floor. My face hit the concrete, nearly knocking out my teeth. “Whaaat, what the hell…?” I looked up. It was Gillian, arms full of liquor bottles, fear dancing across her face.

  “We need to go. NOW,” she said, and before I could even say goodbye, Gillian had whisked me out the door, closely followed by half a dozen giant men wearing all black. Security guards.

  “What - the hell - we just got here! What did you DO?” I asked her between gasps. A bottle of gin slipped from her grip and exploded on the floor behind us in a mess of sticky liquid and shattered glass. but there was no time to worry about that now. “Who did you piss off this time?”

  “I may have possibly accidentally made out with Tahira Jackson’s boyfriend,” she said, “but in my defense, I didn’t know it was him! I thought it was just some guy that happened to look a lot like Tahira Jackson’s boyfriend!”

  There was a wall in front of us. The only way out was over. Chucking our heels over the wall, I said, “It never once occurred to you that it might actually be him?” But apparently, Gillian wasn’t too keen on answering my question, because she stepped into my interlaced fingers and threw herself over the wall.

  I had no idea how I was going to get over myself—my upper body strength was about as useful as a cat in a field of catnip. Also just standing up straight without tipping over was turning out to be a task in itself. After a few attempts at running and hopping over, and one very embarrassing parkour-attempt that did not look anything like parkour, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “We need to get you out of here.” It was Toby. “They’re looking for you guys.”

  “I didn’t even do anything!” I protested, but he wasn’t having it.

  “Look,” he said, “they saw the two of you come in together, and they saw her wreaking complete havoc on the place and you being…well, drunk everywhere, and…yeah. They’ll probably throw you in jail or something if they find you; Tahira Jackson has the money to bribe anyone.”

  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t had even a sip of alcohol and that I was definitely not being “drunk everywhere.” It didn’t matter why they were after me; they were, and me arguing with Toby about it wasn’t going to change things. He threw his coat over me, and started ushering me towards the door, but Tahira Jackson herself whipped around the corner, and I froze. She hadn’t seen me yet, but it was only a matter of seconds.

  I needed to hide, but there was nowhere to hide. I needed to run, but there was nowhere to run. And then, before I knew what was happening, Toby stepped between us and pressed his mouth on mine, wrapping his arms around me so I became basically invisible to any passersby. Behind me, I heard a stampede of footsteps, the high-pitched, whiny voice of Tahira Jackson saying, “They must’ve gotten away, those bitches,” the club music swimming around, confusing all of my thoughts. And all the while, there were these perfect, soft lips against mine.

  When things had quieted down—not that they were quiet, exactly, the music was pulsing in my eardrums—Toby pulled away cautiously, looking around for any signs of the security guards.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, “I didn’t know how else to hide you, and—”

  “It’s okay,” I said, unable to wipe the smile off my lips. “You’re not the first one of us to accidentally give the other unwanted advances.”

  We smiled at each other, and I felt something—I don’t know what—fly between us. Maybe it was a spark of some sort. Maybe it was the rhinovirus, preparing itself to cause the common cold. Either way, we had shared something. Yet again he had helped me out, and yet again I was grateful.

  It was only a few minutes later that we snuck out of the club through a back entrance that he knew of. “The special DJ entrance,” he said, winking at me. What a little shit, I thought to myself, but giggled anyway.

  We found my shoes that I had thrown over the the wall, and ended up in an alleyway, dark and dingy, lit only by the moonlight reflecting off of broken windows and trash cans. Now that we were out of danger, I sent Gillian a text, asking her if she had made it home okay.

  Nah, was her response, i went to chico’s down the street, idk when i’ll get home

  Whelp. She was on her own. I was in no mood to go to another club, so Toby and I walked through the maze of alleyways.

  The Red Bull was already beginning to wear off, and I was again getting very, very tired. Toby believed me when I told him I wasn’t drunk.

  “Keep talking, it’ll keep me awake,” I said to him.

  Toby thought for a moment. “I’d always wanted to live in New York,” he said, “and I did for a few years. I liked a lot of things about it there, but it’s definitely not somewhere you can just go and fuck around. That city will kill you if you do. You need to be constantly on your toes, working and never letting anything get to you. So I was doing that for awhile, and honestly, it was great…in a lot of ways. I made some amazing friends, something I had been struggling with since leaving college. I did some really odd jobs, but learned some cool skills along the way. I met my wife.”

  Right. His wife. I stumbled, and Toby caught me. To my surprise, that upper half of his right arm was strong enough to hold up my body weight.

  “She wanted to get out of New York—she had grown up there—and I was getting super burned out trying to pay rent. Things got a little easier when we moved in together, because paying for a studio in Manhattan is absurdly expensive…but she wanted green. She had always dreamed of having grass and a yard and stuff. And, well, she was—well, is—a politician…so it only made sense for us to move here.”

