Sleeping with Beauty (3 page)

Through four years of college, not once did she find herself remotely attracted to any of her horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, but ever-so-nice-and-dependable, lab partners. The same went for the unfocused yet earnest struggling poet in her English composition class, and the naïve but sweetly endearing member of her study group. She lost her virginity, but never her heart. She’d lost track of the number of end-of-date kisses where she’d close her eyes and pray that this time she would feel something. Anything. Nada.

But she knew she wasn’t holding out for the impossible. There was that Halloween keg party in her sophomore year, after all. Proof positive she could feel something. A whole lot of something, actually. As a joke, she and Jana had dressed up like cheerleaders. With their wigs, orange-hued fake Coppertone tans, and bust-enhancing Victoria’s Secret bras, even Debbie Markham would have believed they’d earned their pom-poms. Okay, only if the lighting was sort of bad. And a lot of beer had been ingested. Which was exactly the case when Lucy ran into the current target of her unrequited—hell, totally unnoticed—affections: junior-varsity quarterback Steve Van Kelting.

He’d mistaken her for the real thing, and the next thing Lucy knew, she was on her back in one of the frat-house bedrooms. A small, insignificant part of her knew she should tell him she really wasn’t Wanda—which is what he’d called her as he’d pulled off her letter sweater—but then his hands were on her, and his mouth found hers, and well . . . what Wanda didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

The earth definitely moved that night. Okay, so maybe there was someone else beneath the pile of coats she and Steve were making out on. The fact remained, she’d finally felt
something.

After that—and despite the fact that Steve not only didn’t call her, but didn’t so much as notice she was still in bed next to him the following morning (she blamed it on all the coats)—the idea of settling for less than
something
was pretty much impossible.

Now getting ready to begin her fifth year teaching perpetually rowdy third-graders at Meadow Lane Elementary (no, not exactly the tenured position her parents had hoped for, but the apple hadn’t fallen so far from the tree after all), she was still searching for
something.

The thing that Lucy envied most about her parents wasn’t their professional accomplishments, but that they had each found someone who appreciated their unique attributes. From the very first time her mother and father had laid eyes on each other, like had recognized like, and
bam!
, that had been that. Thirty-two years later, they still made a solid team, with common interests. It was clear, despite the rather cerebral nature of their relationship, how much love, support, and respect there was between them.

So why couldn’t she find herself madly in love, or even respectfully smitten, with some nice, average guy who’d appreciate her for her sharp mind and cutting wit? She had absolutely nothing against average guys. In fact, she’d hoped and prayed with each successive average-guy date that she’d get that like-recognizes-like thing and the
bamming
would happen. But there was never any
bamming
with them.

Now, put her in the path of the Jasons and Steves of the world?
Bam! bam! bam!
Problem was, there was never a reciprocal
bam
ming. Back to that like-recognizing-like thing, she supposed. Except her “like” was still incognito. At twenty-eight, she was still a Pippi. On the outside. But on the inside, she felt like a Ginger. No one got that about her, though.

Why was she cursed with swooning only for the unattainable? Why was she so attached to the need to swoon in the first place? With thirty looming on the horizon, maybe it was time for her to let go of the need to swoon.

Jana, now a sports editor for the
Washington Post,
had found her
bam!
. She’d married him two years after graduating with a degree in journalism. Of course, Jana’s “like” had come out of hiding by then. She’d bloomed in their second year as college roommates. Although not exactly a swan, Jana had learned to make the most of her unique attributes. Attributes her husband, Dave, worshiped ad nauseam. Apparently the man had a thing for playing connect-a-dot with his wife’s freckles. Lucy, though privately fascinated, didn’t ask for intimate details for fear Jana would actually tell her.

Quebec-born Dave Pelletier, second-string goalie for the Washington Capitals hockey team, had been Jana’s first interview after getting the job with the sports editor at the
Washington Post.
Dave had fallen head over hockey sticks for the cagey redhead. (Lucy wanted a flashy moniker like that—“cagey redhead.” Brunette elementary-school teacher just didn’t have the same flair.) Jana had flair now, and she also had freckle-worshiping Dave. They’d married eight months later.

