Not Quite A mom

by Kirsten Sawyer

  “We’ll be fine,” Courtney says, clearly not picking up on any of Buck’s misgivings. “The girls can stay where they stayed last time,” she says, adopting a woman-of-the-house tone. “Obviously I’ll be in your bed,” she adds in a suggestive whisper.

  “Oh, right, well…I actually never, never sleep in my bed. I’m much more comfortable out here with Wildcat, so you make yourself comfortable in the bedroom.”

  Courtney’s face finally shows a slight understanding of what’s going on here, but she quickly laughs it off. “So, Buck, we need your opinion on something, don’t we, girls?” she says to Tiffany and me. Neither of us has any idea what she’s talking about.

  “Oh, sure,” Buck says hesitantly, “why don’t you all sit down and get comfortable. Anybody want anything?”

  We all gather around the living room’s cluttered coffee table. Buck has clearly cleaned up for our visit, but the table is still littered by newspapers and issues of Sports Illustrated. I pleasantly note that the swimsuit issue is absent from the collection. Tiffany climbs into the small space on the couch where the dozing dog isn’t, and I curl up in a large chair. Across from me, Courtney sits on the loveseat, her arm lying across the back. Poor Buck takes a glance around the room and then takes a seat on the floor in front of Wildcat. As if the dog could protect him from the predatory Courtney—ha!

  “So, what’s the needed opinion?” Buck says quickly, obviously wanting to engage everyone in a topic that will distract Courtney from insisting he sit with her. Normally in these situations, which are sadly common, when Courtney sets her sights on a man who is far from interested, I pity my friend; but for some strange reason, in this particular case it is Buck that I am feeling protective of.

  “Don’t you think buying Dan in a charity date auction is a brilliant way for Elizabeth to win him back?” she says, beaming with pride over her idea.

  I am horrified and humiliated. For some reason, I do not want Buck to know anything about Plan C…or any of the plans. My face flushes with red-hot embarrassment.

  “I hardly think Buck is interested in this,” I say quickly. “Should we see what’s on TV?” I reach for the remote.

  “Wait, no…she’s going to buy him back?” Buck asks, his expression a complicated combination of amusement and horror.

  I’m noticing for the first time how much he looks like Josh Lucas (whom I actually met and interviewed this week…he was so hot that I was actually sweating from being near him). I wish he didn’t look so much like Josh, and I’m wishing he didn’t look so intrigued by the details of Plan C.

  “It’s Plan C,” Tiffany says, nonchalantly thumbing through the pile of magazines, “”Don’t you have anything besides Sports Illustrated?” she whines.

  “Plan C?” Buck repeats, and I cringe.

  “Yeah, Plan A was the supermarket thing and Plan B was the jury duty thing. We want her to do the reverse-rear-end thing, but she refuses,” Tiffany continues, without taking any notice of my silent cues, commands, and pleas to stop talking.

  “You’re kidding, right?” he asks me.

  “Well, it’s kind of just for fun,” I say, pathetically trying to cover. Obviously, no one in her right mind would have fun humiliating herself repeatedly in front of her ex-fiancé.

  “So, what is this charity date auction where you’re going to buy him?” Buck asks skeptically.

  “Oh, it’s complicated,” I say. “Is The Apprentice on tonight?”

  “She actually has to organize the auction,” Courtney pipes up. She has draped herself across the loveseat and has removed her Juicy hoody to reveal a revealing SparkleCourt bedazzled wife beater. “She has to join the Los Angeles Harvard Alumni Association and then volunteer to plan the event. It’s not really that complicated,” she continues, gazing at Buck. Then she turns to me. “Elizabeth, didn’t you say you were exhausted?”

  It’s not a very subtle hint—Courtney wants to be alone with Buck. Although there is part of me that doesn’t want this to happen (the same part that didn’t like seeing Courtney and Buck walk down the hall together the first night he came to L.A.), there is another part that will do anything to escape continuing this conversation with Buck.

  “Right, I am exhausted. Tiff, didn’t you say you were, too?” I carefully avoid looking at Buck and stare directly at Tiffany, who begins to shake her head, then sees my look and catches on.

