“This is the opposite of perfect,” I whispered to him, and he scrunched his forehead up so that it wrinkled all adorably. “But I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
And then I leaned all the way in and kissed him full on the lips, breathing in his warmth, the wonderful smell of his hair—like a baby, I thought vaguely, but my thoughts were barely coherent.
Chapter Eighteen
Things Always Get Better
“Hey Mom,” I said after unlocking my phone and cradling it between my ear and shoulder. My hands were full of groceries for the upcoming week. Now that I wasn’t working and I was spending so much time with Toby, who definitely made a lot less money than Sven, I was going out to eat way less, and cooking way more. Sure, I missed getting sushi three nights a week, but nothing beats making your own pizza from scratch.
“Aw, hun, it’s so good to hear your voice! I’d been missing it over the last few years, it’s like you forgot we existed, all the way out here in the ‘burbs! But talking to you every day…it’s like I finally actually know what’s going on in your life!”
“Whatever, Mom,” I said, trying to sound embarrassed. I wasn’t.
I could practically hear her smiling on the other end. “Penny, it’s just good to hear you sound so much…like yourself. I can’t remember the last time your voice sounded like that. It’s been years, sweetie. Since you were a kid.”
As much as I wanted to roll my eyes at her, I knew she was right. Knew that my voice was actually reflecting how I felt. Happy. Fulfilled. Relaxed. “Thanks,” I said, because I had no other words.
My phone buzzed against my ear. It was a notification, telling me that Candice and Camille’s podcast was just nominated for a Talkie. It was one of the awards that podcasters give out to each other—I had never heard of it before, but it was apparently a big deal. The twins had been talking about the possibility of a nomination for weeks.
“This will open up so many doors for us,” I remembered Camille saying, while Candice had nodded over her shoulder. “We could get so much funding, it’s stupid.”
“Plus,” Candice said, “maybe we could get you on the show! You’d end up even more famous after that whole debacle.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m going to want to be in the spotlight anytime soon after that. I guess I never realized how invasive and scary it can be.”
“We’re used to it,” said Camille, shrugging. “It’s part of the work, you know? And I think it’s important to be able to share the things that we think are, well…important to share. Our story about Dr. Booper has officially spread to seventy-three countries. As more of this stuff comes out, we think that less of it will happen. But that’s why we want you to come on the show. So we can have a firsthand account of all the shitty things he did to people.”
And this, this, was the reason I didn’t want to be reminded of Dr. Booper ever, ever again.
Sure, he hadn’t been the best boss, but I could deal with the shit he did to me. He hadn’t paid me enough, and had taken advantage of my skills and my time. So what.
There were people from whom he stole thousands—maybe even hundreds of thousands—of dollars. There were people who had surgeries that didn’t even have to be done. There were people who were disfigured because of him. Cyril had had to deal with inappropriate touching and grabbing because of him.
Because of me.
Because I had been too self-involved to notice. Because I hadn’t done anything about it.
Candice must have seen the look on my face, because she put an arm around me. “Hindsight, Penny. Hindsight. There’s no way you could have really understood what was going on, or known. We would’ve told you, but we weren’t sure ourselves. And when we finally got all the proof we needed, we couldn’t tell anyone and risk it getting out before we made a big media announcement. Don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault.”
I knew it would take me a lot more than that for me to start feeling less horribly guilty for all the people I had failed. But the past was over. And now there was only today, and I was going to spend the rest of my life working towards making sure that people in my life would never be taken advantage of again.
Mom’s voice on the other end of the phone snapped me back to reality. “Classes going okay, babe?”
“They’re…amazing, Mom. Why didn’t you ever tell me I should be doing this?”
“Sweetheart, you wanted to make money, you wanted to move away from everything about your childhood, I don’t know, you—”
“Mom. Mom. I’m kidding. It’s not as if I would have listened to you anyway.”
She laughed. “True story, that.”
“But in all seriousness, I love it. Talking and listening…it’s like, what I’ve always wanted to do. I didn’t realize that it didn’t have to be involved with…teeth.”
“So that’s a no-go then?”
I dropped my groceries on the kitchen floor, put Mom on speaker, and threw my phone on the counter. The place was certainly looking a lot nicer now that Toby and I had been sprucing it up. We’d gotten Ferdinand a huge cage, which he not only adored, but actually pooped in, which in itself was worth the price tag. A few pieces of furniture, a rug, and a couple coats of paint later, and the apartment looked like a totally different place. There was no hint of Toby’s ex here, except for a particularly stubborn stain on the hardwood floors, which he told me was from a spilled bottle of nail polish remover.
My friendship with Gillian had continued getting more and more strained, until Toby finally suggested that I move in with him. I was hesitant at first—I had always thought I would be married to a guy—or at least engaged—before we moved in together. But when had Toby ever led me wrong?
