My Guys Read online

  My Guys

  Copyright © 2016 by Tanya Chris (www.tanyachris.com)

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.

  ISBN-13: 978-1536891676

  ISBN-10: 1536891673

  For my guy, who doesn’t squawk about the stuff I write

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Chapter 1

  “God damn it,” I muttered, not for the first time.

  “Something wrong over there?” one of the other woman asked. Laurie, I thought her name was—the tall one with the short red hair and aggressively long fingernails.

  “This nail doesn’t want to come out.”

  “I don’t know why we’re doing this anyway,” the prickly one I was pretty sure was named Patty complained. “It’s just busy work, if you ask me.”

  I looked down at the length of two-by-four on the floor in front of me, nails bristling from it in every direction like it had been used as a practice piece for a Boy Scout troop’s introduction to wood working. It was my job to remove the nails from this piece of wood. Laurie, Patty, and—Vicki maybe?—each had their own piece of wood. In a pile near us lay another two or three dozen similarly-spiked but differently-sized pieces waiting their turn.

  “Do you really think they re-use these?” I wondered out loud.

  “We really do,” Phil said, appearing above us. “Aside from the green aspect of it, we’re very poor. We get our labor free but wood costs money. Are you guys bored?” Phil was the master carpenter. The master carpenter, it had been explained to us after the quick tour we’d been given of Central Playhouse, was in charge of getting the set built.

  “Just frustrated,” I said. “I can’t get this one.” And every time the hammer slips I whack my hand on the floor, I thought but didn’t say. There was no sense in complaining about what was caused by my own ineptitude, but I wasn’t exactly having a good time.

  Working on a set at a local community theater had sounded a lot more interesting when I’d signed up for this Let’s Meet event than it was turning out to be. I was stiff from sitting on the floor, the knuckles on my right hand were scraped from the repeated whacks, and I was covered in a fine layer of sawdust because there was a table saw positioned about three feet from my ear that had been running off and on all afternoon.

  Phil sat down next to me and showed me how to use a block of wood to brace the back of the hammer. He wasn’t a bad looking guy—about my age with red hair and a neatly-trimmed beard. I looked hopefully at his left hand as he handed the hammer back to me and then shook my head in disgust, not so much at the ring but because I’d looked for it.

  “Get some hobbies,” my sister Morgan had recommended. “Improve yourself. Meet people. Stop looking for some guy to fill the hole in your heart. Be your own hero.”

  Morgan, safely ensconced in marriage and home and motherhood, read all the best advice columns. Although she needed no advice herself—clearly—she liked to see how the rest of the world was doing. The rest of world, apparently, needed to get out more.

  “Try some of those Let’s Meet events,” she’d suggested. “My friend Shari went to one for classical music and met a very cute college professor.”

  “You just told me to stop looking for a man,” I reminded her.

  “If you follow your dream, the man will find you.”

  Sage advice, Morgan. If I had any idea what my dream was, I’d follow it. Once upon a time I’d thought I had my dream. I’d married my best friend—my soul mate, my prince. I was going to be a wife, then a homeowner and, eventually, a mother. By day, I would file taxes and he would file briefs. By night, we’d cherish each other and those eventual children.

  “I think you’ve got it,” Phil said, standing up. His advice had been a lot more practical than my sister’s. I couldn’t fill the hole in my life but I could now pull a long, thick nail from a hard piece of wood without smashing my knuckles.

  “At least there are men here,” Laurie said once Phil had walked out of earshot.

  So it wasn’t just the Let’s Meet events I went to. The week before I’d gone to one at a yoga studio. The group had consisted of eight women in tank tops and yoga pants and one guy, probably gay. There were a few other guys in the class we were attending. I’d managed to place my mat next to one of them—gray hair but not too old-looking and definitely fit.

  From what I’d been able to see while I concentrated on not falling over, he hadn’t been in any danger of falling over. At the end of the class when we were getting into position for the final resting pose, I turned my head to him, my body wrung out and shimmering with sweat, the bangs I was trying to grow out damp against my forehead, and said, “Was it good for you, too?”

  Which I’d thought was a pretty good line. He turned his head the other direction without a word and I spent the next five minutes of enforced relaxation replaying those two moments over and over in my mind: “Was it good for you, too?” Head turning away. “Was it good for you, too?” Head turning away.

  When the teacher had released us at last, I’d flown to my car without checking where the group was planning to go for the inevitable post-event coffee. I couldn’t decide which to swear off—yoga or men. Then I remembered my husband, Alex, and decided: men.

  “My God,” a man’s voice declared from behind me, startling me from my thoughts. “Do you see what I see?”

  I looked up. I didn’t see anything very interesting so I turned instead to look at the guy who’d been shouting—a short, chubby kid, probably not much out of college, clutching the arm of a taller, chubbier kid next to him in mock drama.

  “Why, I think it’s an actor,” the chubbier one said.

  “All hail!”

