CHAPTER 1

He was bald in a way that made me think of both melons and sex. Tan suit, green tie, white shirt—Chuck was a honeydew.

I met Chuck standing in the concession line at a Cubs game. I saw him and just knew that this was the guy. He was the one mentioned in my Sunday horoscope. As all very important and highly intelligent females do, I read my horoscope every morning—right after finishing the obituaries, and just before I peruse the comics.

That morning my horoscope read, Be watchful; today you will meet the catalyst of your future life.

When I basically accosted him in line and forced him to talk to me, he was wearing a baseball hat. I’d liked his face and his friendly smile. Though I sensed he was bewildered and a bit overwhelmed by my attention, he readily agreed to the date.

But now, without his hat, and illuminated mostly by a single candle on the table, his jaw appeared to mirror the top of his head, which had become a rounded, shiny, nondescript curve of yellow, melon-colored flesh.

“The Bella Costa is an excellent vintage. Light on the nose, but a spicy palate with notes of blackberry and cracked pepper.” He smiled at me. He was looking for approval.

My left eyebrow arched all on its own. “Cracked pepper? In wine?”

“Yes.” He chuckled. “Forgive me. I’m a bit of a connoisseur, really a student of the grape. Last summer I spent a week at the Louis Martini sommelier workshop in Napa.”

“Is that so, Chuck?”

He chuckled again, nodding his big round head.

Chuck, the chuckling honeydew.

“You’re very funny, Sandra.”

“Am I? I wasn’t aware that I’d said anything humorous.” I laughed with him, scrunched my nose, but didn’t know why we were laughing. This often happened to me, people finding me funny for no reason I could discern. Therefore, I’d learned long ago to just smile and nod, yet continue to speak with sincerity. That usually made them laugh even more.

Most people strike me as disappointingly predictable in their normalcy.

However, I wasn’t about to let Chuck’s potential predictability derail my optimism. I’d bought a new dress for the date—crime scene red, strapless, indecently tight, lifting my modest bust up and out to well, hello there, how are ya?—and dolled myself up in expectation. Perhaps the zebra print stilettos I’d borrowed from my friend Janie were a bit much, but I had high hopes for Chuck.

The horoscope had said he would be a catalyst for my future life, and I was beyond ready for my future life to begin.

I tried not to daydream about it, but I couldn’t help myself. Even as I was getting ready for the date, my mind provided Instagram-style status updates of our future together: Cubs season tickets, screaming profanities at Cardinal fans, sharing a hot dog at Portillo’s, watching horror movies every Friday night while na**d on the couch, reading the paper together on Sunday mornings, and a cornucopia of impressive bedroom acrobatics.

But first I had to get past the fact that, so far, he appeared to be very, very normal.

His laughter tapered but his smile remained as he said, “No one calls me Chuck anymore. I usually prefer Charles.”

“Oh.” I stopped laughing. “I’m sorry, Charles. I didn’t….”

“No, no. It’s okay.” He placed his hand on the table between us. “Somehow, with you, I don’t mind at all.”

Oh. Well. Crap.

His words made my stomach tighten with a flare of despair.

I returned his warm, melony smile with as much effort as I could muster; my spirits deflated, but I refused to take it to frown town. I wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Well, you don’t know me very well. I could be a complete freak show.”

He chuckled. “You’re adorable.”

I perked up a bit at the compliment. “Is that why you agreed to meet me so late? My adorableness? Sorry about that, by the way. My shift ended at nine. It’s not every guy who will agree to a ten p.m. first date.”

He waved his hand through the air as though it were nothing. “It’s not a problem. It’s not every day that I meet a gorgeous redhead with green eyes who’s so easy to talk to.”

So easy to talk to.

I smiled in return, endeavored to mask my impending forlornness, and then I turned my attention to the menu in my lap. I tried not to sigh.

Our first date had just started, and I was trying to rally against the fact that it might as well already be over.

Unless Chuck said something astonishing in the next five minutes, he was most certainly not a catalyst for anything except perhaps another evening of me being abandoned for the twenty-ninth time in a restaurant.

I could see the events of the evening as though they’d already occurred, because they had. This was just like every single one of my first dates.

