Thanks for reading the First Look at my novel, Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: A Novel Approach to Dating, currently crowdfunding at Indiegogo.com. The polygamous hybrid of choosable-path novels, chicklit and dating advice books, You, as the reader will make hundreds of decisions based on true-to-life dating scenarios compiled from dozens of books, magazine articles and good ol’ cultural observation.
You’ll find The Prologue, introducing the characters – including Hannah, whose persona you’ll be taking on for the duration of the book – and setting the stage for what’s to come. Next, you’ll get the first scene, and the first two choices. Just follow the directional links and you’re on your way.
I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please head back to the campaign page and contribute what you can so I can get this baby published and into your hands this year! It’s also a big help if you use the buttons provided on the page to share with your social media networks.
PROLOGUE
A key turns in the front door of your apartment and you let out a groan.
Hell. You never should have given them a key.
You’re perfectly comfortable, pajama-clad on a fluffy duvet with Ellie Goulding crooning her emotional solidarity in the background, and now they’re going to barge in and burst your bubble? You glance at the closet and wonder if you have time to burrow yourself in the heap of clothes on its floor. You hear the door open and the stomping of motorcycle boots, followed by the clacking of high heels on your parquet floors.
Too late.
“Hannah Delilah Masters, we’re coming in.” You recognize Val’s stern but feminine voice. Unannounced visit, full name, high heels after 9 p.m. She means business.
You roll your eyes. “I’m naked. In a compromising position.”
“Promises, promises,” says Rachel as she crosses the threshold to your bedroom. Her leather jacket squeaks as she folds her arms. She gives you a slow smile and you picture a yellow cartoon feather escaping her lips. She calls back to Val. “Woman. Hurry up. I’ve got an appointment for meaningless sex.”
You hear a thud out in the hall. “I’m sure he’ll wait.” Valerie enters the room, flipping her long red braid over her shoulder. The yellow satin robe she’s wearing would be long on anyone else, but at 5’11, with unfairly long legs, it might as well be a mini-dress. “That thing is heavier than it looks.”
Yep, you think. No good can come from this.
You start to ask what thing she’s talking about, but don’t get a chance. “I told you so,” she says to Rachel, pointing at the pile of stuff spread in front of you on the bed.
Rachel rolls her eyes. “It’s not an ‘I told you so’ if we agree.” She’s a full six inches shorter than Valerie, but what she lacks in height, she makes up for in attitude.
“Not ‘I told you she’d be wallowing in her own misery.’ I told you taking her to that wedding was a bad idea.”
You tune out their familiar bickering as your mind goes back to Ginny Simmons’ – make that Washington’s – wedding. More specifically, you recall the end of the reception.
The bouquet toss, in many cultures, is the single gal’s lottery. At your age, it occurs more frequently each year and has a minimum entry fee of $150.00 – the average price of a single plate at a wedding reception. Catching the mystical arrangement of calla lilies, gerbera daisies, or even black roses, is a wink from the universe, letting you know you’ve been tapped as the next of the single girls to marry.
Despite having snagged five of these floral footballs in your life, you’re still checking the “single” box. It’s not surprising. Really, who actually knows someone who made the catch and then made the catch? It’s not disappointing either. You’re not sure you even want to get married. In fact, you try your best to be MIA before the emcee herds the single ladies into the matrimonial mosh pit. If that fails, you go out of your way to miss, fumble, or lunge out of the path of a magnolia missile. Yet, fate, cupid, poorly developed motor skills of those around you – whatever – seem to have you in their sights. The grim reaper of commitment.
You were so distracted by figuring out how to smuggle a centerpiece the size of your ass in a clutch the size of your hand, you barely heard the even more marry-wary Rachel shout a warning of, ‘Flowers in the hole!’ from across the room. Ginny’s aim was wide by at least 20 feet, causing a collective whine from the bevy of bouffants as you were smacked in the face with their spinsterhood.
Ever the good sport, you plucked a purple petal from your lip-gloss and smiled when the hall erupted in applause. Not a giddy smile that said, “Yay for me. I’m next,” but one that said, “Yes, I love this tradition as much as the rest of you do and I can’t wait to dance with the creepy uncle who catches the garter.” You’d have abandoned the hideous arrangement the first chance you got, but thanks to the cut-eyes that followed you for the rest of the night, you wound up carrying it home. Exhausted, you tossed it on your kitchen counter and forgot about it.