  I turned around again to see who they were hailing. He was tall—maybe a little more than six feet—and thin, just saved from being gangly by a certain confidence of movement. Twenty something. Brown hair waving down to the nape of his neck where it broke out in curls. Pale, like the outdoors was a place he didn’t go. Or perhaps his mother had succeeded in training him to use sunscreen.

  “My Lordship,” shouted one of the jokers behind me. The guy in front of me made a gallant bow.

  “Bring me ...” he intoned, filling his chest and throwing back his head so the curls danced, “... a beer.”

  “A beer, a beer. Bring his Lordship a beer.” Moe and Curly put on a show, darting around in circles and generally bumping into each other and everyone else.

  “Nate,” Phil called.

  Nate turned and caught the can of beer Phil threw him, then wandered over to a group gathered around a fake fireplace, ignoring Moe and Curly who were being ignored by everyone except our Let’s Meet gang. We were staring.

  “These are weird people,” Laurie said.

  “I didn’t know they had beer,” Patty said. “Anyway, they didn’t offer us one.”


  “It’s not even three o’clock,” Vicki said.

  Patty rolled her eyes at me and we all went back to pulling nails in silence. Around us, the theater bustled with movement, laughter, and the occasional high-pitched squeal of the table saw.

  “I wonder who he is,” I said, finally. My eyes refused to leave him alone.

  “Nobody.”

  I looked up to find a woman standing next to me. She was younger than I was, maybe late twenties, with a chestnut-brown pixie cut. She was looking at Nate, not me.

  “He’s an actor, not even a very good one in my opinion.”

  “What was all the fuss about?” I asked the obvious question, rather than the one that was forming—if you like him so little, why look at him so hard?

  “Just a joke. Actors almost never come help build the set. You know—they’re above it or something. Sets just magically appear for their benefit.”

  “The actors are here four or five nights a week, Deb. I suppose they have to do their laundry sometime.” That was Phil, cruising in to check on us again.

  “Whatever.” Deb shrugged and walked away.

  I worried she was going to walk into something if she didn’t look where she was going instead of at Nate.

  “Doing better?” Phil asked me. I nodded. “Everyone OK here?” The other women nodded too. “Well, when you get tired of this, let me know. I’ve got some painting you can do.”

  “Could I paint?” Patty asked. “I’d rather.”

  “Absolutely. Come on, I’ll get you started.”

  Patty followed Phil, then Vicki stood up and dashed after them. Painting did sound better. I looked at the pile of wood waiting to be stripped. It had hardly diminished at all. I sighed. We couldn’t all paint.

  “I’m going for a cigarette,” Laurie said. She stood up and snagged her purse from the floor, then walked over and leaned down to my ear to say, “This blows.” I had a feeling she wouldn’t come back from her cigarette break. Well, I wasn’t giving up. I didn’t have anything else to do anyway. Just another long, empty Saturday leading to a longer, emptier Sunday. Why not pull nails?

  I pushed my too-long bangs out of my eyes for the hundredth time and bent my head back to the cork-screwed nail I’d been working on. Also Morgan’s fault, those bangs.

  “Change it up! Do something different! Remake yourself.”

  “Maybe you should be a motivational speaker,” I’d told her.

  “Do you think?” She’d been so flattered she hadn’t noticed I was being sarcastic. But, make fun of her advice as I might, there I was sitting on the floor of a theater with my bangs in my eyes. Her advice gave me some place to start, something to work on, something easier to address than what Alex had said the day our marriage ended: uninterested and uninteresting.

  “Has anyone ever told you that sawdust is your color?” Nate descended beside me like an accordion collapsing, his long legs scissoring into a cross-legged position.

  “Am I covered in it?”

  “A dusting in your hair. Like glitter. It suits you.”

  His eyes were the darkest blue and his lashes were the blackest black. He looked like Lord Byron, if I imagined what Lord Byron would look like—delicate features on creamy skin and above all—those eyes.

  “I’m Nate.” He held out a hand to me.

  “I’m sorry.” I’d totally been staring. “I’m Melissa.” I put my hand in his and he gave it a squeeze-shake.

  “Melissa, huh?” He tilted his head, considering. “No, I don’t see it.”

  “Yes, Melissa.”

  “Missy? OK, don’t panic.” He held up a hand. “I see by the expression on your face that you are definitely not Missy.”

  “As a baby,” I admitted. “It took a long time to grow out of.”

  “OK, no going back now. Not Missy.” He pondered me. I used the opening to ponder him back. Apparently staring at a stranger was OK in the world of theater.

  “Mel?”

  I made a face.

  “Oh, a girly girl, are you?”

  “Not exactly. But not a Mel either.”

  “Probably not. If you were, you’d have these nails out by now.” He reached across me to grab the hammer Patty had left. He smelled like spruce with a hint of cheap beer. “It’ll come to me, your name.”

  “Not Melissa?”

