Slightly Stalky: He's the One, He Just Doesn't Know it Yet (Slightly Series Book 1) Read online

  SlightlyStalky

  He’s the one…He just doesn’t know it yet…

  Amy Vansant

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by any means, without the permission of the author. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-10: 0-9837191-5-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9837191-5-1

  Vansant Creations, LLC / Amy Vansant

  Annapolis, MD

  http://www.AmyVansant.com

  http://www.SlightlyStalky.com

  Cover art by Farik Osman - http://www.sexytoonpinups.com

  Copy editing by Nicole DeFelice and Carolyn Steele.

  DEDICATION

  To the Chicken Club Crew.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter One

  “In college you’re constantly being thrown into rooms with the opposite sex,” said Emily. “College is a Petri dish of lust.”

  Emily sipped her Chardonnay, deep in a buttery, oaky rut. She preferred a warm, chocolaty rut, but summer meant time to mix-up the ruts.

  “That sounds like the worst romance novel ever,” said her friend Kady. “Petri Dish of Lust.”

  Emily chuckled.

  “Seriously though, where are you supposed to meet people on the wrong side of twenty-five?”

  Emily sat on Kady’s porch, pushing a flake of peeled white paint back and forth with her toe. Kady and her boyfriend, Joe, were Emily’s “hippie” friends. Kady and Joe lived in a fixer-upper they never fixer-upped, went to concerts featuring one endless song, and ate unidentifiable plant pods on purpose. Emily had no interest in jam bands or kale salad, but she and Kady had other things in common like wine, food and books. Kady was also one of the warmest people Emily had ever met.

  While the girls sipped wine, Joe attempted to roll a cigarette, tongue hanging from his mouth like an overheated Labrador’s as he concentrated. Without looking up he muttered, “Why don’t you go to dart night at the Irish Rover?”

  “Irish Rover the bar?” asked Emily.

  “Yes, the bar. They have a round robin where you play darts for money. The place is full of men. It’s a Petri dish of lust.”

  Kady groaned. “You have no idea how close that is to the truth. That place is filthy.”

  Emily recalled the dartboard that had once hung in her father’s garage. As a pre-teen, she had punctured more holes in the Stanley Cup Winning Flyers team photo pinned next to the dartboard.

  “My dad had a dartboard when I was little, but I wasn’t very good. But I threw javelin in high school...”

  Joe tilted his head, his floppy auburn hair spilling to the left.

  “That’s like saying you’d be an excellent bowler because you played marbles.”

  “Why? Same idea, right?”

  “No, it really isn’t. For one, you don’t aim a javelin.”

  “Mmm. Excellent point.”

  “Ha!” said Kady, jumping in her seat. “Get it? Excellent point!”

  “Bad dum dum,” said Joe, verbally providing Kady with a lackluster rimshot.

  Emily ruminated on Joe’s suggestion. She did love the idea of throwing sharp pointy things. She definitely had a competitive streak. However, meeting men in a bar sounded so...meeting men in a bar.

  On the other hand, she was tired of drinking café lattes alone at Grounded coffee shop under the guise of reading a book, while not-so-secretly trolling for sensitive, literary types. Avoiding eye contact with the other single girls was becoming pathological. None of them could bear the sight of their own desperation reflected in each other’s eyes.

  Emily knew which girls were on Grounded Man Safari by the way their gazes laser-locked on women with boyfriends. Women-with-boyfriends always entered the Grounded arm in arm with their man, moving in slow motion, heads tossed back in the throes of an exaggerated laugh. The vision of those white teeth flashing activated jealousy processes in the brains of the hunters, loud as a room full of ticker-tape calculators. Judgment was passed. The girlfriend was found wanting. Too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, fashion-impaired, crooked-nosed, obnoxious, obvious, loud and mousey. Wait, isn’t one of her breasts smaller than the other?

  After judging the girlfriend, attention shifts to the boyfriend. He seems nice. Or douchey. It doesn’t matter; gazes pull back to the girl as if magnetized. That’s when girlfriend notices the gaping latte drinkers. She looks back at them.

  The jig is up!

  Eyes dart away. Heads drop and noses tuck into books. The hunters squash the urge to form an over-caffeinated, snarling wolf pack.

  Emily didn’t think she would meet the love of her life in a coffee shop, but she worked from home as a freelance writer and web designer, and she didn’t get the daily human interaction most people took for granted. Her friends had lives and families of their own and even if they didn’t, she wouldn’t expect them to babysit her. She loved her dog, Duppy, but he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. The chairs in Grounded weren’t chatty either, but the constant flow of people walking in and out with their mochas and muffins made her feel social. It was like being at a party during that uncomfortable in-between-conversations moment. Awkward but, hey, anything could happen.

  Emily decided to play darts.

  “When is it?” she asked.

  Joe held up his freshly rolled cigarette, beaming.

  “How about that?”

