Chapter One

Everyone is Getting Some But Me

Week of Thanksgiving

Tuesday Morning

 

The alarm blasted into Jade’s ear at 6:00 a.m.  She rolled over and glanced at her phone before she turned it off.  She wanted to hit snooze, but she knew that ten more minutes in the bed wouldn’t help what ailed her.

Grunting, she rolled over and kicked her legs from under the comforter.  Everything was hazy and cold.  But that was intentional.  She always turned the air down to 65 degrees before she went to bed.  She liked snuggling under her covers in the dark in a perfectly clean room.  Something about it was comforting.  But in the morning when she woke, it was always the same.

Cold. Dark.  Lonely.

Standing up beside her bed, she grabbed her glasses and slipped them onto her face, instantly going from nearly blind to 20/20 vision.  Turning on her lamp, she looked around her large master bedroom.  She always looked around every morning, scanning for anything that might be out of place.  Besides work, she had nothing else in her life.  So, keeping her house clean as a whistle had become an obsession. Healthy or not, it was all that she had.

Meandering through the long hallway, she made her way to the kitchen.  Turning on the television in the corner atop her countertop, she poured herself a cup of coffee from the Keurig she had bought herself the previous year for her birthday and stared at CNN reporting on another violent eruption in the Middle East.

Then it hit her.

Today was her birthday. How could she forget that?  Or maybe, she hadn’t forgotten at all, maybe she had pushed that date to the back of her mind until she had no choice but to deal with it.

Well, here it was.

There was something that went instantly sour in her stomach.

She was thirty-five today, and still she was single.  Absolutely, positively single.  How could a woman with a 775 credit score, thousands of dollars in the bank, no children, no STDs and no behavioral disorders be single at 35 when Honey BooBoo was juggling two men?

She didn’t even have a male friend in this city. Hell, at this point, she’d take an affair on Tinder to have someone to talk to.  She was…pathetic.  She had moved to Memphis from Manhattan one year ago to work for Koch PR firm, a move that she thought would help her find peace in her life.

Two years ago, she really had been in love.  And she thought he was in love too.  That was until he accepted a job with a bigger PR firm in Toronto and broke up with her to further his career.  He called it an opportunity of a lifetime…like she was just something to do.  Six months later, he was engaged to someone else, someone new. It only took six damn months. She saw it on Facebook.  How tacky?  And the woman had been far less pretty, in her biased opinion.  The least the jerk could have done was block her as a friend before dropping the news on everyone and making her look like a complete ass.

Or maybe she should have looked at all the signs.

He said that he loved her…her knight in shining armor.

He said that he wanted to be with her. But he never moved in.

He said that they would spend their lives together, but he had never popped the question.  She had been waiting, but it never came.  She couldn’t even name how many times that he had taken her to dinner at a five-star restaurant and she thought, this is it, only to be disappointed by it turning out to be a celebration of some other special moment in his life. A promotion.  Closing a deal.  Paying off his student loan.

But he couldn’t seem to promote their relationship or close the deal with her.

FUCK HIM.

He became him who would not be named.

And according to him who would not be named, she had one fatal flaw that he could not get around.  She was a classic workaholic.  Unfortunately, he lived in the world of man, where a woman could make as much money as her man just as long as it didn’t affect their personal time together.  However, if she worked one hour longer or went in one hour earlier, then she was accused of cheating – her job was the other man in her life.  The punishment…breakup.

Never mind his own business trips.  Never mind his own untimely emails and phone calls.  Never mind his emergency weekend meetings at the office.  Those were looked over and chalked up to being reasonable while her job was treated like the elephant in the room.

So after the breakup and the new woman, she moved.

As accused, she had settled into her new job as the Director of Social Media and began slaving away and climbing the proverbial latter.  Only, in the process of trying to prove herself, she had lost any semblance of a personal life. With no one on the weekend to occupy her time, she had nearly forgotten what it was like to have weekend plans or birthday plans or holiday plans or any plans at all.  She had none.

No friends – except work acquaintances.

No boyfriend.

Not even a damn dog.

In six months, the only thing that she had managed to build was her portfolio.  But who really gave a shit, when there was no one to enjoy retirement with?

“I need to stop feeling sorry for myself,” she said aloud, cutting out thoughts of sorrow.

Reaching to the back of the cupboard, she grabbed the slightly dust covered whiskey bottle and poured a little something special into her morning coffee.  “Happy fucking Birthday,” she said, headed to the bathroom to get ready for her perfectly boring day.

 

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