Not only did Dave think her splotchy freckles were endearing, he loved her frizzy, corkscrew red hair, calling it unbelievably sexy. Dave had a scar across his forehead from a hairline skull fracture he’d received his first year in the majors, and a nose that had been broken more times than a heavyweight boxer’s, which might explain his questionable judgment regarding beauty. But Jana adored his French-Canadian accent, his oddball sense of humor . . . and of course there was that quirky discovery that having a husband with removable front teeth made for some very interesting sexual side benefits. Lucy supposed there were other reasons, but she’d always gotten a little hung up on that one. Anyway, it was obviously yet another match made in heaven.

And this was all fine with Lucy. She was happy for her friend. Dave traveled a good part of the year, and other than being forced to bear occasional witness to their somewhat gooey attachment to each other, Lucy and Jana still had plenty of free time to continue their friendship relatively unencumbered by the change in Jana’s marital status. The only real downside was that in her three-plus years of wedded bliss, Jana had joined the ranks of the Come in, the Water’s Fine Club.

Just when Lucy had finally adopted her Single Pride mantra with a believable note of sincerity.

Not that it had been all
that
challenging, really. Jana’s occupation regularly put her in the direct path of hockey goalies, point guards, and shortstops. Lucy’s options within her immediate office dating pool were somewhat more limited. As in extreme to the point of laughable. Most of the elementary-school staff were female—though choral teacher, Bonnie Colvin, had given Lucy a few looks that could only be described as “suggestive.” Which left her to choose between Jared, the still-closeted art teacher; Ramon, the janitor, who, in addition to using gold dental plating as his main fashion accessory, was also married with three small children; or the former Navy bomber-cum-PE teacher, Ed Foley, who, though widowed and available, was old enough to be her father. Possibly her grandfather. There would be no
bam!
with him. Not ever. Even she was not that desperate.

Jana had taken it upon herself to fix her best friend up with the occasional athlete, newspaper reporter, or franchise executive. This was not a bad thing, in theory. Jana knew the kind of guy Lucy went for and came through like a champ. The problem? The only ones who called her back were the recent Russian athletic imports, who spoke next-to-no English but were very willing to let her do their laundry and fix them breakfast in the morning. Or the vertically challenged Washington power execs who thought that having an almost-six-foot woman on their arm—even a mousy, fashion-challenged klutz such as herself (she was the anti–Heidi Klum)—somehow compensated for their, uh, shortcomings.

It wasn’t like she was looking for wedded bliss. Or even a seriously committed relationship. But it would be nice on the nights that Dave was in town to have someone else to rely on as a movie-and-coffee date. Sex was optional, though preferred. Of course, there was Grady, providing he wasn’t working. Except he always was.

He’d become a think-tank genius for some government setup, in charge of creating God-only-knew-what kind of technological wonders. Lucy had asked him for details once, but with his typical deadpan humor, he’d spouted the very tired “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” line. With anyone else, she’d have rolled her eyes. Only, where Grady was concerned, well, she still wasn’t entirely certain he hadn’t been telling her the truth. Of course, macho as all that sounded, the bottom line was, whatever he did for their government, he was doing it in a lab. Hardly James Bond. More like Q.

Not that he didn’t socialize in between designing fountain pens that were actually poison darts or nametags that secretly harbored powerful zoom lenses. He jogged and played racquetball—two activities he’d invited her to participate in a total of once. Her insurance through the school system just wasn’t that broad-ranging, and his first-aid skills were negligible. Apparently his mad-inventor genius didn’t extend to devising a racquet that magnetically attracted the ball to it, thereby rendering skill and coordination a noncompetitive factor.