  “I really am exhausted. I’m going to turn in, too,” she says, without sounding at all convincing.

  We get up to leave and Buck quickly stands. “Are you sure you’re tired? You look okay.”

  “We’re exhausted,” I confirm, “goodnight,” and with that, Tiffany and I retreat to our guest room, where the inflatable bed is already set up on the floor.

  Buck is left alone with Courtney, and Tiffany and I have nothing to do but go to sleep. I actually am exhausted, although I have a hard time falling asleep because I can’t stop thinking about Buck and Courtney alone together. I don’t know why it eats away at me, but it does. I’m restless the entire night because I am preoccupied with the hope that they didn’t have sex. I don’t know why I care so much, but I do.

  I wake up early—or rather, I stop trying and failing to sleep early and pad out into the hallway. I am desperate to see if Buck is asleep on the small couch or if he has spent the night in his bed with Courtney. I tiptoe down the hall and into the living room. I hold my breath and say silent prayers that Buck will be on the couch. I hear soft snoring and relief fills me until I peer over the back of the couch and find Wildcat stretched out comfortably. I am crushed and angered. How could he sleep with Courtney? He hardly knows her!

  I stomp into the kitchen and bang through the cupboards looking for coffee. I’m about halfway through the kitchen when I hear “Shhh” behind me. I turn around and find Buck, shirtless in the same workout shorts as the night before, his eyes not completely open yet. His chest is perfectly sculpted, with just a small amount of golden hair between his hard pecs. I want to put my hands on his hard body and press my own against it. I’m incredibly jealous that Courtney got to do just that. Why can’t Dan’s body be like Buck’s? “It’s early,” he says sleepily.

  “Sorry,” I say coldly, “I couldn’t sleep and I’d like some coffee.”

  “Whoa, wake up on the wrong side of the air mattress?” he says with an adorable smile. The smile pisses me off.

  “I can’t believe you slept with Courtney,” I say and as soon as the words are out of my mouth I can’t believe I’ve let them go.

  The truth is that I have absolutely no right or legitimate reason to be upset. Aside from his being a high school dance date that I blew off, I have absolutely no claim to Buck Platner. I have to spin this.

  “She really likes you, and if you’re going to treat her like just another conquest you should be ashamed of yourself,” I say, and immediately feel ashamed of myself. I cannot believe I have gotten myself into this conversation and I can’t believe that I keep digging in deeper.

  Buck looks right at me and his normally warm eyes turn icy. Immediately I know I’ve gone too far.

  “Your friend Courtney is extremely aggressive,” he says.

  “She’s extremely passionate,” I counter. I don’t know why…somehow my brain and my mouth are no longer connected and I can’t stop myself.

  He looks at me like I’m crazy, but before he can say anything, Courtney saunters out of the bedroom and toward the kitchen. She is dressed in the T-shirt Buck greeted us in the night before. Her blonde curls are cascading down her shoulders in a sexy mess. I feel pathetic, with my thin ponytail and Old Navy pajama pants.

  “Good morning, lover,” she calls to Buck, who flushes slightly.

  Just before Courtney reaches us he turns to me and intensely looks me in the eye. “I did not have sex with her,” he says.

  I feel catapulted to the moon. I want to grab him and kiss him and tell him how relieved I am…but I can’t. Courtney steps up behind him and puts her arm
s around his bare chest. He noticeably flinches, but she doesn’t notice. What she does notice, apparently for the first time, is me.

  “Oh, hey, Elizabeth,” she says with a grin.

  Buck turns away from me and toward Courtney. “Did you sleep alright?” he asks her.

  The rest of the weekend is a sucky blur. Courtney dominates most of Buck’s time…not that it matters, since I clearly offended him and he isn’t letting it go. Sunday night, as Courtney and Tiffany are packing up the car, I find myself alone in the living room with Buck. I open my mouth to talk to him, and my tongue feels thick and clumsy.

  “Buck, I’m so sorry,” I start.

