“Of course,” he says. “You’d be my wife. And you’re bound to love a C&C.”
“C&C? Like the sailboat?”
“Chopper and cock,” he says. “Cock in the cockpit. Blow job while flying. Can’t be beat.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve already had this done before,” I tell him and I cringe at the thought of him getting head by some bimbo in the air.
He reaches across the table and pats my hand. “You’ll be the first.”
“You’re so romantic,” I say dryly to which he laughs.
Here goes another year.
CHAPTER TWO
27
I think I’m in love with Owen Geary.
In fact, I know I’m in love with Owen Geary. Even the sound of his name does this thing to my blood, boils it up a little, makes my head feel all swimmy.
Twenty-seven is going to be the best year yet.
It’s mid-October and San Francisco is going through yet another heatwave. I’m wearing black leather shorts to my job at All Saints, trying to ignore the small traces of cellulite that appear on my upper thigh in the wrong light. I’m still in my twenties, life is still good. I can get past the fact that my own fucking skin is turning on me.
Sometimes I wonder if I need to become a vegetarian, maybe eat more kale and nuts and less cupcakes and fruity cocktails. When I turned twenty-seven yesterday, I made the conscious decision to start using night cream and serums and fancy sunscreens. My father may have darker skin because of his Mediterranean heritage, but I knew I wasn’t exempt.
I also decided I needed to start doing yoga and training for marathons. The city’s one was a few weeks ago and all the fit, lean ladies were doing their effortless runs through Golden Gate Park or their sprints up the stairs to Twin Peaks. I used to be able to coast through life without lifting a single weight but now my body is starting to add extra fat to my thighs, stomach, and boobs. The boob part I can live with, but I feel like if I don’t do something soon, I’m going to be a blob. A blob with big boobs.
Part of me wants to just keep on keeping on, as I always have. But I can’t do that. I have goals. Sure, I’m still a manager at All Saints, but I feel like my own store is just within my reach. And my love life is finally where it should be.
Of course there are things about Owen that aren’t perfect. He’s an accountant at a major firm downtown, so he’s extremely successful but he works long hours and he doesn’t really have that dreamer’s mentality about him. He’s handsome in that clean-cut all American boy way, and it’s great, though his ears are a little bit big and pointy. And he loves to talk about golf when I’d rather him talk about hockey.
Despite all of that, it’s hard to find fault. I mean, other faults. Plus he’s good enough in the sack and we have plenty of things to talk about. Most of all, he’s dependable and dependable is what I need right now, especially when the rest of my life is kind of hanging in the balance.
My parents are separating and probably getting a divorce, another blow to the past year and a total surprise. I always thought of divorce as something that ripped apart my friends’ families in grade school, and that had lasting effects in high school. But I never imagined that it could happen beyond that tumultuous realm of adolescence. Yet suddenly, or at least it seems sudden, my father decided he wanted to be free of my mother. He packed up and moved to Oklahoma.
I still don’t know why. My mom doesn’t know either, or so she says. I’ve asked her if dad fell in love with someone else, I’ve asked my dad if he found someone else but the answer is always the same: change. He needed change.
I just don’t see how you can be married to someone for thirty-five years and then suddenly need change. Why at thirty-five? Why not thirty? Twenty? After everything my family had gone through with my brother, Nate, and the years and years of having to cope and move on…why now?
So now I spend my weekends with my mother in Petaluma, out of guilt. My father rarely calls or emails. Maybe he feels guilt too. I hate seeing how sad my mom is, how empty the house is, how jaded she’s become about life.
Maybe that’s why I really hit it off with Owen – to show her that I could have someone and make it work even if she couldn’t. The dependable men, those are the ones that stick around, the ones you marry. Not the playboys. Not the dreamers. Not, apparently, someone like my father.
Besides, it doesn’t matter what she thinks. I love Owen Geary.
Since I started dating him a few months ago, I’ve seen James and Linden less and my friend Nicola Price more. I actually went to grade school with Nicola, though we were never friends back then, and reconnected when we both went to the Art Institute for a year, both of us in fashion merchandising. Owen likes Nicola; he doesn’t like James or Linden. James, I’m going to assume, because he’s my ex-boyfriend, and Linden because he’s a guy who’s close to me. And he’s Linden.