AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He said all the right things, took me out, brought me presents. Then, about six months into our relationship, came the not-so-subtle hints to lose weight.
The oh-so-polite comments that I should join a gym, avoid fried food, skip desserts, and my favorite, the I’m only saying that because I love you babe suggestions about what I should wear and eat.
“Hello? Delani? Are you listening to me?”
My best friend, Jan, yelled through the receiver on my cell phone, and I sighed.
“Sorry, Jan. It’s just it will be another Valentine’s Day alone. Again! I am fucking cursed. I can’t believe he cheated on me!”
“That jerk. Did you ditch him?”
“Of course I dumped his stupid ass,” I snarled.
I actually forgot I had her on the line for a minute, and I felt slightly guilty, but I needed to put her on speaker.
Jan could be a bit much and was better in small doses. Especially when I hadn’t had any coffee yet.
But the idea of another dateless Valentine’s Day made me cringe.
What a cliché!
The chubby chick stays alone while everyone else goes out and gets lucky every February the fourteenth.
Ugh.
“I told you Pete was a complete loser before you guys got to date three, remember?” Jan said.
Her voice sounded scratchy through my cell phone’s tiny speaker, but I’d live.
“The infamous date three, of course, I remember,” I told her.
We had this thing where we gave a man three dates to fall into one of our acceptable boyfriend categories.
If he passed, the relationship could progress from there, but if he failed to meet some pretty important standards, we moved on to greener grass.
My favorite dates with the potential to turn into real boyfriends typically fell into one of the following three categories:
The alpha male who treated me like a princess but knew when to let me fend for myself.
The cinnamon roll who was all things sweet and charming but knew when to pull this girl’s hair in the bedroom.
Thank you, Daddy.
And the tall, dark, mystery man who swooped in and made my wildest fantasies come true.
Of course, there weren’t many of those on the ground, which was how and why I settled on Pete the Cheat.
Sigh.
Jan pretty much agreed with my list, and we were always on the lookout for potential boyfriends. And yet, even with several categories of male all picked out—with a Google doc for cross-referencing purposes shared between us—we were both still single.
Jan and I, along with a few select women from our friend group, used the doc to list pros and cons of our dates, and to see where they fell in our possible boyfriend category profiles.
It worked. Mostly.
Just recently, one of our own had actually just found her HEA ending.
Rena and I were old college pals. And she’d just announced her marriage to her old high school flame. She’d added men seeking redemption, worthy of second chances, to our category of our list of acceptable partners.
