Authors: NM Silber
Winning Appeal (13 page)
By Daisy Prescott
Get it now!
Author Bio
Before writing funny contemporary romances about adults, I dreamed of being an author while doing a lot of other things. Antiques dealer, baker, blue ribbon pie-maker, fangirl, freelance writer, gardener, pet mom and wife are a few of the titles I’ve acquired along the way.
Born and raised in San Diego, my husband and I currently live in a real life Stars Hollow in the Boston suburbs with our dog, Hubbell, and an imaginary house goat.
Ready to Fall, my second novel, features John Day, the hot, sexy neighbor in my debut novel Geoducks Are for Lovers. Both can be read as standalones.
My third novel, Missionary Position, a contemporary romance/romantic comedy, released on June 10, 2014. It stars Selah Elmore, from Geoducks, and can be read as a standalone.
By Zack Love
Synopsis
New York City, May 2000. The Internet bubble has burst and Evan, a computer programmer, is fired with an email from his boss. The next day, his girlfriend dumps him, also via email. Afraid to check any more emails, Evan desperately seeks a rebound romance but the catastrophes that ensue go from bad to hilariously worse.
Fortunately, Evan meets Sammy — someone whose legendary disasters with females eclipse even his own. To reverse their fortunes, they recruit their friends — Trevor, Yi, and Carlos — to form a group of five guys who take on Manhattan in pursuit of dates, sex, and adventure.
When Evan, a closet writer, falls desperately in love with a Hollywood starlet, he schemes to meet her by writing a novel that will sweep her off her feet. Sammy knows nothing about publishing but is confident of one thing: Evan’s book should have the word “sex” in the title.
With musings about life, relationships, and human psychology, this quintessential New York story about the search for happiness follows five men on their comical paths to trouble, self-discovery, and love.
Evan’s Journey from Bad to Worse
“Your employment is terminated. I’m out of the office this morning for meetings but you should pack up your belongings by 1 p.m. today. Your last pay check will arrive in the mail.”
That was the first email waiting for Evan on Monday morning, May 29, 2000, at the office where he had worked for the last two years. ChocaChump.com, the Internet-based, chocolate home delivery company, was another dot-com whose days were numbered. About six weeks earlier, the NASDAQ had dropped more than twenty-five percent from its peak in a single week.
The tech crash would continue, and Evan’s boss, a mercurial CEO who closely managed his twenty employees, grew increasingly bitter and difficult as his company faltered. After Evan read the email terminating his employment, he recalled their curt discussion from the previous Friday.
“Tell me the real reason why you were gone so long yesterday.”
“It’s the reason I gave you: my grandma had a bad fall and needed to be taken to the hospital. She called me for help because my parents were out of town.”
“You were gone for six hours.”
“Well, I had to go to Queens, where she lives. She needed a bunch of medical tests. And I wasn’t just going to leave her alone in the hospital. She’s a seventy-five-year old widow, so I had to be there to comfort her, and help her deal with insurance forms, doctors, etc.”
“Evan, everyone’s got problems. You don’t think I have a grandma who needs me just as much? Do you think our competitors care about our grandmas? It’s war out there! And we’re losing. Things used to be much better, but our operating budget no longer covers middle-of-the-day-grandma-emergencies.”
“But this is the first time I’ve ever done that. And I told you before I left that I had a family emergency. I can come in this weekend to make up for the lost work time.”
“Yes, please do that…I’ll have to think things over.”
As he promised, Evan spent much of his Saturday making up for his time away from the office. But there was no reversing a CEO desperate to trim his payroll.
Evan decided not to tell his girlfriend, Alexandra, about the fact that he was now unemployed. He would wait until after they returned from the Puerto Rican vacation that he had promised her a month ago, so that she could fully enjoy the experience, rather than feel guilty about the expense. The quality time with her would also help him to refocus on what really mattered to him, he thought.
Hoping for a fresh and positive start the morning after he was fired, Evan turned on his home laptop and purchased the airline tickets online. He then logged into his email account, so that he could forward the trip details to Alexandra. He noticed a new email from her in his inbox.
