Three Girls And A Leading Man

 
Copyright 2011 Rachel Schurig

Kindle Edition

.

All rights reserved.

Kindle Edition,
License Notes

This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or
given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this
author.

For Andrea.

Twenty-plus years and
still going strong. Thank you for everything!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to
Andrea, Angie, Mary, and Michelle for your help and advice.

Thank you to my
family and friends who have been so supportive of this series.

Thank you to Nicolas
J. Ambrose for editing services.

Book cover design by
Scarlett Rugers Design 2011

www.scarlettrugers.com

Chapter One

‘Are you feeling
lonely? Depressed? Hopeless? As the years go by are you finding that more and
more of your friends are getting married and leaving you behind? Are you tired
of being the only single girl? Don’t despair—there’s hope for you yet!
You’ve taken an important first step in buying this book. Together, we’ll
discover what’s holding you back from the happiness you deserve.’—
The Single Girl’s Guide to Finding True
Love

“She has got to be kidding me,” I
muttered, staring down at the book in my hands in disgust.

“What’s up?” Jen asked, peering
over the top of her laptop.

“My mother,” I said, sighing.
“She’s sent me a
gift
.”

“What is it?”

“Seriously, Jen, you don’t even
want to know.”

I threw the book, along with the
rest of the mail I had just brought in, down on the dining room table and
walked into the kitchen to pour myself a drink.

“Wow, Annie,” Jen called from the
living room. “If you need a drink before you’ve even taken your shoes off or
set your purse down, that must have been one heck of a present.”

After a moment’s search, I found a
half-empty bottle of chardonnay in the fridge. “Thank God,” I muttered, turning
to the cabinet to find a wine glass. Empty. Of course. I pulled open the
dishwasher, where I had loaded several glasses the night before, to find it
full—but still unwashed.

“Damn it, Tina,” I muttered,
slamming the washer closed. My irritation was growing by the minute now, and my
roommate Tina’s inability to do the simplest thing was so not helping. It was
Friday night, I’d had a long week at work, and I just wanted a glass of wine.
Was that too much to ask?

“Hey, pour me some,” Jen called.

A minute later I joined my best
friend in the living room.

“Classy,” she said, raising her
eyebrows as I handed her a coffee mug full of chardonnay.

“It was the only thing that was
clean,” I told her, sitting next to her on the couch. “Tina didn’t run the
dishwasher after her little gathering last night.”

Jen groaned. “That girl is on my
last nerve.”

Tina was our third roommate. She’d
been living with us for the last six months. To say we weren’t crazy about her
would be an understatement.

“She had those people here until
two a.m. last night,” Jen continued. “Chanting and doing God knows what with
those crystals.”

“Let’s just kick her out,” I said,
plopping my feet up on the coffee table.

Jen laughed. “If we could afford
the rent, I would in a second. I’d be happy to be rid of the incense and the
mess and the constant references to my aura.” Jen pushed her dark hair out of
her eyes. “Do you know that last week she told me my prana was murky? What does
that even mean?”

I rolled my eyes and took a long
pull of my wine.

“How was your day?” Jen asked. I
closed my eyes. My day had been
long
.
“That good, huh?”

“Same old crap,” I said. “Stuck in
the office doing busy work while Grayson got to do all the creative stuff. Just
what I always dreamed I’d be doing when I went to work in theater.”

Jen winced. “I’m sorry, hon,” she
said. “Want to talk about it?”

“What’s there to say? My job is
lame and pays me next to nothing.”

We were distracted from this
depressing topic by the sound of someone at the front door. Whoever it was,
they seemed to be having a difficult time getting the door open.

“A little help?” called a familiar
voice from the porch.

I jumped up and ran to the door,
throwing it open to reveal our other best friend, Ginny, standing on the porch
with her arms full and a small child by her legs tugging on her sweater.

“Gin!” I said happily. “I didn’t
know you were coming over!”

“Grab the baby, would you?” she asked,
shifting the load in her hands.

I scooped Danny up, kissing him.
“Hey, buddy!”

“Annie, Annie!” he squealed, and I
felt my heart soar.

Besides Ginny and Jen, whom I had
been best friends with forever, Danny was the most important person in my life.
It had been a shock, sure, when Ginny told us she was pregnant at the age of
twenty-three. And, yes, it
had
been
super scary dealing with the birth and having a newborn baby around. But I
wouldn’t change any of it for anything. Because now we had Danny.

I stepped aside to make room for
Ginny to come inside, bringing Danny over to the couch and swinging him around
and down into Jen’s arms. He laughed and reached for her and I saw her face
light up, too. God, the kid had us wrapped around his little finger.

“I’m glad you’re both home,” Ginny
said, dropping Danny’s diaper bag and folded up pack-and-play on the floor. “I
was hoping to hide out here tonight.”

I smiled, glad that Ginny didn’t
feel the need to ask for our permission. This used to be her house, too. The
three of us had found it after graduating from college and rented it together.
Ginny had found out about the baby right there in our kitchen, and this had
been Danny’s first home.

“Yay!” Jen said, tickling Danny’s
belly. “Sleepover!”

“What are you hiding out from?” I
asked.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “Josh is
having a fantasy football draft at our house. Can you believe that? Ten grown
men pretending that they have actual football teams. Drinking beer and smoking
cigars like they think they’re so cool. It’s just too lame for words. I had to
get out.”

