Sleeping with Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page A

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