Free 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life by Kristen McGuiness Page A

I go back to feeling like Katie in The Way We Were . The random, “quick one” Hubbell dates before going back to his more un-refreshing type.
     
    As we drive to Oxnard that night to spend the weekend with John and Teresa, I know, without words, without any obvious action, there is a hiccup in our chemistry. Though we do our best to make conversation, though Jimmy’s hand cups the back of my neck, and I get to relax a little, though we are laughing and listening to music and pretending that everything is okay, something has changed. And those kinds of changes are never good.
     
    I make it through the first two days. Jimmy’s hugs are infrequent and far away, but I have been here before. We all have. Wanting so badly for the affection we thought was ours and feeling all the more awkward and insecure as the object of that affection crawls into itself and away from us. I try to be cool about it, and I try not to cry when Jimmy doesn’t follow me to bed that first night, when he stays up in the living room watching a Lee Marvin movie by himself.
     
    The next day I leave for a while to work at the stables where I ride. I go into my favorite horse’s stall, and I hug that great big animal, and I cry and I cry and I cry. Because I thought it was real this time and that the candy was only going to lead to more candy. I believed that the kind words and the generous offers of romance were all just the beginning and not the end.
     
    I get back to the beach house that night. Jimmy is friendlier. When I yawn and get up and go to bed, he comes in soon after me. At first, we begin to make out, but then I stop it. I may not know what to say, but I know I need to say something. Though I may have found myself in this same place a year ago, I don’t have to react the same. I can ask why. I pull away from Jimmy, and I can see him brace himself for what he surely knows is coming. I tell him I have felt a shift. And I ask him. Why?
     
    And that’s when I find out.
     
    That is when the greatest revelation in my thirty years is revealed. That is when Jimmy tells me about RAD.
     
    RAD stands for “Relationship Anxiety Disorder” and apparently Jimmy has a bad case of it. I feel like the scientist who discovered the cellular engineering of polio. The doctor who broke the riddle of AIDS. The girl who found out why so many of the men she has ever fallen for have left as quickly as they came.
     
    “I’ve been working with my sponsor on it,” Jimmy tells me.
     
    I am trying desperately not to laugh because Jimmy is taking this all very, very seriously.
     
    He looks like he might cry, and I almost begin to feel bad that this nearly forty-year-old man still needs to make up acronyms for his inability to commit. Because RAD? I mean, come on. Who doesn’t have that? It could be on the cover of Newsweek . In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a decent dose of it too. I haven’t been in a relationship in three years; in fact, at this point, I don’t even know what a relationship is. So though he might have anxiety over the whole deal, I can’t even tell you what the deal looks like. Does he think I’m on the verge of wearing his letterman jacket, his class ring, changing my relationship status on Facebook?
     
    “I just think we should take it slow,” he says.
     
    And the smile on my face slides into sadness because I know what that means. I’ve heard about slow before. It wasn’t long after Sunshine that my own sponsor and I discussed my habit of falling for what we call Counterfeit Romeos. Like Sunshine, like Jimmy, like that man I call Dad, they tell me all the things I want to hear, but they can’t actually be there in any real way. They have things like RAD or a prison sentence that prevent them from putting action behind all that powerful romance.
     
    I silently fight back the tears that have begun to surface, and I take his hand in mine, “Okay, hey. All I ask is that you’re honest with me. Because otherwise, well,