Hell on Heels(3)
While I had my issues with men, and I’d admit they ran deep and ugly, my self-preservation instincts were fully intact, heightened rather. Honestly, I think people would do anything in the name of love. Sometimes I had to wonder if it was just stupidity that made us that na?ve, or if we were all just clinging to a desperate notion that we remained hopeful romantics and not just selfishly seeking out partnership to even the playing field within ourselves. Ensuring we were gold-plated in the areas we lacked, rather than polishing the authentic twelve-karat facets of our personalities. It was easier to believe you just had to find the right person, put up with the right *, and settle for a little less than the dream, because you’d be happy, or at the very least, you wouldn’t be alone. Because the alternative was eating Chinese takeout, alone, in your one bedroom walk up and looking inward at the abundance of work it would take to heal by your own hands. And that seemed to be a job description most of us weren’t willing to sign on the dotted line for.
Happiness and love were among the most fickle and fleeting of emotions. I had no time for either, yet in no way was I a sadist or among those adverse to romance. The fact was I’d spent much of my adult life in the company of great men, and I wanted to love each of them. I wanted them to save me, but each time, as the high ran dry and true colours were bled, I did what the past in me had bred and I fled, downward and fast, until I was picking myself up off the ground again, piece by piece, little by little, bloody knees and broken heart in tow. Maybe that was the problem: my insecurities and ill fitting need consistently led me to believe my saviour would be a gentleman caller of sorts. My mind relentlessly insisting I was a queen, but my heart reverently convincing us we are a lady in waiting, a lady waiting for a man specifically.
While I toyed relentlessly with the ebb and flow of love, Leighton, however, was a true bleeding heart. Trusting and full of unrelenting hope. I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing, but every guy she encountered who had half a brain somehow managed to prey on her romanticism, and while she was off planning their Page Six wedding, he was juggling a handful of other women and she was none the wiser.
Her latest venture to find men? Tinder. The online, grown-up version of Hot or Not. Ever wondered what ordering a person to your door like pizza looks like? That was Tinder.
“Where else am I supposed to find a man with the hours I keep?” She pouted.
Tucking my napkin under my salad plate, I looked up, pretending to search for an answer before locking my eyes with hers and raising my brows in surprise. “How about, real life? You work in a building full of men.”
Fidgeting, she pursed her lips. “Pompous men.”
“Yes, because the Tinder Trophies you’re racking up are of substantially higher quality.” I cocked an eyebrow at her, sarcasm hanging off my words in the air.
“I guess so.” Furrowing her brow, she made a funny face. “I think his studs were bigger than mine,” she whined, twisting the princess cut diamond in her right ear.
“The bigger the diamond, the bigger the douche.” I laughed, tilting my glass in her direction in a mock toast.
“And the smaller the dick,” she grumbled, just as our waiter returned to the table, cheque in hand.
“I thought you were into your dentist anyway,” I offered as our joint chuckles subsided, signing my haphazard signature across the bottom of my bill.
“He was just,” she paused, struggling to tuck her wallet back inside her structured black tote, “too into me.”
Women.
“He was too into you?”
Waving her hands in the air, she shrugged. “Too clingy. Too easy. Too much of everything. I didn’t even want to sleep with him. He was acting like such a bitch I was afraid I’d get down there and realize my balls were bigger than his.”
Tilting my head back in poised laughter, I marvelled at the absurdities of love. Her reasoning was thinner than her two petite arms. It was kind of sad, wasn’t it? We needed fear. It motivated us, even when it came to loving other people; we must fear the loss of them to inevitably want them in the first place. I think in more common terms it’s referred to as “the chase.” While no one wanted to chase or be chased too long, no one wanted to catch or be caught too suddenly. It was a delicate equation that lovers in the dating game couldn’t seem to solve. Leaving us to continue playing Russian roulette, blindfolded in the dark, with our relationships.
“It’s nearly one. I need to get back to the office. I’ve got an appointment in thirty minutes,” I said with a reluctant edge to my voice, standing from my seat and shimmying up the black denim hugging my thicker thighs.
Dropping her napkin on the table, she nodded in agreement. “I should get back, too. The partners will have my hide if I don’t bag this up-and-comer by end of day.”
Leighton was a little shorter than me, standing at around five foot five or so, with dark hair, a slender figure, and dark green eyes. She was also smart as a whip. That was how we met, actually, my second year of college at The University of British Columbia. She was a literary agent now for Hill & Decker Publishing House, specializing in the closing of romance novelists, which suited her personality somewhat perfectly. Her job title was expanded on the rise of what people were now calling The Fifty Movement, and she couldn’t have been riding the wave any harder.
I, on the other hand, stood at a very curvy five foot seven, sans heels, with ash blonde hair that was becoming less mine and more salon as the years crept toward my thirtieth birthday, but hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you blonder, right?