They always start the same: the guy tells me he feels comfortable with me even though we don’t know each other. He searches his brain for the reason why, then tells me that I remind him of someone else—his first girlfriend, the girl next door, or the girl who got away. I probe deeper, and he admits it was an older woman, a kind teacher or an aunt or, worse, his mother. He tells me how much that relationship meant to him, then he unloads more than I will ever want to know about his life, his dreams, his expectations, how he failed his parents or siblings or friends, or how they failed him.

In the end, he cries.

If I’m lucky, it won’t be in the restaurant.

Eventually, he thanks me. He tells me how lovely I am, and then shakes my hand. He asks if he can call me again to talk. I give him my friend Thomas’s card, a board certified psychiatrist with a focus on family counseling. We part as friends, and I have another guy in my friend arsenal; another guy to hang pictures in my apartment or help me move.

And he has a female just friend to introduce to the girl he eventually marries.

Trying not to be resigned to my fate, I perused the menu without reading it. I already knew what I was going to order. This was one of the two reasons I always picked Taj’s Indian Restaurant for my plethora of first dates. Their butter chicken is amazageddon (amazing plus Armageddon) good. If I could have one final meal on the face of the earth, it would be Taj’s butter chicken.

The other reason, I noted with somewhat buoyed spirits, would arrive at my doomed table any minute.

“You know, you remind me of someone.” Chuck’s words meet my ears right on schedule. I almost mouthed along as he continued, chuckling, “You look a lot like this girl I used to know.”

I didn’t meet his gaze because I wasn’t listening to him anymore. Instead, I braced myself for what came next.

Or, rather, who came next.

Like clockwork, I sensed my waiter approach. I didn’t need to look up to know he was carrying two water glasses. Mine had no ice and no lemon.

“Good evening.” He said, his velvety voice sending ripples of delicious awareness from my nose to my toes. “I’m Alex, and I’ll be serving you tonight.”

Be cool. Be cool and act cool. Be chill, act chill, be ice. You’re an ice cube. Just be cool.

Heat suffused my neck and cheeks; but, as I was expecting him, I was able to temper the warmth before it became a telling stain. I paused a moment, gathered a deep breath, and lifted my chin and eyes to meet his gaze.

Ahh, Alex the waiter.

Alex the waiter was on my Spank Naughty list in third place, right after Henry Cavill the actor, then Henry Cavill as Superman. He was proof that God existed, and that God loved straight women.

As usual, he was looking at me with thoughtful, deep-set indigo eyes behind black horned-rimmed glasses. As usual, his mouth was curved in a small fleeting smile. As usual, he stood at the edge of the booth, a six foot three hovering, angular, lissome specimen of pure manhood.

His strong jaw, dusted with black stubble, was marred by a deep, irregular scar that ran from the center of his bottom lip at a jagged slant to one side of his chin; he had a slightly crooked nose, likely broken on more than one occasion; close-cut black hair, a little longer on the top as though it had mohawk aspirations; and a mouth just a bit too wide and soft for the rest of his rugged face.

As usual, he was dressed in all black.

If you went for rough edges, chip on the shoulder, effortlessly sensual, young, dangerous, and the build of an Olympic swimmer, which I usually did not, he fit the bill and caught the fish—hook, line, sinker, sexy.

I usually gravitated toward nice men—meaning, men who looked like they were nice men: men who smiled a lot, liked to golf, paid their parking tickets, owned sensible suits and shoes, and considered sweater vests appropriate Sunday attire; men who knew a Mallard from a Muscovy and had all their ducks in a row; men who would and theoretically should make good husbands and fathers— men with no outward sign of emotional baggage.

Alex didn’t fit the typical nice man mold; he had a flashing, Las Vegas Strip-style neon warning marquee of emotional baggage. Yet, I couldn’t help myself. The first time I heard him speak, I was sunk; his voice made my stomach do a skydive to my toes without a parachute. His voice reminded me of jazz and the bedroom and a strip tease: melodic, deep, soothing, slightly sandpapery, but with an irreverent, careless quality.

I daydreamed about him reading me a book, the newspaper, a greeting card, an eviction notice—anything. As much as it was possible, I was infatuated with his voice. I often asked him questions about the menu—even though I already knew what I was going to order—just so I could hear him speak. When he spoke, life was good.