  “Wow,” I said. “So you’ve already gone on this whole giant life adventure.”

  “Kinda, I guess?” he said. “It’s just my life, I guess I don’t really think about it like that. It’s just…what happened to me? I think of a lot of it as failures, to be honest. I failed at New York. I failed at my relationship.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking…what exactly happened with that?”

  “Ah, this old thing?” He did a few arm circles. “Born with it, actually. Well, I mean I was born with a totally screwy right forearm, I technically had one, for the first few hours of my life. I’m talking, all broken, bent…there was no fixing it. The doctors figured the best course was to amputate. I’ve had some opportunities to get a prosthesis, but I’ve been like this my whole life, so it seems easier ju
st to keep on with it.”

  I had been reddening as he told me all this. “Oh, I meant…I’m sorry. That sucks. But I was asking…with your ex-wife. What happened with…her, I mean?”

  Toby started laughing madly. “Oh my god, I thought you meant…I don’t mind talking about it, though, so it’s…” He snorted, took a breath, and tried speaking again. “With Chloe, it was honestly so many things, I couldn’t even tell you just one,” he said. “All I know is that everything was fine until we got engaged…and then she turned into someone…different. I thought I knew everything about her, but as it turned out, there were a lot of parts of her that she didn’t show me until we got close to the wedding day.

  “Our engagement was short—only six months, and then we got married, and things just kept getting worse. Neither of us was happy. We fought all the time, couldn’t agree on a what to eat for dinner, let alone what type of house we wanted, whether or not we wanted kids, all the important stuff. We tried to make our marriage work for two years…and then we decided to end things.”

  “Oh, so both of you decided? Are you on good terms at least?”

  “Well, really she decided…I wanted to keep trying to make it work, but she was done. One day she took everything…everything but her goddamn ferret, and stuffed it into our car, and drove off. I came home to an empty apartment with a ferret running around, destroying everything it touched.”

  Jesus. I couldn’t imagine being in that kind of situation. Marriage was no joke.

  So then…why was I in such a hurry to get married? Was it just because everyone I went to high school with was? Was it just because whenever I scrolled through Facebook I was bombarded by pictures from yet another wedding, or engagement, or baby being born?

  Yes. That was why. Crap.

  “So here I am, wandering through life here in D.C., wondering what the hell I’m going to do and where I’m going to go and what, if anything, is next.”

  “At least you’re not a dental hygienist,” I said. “I have to stick my hands in children’s mouths.”

  He laughed at that, and put his arm around me. I shuddered a tiny bit at his touch, and I remembered that I was still wearing his coat. It smelled like leather and old books and campfire.

  “My boyfriend, Sven…he doesn’t laugh at me like you do. I forgot that I say funny things sometimes,” I said. “You should meet him, you’d like him.” Why did I say that? They would probably hate each other, honestly.

  “I’d like that.”

  Ugh.

  “I just…I have a lot going on in my life right now,” I said to him slowly. “We have a huge gala work thing coming up, and Sven has been super busy, and Gillian is nuts, and my mom is…I don’t know. Everything is so stressful right now, and I know I should be trying to enjoy it because my whole life will pass me by if I don’t learn to enjoy the tough times…but part of me still just really wants it all to be over.”

  “That’s okay,” Toby said, pulling me into his side. Why was he so warm? I was wearing his coat, leaving him in nothing more than a long-sleeved button-down. But he was radiating heat. I snuggled in closer. I accidentally brushed his chin with my cheek, and his stubble gently scratched me. It felt…good. So good.

  I hadn’t been held like this in so long. Hadn’t been hugged like I was the only other person on the planet. Hadn’t been spoken to as if I was…

  What?

  As if I was a person worth speaking to. As if I was amazing and beautiful and incredible. As if I was all these things that nobody except my mother had ever told me I was, so eventually I stopped believing her.

  More than anything, in that moment, I wanted to kiss him. Wanted him to stroke my cheek and passionately press his lips into mine, to hold me, to push me against a wall and make me know that I was everything he wanted. Because right now, despite what I had been trying to tell myself, he was everything I wanted.

  But I didn’t. That wasn’t me. I would never do that to Sven, it wasn’t fair. And I knew that I would immediately regret it. So I said nothing, did nothing, just pretended that I had no feelings.

  Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow I will feel totally differently. I’m just really emotional right now is all, and hopped up on Benadryl, and Toby has just kind of…been here for me recently. Nothing to worry about.

  In my ear, I could hear his breathing, long and slow and heavy and calming. His warm breath made my earlobe tingle, and the tingle went all the way down my spine.

  “Toby,” I said suddenly, pulling slightly away and looking him square in the eyes, “what’s something you’ve always wanted to do?”