Fourteen days later, you were blind-sided with a break-up by James, your boyfriend of six months. It wasn’t a particularly serious relationship. You were just two people who got along well, laughed a lot, and had physical chemistry. Exclusive, yes, but you were more joined at the hips than at the hip. In your mind, whatever happened was going to happen, and apparently what happened was that stupid bouquet. James spotted it the next morning and had a meltdown.
To him, it was a strategically placed hint that you were in love (you weren’t) and expected a ring (you didn’t), followed by more flowers (no thanks), a white dress (nope), another ring (uh uh), and a lot of bills (not even close). No amount of denying, explaining or assuring could convince him otherwise, and then, faster than you could say, “That’s my phone charger!” he, and everything he ever left at your place, was gone. If you had to guess, that’s how Houdini handled a break up.
Predictably, you fell down the rabbit hole. You tortured your friends, co-workers, and even cab drivers, with one variation or another of how things didn’t work out with James because of wilting gardenias. Gardenias! Were they just a convenient excuse to do what he already wanted to do?
You wallowed in processed food, watched depressing feel-good romantic comedies, and entertained dozens of third party assurances that he’d be back before you could wonder if you’d put on break up weight, all for a guy you didn’t even love. A guy you haven’t even thought about calling since he left. You never even cried.
Two weeks into this process, you finally realized you weren’t mourning your relationship with James. You weren’t trying to figure out what really happened between you and him. You were trying to figure out what happened between you and every other guy you’d invested in, only to find yourself on the business end of a break up – sometimes for reasons you understood, usually for reasons you didn’t. Each split left you more disillusioned about love and led you to where you are now: a romantic pessimist who thinks more about the likelihood of a divorce than a marriage.
It wasn’t always like this. All through high school, you annoyed Rachel with whatever crush or crushes you were obsessing over at the moment. By the time you both arrived at university, you were even worse because you’d actually started dating, only to be crushed by, or having to crush, someone else.
By contrast, Rachel had an entire campus of fresh meat to toy with – and no curfew. She quickly earned the nickname The Mantis. Not because she was a slut – far from it. Her personality is such that she gets bored quickly, and she doesn’t waste her time or anyone else’s. It wasn’t her fault guys got so wrapped up in her hourglass figure, wavy brown mane and deceptively innocent blue eyes that they didn’t heed her ample warnings not to get too attached. Most girls were jealous, but Rachel never cared, which just made them more jealous. The same is true today.
You met Valerie when she moved into a single room across the hall from the double you shared in the dorms. To Rachel’s relief, and your delight, Valerie was a true romantic. Her textbooks were outnumbered only by Jane Austen novels, Harlequin romances and magazines that promised foolproof methods to catch and keep a guy. When she wasn’t in the chemistry lab, she was testing romantic hypotheses on whichever guy had caught her attention. If she did X, he would do Y. She was as happy to tutor you as you were to be tutored.
Real life caught up to each of you after graduation, and you found careers. Your communications degree led you to public relations. Valerie joined the family optometry business, opening her own practice and eyeglass boutique last year. Rachel, who had more majors and minors than anyone you’d ever met, graduated with a liberal arts degree, but it was her music fetish that led her to the dream job she didn’t even know she wanted: working as a music supervisor for television and movies.
You all outgrew boys in favour of men. Valerie graduated from magazines to self-help books but, mostly, she makes her own rules. Rachel’s only rule is to have no rules at all, especially about men. You fall somewhere in the middle. For the most part, you’ve given up the notion that a handbook could lead you to everlasting love, but you’re still too neurotic to not apply some strategy to relationships.
You just can’t remember the last time you actually cared enough about a romantic prospect to second-guess your every move, or to analyze his. Strangely enough, you miss it.
And that is why you’re spending your fifth Thursday in a row camped out on your queen-size with Ellie, pouring over mementoes from a shoebox time capsule, and obsessing over the coulda, woulda, shouldas of how you’d still be with any one of these old boyfriends if you or they had done any number of things differently.