  The tension that has surrounded him like a shell all weekend immediately melts away. “No, don’t be. I was just in a bad mood. Courtney is a handful.”

  “Yeah, I know she is,” I admit.

  “It was good to see you and Tiffany, though,” he says.

  “Thanks, it was good to see you, too,” and I lean forward to hug him good-bye.

  I turn my head to kiss him on the cheek, but something strange happens. Buck also moves his head in a way that puts us on a direct path to an unavoidable lip collision. Before I know it, the kiss has come and gone. It was just a tiny peck. “Friendly,” is probably too generous a description, but it leaves my lips tingling and my cheeks warm. I look up at Buck, but his face doesn’t register that anything out of the ordinary has occurred.

  “Good luck with Plan C,” he says gently, and my cheeks flame to a scarlet red.

  Before I can say a word, Courtney dramatically comes through the front door exclaiming, “I can’t believe it’s already Sunday!”

  Me neither, I think at the exact same time Buck says it out loud. I glance up at him; he is looking over Courtney’s shoulder—she’s embracing him now as if they are long-lost sweethearts—directly at me.

  34

  Much too quickly for my taste, Renee recovers from her accident and is back in the anchor chair (couch) and I am demoted back to my “Fact Girl” desk for less than a minute a day. All I have left of my moment in the spotlight are e-mails of praise from the studio and network and a small pile of fan mail. Yes, I actually received fan mail and it’s some of the most simultaneously gratifying and terrifying letters I have ever seen. The only fortunate thing about Renee’s return to work is that not hosting the show lightens my schedule significantly and gives me much more time to work on Plan C.

  For reasons I still cannot figure out, I have become a member of the Los Angeles Harvard Alumni Association under the name Lizzie Platner. Not only that, I have struck up a friendship with the association’s president, Suzanne McNally, who thinks she remembers me from her freshman dorm. This supposed Ivy Leaguer insists that we lived down the hall from each other for an entire year. I really have no choice but to agree with her. After countless trips down a memory lane I have never even visited, I finally work up the guts to suggest the charity date auction.

  I think part of me is hoping she will reject the idea and save me from the possible (probable) humiliation that Plan C is sure to bring. Unfortunately, Suzanne’s love life doesn’t have much life in it and any opportunity to land a man is one that she jumps at. She loves the idea, and before I have a moment to catch my breath, we’re planning away. I had intended to work on this project alone, but Suzanne is so excited about it that we end up as cochairs. The best thing about this is that Suzanne, ever eager for any exposure to the opposite sex, is happy to call all the Los Angeles alumni between twenty-five and forty years old listed as “single” in their membership profile. This means that I don’t have to worry about Dan’s recognizing my voice and putting an end to Plan C before it even begins. (And I don’t have to worry about his not recognizing my voice and driving me to suicide.) The only concern now is that Dan’s relationship with Defender Bitch has taken him from “single” to “double.”

  Within weeks, Suzanne has a list of twenty-seven eligible Harvard male grads for the single (desperate) alumnae in the Los Angeles area to bid on. Ironically, what started as an extremely selfish act has turned rather unselfish, since the auction will be raising money to help a local homeless shelter. I sit across from her in her mostly pink West Los Angeles apartment—anything west of the 405 and north of Pico is considered prime “Westside” property—eyeing the neatly typed-up spreadsheet of bachelors. Today’s project is to set a starting price for each man…it’s actually a pretty entertaining way to spend a Saturday afternoon. We study each man’s picture, along with his résumé, and set prices ranging from twenty-five to one hundred dollars. Mind you, these are only starting prices…hopefully, there will be lots of bidding on everyone except Dan. I actually still don’t know for a fact that Dan is a participant, but at this point I’m not sure I’ll be able to drop out of the event even if I don’t come across his name on the list.

  I’m starting to lose hope by the time we get to the second page, and I’m also growing really bored with setting fifty-to seventy-five-dollar starting prices for Century City corporate attorneys who enjoy golfing and wine tasting. Finally, the third name on the second page is Dan’s.

