Virtually Mine: a love story Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the official list,” Dustin
continued, “but she’s working the session and she says she’ll let me crash if I
can get over there in the next thirty minutes, so—”
    Kate shook her head. “I thought you said
she was an intern to an assistant to a semi-monstrous sized casting director.”
    “Who is slumming in commercials in
between, where I can meet her, I know! How do I look?”
    Kate tried her best to hold it together.
“Like a waiter?”
    Dustin began to unbutton the shirt of his
uniform. “Doesn’t matter. It’s shirtless.”
    Kate watched as he took the shirt off and
hung it in his locker. “Shirtless. Great, of course. Then you’re... Great. Just
great.”
    There were times when Dustin could be
completely nonsensical and this was certainly one of them. For an actor, he had
very little grasp of nuance. He didn’t seem to get what was being said between
the lines, what Kate wished to heaven he could hear without her having to come
right out and say it. Instead, Dustin grinned broadly, accepting her words as a
compliment. He turned his bare back to her and ambled out the door.

 
     
     
     
     
    four
    ♥
    I n the
privacy of his sparsely decorated, one-bedroom apartment, Charlie painstakingly
labeled a stack of color brochures. The   leaflets were every bit as slick as the company they advertised: Virtually
Mine . Neatly, he affixed a sticker that said “Operator 52” to each one.
Charlie lined each label up as straight as he could, right beside the contact
info, wanting it to look as legitimate as possible. After all, he reasoned, he
was finally a bona fide Operator for the company and he wanted to do a good job.
    Charlie opened one of the brochures. He
studied its offering of Imaginary Boyfriends for lonely-hearted souls desiring
a sense of beau-like companionship and attentions. The Imaginaries pictured
were a variety of ages and types, but every one of them, in his own way, was
just as insanely good-looking as Eric Bender had been. There were chiseled
jaws, broad shoulders, and perfect hairlines straight across the board. There
wasn’t a single unstraightened, unwhitened tooth in the bunch.
    Charlie
looked into the mirror, examining his reflection image in contrast. It’s not
that he was bad looking, but he knew he was no Eric Bender. That was for sure.
Charlie had never given much thought to his average, boy-next-door looks. With
his dark hair and brown eyes, he was the spitting image of his father,
something that had delighted his dearly departed mother to no end.
    Maybe I should get contacts , Charlie
thought. He took off his glasses to check out the change, but quickly put them
back on, unable to see himself without them.

    Charlie cracked the door of his apartment
and peeked out. The coast was clear. He sneaked door-to-door, hanging one of
his Virtually Mine brochures on each knob, even Mrs. Teasdale’s.
    Circling back to Kate’s door, right next
to his, he checked around. There was still no one to be seen. Surreptitiously,
he dangled a brochure on Kate’s doorknob, then whispered heavenward:
    “ Okay, I know in the tenth grade I
told you I was putting the whole chimichanga on Gina Paphites, and I’m not
saying I’m faulting you for not coming through for me on that one, but...okay,
this once... Just —”
    Suddenly, M.J. opened their apartment
door.   Charlie whirled.
    “Charlie, hi!”
    “M.J!   You’re not—”
    “Littering Santa Monica with parking
tickets? Yeah, I...took a personal day. Check out what I just made.” M.J.
flashed a computer-generated business card. It read:
    No time to walk your favorite pooch? Just Call: M.J. Poster, Dog Walker
Extraordinaire!   310/555-6243

    “Okay,” M.J. went on, “I get that there
are pet limits in this building, but it’s totally a house-calls thing. So,
what’s all this?”
    Charlie panicked, realizing that M.J. had
noticed the brochures she saw in his hand. “Me? What, you mean these? I...
Well, you know those pesky