Boyfriend From Hell (Falling Angels Saga) Read Free Page A

me. After dinner you can help me fill it out. No one knows me better than you.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    Suze moved to the cabinet where she kept the cooking sherry. “Don’t say it like that. It’ll be fun.”
    Fun?
That questionnaire was going to ask my mother questions about herself I did not want to know the answers to. What happened to the good old days when mothers wore knee length skirts and spent all their time in the kitchen baking bread? Those mothers didn’t care about dating, or questionnaires, or butts. All they cared about was how good their kitchens smelled. I suddenly had a taste for fresh baked bread.
    She looked at me and smiled. She had the biggest, bluest eyes. A lot like mine. “What do you say?”
    “Sure,” I replied weakly. “It’ll be… fun. But let’s order some cheesy bread.”
    It was as close as I was going to get to the good old days.
    #
    Dinner was a disaster.
    The meal was good, perfect, although I must admit cheesy bread is an odd complement to Chicken Paprikash.  The disaster was that my thoughts kept drifting to the result of us filling out that questionnaire—and what I saw was not pretty.
    A short time after we had eaten, cleaned the kitchen, and put the leftovers away, we seated ourselves on the high wooden stools at the kitchen counter with the questionnaire lying between us. That’s exactly how I felt. That stupid questionnaire was coming between us.
    Our special bond began way back when I was five years old. That’s when, after six years of marriage, my father decided to move to Australia to find himself. I guess he figured if he took us with him, he’d be harder to find—so he split, leaving us high and dry.  I haven’t seen or heard from him since. No biggy. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to meet him. I even tried looking him up on Friend Finder a couple of times.
    The good news is, I was so young when he left I don’t remember him leaving. Since his departure, though, my mother and I have become, well… friends.
    I mean for ten whole years it had been just the two of us, me and mom—the Two Musketeers. We had a great time doing everything together: movies, concerts, amusement parks, museums, and let’s not forget the tons and tons of garage and estate sales.  She took me to my dance recitals, and I accompanied her to art shows where she shared her love of sculpture. She sat up with me when I had the chicken pox, and after Erin’s eleventh birthday party where I ate two dozen chocolate chip cookies on a dare, and spent the entire night throwing my guts up into a bucket…  [By the way, if you’re an eleven-year-old, you need to know that a dozen chocolate chip cookies should probably be your limit.]
    Anyway, after all the good times we shared, she suddenly wanted to change things.
    She picked up her pen and began to write. “Let’s see,” she said, thinking out loud. “Attractive single parent…”
    I made a face.
    “What?”
    “It’s that word,
attractive
.”
    “You think I’m ugly?”
    “No, no, of course not. You’re beautiful, Mom. But if you lead with
attractive
you sound vain. Think about it. The first thing you mention is your looks. You sound like one of those botox bimbos.
Ooh, look at me, I’m so cute
.”
    Suze stared at me a moment and then nodded. “Hadn’t thought of that. Good catch.” She started over: “Intelligent…”
    I made a face.
    “What now?”
    “You sound like a snob.”
    “Because I say I’m intelligent?”
    “Mom, you know how boys are. They like to think they’re the smart ones. I’d hate for you to miss out on a good date because Mr. Perfect was feeling a little insecure the day he read your questionnaire.”
    She started over again, and for the next hour and a half, I challenged every word she wrote: Sincere…
means insincere
; clever…
gay
; Sensitive…
crazy
; loves life…
loves sex
, industrious…
means you have no time for him
, caring…
means you have too much time for him
. After a