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

it’s just a waste of our time.”
     
    “I don’t believe that anything is a waste of time,” he says.
     
    “You’re right. I guess it’s our romantic foibles that really show us what it means to be human.”
     
    “That’s good,” Jimmy tells me. “You should use it in one of your books.”
     
    So I do. Right here. That one is for you.
     
    Jimmy and I try to enjoy our last day in Oxnard, but the jig is up. There is nothing like watching a three-week relationship with all its hope and possibility die in the same place it blossomed. It’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable, and it breaks my little heart. I wanted so badly for this man to be my boyfriend. As I sit on the other side of the living room from him, both of us pretending to care about the football game that is on TV, I feel like I want to throw up right there. But I don’t. I get up, and I offer him tea, and I pretend that we are just friends, that we’ve always been just friends, and I secretly hope that his kind smile means that there might still be a chance for more.
     
    But then Jimmy doesn’t call for days, and whatever hope I had that RAD was just a forty-eight-hour bug quickly begins to fade. For Jimmy, RAD is something far more chronic. I don’t know why this keeps happening to me, but when Jimmy sees me at a meeting and says he’ll call and he doesn’t, I know that I don’t have to let it. I can’t keep falling for these Counterfeit Romeos with their California heartbreak names and their easy compliments. I break up with Jimmy via voice mail, and I thank him for the good time. I say I just see us as friends, and he leaves a voice mail in turn.
     
    “God, Kristen, thanks so much for your message. Wow, you’re such a fucking gem.”
     
    I couldn’t have written the line better myself. Though in some alternate reality we might have shot guns and rode horses and zipped through the night on yet another motorcycle I never got to ride, that was not our reality. The reality was that Jimmy has RAD, and I have a bad sense of direction when it comes to cowboys. I lie alone once again in my bed, and I begin to cry. Because I know I can’t keep taking candy from strangers and not expect to find myself hurt and used in the back of their trucks. After a while, I can’t even blame them.
     

11
     
    Date Eleven: Finding Faith in Chatsworth
     
    I was sitting across from Noelle when she asked me, “So what qualifies as a date then?” She found me crying in my office and because she is a boss who cares, she sat me down to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I had told her about my visit to my dad, my fling with Jimmy, and my fear that this whole idea of 51 dates in 50 weeks was a pointless attempt for me to change an unchangeable situation.
     
    “I have someone for you,” Noelle offers.
     
    Noelle and I have never discussed men before. We talk about work and our families, and though I know she is divorced, she seems to have evolved past the point where needing a man is part of her life. She is everything I want to be, and fear I never will. Whereas I can never wake up in time to put on makeup or blow dry my hair, Noelle comes in every day looking like she’s been hand-painted. Her soft voice, her warm green eyes, her perfect auburn hair speak of a femininity that I can only imagine has won her a number of suitors.
     
    When she tells me that she has someone for me, I think she is referring to a guy. I begin to decline, but she stops me, “No, I think you might need some spiritual work.”
     
    I nod and begin to cry again because I do. I do very, very badly. Noelle is the first female boss I have ever been able to trust. In my years in books and film, I worked for a slew of notorious female executives. Most of them came up in the wild and rowdy seventies when to make it as a woman you either fucked the boss or were mean as hell. I generally worked for the latter. When I landed on Noelle’s desk, I had just moved back to L.A. after