Gillian apologized for destroying my ant farm the day after I moved out. It had been Tahira Jackson, after all, who had sent the offending tweet, after discovering that Gillian was still seeing her boyfriend. Apparently, the night that Gillian had claimed that she hadn’t gone out, she had actually been clubbing with Tahira Jackson, who had stolen her phone, tweeted the tweet, and sent lots of inappropriate texts to her coworkers in revenge. Gillian learned all of this while watching one of Tahira Jackson’s YouTube videos, where she had bragged about the whole thing, while waving Gillian’s stolen phone at the camera. Fortunately Gillian had been in much less trouble with her boss than she had expected—the internet had forgotten all about her tweets by the next morning.
Gillian showed up at my door at 7pm with a bottle of wine, a three-page-long apology letter, and a handful of 90’s dance movie DVDs. She cried as she explained how terrible she felt about it, and that whenever she found ants in the apartment for the next few weeks, she just left them some crumbs to eat, because she couldn’t bear to squash them or to take them outdoors to freeze. She also offered to replace the ant farm, but I realized that now that it was gone, I didn’t miss it so much. And petting Ferdinand was better for my nerves than watching the ants had ever been.
Now that I was no longer living with her, our friendship blossomed. It helped that she couldn’t pawn off all the housework on me. Now that she was no longer my unofficial landlord, I felt more comfortable telling her off when she got a little too bitchy. She still invited me to her crazy clubs on the weekends, and once in awhile I actually went. Voluntarily.
Even better, now that there was an extra bedroom in their place, the twins had made it into a studio, filling it with brand-new equipment. Gillian had even started dabbling in some YouTubing.
Because I was doing something I actually found fulfilling, I wasn’t even jealous of Gillian’s super successful social media presidential campaign. Or the fact that she was now making enough money with it that she could afford to hire out two remote assistants, thereby cutting her already small workload in half. I mean, I was barely jealous.
Most importantly, now that I had moved out, Mrs. Purrpaws and I could live our separate lives at a comfortable distance from one another.
As I threw a
head of lettuce and a carton of eggs into the fridge, I continued my conversation with Mom.
“I don’t think I’ll be going back to dentistry, no. I mean, I was offered a job with Dr. Strata, but I probably won’t take it. Cyril’s there now as an office assistant, and she loves it. They are funding her getting her dental hygiene degree! She fits in so well with the staff there, and it’s a big enough practice that she can get off whenever she needs more time with her kid. Plus, he actually pays her a decent amount.”
“Finally!”
“Right? But me? I don’t know. I guess I could always go back to it—if I need to. But even though being a school psychologist won’t pay nearly as well as I had always hoped my dream job would, I don’t know…when I’m working with these kids, these kids that need actual help, that just want to talk to an adult that will take them seriously…well, that’s kind of all the payment I need.”
Just then, I heard the door creaking open—one of the things still on our list was replacing the hinges on the front door. Toby stepped in, and I bounded up to see him, abandoning the grocery bags on the floor.
“You’re home early,” he said, scooping me into a hug. “What have you been up to?”
“Oh nothing,” I said mischievously. He started toward the living room, but I grabbed the back of his shirt. “Um, don’t go in there. For like, five minutes. I might have a little something for you.”
From the counter came a familiar voice. “Could you wait to be all mushy until after I get off the phone, Penny?” Whoops.
“Sorry Mom, send Cam my love, can’t wait to see you next week!” I called out as I nearly tripped over myself running for the phone. “Bye!”
“What?” Toby asked, a huge smile breaking across his face. “What’s going on?”
“Listen to your girlfriend!” I told him seriously. “Just…turn around and face the door.” He laughed, no doubt remembering the first time he had told me to do the same thing. The first time he had brought me into this apartment.
“Okay, okay, but I’m coming in in five minutes, EXACTLY. Or else!”
When I finally called to him from the living room, seven minutes later, he was still just standing at the edge of the kitchen island, eyes closed. He stormed in, pretending to be annoyed, but I knew he was excited. I knew he was over the moon to have someone that loved him so much, who didn’t care about his past, who didn’t care about what he looked like, but only cared about now. And I felt the same way about him.
Which was why I had spent the last few months writing my very first song.
I shyly greeted him, sitting in my folding chair, with my music stand and music out in front of me.
“You got it out.” My oboe was resting on my legs.
“I did.”
“I thought you said you never wanted to—”
“I changed my mind. And I’ve been working on this song. I wrote it, actually. It’s um. It’s for you.”
I watched Toby’s face as his eyebrows raised slightly, his cheeks flushed, and his lips parted. “You wrote a song…for me?”
“Well, don’t get too excited yet, I haven’t played it in front of anyone.”
“Right, right. Not excited. No expectations.” But he was bursting with something. Pride? Happiness? I wasn’t sure.
“Well. Here it goes.”