“Evan, Hun, sorry to tell you like this over email, but my plane’s leaving soon, so I don’t have time to do this in person. I’m leaving because I really need a break. From everything. Please don’t start wondering what this means or what you did wrong or anything, because you’ve been great. And that means that I have to use that trite line about how this isn’t about you. Because it really is about me…I’m twenty-four years old and I feel like I’m losing my youth suddenly. I just want to feel young and free for a few months. And I’m tired of this city. It’s making me old. The routine, the stress, the constant competition. I just need to escape for a while. I know we were supposed to go away one of these weekends, but I need more than a weekend. Much more. I decided – in a totally spur of the moment kind of way – to go to Australia. I know this all seems crazy and surprising, but that’s how these things go when you’re young. Without planning too much. I’ll be gone for six weeks. Maybe more. I’d ask you to wait for me, but that wouldn’t be fair to either of us. And I’m just not sure we’re right for each other, even though you’re really a wonderful guy…I think a clean break would be best for both of us. By the time you read this I’ll probably be on a plane. I’m really sorry, Evan, because I know this will hurt, even though that was never my intention. Call it a crazy and selfish impulse, but I just need this change right now. You’ve always been a sweetheart and I’ll totally miss you. Postcards will follow! Kisses, Alexandra.”
*****
Evan stared at his laptop screen, in speechless disbelief.
For the lonely three months that followed, he struggled with the loss of a job he had mostly enjoyed, and a woman he had begun to love after almost five months of dating her.
On the few occasions when he could motivate himself to go out and act like a single man again, Evan crashed and burned with every woman he approached. Julia, a sexy, thirty-two-year-old therapist, was the only exception, but there were too many issues for that prospect to go anywhere. She couldn’t resist psychoanalyzing Evan whenever they met, which he soon realized was just her way of avoiding her own doldrums. Julia was clinically depressed and desperately seeking marriage and children (which Evan didn’t want for another four or five years), so his conscience forced him to nip things in the bud, even though she seemed open to a fling with him.
Thus, Evan continued stumbling along his losing streak, learning just how much being down is not particularly appealing to anyone – especially the attractive women of New York City, clad in their heels or hipster boots, looking for a good time.
Evan Cheson was actually a charming and good-looking man. He had a full head of thick, black hair; blue eyes; an athletic, six-foot-one build; smooth, dark eyebrows; and facial features suggestive of his French-Italian ancestry. And for most of his adult life, he had been a confident and successful man, from school, to work, to women.
But several major failures in rapid-fire succession can inhibit good judgment, and thereby invite more failure. For Evan, losing a job and a girlfriend, each via email, one day after the next, was too much to avoid the absurd downward spiral that would ensue. He even avoided checking emails for a while, but that didn’t help.
On Thursday night, after a few months of fruitless rebound attempts and embarrassing faux pas with women, there was something perverse in Evan – maybe even carelessly self-destructive – that wanted to know just how laughably low he could go.
So he put on a new pair of dark slacks and a collared, button-down, sky blue shirt just snug enough to suggest his occasional gym routine. His clean look – with a dab of cologne, a gargle of mouthwash, and freshly polished leather shoes – was calculated to minimize the entrance hassle into Manhattan’s clubs. But had Evan fathomed just how hard he would end up crashing that night, he would have surely stayed home in his T-shirt and boxers.
2
Evan Runs Full Speed into the Wall Ahead
It began in a bar. The Bowery Bar. It was the end of summer – an auspicious time for an unattached twenty-nine-year-old male in Manhattan. Scattered sparingly about the spring, summer, and fall, there are about fifty days of perfect weather in New York City: zero humidity, clear skies, and seventy-five to eighty degrees fanned by a light, cool breeze. During such days, smiles sprout more readily, clothes pronounce rather than protect, and the sweet scent of promise wafts everywhere in the air.
The last day of August 2000 was one of those perfect fifty days. And it was a Thursday, which meant that most of the Manhattanites leaving the next day for a weekend in the Hamptons were still in the city, and that meant more female prospects for Evan. Indeed, that Thursday felt so promising that Evan thought he might finally reverse a dry spell that somehow felt longer than his postpubescent years. But Evan’s new insecurity, which resulted almost entirely from his recent bout of bad luck, made him somewhat desperate to prove himself any way he could. And as his desperation led to ever greater and more frequent fumbles, he began to question the quality of his goods, as even the most steadfast traveling salesman does after enough slammed doors. He lost his touch, hesitated with his humor, and forgot some of the tactics that had served him so well in the past.
