Hope Breaks: A New Adult Romantic Comedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

I found a pair of barely worn midnight blue jeans that I could just tell were going to be an effort to get on.
    I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d worn either of them.  Maybe Bette had a better point than she thought.  I was alive, but I wasn’t kicking.
    I was tiptoeing through life waiting for someone to hand me a walker.
    A nice bra and matching panties, and I took my first shot at getting my jeans up over my hips.
    Oh boy, I’d gained some weight.  I pulled and pulled, and then fell on the bed, sucking it all in and puffing out every molecule of air I had in me.
    Finally , the damn things pulled up over my hips.  I took in a deep breath and cheered.  Thank freaking god! 
    Now to get them buttoned.
    There was another expelling of all the air—and unfortunately oxygen—in my body, and some more sucking in.  Not that I’m heavy, or big boned.  It’s just that I hadn’t worn these jeans in about three years, and one’s ass is bound to…change.
    Grow?
    Shut up! I shot my inner voice—that Benedict Arnold.
    With a Herculean effort I finally got the button on my jeans to hook, and then I zipped up the zipper.
    I lay there on the bed, breathing hard, in pain, and with a light sheen of sweat all over me.
    Okay, wasn’t this how I was supposed to look and feel after the date—not that this was a date.  And not that I was going to sleep with him on the first date!
    Lord, I needed mental health help.
    I lay there kind of breathing, feeling my internal organs shift higher in my abdominal cavity.
    So now I needed to stand up again.  Okay, not an impossible task.  It only took me a few tries, and then I got purchase on the side of my mattress and hauled myself up to a sitting position… and all the air I’d gotten back into my lungs just whooshed out.  My head spun.  And I think I was strangling my pancreas or my liver.
    I sat there for a few beats and then made my legs move to stand me upright.  They were already starting to tingle.
    I took a couple steps toward my closet and the full-length mirror some sadist had installed there before I ever moved in.  Looking into it I realized I should have pulled it off the door long ago.
    I was red faced and sweating, my eyeliner and mascara were starting to run, and I looked like a plump polish sausage, ready to burst its bindings from the waist down.
    Screw it!   I pulled the jeans open and took in a greedy, gasping lungful of air.  I’d just have to make do with the nicest pair of jeans that actually fit me.
    That turned out to be a pair I’d bought last month.  Nothing fancy: stone washed with some silver thread work on the back pockets.  But they weren’t stained, and they hugged my curves better than the other “comfortable” jeans in my closet.
    So I slipped on the blue top and took another look in the mirror.
    Much, much better.  My color alone was a striking improvement.  And the jeans actually made my legs look long and sexy.
    Then I looked down at my bare feet.
    Shiiit…
    I hadn’t worn heels in years either.  And truthfully, I never did like them.  They had obviously been invented by a sadist.  So I rooted through my meager shoe collection and found a n almost girly pair of strappy sandals—and they were flats.
    Fantastic.
    Truthfully, I think I would have felt overly desperate if I’d come clacking down my cement walkway in a pair of heels.
    It was not a date.
    It was not a date. 
    I was just driving Jake back to the Wal-Mart and his truck.  I didn’t even have to go in; I’d already paid with my credit card.
    I sat in my kitchen, breathing in the central air, letting my coffee get cold.
    I sat there trying to think of what I was going to talk to Jake about…on the ten minute drive from here back to the Wal-Mart.  Ten minutes, if I drove like a grandma…
    This was crazy. 
    I was pathetic. 
    I let my head fall into my hands and felt like such a fool.
    I went back to my bedroom and looked hard in the mirror.  I