from my delirious ramble, I’ll lay it out for you.
I’ve yet to be sexed up by anyone.
That’s right. I have officially bought myself a one-way ticket to the afterlife as a virgin for-freaking-eternity.
And now, I guess I’ll never know how it feels to have an actual penis rub up against my G-spot because, you know, I’m dead. And I’m pretty certain God probably frowns upon people flashing their boobs at the angels and public displays of leg-spreading and definitely the unchaste actions of a desperate-to-bone but unwed woman. No way. Heaven’s strictly G-rated.
I put it all off. I figured I had time. I mean, I thought I’d at least get to see The Office do a reunion special before I went lights out for good.
Although, my parents’ flower shop feels more like purgatory than heaven, and I thought for sure I’d be wearing something other than jean shorts and Converse when I headed to meet the Big Guy upstairs.
Honestly, the afterlife feels eerily like real life, and I’m not one to be dramatic, but I have to be dead, you guys. Seriously. Because no one could live through what I did.
I’m talking a 10.0 on the Richter Scale of embarrassing and awkward.
A Category 5 hurricane of humiliation.
A twisting, catastrophic EF5 tornado of comedic disaster.
No freaking way I survived that…right?
Okay. Fine. So, I can be a little dramatic sometimes…
And maybe, just maybe, I’m exaggerating things a bit here, but I’m doing it in the name of self-preservation.
Because, trust me, if you did what I did, you’d let yourself mentally pretend to be dead for a little bit too.
Because if I’m not dead, I’m going to have to face the consequences of my awful, humiliating, cringeworthy actions.
I’m going to have to face him.
Milo Ives—a tall, handsome, unbelievably sexy drink of water.
A man I’ve known since I was a prepubescent girl.
A man I’ve basically been crushing on my whole damn life.
A billion-dollar-empire kind of successful man who just so happens to be my brother’s best friend.
I’ll say it again for the folks in the back.
Milo Ives is my brother’s billionaire best friend.
And I’m in way over my head.
Maybe
“Yoo-hoo, Betty! Where is Maybe? I thought she was going to man the front for a few hours?” my dad shouts, his voice filtering with ease into the back room of the floral shop.
Just the sound of it makes a deep, cavernous sigh escape my lungs.
And the fact that he’s asking about my whereabouts? Now that’s worthy of a tight chest.
“I think she just needed a minute to—” my mom starts to reply, but she’s cut off before she can convey any real information. Bruce the super-sniffing shark only needs a trace of blood in the water to attack.
“Needed a minute?” He guffaws. “I’ve needed a minute for the past thirty years, but you don’t see me dillydallying around.”
“Bruce,” my mom chastises. “Stop being such a grumpy bastard.”
My dad’s been on the warpath since he found out our shipment of Gerbera daisies is running behind schedule, but his behavior really isn’t the slow delivery’s fault. Today, when it comes to Bruce, isn’t any different from any other day.
He always has zany criticism for me and my mother—what we call Bruce-isms—and an overabundance of dad jokes locked and loaded and ready for use.
Deep breaths, I coach myself as I finish up an email to a potential publishing house. This is only temporary.
Too bad it doesn’t feel that way.
I’ve only been back in New York for two weeks, but it may as well have been an eternity.
I just completed graduate school on the West Coast and moved back here to find a career in publishing, and all in all, I felt like I was making the right moves. While I had friends in school, I never found the core group of people that would be mine for life, and in New York, I have an emergency support system.
Plus, New York has far more options for a career in publishing than California and over eight and a half million people who could be potential friends.
Honestly, before turning in my final thesis, it all sounded pretty simple.
Find a job—preferably as an editor at a prominent New York publishing house.
Get an apartment.
Find new friends.
Find a man etc, etc.
Alas, things in real life are never as easy as they are on paper, and as a result, I’m currently spending forty hours of my week working side by side with my parents and living out of my brother Evan’s old bachelor pad in