Heather Macallister - How To Be the Perfect Girlfriend

“But do you truly want to?” Hayden asked.

Sara raised her head just high enough to prop it on her fist. “Maybe not stop so much as slow them down.”

“And then what?” Missy asked.

“What do you mean ‘and then what’?”

“What are you going to do with them when you’ve got them?”

“Well, I don’t know. I was hoping we could talk about that after I found somebody.”

“I think that’s been your problem. We should be talking about afterward before.”

“Huh?”

Missy reached into her wedding tote, withdrew a Palm Pilot and unfolded a keyboard for it. “You need a goal and a plan to reach it.” She looked at Hayden. “Am I right?”

“Yes.” Hayden crossed her arms over her chest and watched the parade of men coming down the escalator. “Much as I hate to admit it.”

Missy’s fingers were poised over the keyboard. “So, what do you want, Sara?”

Well, this was it and she’d better pay attention. “I want a man who’s interested in making a life with me.”

Missy started typing. “Marriage.”

Hayden snorted.

“Or at least long-term devotion. Long-term enough for me to decide if I want it to lead to marriage,” Sara added because she didn’t want to completely alienate Hayden with marriage talk. “Certainly a better caliber of man.”

“What kind of man do you want?” Hayden asked, as though it were that simple.

“The perfect man, of course,” Sara said flippantly.

“Then you’ll have to become the perfect woman.” Missy was serious.

“Oh, sure. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll get right on it.” Sara slapped her hands on the table and looked around the atrium. “Anybody seen my fairy godmother?”

“Snippy, snippy.” Melissa typed something.

“Calm down, Sara.” Hayden stopped casing the escalator for men and closed her plastic salad container. “Perfection is the way you define it. Missy has her idea of the perfect man, I have mine and you should have yours.”

“And then you have to become his match.” Missy eyed her, then typed some more.

Sara eyed Missy right back. “Now, wait a minute—I am not becoming one of those women who completely changes herself for a man.”

“All we’re saying is if you want a pilot, you hang out around airplanes. You don’t want a bowler, then stay out of bowling alleys.” Hayden leaned sideways trying to see what Missy was typing.

“Oh.” That made sense.

“Good Lord, she’s started a spreadsheet.” Hayden grinned at Sara. “You should see what’s in the ‘improvements’ column.”

“Sara said she wanted to upgrade her men.”

“I just thought you’d teach me a secret handshake and tell me to wear a padded bra,” Sara grumbled. Why had she thought this would be as simple as a few tips over lunch?

“Excuse me!” Missy gestured to her chest. “There is nothing padded here. That’s…that’s false advertising.”

“There is nothing false about my advertising, honey,” Hayden snapped.

“Hello?” Sara waved her hands. “Me? Focus on me!”

Hayden grabbed her hands. “Nails.”

“Oh, I know,” Missy tut-tutted. “Acrylic?”

“Hmm.” Both Hayden and Missy looked at Sara.

She pulled her hands away and resisted the urge to sit on them.

Hayden laughed. “Let’s just go for groomed right now.”

“Oh, thanks a lot.”

“What about her hair?” Missy tossed her mane of one hundred and fifty dollar highlights over her shoulder. “Except I really shouldn’t fill that in if she wants a low-maintenance man.”

Sara wasn’t sure, but she thought there was an insult in there.

“Sara, you’re going to have to give us specifics on the kind of man you want.” Missy waited expectantly.

“Well…he should be kind, honest and have a sense of humor—”

“Yeah, yeah, we all want those.” Hayden made a hurry-up gesture. “Add sexy.” She smiled at Sara. “My little gift to you.”

“I’m going to type all those in,” Missy said. “Later, you’ll have to rank the traits.”

“What is this?” Even though she’d asked for help, she hadn’t expected them to be quite this helpful. “Are you running a dating service?”

Missy ignored her. “Possible professions?”

“I don’t know—professional.”

Missy typed. “More.”

“Probably older than me. Mature. Never married—or at least no children. I don’t want to do the stepmother thing.”

“Completely understandable,” Hayden agreed. “Go on.”

“I—” Sara thought of Bradley from Friday night. Why had she thought he was attractive? “Classy. Someone who enjoys dining occasionally, rather than just hitting all the fast food places in town. A man who might like to cook, even, or at least take a class with me. Someone who knows how to use all the silverware and doesn’t make jokes about the spork being the perfect utensil.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Hayden said. “What else?”

“Cultured. Refined. Elegant.” Now she was thinking of Ryan, her last boyfriend, who had been none of those things. She was describing the anti-Ryan. Well? Wasn’t that the idea? “A man who’d appreciate seeing a play, or going to the symphony, or…an art gallery. And money. I don’t want to have to lend him money. And his car should be nice. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it just has to work. And he should be the type of man who’d walk me to the door and pull out my chair and buy my mother a corsage for Mother’s Day because he’s just so damn happy she had me.”

Missy had stopped typing. Sara was aware that she and Hayden were staring at her. “What?”

“Anything else?” Hayden asked.

“He should dress well. You know, somebody who actually owns a suit and doesn’t need help tying his tie and isn’t color-blind. Oh, and he shouldn’t freak out when he sees a wine list in a restaurant.”

“Is that all?” Hayden wore a funny smile.

“Yes—no. He should know how to dance.”

“The Cotton-Eyed Joe?”

“No, real dancing.”

Missy gasped. “Bite your tongue!”

“Okay, he would be willing to dance the Cotton-Eyed Joe if we were ever in a place where people were dancing it. But I was just thinking that it would be nice if he knew how to dance the kind of dances that get played at weddings when the bride and groom get the first dance and then the bridesmaids have to dance and it’s really awful if your partner can’t dance because everyone is staring at you and you trip over the stupid dress.”

“I ran out of room,” Missy said. “I should have brought my laptop.”

Hayden studied Sara. “And is that everything about your ideal man?”

Sara thought. “He should be well-spoken and use correct grammar.” Hey, it would make her mother happy.

“Maybe even with a slight accent?” Hayden asked.

“Accents can be cool.”

Hayden laughed. “I guess so because, Sara, sweetie, you have just described Simon Northrup.”

SIMON NORTHRUP was having a bad day. He knew it when the highlight had been fixing a paper jam. The afternoon had gone downhill from there. Not one, but two, count ’em two, accounts had gone to rival companies. Yes, the paper jam had definitely been the best part. And the girl—woman, female or whatever the politically correct term was these days—was the sole reason the paper jam was a highlight.

Until he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be having female highlights. He had enough trouble with the females in his life as it was. He needed to keep his eyes in front and his mind blank.

But he couldn’t. She’d had brown eyes. Soft brown hair. A quiet, conservative manner. Such a refreshing change from most Texas women who were all woman and let a man know it at every opportunity and expected said man to acknowledge their womanliness constantly. In-your-face-female pulchritude. For some men, sexual nirvana. For Simon, who had temporarily forsworn women, torture. Texas women were so much effort. As he had cause to know, they were well worth that effort. But restful they definitely were not.