So when Evan spotted a woman across the bar who easily qualified as a “9+ hottie” in his book, he broke one of the most important rules of the pick-up: never wait more than a minute to make a move. A longer delay after initial eye contact suggests a lack of interest or – even worse – a lack of confidence. It also converts the interaction from the flowingly spontaneous to the self-consciously calculated. Evan’s five-minute delay before approaching a woman who absolutely attracted him was, in this case, attributable only to his three-month string of prior botches. To exacerbate matters, when he finally gathered the gumption to approach her, he allowed some form of autopilot to take over, in the hope that luck alone might produce some good results.
She was wearing body-tight, silk white shorts, and a pink wife-beater undershirt with no bra. Her perky, full breasts looked to Evan like two deliciously firm, cherry-topped cantaloupes, daring him to look anywhere else. The woman oozed sex and her name was Tina, although Evan would never actually come to learn this basic fact about her. He would instead remember her only as “the soft porn babe I massively underestimated.”
As Evan arrived next to her at the bar, he realized that the only thing about her that he had observed was that this sultry, petite blonde in his crosshairs had the figure of an exotic dancer or a soft porn actress. Evan’s autopilot skills were reliable enough to avoid a disastrous opener like, “Say, did anyone ever tell you that you could be a great exotic dancer?” But they were sufficiently lacking in foresight and imagination to realize that asking Tina what she does for a living might be just as bad, if she was, in fact, an exotic dancer. So when Tina turned and noticed that Evan had squeezed into the small space at the bar next to her, all Evan could say when she looked at him was “So…What do you do?”
Tina, who had noticed Evan hesitate for several minutes before walking up to her, just shook her head with a mockingly disappointed look on her face. “Couldn’t you do any better than that?” she replied.
As Evan’s continuing bad luck would have it, Tina had already been approached by four conversationally unimaginative men during the last two hours. All four had started with a similar question, and they were each clearly interested in Tina only as a sexual object. So by the time Evan came by, Tina was more than ready to dish it out.
“Well I realize it’s not a great opening line,” Evan began excusing himself, “but you’ve gotta start somewhere, right? So why not with what you do?”
“Because that’s probably the worst question you can ask a woman you don’t know.”
“Why?”
“It’s about as original and sincere as a flight attendant greeting.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Guys ask me that question all the time. You think any of them actually cares what the answer is?” Tina perked up her chest a little, as if to emphasize what they really care about.
“But I do care.”
“I’m sure you do,” she replied. “Which is why I’m sure you stopped to consider the possibility that I might not like what I do, or might not want to discuss it with a stranger.”
Evan realized that he had to get off autopilot fast, because the young beauty in front of him was far sharper than he had estimated. He feared that he would soon be adding her to the list of females who had abruptly walked away from him in the middle of his attempt to “make a new friend,” as he liked to think of his bungles.
“So,” he began, “should I have started by asking you what you don’t do?”
“Maybe.” Tina released a slight, reluctant smile at the question. “At least it would have been more original.”
“All right,” Evan started anew. “So tell me. What do you not do?”
“I don’t tell guys I don’t know what I do.”
“OK. What else do you not do?”
“I don’t play basketball.”
“How funny! I also don’t play basketball,” he said, forgetting his love of the game.
“I don’t approve of how the city government handles New York’s solid waste problem.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more about solid waste,” Evan replied, despite his complete indifference to the issue.
“And I don’t particularly like your outfit.”
“Really?” Evan smiled with some embarrassment. “It’s actually refreshing to hear a woman say what she really thinks, at my personal expense…”
“At least you don’t have to wonder what I really think.”
“I actually spent four hours in the store, consulting with every female in the area, before I bought it.”
“That just goes to show you that your shopping time isn’t helping the quality of your shopping decisions.”
“I hate shopping.”
“It shows.”
“Say, can we restart this conversation at some point where I was doing better?”
“There is no such point,” she responded with a playful half-smile. “You were always doing this bad.”
“So I should probably quit while I’m ahead?”
“Probably,” Tina replied, mysteriously. “But I’ll let you crash and burn for a little longer by telling you what I do for a living.”
“Thank you…I guess.” By now, Evan was at once intrigued, intimidated, and otherwise totally at a loss with respect to how he should proceed with this woman.
“I actually don’t know why I’m going to share this information with you…” Tina paused for a moment, to give the value of her confession the respect and seriousness that it deserved. “Because I ordinarily don’t tell this to strangers, but for some reason I trust you.” Tina suddenly seemed vulnerable and exposed to Evan, who now felt awkwardly unworthy of whatever it was that she was about to disclose about her job.