  “Nice,” Emily said, having no real opinion on the quality of his workmanship. She considered Joe’s ragged beard. It never grew in. He wore a flannel shirt, but it was Ralph Lauren. He wanted to be a hippie, but no matter how hard he tried, he always looked like he’d grown up in the affluent area of Short Hills, New Jersey. Which he had.

  “Wait,” said Emily. “Aren’t you the only granola muncher in the world who doesn’t smoke pot? Why do you need to roll cigarettes?”

  “I just thought it was something I should know,” Joe said, slipping the cigarette into the pocket of his flannel.

  “In case you’re magically teleported to the old West?” Emily asked. “Cigarette rolling is not something you need to know. Nobody ever screams, ‘This man is having a heart attack! Quick! Someone roll a cigarette!’”

  Kady laughed, the dark curls framing her face, bouncing. “The plane is going down! Can anyone roll a cigarette?”

  Stone-faced, Joe chose to ignore them.

  Kady’s giggles faded. “He said he saw someone roll one last week and he thought it was cool. He just
had to know how to do it.”

  “Thank god he didn’t see someone speed-balling cocaine,” said Emily.

  The part of Emily that was not fond of Joe sneaked out for a visit, and she took a sip of wine to quiet herself. She didn’t want to appear mean-spirited and offend Kady. Joe was her boyfriend, after all. Emily knew better than to pick on a girlfriend’s mate, even if the girlfriend initiated the attack. A week later, that same girl would reunite with the man she'd bashed, and Emily would be the jerk for calling the love of her friend’s life, “King Needle Dick of Loserville.”

  Unlike Joe, Kady was a genuine person and more of an earth-mama-hippie than a dancing-bear-hippie. Kady liked jazz and cobbled together signature outfits from vintage clothes purchased on eBay. Kady thought the Eleventh Commandment should be “Thou shalt not shop at Pottery Barn,” because every time she found a classic piece of furniture, she’d discover Pottery Barn mass producing carbon copies and it broke her heart. She loved plants and insects and worked in the garden department of Home Depot to finance her tuition to landscaping college.

  How many hippies make six figures a year in corporate finance? That was another fail for Joe. He wore a tie to work and looked more comfortable in suits than hemp t-shirts. Emily knew it shouldn’t bother her, but something about Joe felt disingenuous, like he was a bored rich kid trying on new personalities, dating Kady to complete his hippie ensemble. Emily would never share her theory with Kady, but she was tempted. Especially because Joe wasn’t always nice to Kady. He didn’t seem to appreciate Kady for Kady.

  Emily sighed. The Joe-puzzle was unsolvable today; time to let it go.

  “When is dart night?”

  “Tonight,” said Joe.

  “That seems sudden. Should I go tonight? Do I have to buy darts? Should I practice throwing soft things first?”

  “You could throw Q-tips,” suggested Kady.

  “You can borrow my spares,” said Joe.

  “Great,” said Emily. She glanced at Kady, still unsure.

  “We’ll all go,” Kady said. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Who me?” said Joe. “I don’t want to go.”

  “Oh come on, Joe. Why wouldn’t you? You were just saying you wanted to go out tonight, like, an hour ago.”

  Joe wrinkled his nose and then nodded his head from side to side, relenting.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine,” said Emily. “Good.”

  Emily supposed it wouldn’t kill her to give darts night a try.

  Unless someone had terrible aim, in which case, maybe it could.

  Chapter Two

  The Irish Rover was a smoky saloon smothered in dark wood, Celtic knots and Irish drinking songs stuck on eternal replay. To the right of the entrance was an area the size of a large walk-in closet called “the snug” featuring a bar that began there, made a hard right, and continued to the back of the restaurant. The snug boasted two dartboards and four twenty-to-thirty-something-aged men practicing for “Dart Night.”

  As soon as they entered, Joe peeled from the girls to offer his homemade cigarette to one of his smoking friends. Kady and Emily moved to the back of the pub to find the person in charge of the dart competition, passing another pack of men practicing at additional dartboards in a second snug located to the left of the restaurant area.

  This is like man shopping, thought Emily. Like shopping at Whole Dudes.

  An older man with an impish grin, shining eyes and slightly pointy ears stood at the back of the bar taking money and scrawling names on torn pieces of paper. He was short and animated.

  “Slow down and look casual,” Emily stage-whispered into Kady’s ear.

  “What? Why?”

  “Otherwise he’ll know we’re after his pot of gold.”

  Kady cackled with laughter.

  “That’s Sean,” she said. “He does sort of look like a leprechaun!”

  “Named Sean. There’s a shocker.”

  Sean the Leprechaun asked Emily and Kady for ten dollars to enter the dart tournament. Depending on the number of contestants, they could win much more. Emily handed the man a ten, knowing she’d never see it again. Kady paid her fee and Joe’s as well.

  Kady ordered a Pinot Grigio and Emily, a vodka and lemonade. They sat at a tall, circular bar table to wait for the availability of a dartboard for practice. Kady read the various names carved in the tabletop while Emily scanned the room. The bar was packed. A whole ecosystem of dart players thrived just a few miles from her home. Who knew?

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said.