  He shook his head and started pulling nails from the other end of the board I was working on, humming to himself beneath his breath. Gold Dust Woman, I realized, smiling.

  “Do you always rename people?”

  “Most people’s names go along with them. I don’t believe you’re really Melissa.”

  I laughed. He raised an eyebrow at me questioningly.

  “An inside joke,” I said, shrugging it off.

  “Who’s on the inside? You and you? That’s a lonely joke.”

  “It’ll sound stupid.”

  He didn’t say anything, waiting me out.

  “All right, I just ... Maybe I’m not Melissa anymore. I’ve been trying to ... change things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I’m here, for one.”

  “Not a place you’d normally be?”

  “Not here anyway. Maybe up there.” I waved at the tiered audience seating in front of us.

  “What else?”

  “I’m growing out my bangs.” I glared at them through my eyelashes in disgust. “That sounds lame.”

  “No, I totally sympathize. I had to get a buzz cut for a part a couple of years ago.”

  “You cut your hair?” I’d just met him and I was already attached to his hair.

  “For a part. We actors must be willing to sacrifice everything for our craft.” He sat up very straight and lifted his chin to illustrate the nobility of his calling. “Or at least get a haircut.”

  “Do actors really never help with the set?”

  “Who said that?” He looked around. “Oh, that business with Pete and Repeat when I came in.”

  “Pete and Repeat?”

  Nate gestured towards Moe and Curly who were enacting a new comedy routine, one that involved balancing donuts on various body parts.

  “Which one is Pete?”

  “They both are, so we call the taller one Repeat. Pete tends to take the lead.”

  “I don’t think I want to know what he’s going to do with that donut next.”

  “Then I’d advise you to look away.”

  I turned my attention back to the piece of wood I was holding. “Actually, it was Deb who said actors never help with the set.”

  “Oh.”

  I waited for him to elucidate, but he didn’t. “Is she an actor?”

  “We all act sometimes, and we all help with the set sometimes. Never mind Deb. You were telling me about the brand new Lissa.”

  “Lissa?”

  “No, I guess not. Too close to Lisa, which is too ordinary. You’re not ordinary.”

  “I’ve never thought of myself as un-ordinary.”

  “Extraordinary. I don’t think un-ordinary is a word.”

  “Well, I’ve certainly never thought of myself as extraordinary.”

  “That was Melissa. The new you is extraordinary.” He smiled charmingly and for a moment I felt extraordinary. This was what I’d wanted, though I’d been trying very hard not to think of it—to have a man’s attention all to myself for a moment, to feel extraordinary, if only to one person.

  “How old are you?” I asked, driven to outright frankness.

  “Twenty-five. How old are you?”

  “Too old to be comfortable answering that question.” I’d been hoping he was older than he looked, but he was every bit as young as he looked.

  “You want me to guess?” He scrunched up his eyes and looked me up, down and sideways, even rising up onto to his knees to look over my shoulder at my backside. Then he sat back, closed his eyes, and pondered in silence before making his pronouncement: “Thirty-five.”

  “Close.” To be exact, I wa
s thirty-seven, but I saw no need to be exact. “How did you do that?”

  “I figured you had to be at least ten years older than me or you wouldn’t be making a big deal of it. Then I figured that if I guessed too high you’d be insulted and never speak to me again, so the easy guess was exactly ten.”

  “You’re wise beyond your years.”

  “Among other things.” His gorgeous eyes looked dead into mine. The complete lack of a wink or smirk made it feel more like a promise than an innuendo. I dropped my eyes. Best case, someone completely unsuitable was flirting with me. Worst case, I was so desperate for a man’s attention that I was imagining that someone completely unsuitable was flirting with me. I tugged at a nail, wondering how stupid I looked.

  “What else?”

  I lifted my eyes.

  “The new you.”

  “Just trying to be open to whatever comes. Maybe I’ll find something I really like that I never knew about before.”

  “Green eggs and ham.”

  “Exactly.” I’d never known I could enjoy sitting on the floor stripping nails from old lumber, but there I was. I watched him deftly pull three nails in quick succession before throwing the piece of wood in his hands behind him and reaching for a new one.

  “Next week I’m going rock climbing,” I told him. “It sounds terrifying, but maybe exciting too.”

  “I’d try rock climbing. How about skydiving?”

  “Not a chance.” I shook my head to emphasize the point.

  “Not any chance?”

  “None at all.”

  “Would you, could you from a plane? Would you, could you in the rain?”

  I laughed and shook my head again. “Not from a plane, not in the rain.”

  “With a chute? In a suit?”

  “How do you do that so fast? Are you a rapper?”

  “Definitely not. Not with a mic, not on a bike. Improv training.”

  “Improv? That’s where you’re making it up as you go along.” I shifted position, trying to get feeling back into my legs and to make it less obvious that I was watching him. “How do you train for something that you don’t know what it is?”

  “You practice saying yes and being open to whatever comes next, sort of like you’re doing with your life right now.”