I took a deep breath, and put my lips to the reed.
Afterword
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Please keep reading for a free excerpt from my first novel, Chrissy à la Carte!
Chrissy's life is a ludicrously humiliating hot mess. She's homeless, unemployed, broke, extremely single...and now she has to live with her parents! What could be better?
...Literally, anything.
Available now on Amazon!
Chapter One
Moving Is The Worst!
I held my breath as I dropped my tiny, virtually empty suitcase to the ground. I passed over the doorbell, which has been broken for the past twelve years, and, squeezing my eyes shut as tightly as I could, pounded on the front door with my fist. I couldn’t believe I was actually doing this. The thing I swore to myself I would avoid at all costs. What was wrong with me? These people hated me! Well, hate’s a pretty strong word. But they didn’t exactly like me.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had all but refused to go to college. What did I need a degree for, anyway? But Mom and Dad can be surprisingly forceful when they get the chance, and apparently my studying “something academic” actually meant something to them. I ended up graduating from a tiny private college in Kansas (it was the only school that had accepted me), certainly devoid of honors, with a BA in Psychology. Not so much because I was particularly interested in psychology. Mostly because it had the easiest classes and the fewest credits necessary for graduation.
But I’m not a slacker. I’m really not.
So in rebellion, the day after my graduation, I ran off to Texas with my then-boyfriend Enrique, a super-hot biker. Well, he seemed super-hot. At first. I mean, he was older. And he had a bright red Harley-Davidson; what’s not hot about that?
But as it turns out, being on the road with a forty-year-old biker isn’t nearly as romantic as it sounds. Did you know that they barely let you change your clothes? And that you’re in the desert for long periods of time with NO SHOWERS? And that you have to pee in bushes and stuff?
After about a month, instead of clean leather, he smelled like body odor and tumbleweed. After about two months, what was once his “sexy scruff” beard had grown so long that he could tie it into a knot. And it was three whole months before I finally noticed that the tattoo on his left arm had three women’s names on it. “My wife,” he explained to me when I asked about them. “And my two little girls.”
Not the easiest news to digest, let me tell you.
“Were you planning on telling your girlfriend about them anytime? Or were you just going to bring me to your house and wait until I figured it out myself?” Enrique had stared at me blankly for a full five seconds after I said that. And then he started laughing—much more, I’d like to point out, than was necessary.
“Girlfriend?” he managed to choke out. “You?”
Oh. So that was why he barely gave me more than a peck on the cheek, ever. I guess I was so excited to have a boyfriend that I pretty much forgot what it actually meant to, well, have a boyfriend.
I didn’t see too much of Enrique after that. He couldn’t believe that I had actually thought we were a couple, and made that so abundantly clear at least once an hour that I couldn’t take it anymore. The next day, I hid in the bathroom of a gas station, and he took off without even looking for me. I’m not even sure if he ever noticed I was gone.
So with no home, no biker to support me, and having spent what was left of my graduation money from Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Bert on a new tattoo for Enrique (before he laughed at the idea of me being his girlfriend), I had to get a job. With my completely, totally, perfectly useful degree in psychology.
First, there was that waitressing job, from which I was fired because I may have accidentally-on-purpose told the entire staff of my boss’s erectile dysfunction disorder. But only because he was an asshole and I had bonded with his sexually-frustrated wife. There was a period where I tried working for all of the big corporations—Starbucks, McDonald’s, Rite Aid…until I realized that they actually care if you
don’t come in on time. Then was that bicycle repair shop and a stint working at an amusement park, both from which I was fired for not bothering to read the safety instruction manual properly. Not that anybody died or anything.
But I’m not lazy. I’m really, really not. There are just some things that aren’t worth my time.
And so, a year after graduation, here I was again, on the stoop of my parents’ house in San Francisco, California. Or, as I like to call it, the ninth circle of hell.
There wasn’t much time to contemplate just how shitty my situation was, because a moment later a familiar face appeared, which at first looked confused, and then surprised, and then just very, very, happy.
“Christina! It’s so good to see you! What, they don’t have phones in Texas?”
“Hey, Dad,” I said, allowing him to lift me into one of those hugs that your parents reserve for special occasions, such as your middle school graduation or your sixteenth birthday. Or showing up on their doorstep without warning after not having spoken in a year. “I’ve missed you!”
It was more than true. While many months without Mom had sounded like a great plan, not having my father in my life made what were once easy decisions a lot more challenging. Decisions like whether or not to pay for your biker boyfriend’s new tattoo with the rest of your savings.
My dad was dressed in sweatpants and his favorite slippers that I had bought him for Christmas at least six years ago. His t-shirt was slightly snug. He looked exactly the same as I remembered, although his bald spot might have grown. But only slightly. “You look good, Dad.”
Impractically Perfect: A Romantic Comedy Page 19
