Another Bad Date
“Already?” Mona Zimmerman’s voice shrieks through the phone against my ear as she laughs.
Cackles, really.
“Ugh!” I groan and lean against the outside of my apartment building.
Well, my brother’s apartment building. He’s off in Australia doing something for school—or work. I really should learn to pay more attention when he tells me things, but I didn’t hear much after he offered to let me sublet his apartment. It’s one of those perfect location buildings that are extremely hard to rent and requires a recommendation and probably some type of blood oath.
“How bad was it?” she asks with a sigh.
Even over the phone, I can hear her smile. She finds my painful dating life entertaining.
I sit on the stairs and look up at the evening sky. It’s not even dusk yet—which should tell anyone who knows me that the date went horribly.
“He kept comparing himself to Christian Grey. You know, fromFifty Shades of Grey? How he doesn’t like to be touched outside of approved areas, and how he needs to be obeyed.”
Mona hasn’t read the books, but she dragged me to watch all three movies—each one worse than the one before—so she knows the basics even though the movies left out some of the better parts of the stories.
“Was he abused as a child?”
“No! He just thinks this is the character most women have read about and that he should emulate. But then he asked me to go Dutch.”
I groan as she laughs again. “So…” She tries to compose herself. “He didn’t read the book? He just heard about it? Or does he just really want to hang onto those billions?”
“Oh, he barely has two nickels to rub together,” I say.
“Did you pay for your own meal?”
“No, and it wasn’t technically Dutch because I paid for mine and part of his. He wanted to split the bill fifty-fifty, saying I could Venmo him. Even though he ordered steak and lobster, and I had the chicken. And when I pointed out that we should just pay for our own meals, he said I may need to be punished in theblue room.”
She pauses, and I know she’s thinking about the story. “It’s the red room, right?”
“Yep. But he hates red—it’s offensive. He likes a more serene color when he punishes his women, so he has a blue room.”
“Oh my God.” Her laugh is loud enough to make me pull the phone from my ear.
This isn’t the first call she’s gotten about a bad first date in the past month. It’s the seventh. Out of seven. They’ve all gone terribly, and I swear, each one gets worse than the last.
“Why can’t I find a decent guy, Mona?”
“Holly, we’ve been over this. Multiple times.”
We have. I know we have, but she just doesn’t understand. She isn’t the type to get lost in a good book like I am.
“Why can’t fiction be reality?”
“Uh, because it’s fiction, dummy.”
“Is it really such a bad thing to want a romance like I read in my books? I mean, realistic ones, at least? I have no delusions that I’m secretly a shapeshifter who will meet my fated mate, the alpha wolf of a pack. I mean… I’m not crazy.”
“Well, at least we cleared that up…” I know she’s rolling her eyes. I can’t see her, but I know. I can feel it. “Holly, you are not going to find a fairy tale. It’s not real. We would all love to have a Prince Charming sweep us off our feet, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after in his castle. But life doesn’t work that way. And the books you read aren’t that realistic. If you dive into them, you’ll find all the issues and red flags disguised as romance.”
Mona’s my best friend in the entire world, but I just can’t agree with her here. Why can’t I find my Prince Charming? And who’s to say I can’t? Stranger things have happened.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, my tone warning her not to ruin my fantasy world.
“Well, Prince Charming was really just a foot fetish freak inCinderella. I mean, how is that the only way he could identify her? Her face didn’t change. AndBeauty and the Beastis a romantasy that romanticizes Stockholm Syndrome. You don’t even want me to get started onSleeping Beauty.And these are just the fairy tales we’re all read as little girls.”