  For a moment, he just gazed at me, but then a faraway look came into his eyes and he turned towards the sky. His voice cracked as if he had lived a thousand lifetimes as he said, “Marry the most fascinating woman in the world. Travel to the beaten-down deserts, the snow-capped mountains, the colorful rainforests. I want to meet everyone I can, and form meaningful relationships. I want to try new foods, go running with the bulls, learn five languages, go hang-gliding, scuba diving, rock climbing. I want to create beautiful things that make people think.”

  Um, okay. Wow?

  He stood there for a moment, contemplating. “What about you?”

  “Me? I…I don’t know.”

  Except I did know. I wanted my life to go exactly as I had planned it out when I was ten years old. I didn’t want any surprises, I didn’t need any adventures.

  Unless…did I? I had never done anything that wasn’t planned. Even going to visit my mother in the suburbs required at least a week of preparation—packing everything perfectly, making sure things were in line when I got home, squeezing in last-minute doctor appointments. I never understood how some people could just do whatever they wanted, when they wanted. I never understood it…but part of me wanted to. Why couldn’t I be like them?

  Toby made me feel different. Like that maybe, just maybe, when we were together I could do something crazy. Something like not putting on my blinker when making a turn or not recording the exact number of calories I ate one day. Maybe we could go on an adventure. Maybe, things had changed a little bit since I was ten.

  “I don’t know, except…I want freedom. I’ve always done what I was supposed to do, never just done what I wanted. It’s been so long since I listened to my heart that I don’t even know what it sounds like anymore. Is it the soft tap tap tap of raindrops pattering on my head? Is it lying on an ocean beach, or diving into its depths, gazing at the coral reefs?” Ooookay, Penny. That would be the Benadryl talking.

  Toby turned to face me, and he looked…sad.

  “What’s the point in life if you don’t live it?” he said.

  I didn’t want to say it, but the words came tumbling out. “But like, I don’t want to make any mistakes. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to end up in a position I don’t want. I don’t want to end up divorced like you are, left with nothing but a ferret and a pair of basketball shorts.”

  He took my hand and gazed into my eyes very seriously. “Penny, I know my life might seem like a mess right now. But it’s my mess. And you know what? Everyone goes through this kind of stuff. Everyone has their own messes to deal with, all the time. Just because someone’s life seems perfect, there’s a good chance that they are deeply unhappy, in one way or another. And me? Yeah. I’ve gone through some rough times. I’m divorced at age 30. You think I saw myself here when I was a kid?”

  Biting my lip, I shook my head slowly. I was already ashamed of bringing up Toby’s life, of using him as an example of something I didn’t want. Jesus, what kind of apathetic humanoid robot was I?

  “But the thing is,” Toby continued, “I don’t regret anything. I’ve had some pretty crazy shit happen to me. Did you know that I’ve parachuted out of a hot air balloon before? And that I knitted a blanket for my mother? And…” his voice softened, “I’ve been in love. Truly, completely, deeply in love. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  For some reason, a pang of jea
lously slid through my heart. I had wanted to be in love, so badly, and…was I? Was I completely consumed with my love for my boyfriend?

  It was the first time I was going to voice the words in my head out loud. “I thought I had fallen in love with my boyfriend. But I don’t…I mean, I’m not sure…if he loves me.”

  Toby squeezed my hand, and we stood in silence for a moment, letting the wet slushy snowflakes fall on us. “Well, you don’t fall in love,” Toby finally said, quietly. “You jump into it. It’s a choice, but one that’s full of adventure. You could play it safe your whole life, and carefully love people a bit, I guess, and be there when they need you, and maybe they’ll be there for you too. But to really, truly, deeply fall in love? You gotta take a big breath, close your eyes, and jump off that cliff into the rushing water below. You can’t just fall…you’ll gash yourself on the jagged rocks if you’re that close to the cliff. No, in order to make love work, you need to give yourself, give everything, to somebody else. Give without expectation. Make the decision, knowing full well that you might get hurt.”

  “Why would you want to do that though? I don’t want to hurt anymore, Toby.”

  “Because,” he said, “the adventure is worth it.” And he pulled me into him and kissed me long and hard and deeply, and I realized at that moment I had never before really been kissed before. That this, this, was what I had been missing out on all my life. What I had been missing out on during my last three-and-a-half years with Sven.

  Sven. Sven. Oh god.

  “Toby, I…” I pulled away, even though I didn’t want to, I so didn’t want to. All I wanted was to kiss this man who was changing everything for me, who was making me see the world in a whole new way. But I had responsibilities. I had a boyfriend, for god’s sake. “I can’t do this.”

  As if waking from a stupor, Toby suddenly realized where we were, who I was, what he was doing. “Holy shit, Penny, I’m so sorry. God, I’m so so sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen, I…”