“I have to admit, it’s exhausting having the same conversations every night. It’s like I’m being interviewed nonstop. It’s like going on one continuous first date. How can these men enjoy serial courtship?”
“It’s a quick hook-up. The ones that enjoy it are the guys getting laid.”
We both burst out into laughter.
Chapter 2
Marj shouldn’t have been thinking about her spray tan. She should have been focused on the orientation for her new job. Still, she had forked over nineteen bucks for some cosmetology student to make her Bermuda tan and she’d left the shop looking more of a Dreamsicle orange. Marj had gone after her limbs with the loofah, but no amount of exfoliation had rid her of her sherbet hue. So instead of listening to the trainer drone on about the PowerPoint, Marj was obsessing over the fact that her gorgeous and diligently toned long legs were an unflattering apricot shade that didn’t go well with her navy pencil skirt. So much for trying to look professional on her first day, she thought.
She had enough student loan debt that she wasn’t a woman who took a nineteen-dollar luxury expense lightly. What a waste, she thought with irritation. She’d wanted to look sleek and put together and like someone who took beach vacations instead of someone who only let herself have Starbucks once a week for budgetary reasons. She was in marketing by trade, but she had the soul of an accountant, or so her bookkeeper friend Britt had told her. Correction, her best friend Britt, the former bookkeeper turned billionaire’s wife. Marj sighed, possibly aloud because the trainer gave her the stink eye before droning on about the slides again.
Marj knew that every company thought it was super special and had to build the culture with lots of training procedures but, frankly, she was good at marketing and knew how to do it without a dose of jargon. It was a challenge to leave her phone in her purse. She wanted to check her social media and see if she’d been getting any good swipes on Tinder. Although she was losing faith in dating apps. She hadn’t met anyone halfway decent since she and Luke broke up. And by ‘broke up,’ she meant ‘since he knocked up his secretary’ which is so cliché it didn’t bear mentioning.
She made herself take notes, although she had no intention of ever reading them. Marj jotted down the names of competitors, which she already knew, and noted that the current CFO had been head hunted by a multinational based out of London. Whether this was mere boastfulness or whether the company needed new management, she wasn’t sure. The point was, she wished they’d get a new CFO for a very simple reason. At her last job, before the Luke debacle, Creative Consulting had been acquired by the Fitzsimmons Group, which included a new CEO and his hot son who ended up falling for Britt. So if this joint had a new executive, maybe he’d be hot or have an attractive single relative who’d like to meet a somewhat jaded but very shapely and aerobicized marketing girl.
Until some mythical Billionaire Charming (so much more desirable than a mere Prince Charming, to Marj’s mind) appeared to sweep her off her office chair, she was doomed to at least another thirty years of focus groups and targeting demographics. She tried not to stare at her legs. They annoyed her and also made her crave orange sherbet, which most definitely was not on the low carb diet she just started yesterday.
When the training dismissed, she bolted to the cavernous lobby of the building and checked her phone. A missed call from Britt. She’d been trying to reach Britt for two days and kept missing her. Britt was touring with her husband the adorable billionaire’s band. Because he wasn’t perfect enough, he wrote songs about her and played them on his guitar while looking hot and having more money than most Central American nations. It was hard not to be bitter about the preciousness of the whole Britt and Jack union , but Marj did her best. Because she loved Britt and a truly perfect man was the only solution, because no one else could hope to deserve her. She wanted Britt to be this happy. She just wished that Jack had an equally flawless brother for herself.
Jack did have a brother, but that hadn’t worked out well for Marj. He’d brought a date to the rehearsal dinner and rebuffed Marj’s every advance despite the fact that her incredible cleavage had threatened to spill forth from her dress. Apparently he’d gone ahead and married the girl. So Marj would have to shop outside her BFF’s in-laws to find a mate.
She was beginning to think that romance and happy endings didn’t happen for girls like her. Britt was a total sweetheart, not to mention one of the most loyal and responsible women on earth. So it wasn’t like they were ever competing for the same men. Men had types, for sure. And anyone who wanted Britt’s all-American cuteness wouldn’t have looked twice at Marj with her low-cut tops and her sarcasm.