Thankfully James comes over to join our group and asks if we want more drinks, and I take the opportunity to escape. Steph and Nicola protest, saying they’ll cab with me later, but I can’t sit there for a single moment longer with the Scottish beast across from me.
I quickly wave goodbye, barely focusing on Lachlan, and then I hightail it out of there. As soon as the cab drops me off, I head straight to my apartment and into my burgeoning stash of battery operated boyfriends.
I don’t waste any time whatsoever. I didn’t need any more foreplay, I got enough staring at Lachlan, as one-sided as that seemed. I’m already wet from just thinking about him, so I lie back on the bed, plunge the dildo deep inside, and imagine it’s his cock slowly pounding me. I imagine his taut, hard, impossibly sculpted muscles above me, a feverish intensity in his eyes, his brogue calling out my name.
Then the fucking batteries in my vibrator die, and I’m left with a stuttering fake penis. I groan in frustration, throwing it to the side, then finish myself off with my hand.
First the men in this city disappoint me, then my vibrator does.
I fall asleep reinstating the thought that anything penis-shaped needs to stay far, far away from me.
CHAPTER TWO
Kayla
The next morning I wake up feeling slightly worse for wear. This is my punishment for having three glasses of wine last night. It doesn’t take much to get me tipsy, and unfortunately that also means it doesn’t take much for me to feel like shit the next day either.
Somehow I manage to get up before my last snooze alarm goes off, and I take a cold shower. Literally. Some days I feel it’s the only way to really wake up and knock some sense into myself, which means I’m subjected to freezing cold water at least a couple of times a week. It’s no secret that I’m, how does my mom put it, a “fanciful girl,” and that I need to regroup my thoughts from time to time. Also, it makes your hair extra shiny.
Afterward, I decide to take some extra care with my appearance to make up for looking like crap last night, and I drive to the office just before I can get reamed out for being late.
Not that my boss, Lucy, would ever yell at me, even though I’m late constantly. She doesn’t really say anything half the time, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. No criticism, but no praise, either.
When I first graduated university, I had all these grand ambitions. I mean, who didn’t? I thought I was going to waltz out of school and straight into an amazing new career. Bram hadn’t been too far off with his presumption that I could write. In school, my major was in journalism, with a minor in advertising. Both of those careers seemed to appeal to the two different sides of me—one visual, one internal. Both creative.
But the world was a cruel bitch, and the job market was flooded with thousands of na?ve dreamers like myself. I was lucky as hell that, after interning on the production side of things at the Bay Area Weekly, a position opened up. I was an assistant to retail and classifieds advertising. I worked three long years, taking any shifts possible, under two different bosses, until finally I was able to move on up. I took over the classified’s account, then eventually the retail account.
It’s an okay job. Nothing exciting whatsoever, which I guess makes it less than okay. But from the point of view of someone who just wants a job for the sake of having a job, I’m doing all right. Since I’ve worked there so long I have full benefits, three weeks’ vacation a year, and a paycheck that allows me to pay rent in San Francisco, which is a miracle on its own.