There are countless couples self-portraits taken with an outstretched arm, bent concert ticket stubs, and dried flowers with petrified petals that are barely hanging on. But those are just things. Far more dangerous are the contents of your head. Memories of times when you were affectionate to the point of annoying, passionate to the point of complaints from the neighbours, and so addicted to each other that you used up a year’s worth of sick days in a week rather than be apart until dinner.
Those reminiscences are the enemy of moving on. Their grip is so ironclad they induce selective amnesia, blocking out the realities of incessant fighting, cheating, and countless lies, from little fibs born out of good intentions to the big ones born out of not so good intentions.
Sometimes, even after years go by, you can’t see past the brilliant, cozy memories of love without intervention from friends who aren’t looking at the past through rosé-coloured glasses; friends who respect your need to grieve love lost, but who eventually cut you off from your own misery; friends who show up at your apartment on weekday mornings to make sure you shower, dress in matching clothes, and go to work, instead of sitting at home pining with a pint of ice cream; friends like Rachel and Valerie who just infiltrated your apartment to help you put your break up with James into perspective so you can move forward.
“Are you upset they broke up?” Rachel asks Valerie. “Because I’m not.” She gestures to you. “She’s not.”
She’s right, you think.
“Why are you here?” you whine, effectively stopping their bickering.
“Vampire Diaries is a rerun so we thought we’d see if you were building a shrine. Oh, look. We’re right on time.”
“You’re mean,” you say.
Rachel smiles and nods. “I am.”
Valerie steps back into the hallway and returns with a paper shredder cradled in her arms. She sets it on top of your dresser and leans down to plug it into the wall.
Rachel’s wrist moves almost imperceptibly toward you. You fling yourself forward, a human shield protecting the contents of what she refers to as your “hopeless chest.”
“No!”
“You’re not leaving us much choice,” says Valerie, flicking the shredder on and off, revving its motor for effect.
You glare at her through the curtain of hair draped across your face. “Sorry I’m not moving on according to your preferred schedule.”
“You’re not moving at all,” she says. “And don’t pretend this is about James.”
Valerie’s right. There isn’t so much as a solitary movie stub from your time with James mixed in with the mementos. You’ve been wondering why that is. It’s not because you’re becoming less sentimental with age. There are some guys from your not-so-distant past among your collection, but you don’t add exes to that box nearly as often as you used to.
What does that say?
“Oh, I’ll tell you what it says,” says Rachel, and you realize you were talking out loud. “It says, ‘I date guys I don’t have a future with because I’m too much of a prude to have the occasional one night stand to satisfy my sexual needs. Instead, I waste months going through the motions, waiting for some poor bastard to dump me so I don’t have to dump him.’”
Oh, is that all?
“I don’t do that,” you say defensively.
“Yes you do,” says Valerie, abandoning the shredder and planting herself on the corner of the bed. “But that’s not why.”
“I don’t want to have one night stands. At least, not on purpose.”
“Everyone wants to have one night stands,” says Rachel. “Your problem is that you have long-term stands.”
“Hey, remember how awesome it was when you guys were downstairs in your own apartment?” you ask. “Ah, that was the day.”
“Look at this,” says Val, waving her hands over the mess of pictures, papers, and presents. “Ignoring the fact this looks eerily like the contents of a hidden drawer in a serial killer’s house, only four of the guys you’ve dated in the last six years are in this box. And we all know that’s a fraction of the number of guys who made it into your other box in the same time frame.”
“Relationship Rain Man, ladies and gentleman,” says Rachel, as she flops down beside you. “You should see how quickly she adds up tampons if I knock over a box.” She picks up a photo. “I remember Ted. He was hot.”
He was hot. Whatever happened to –
“A cheater,” she adds, returning it to the pile with a shrug. “But hot.”
Oh. Right.
You glare at Val. “So, you’re saying my problem is that I’m a slut?”
“If the shoebox fits,” says Rachel, stretching her arms above her head.
“No!” says Val. “I’m saying that clearly you’re an emotional hoarder, but you’re not doing very much hoarding lately, which tells me you’ve been dating guys you aren’t all that into. And then when you do find someone you see actual potential with, you invest to the point it backfires.”
“Not a-fucking-gain,” Rachel groans, smothering her own face with a pillow.