  A single shaft of late afternoon sunlight pierced the gloom of the dimly lit bar. Smoke and dust particles sparkled in the beam. Emily followed the path of light from a small rectangular window to where it landed on the face of a brown-haired man, sitting at a table near the back of the bar. A tiny brunette sat across from him. The girl had impossibly large breasts. She looked as if she was smuggling cantaloupes under her light summer sweater.

  The light illuminated the man like an angel; his blue eyes appeared lit from within. Seeking relief from the glare, he turned his gaze in Emily’s direction to find her staring at him. Their eyes locked until his tablemate slapped him on the arm, encouraging him to refocus on their conversation. When his attention returned to the agitated anatomical anomaly, Emily realized she had been staring and looked away.

  Emily took a moment to compose herself. It wasn’t like her to stare at someone, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew the man.

  “You have to see this guy,” said Emily, tapping Kady’s arm.

  “Who?”

  “Turn around. I can’t look again. It’s the table against the back wall. The guy who is...glowing.”

  Kady twisted in her chair to get a better view. Just as she did, the leprechaun released the back blinds and the beam of sunlight disappeared.

  “Who?” asked Kady. “I don’t see any glowing men.”

  Emily saw her glowing man had fallen into shadow.

  “He’s not glowing anymore.”

  “What?”

  “He—never mind. He’s going to think we’re nuts if he sees you gawking at him.”

  “Who?”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Never mind.”

  The male-to-female ratio at the Irish Rover was already crushing Grounded, and the handsome-to-ho-hum equation proved excellent. Emily noticed a pair of boys abandoning the last dartboard in the back.

  “I think a board opened up!” she mouthed to Kady over the Irish music.

  Kady nodded enthusiastically, her Pinot Grigio bee already buzzing. She removed two small black cases from her oversized purse and jumped from her stool to hand her bag to a giant woman pouring a drink behind the bar. The woman accepted the purse with her free hand and tucked it out of sight. Emily took a moment to gape at the bartender; the woman was easily over six feet tall. Long, dark hair flowed over the Amazon’s shoulders. She wore a Renaissance-style dress with a poufy, white cotton front and a skirt, waist and sleeves of dark green felt. Her breasts spilled over her bodice like toothpaste bursting from a tube.

  Emily scanned the bar to confirm none of the other bartenders wore costumes.

  “What’s with the outfit?” Emily asked Kady as they made their way to the dart area.

  “Oh, Wendy? It’s her thing. Tips.” Kady cupped her hands over her chest to manifest large, imaginary breasts as she said the word “tips.”

  Emily nodded. That made sense. In a bar full of men, more cleavage meant more money.

  Kady and Emily claimed the abandoned board. A movie-star-handsome man playing darts on the board beside theirs nodded his acknowledgement of Emily’s arrival and then turned his attention to his game.

  “Who is that?” Emily asked Kady.

  “That’s Ryan. Good-looking guy, huh?”

  Emily nodded. Yes, indeedy, she thought, and made a mental note never to say “yes, indeedy” aloud.

  Kady erased the scoreboard and prepared it for the
ir practice game as Emily hovered, looking for an opportunity to introduce herself to Ryan. She couldn’t get close to him without being obvious; an entourage of enraptured beta-men surrounded the ruling king of his court.

  Kady opened one of her black cases like a tiny coffin and retrieved a set of darts. As she fiddled with the points, Emily caught enough of the nearby chatter to hear Ryan sharing his latest sexual conquest. His most recent night of passion had ended with the girl requesting an escort home, which he refused to provide.

  “What did she say?” asked one of the other boys, barely able to contain his laughter.

  “But it's dangerous out there!” said Ryan in falsetto, his hands in the air to mimic a damsel in distress.

  The group erupted with laughter.

  “So you made her walk home alone?” asked someone.

  Ryan offered a wicked grin.

  “I walked her to the kitchen and pulled a knife out of the drawer.”

  The group fell silent as Ryan aimed his next dart, allowing the suspense to grow. He threw and turned back to his enthralled audience.

  “‘You’ll be fine,’ I told her,” he said, pantomiming handing the girl the knife. “Take this with you.”

  Laughter drowned the Irish music and Ryan beamed. His gaze caught Emily’s and she quickly looked away.

  “Then I went back to bed.”

  Emily groaned too quietly for anyone to hear over the music. First, Ryan’s appalling behavior deserved nothing less. Second, she was ashamed; twice caught staring at men and the tournament hadn’t even started yet.

  Story time over, the group surrounding Ryan dissipated. Kady looked up from her dart sharpening.

  “You want me to introduce you to Ryan?”

  Alarm bells ringing in her mind, Emily shook her head. Ryan was knuckle-bitingly handsome, but she was too old to fall for bad boys.

  At least that bad boy; he’d lost the element of surprise.

  Someone lowered the lights in the restaurant area and used a separate set of directional can lights to illuminate the dartboards. Awaiting her practice turn, Emily stared into the darkened restaurant. One recessed light hadn’t received the memo and continued to shine brightly upon the man sitting directly beneath it.