  “Daniel McCafferty,” Suzanne says, “Beverly Hills assistant D.A. Oooh, lives in Beverly Hills, and it says he just got out of a relationship.” Suzanne had each man fill out a detailed questionnaire about himself after his acceptance to be auctioned off. “He’s pretty cute,” she says, handing me a small picture of Dan.

  An arrow pierces my heart as I take the picture…it was once a picture of the two of us standing side-by-side at his friend Lee’s wedding. Dan is dressed in a tuxedo and looking extremely handsome. You can still see part of my hand dangling next to his, but the rest of me has been cut off.

  “You think?” I ask, trying to play it cool.

  “Definitely. I bet we could make him a hundred-dollar bachelor,” she says and starts to mark it on his profile page.

  “No!” I almost shout. “He’s only an A.D.A.,” I point out, trying to regain my composure, “and I actually think I kind of remember him being a jerk.”

  “Really?” Suzanne asks and then tilts her head to one side. “Oh my gosh—Danny McCafferty…I totally remember him now, he was a jerk. Remember, he lived downstairs from us? He was the one who had sex with that really fat girl, Marly Something…Marty Something, and then never called her. Fifty dollars,” she says with a look of distaste on her face.

  I also have a look of distaste on my face, and a sick feeling in my stomach. Dan and I had supposedly shared all of our previous sexual encounters with each other. He had never mentioned a one-night stand in his college dorm. Suzanne obviously doesn’t have a good memory, I try to console myself. She remembers me living down the hall from her and I didn’t even attend Harvard. She could easily have Dan confused with some other chubby chaser. And at least now Dan’s starting bid is fifty dollars, so hopefully I won’t lose my rent buying back my fiancé.

  35

  Things go smoothly right up until the week before the date auction. Really, things were going too smoothly and I should have realized that it wasn’t realistic that they would remain that way. One week—actually six days—before the auction, Suzanne calls me.

  “So, Lizzie,” she says. I used to cringe, almost convulse, when I was called Lizzie, but neither Tiffany nor Buck seem able to break the habit so I’m growing accustomed to it. “I don’t think either of us should bid at the auction.”

  “What?!?” I ask in confusion and alarm. Not only is this entire thing a waste for me if I’m not “allowed” to bid on Dan, I’m completely confused that Suzanne, the biggest manhunter I’ve ever met (aside from Courtney), doesn’t want to bid.

  “I think it might look weird if we were bidding. Like we rigged it or something. Although Alex Turner, class of ’93, is a hottie…” she trails off.

  “He is a total hottie!” I encourage. “You should totally bid on him. No one will think we rigged a charity date auction. He could be the one for you,” I add, dangling the happi
ly ever after that I know she desperately seeks.

  “No,” she states, quickly collecting her resolve. “It’s inappropriate. In fact, I think we should bring dates,” she adds.

  “Dates?” I ask. “I thought the whole point of the auction was to get a date.”

  It turns out that Suzanne met someone at her speed-dating session earlier in the week. In a breathlessly dreamy voice, she explains that she had been doing speed dating every week for almost a year and a half and certainly didn’t expect to meet someone now, but she has, and although it’s only been four days, they are very much in love. So she’s invited him to the “charity event” she is hosting and doesn’t want him to know that she ever considered bidding on a date because that would make her look like she was totally desperate. I use every ounce of my energy to avoid saying that the mere fact that she has done speed dating for eighteen months proves just how very desperate she was, and I find myself agreeing that we will bring dates and not bid on any of the bachelors.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I say as I hang up the phone, although I rarely curse.

  “Everything alright?” Renee’s shrill voice asks from the door to my office. She stands there dressed in yet another Juicy warm-up suit, this one a pale pink terry cloth, leaning on a cane with her right foot wrapped in a bright pink plaster cast.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, I silently repeat in my head. See…I save it for really bad things.

  “Elizabeth, I need to go over a couple of facts for items on next week’s shows,” she says. Then she leans against the doorway and says, “Ow, I really need to sit.” I motion to the couch against the glass wall opposite my desk. She looks at it for a second before saying, “A chair would be better,” looking at the chair behind my desk.