Grady dated, but he didn’t talk about the women in his life much. Still, she and Jana knew they existed. You could always tell when Grady had gotten laid. He sprang for the pizza
and
the beer at their quasiregular get-togethers. But he still didn’t talk about them. Probably because he’d so wittily eviscerated every guy Lucy had ever dated, that he didn’t dare. But she and Jana suspected that if he ever got serious, they’d know, because he’d bring her to one of their get-togethers. That’s how they’d met Dave. It was like introducing your intended to family. They each had their own families, of course—in a manner of speaking, anyway—but the opinions that truly mattered would always be one another’s.

Lucy considered it a blessing that, despite his critiques, Grady never offered to fix her up. She’d met several of his coworkers over the years.
Bam!
candidates they were not.

But Grady came through for her in far more important ways. He’d long since stopped having to rescue her, of course. Well, not counting that time two Thanksgivings ago when she’d been craning her neck to get a look at the new frozen-food guy and ended up plowing her grocery cart into the carefully arranged display of pumpkin-pie filling, condensed milk, and canned cranberries. Grady had managed to calm the store manager down
and
get the hunky frozen-food guy to put a bag of frozen limas on the lump that had sprouted so becomingly on her forehead. Truly her hero, that Grady, even if the frozen-food guy had turned out to be more interested in getting Grady’s phone number than hers. But really, most of the time she hardly ever needed rescuing. Physically, anyway.

In the words of the great Mick Jagger, Grady was oftentimes her “emotional rescue.” The best thing about him was that she knew with absolute certainty he would stop whatever he was doing, possibly jeopardizing national security, to be there for her if she really needed him.

Of course, her parents were more than glad to fix her up, and did, with painful frequency. It seemed beyond their academia-saturated comprehension that their nice, well-educated, and respectably employed twenty-eight-year-old daughter wouldn’t fall for “a catch” like American alumnus and department head Hugh Wadell. A forty-two-year-old divorced anthropology professor with alternate-weekend visitation rights. She supposed it was her fault for not making a romance match while her parents were still going through the staff roster of single men in their thirties. She loved her parents dearly, but unlike her mother, she didn’t feel the urge to order wedding invitations simply because the guy in question could complete the Sunday
Post
crossword in pen. If these were her choices, she’d rather stay solo,
bam!
or no
bam!

It was just, sometimes it got a little depressing that the guys who called her back weren’t the ones that sparked her. And the ones that did spark her didn’t even look in her direction, much less ask for a phone number. Not that she hadn’t put herself out there. But the result of her attempts? She could write a book on “I’m Hot, and . . . Well, You’re Not” letdowns:

“You’re such a nice person, I know the perfect guy is out there for you.”

“I wish I was the one for you, you have so much to offer the right man.”

“It’s totally me.”

“You’re so together and, well, I guess I still have some growing up to do.”

And her personal favorite:

“You understand me better than anyone I’ve ever met. Let’s stay friends, okay?”

She understood, all right.

But was it so wrong of her to want what she wanted? To be honest, and very possibly shallow, she wanted to experience, at least once in her life, a night of wild, out-of-control, down-and-dirty, multiple-condom sex. With a sober partner who called her by the right name. And no coats on the bed. Or other drunken party guests.

What she wanted was a guy who was as turned on by her as she was by him. At this point she’d be happy with missionary position and an orgasm, as long as both parties were still in the same room for Part A and Part B.

Did that make her pathetic? Desperate? She didn’t think so. A girl could dream, couldn’t she? Fantasize? Hallucinate?

Then the reunion invitation had arrived. The very same day she’d tossed
Glass Slipper
into her shopping cart. Who could have guessed that one innocent little postcard and a makeover magazine would start a chain of events that would turn her entire life upside down. Or at the very least, the last two weeks of her summer break.

Lucy opened the magazine to the “Inner Beauty Boot Camp” article she’d marked with the reunion postcard. They promised miracles.

So what if she decided to go to the reunion after all? Maybe what she needed to get her head on straight was to take this opportunity to go back and revise past history, beginning with getting the attention of a rumored-to-be still-single Jason Prescott. Well then, a miracle was exactly what she needed.

Fate had long since given up sending her signs. So, probably, had God.