You sigh, half-listening as Val sings a familiar song. “You over-compensate when you meet a guy you really like… over-enthusiasm takes over until you’re a woman possessed…break every dating rule ever written…just gets worse the longer you’re together…”
“Stop,” says Rachel from beneath the pillow. She pulls it away and launches it at Valerie, who sways swiftly to the right and avoids impact. “We’ve heard it all before.” She digs her hands into her hair, obviously frustrated.
“See,” you say, aiming a smug smile at Valerie. “You’re wrong.”
“I didn’t say that,” says Rachel, folding her arms into a headrest. “V has some points. You do stay too long with guys you’re lukewarm over – including that guy, Luke – and when you break up, you’re depressed. By contrast, when you meet a guy you see actual potential with, you go bat-shit crazy, which usually leads to a break up and real depression. It’s your thing.”
“That’s surprisingly insightful,” says Val, straightening her glasses. “I’m inclined to agree.”
“Thank you. Though that’s ironic, given the bat-shit crazy part is usually your fault.”
“Is not!” She sounds like a petulant eight year-old version of herself. You can almost picture her with red pigtails and glasses far too big for her face.
“Puhleeze,” Rachel laughs. “You’re a walking self-help section.”
“What’s wrong with getting a little advice?” You notice the sideways glance she gives you that says, Don’t act like you haven’t borrowed any of those books.
“Nothing. When it’s good advice.”
You interrupt. “I ask for that advice. Sometimes.”
“See,” Val says.
“And sometimes it works.”
“And,” says Rachel. “Sometimes it blows up in your face, which just makes you redouble your efforts leading to greater disaster. Oh, the calamity!”
“And because it comes from your personal experience and not a book, your advice is superior?” Val asks.
Rachel nods. “When it’s followed.”
“Actually,” you say. “You’re both wrong at least as often as you’re right.”
“Can we agree on one thing?” asks Val. “You waste far too much time with guys you don’t love.”
“Agreed,” says Rachel.
“Whoa. Who’s to say how long it takes to fall in love with someone?”
“Six months,” they say simultaneously.
You sigh. Outnumbered. Again. “How do I make you both leave?”
“Promise to come out with us tomorrow night,” says Rachel.
“No chance.”
“Oh, you’re coming,” she says. “You are not spending another Friday night in this room. Especially when the rebound orgasm you’ve earned could very well be at that bar.”
“Yeah,” Valerie says. “Are you going to let some tarted-up tramp like Rachel steal him from you?”
Rachel shrugs. You all know she’s never had to steal a guy in her life.
“The last thing I need is to cruise for guys,” you say.
“Actually, the last thing you need is an orgasm,” says Rachel. “The first thing you need is to find a guy who can give you one.”
“So, we are looking for guys.”
“I am,” they say in unison.
“Fine, but I pay for nothing.”
“And we pick your outfit?” asks Val, who hates the contents of your closet.
“Fine.”
“Deal!” they exclaim, a united two-headed monster once again.
“Perfect. Now please get out. And take your office equipment with you,” you say. “Enjoy your meaningless sex, Rach.”
“Thanks. Here’s hoping I get to wish you the same tomorrow.”
Ten minutes later, they’re gone and the shoebox is back in the closet. You lie in bed, thinking about the talk you just had.
It’s not like you just don’t want to be single. Not consciously, anyway. You want to find someone who you want to be with. And when you find him, you don’t want to be the maniac your friends described earlier.
How did you get here? On paper, you’re a catch. Credible, unpaid, third parties have told you that you’re smart, pretty, witty and fun to be around. You have a job that you might not love all the time, but you’re great at it. You make good money, own a car, have your own place, and don’t expect a man to pay your way. You’d totally date you!
And yet you’ve watched a Prince Charming transform into a Prince of Darkness overnight. More than once.
That might make you jaded, even cynical, but you don’t think so. You could insert any girl into your story and it would ring true. Couldn’t you? You’d never unconsciously settle. Would you? You don’t need to change what you’re doing. Or should you?
You don’t need to worry about it tonight. After all, what are the odds you’ll meet a major prospect on your first night out post-break up?
Rebound sex, possibly, but a genuine Maybe Mr. Right? Unlikely.
And you drift off into your best sleep in five weeks.
CONTINUE TO SECTION 1