I laughed, rather nastily, and Jen
shot me a warning look. I had a bit of a history of disliking Ginny’s husband,
Josh, but I was over it now. Mostly.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I
told her. “Jen and I were just having some wine.”

“Ooh, that reminds me,” Gin said,
bending down and rummaging through Danny’s diaper bag. “I brought us some
pinot!”

Jen and I both laughed. It was so
Ginny to carry wine around in her baby’s diaper bag.

“How ‘bout I make us some dinner?”
Jen said, getting to her feet. “What do you guys feel like? I think I have some
pesto; we could do a chicken and pasta thing.”

Ginny moaned. Jen was a fabulous
cook.

Looking around the room, I felt my
spirits rise. I might be totally frustrated in my job, live with a psycho like
Tina, and have a mother that drove me crazy, but tonight, it didn’t matter. My
two best friends were here. What else did I need?

Chapter Two

An hour and a half later, the three
of us sat down at the dining room table. While Jen had cooked, Ginny and I had
fed Danny, given him his bath, and set him up in my bedroom in his
pack-and-play for the night.

“Freedom,” Ginny said, raising her
wine glass (I had begrudgingly run the dishwasher). “No baby, no men, no jobs.
It’s the weekend, girls.”

“Thank God,” I said, downing my
pinot quickly. “This week was hella lame.”

“Annie is having a shitty time at
work,” Jen explained to Ginny.

Gin made a face at me. “Sorry, hon.
What’s up?”

“I’m just…bored. I never wanted to
work in an office and it feels like that’s all I do.”

On paper, my job was perfect. I
worked at Springwells Theater Company, an awesome small, non-profit theater in
Detroit, about twenty minutes away from our house in Ferndale. We ran a lot of
programs for teens and kids—play writing, acting, dance, things like
that. I loved that part of my job—but more and more I was being shunted
off into the office to do busywork.
 
Administrative crap was really not my thing.

“I went into theater so I could be
creative,” I said, pouring myself more wine. “But it feels like I sit at a desk
all day dealing with soul-crushing, administrative bullshit.”

“Well,” Jen said, dishing me out
some pesto pasta. “Are there any auditions on the horizon?”

I had to roll my eyes a little.
Just like Jen to bring it back to the positive, no matter how grouchy I was
acting.

“Actually, there is. A really cool
new show has open calls next week.” I paused for effect. “It’s being produced
by Jenner Collins.”

“Oooh,” Ginny said. “Big time!”

Jenner Collins was a native
Detroiter who had made it big in Hollywood. He’d even been nominated for a
Golden Globe a few years ago. When he wasn’t hanging out in L.A. being a
big-time movie star, he spent part of his time back in Detroit, producing new
plays with local talent. Getting into one of his shows would be a dream come
true.

I’d wanted to be an actress for as
long as I could remember. There was nothing I loved more than getting up on
stage and completely losing myself in a character. My friends have always said
I have a flair for the dramatic; I guess it makes sense that I chose drama as
my career.

A lot of old friends from college
question why I still live around here. Detroit isn’t necessarily the place to
be if you want to be a star. When I told my mother I was majoring in drama, she
burst into tears, assuming it meant I would be moving out to L.A. to try to
break into movies. “You’ll end up living in a slum and taking your top off for
money!” she had sobbed.

What most people didn’t seem to
understand is that I had no interest in the fame thing. Sure, I would love to
act on stage on Broadway, or something, but I wasn’t going to uproot my life
over it. I was happy in Detroit—it was an awesome city with a great arts
scene. People were putting up cool, edgy shows all over the place. I would be
happy if I could make a living working around here, even if it meant I never
made it to Broadway. Besides, the girls lived here.

What I had never realized is that
it’s every bit as hard to find your big break in Detroit as it is a big city
like New York.

“Well, I think you should go for
it,” Ginny said, reaching over to move a pile of mail a bit farther from her
plate. “Let me know if you need help running lines.”

“Thanks,” I said. This is what I
loved about my friends—they always took my passion seriously. Never once
had they told me I should move on and find a real job.

“Hey, what’s this?” Gin asked,
pulling a book off the pile of mail she had just moved. “
The
Single Girl’s Guide to
Finding True Love
?”

I groaned. “My mother sent it.”

Ginny started laughing as she
flipped through the book. “Oh, my. This is ridiculously sad.”

“Tell me about it,” I grumbled,
helping myself to more of Jen’s pasta concoction. “That woman just has no
clue.”

“Aw, she means well,” Jen said.
“She just wants you to be happy.”

“And apparently, being happy
requires you to follow these ‘Ten simple steps to making the right impression
on your first date’,” Ginny said, pointing to a random page in the book. “Oh,
no. I’m starting to see where you’re going wrong, sweetie. According to this
you should always let the man lead the conversation and should only talk about
yourself in response to his specific questions.”

Jen snorted. “That sounds just like
you, Ann.”

“You also should never, ever ask a
man out and should only kiss someone after three dates.”

“If that’s what it takes to land a
guy, you’re screwed,” Jen said with a smirk.

“I doubt I would have much interest
in any guy that would care about shit like that,” I replied. “When was that
book written, anyhow? 1950?”