Trophy Husband Read online

  “Why should age be a barrier? A Trophy Husband is just that – a catch. A pretty young thing. That’s what we’re going to get you, and you have what it takes to land a trophy husband whether you’re twenty-seven or thirty-seven. You don’t have to be Hugh Hefner’s age, McKenna.”

  “Thank god for that, but I haven’t dated, haven’t been involved, and haven’t a clue about men in the modern age. Hayden’s daughter is trying to set me up with the Fedex guy! Because that’s like the only chance I have and I’ll probably bungle that one somehow.” I look up at the crew. Their sympathetic eyes stare right back at me. “This is silly. I can’t do this. I’m not cut out for this.”

  Erin slaps her palm on the table. “You are one hundred percent cut out for this. Men do this all the time and there’s no reason a woman can’t. They are always scoring younger chicks. Constantly. Besides, you have everything you need to snag a Trophy Husband. You sold your business for a ton of cash, you’re loaded at twenty-seven, so why the hell not?”

  “But,” I say, starting to protest more, to tell them all I really want is a date with one good guy.

  “No buts,” Erin says firmly. “You have been in a funk for a year. Totally understandable, and no one expected otherwise. But this is your chance, McKenna. This is your light at the end the tunnel. Your way out of the sadness.” Erin sounds so earnest as she reaches across the table and clutches my hand. “This is the perfect way to get back in the dating saddle again. By making it fun. By turning the tables. By having a crazy good time with a hot young guy.”

  “I know guys, but still. I just want –”

  Hayden chimes in. “What do you want, McKenna?”

  “I want,” I start to say, and there it goes again. The hitch in my throat. The stinging in my eyes. The start of that horrible shaking feeling in my chest that says another round of tears are going to take over. I am so tired of this. I am so exhausted from the way my stupid emotions have controlled me. I don’t want to be this person anymore. “I want to move on.”

  “Then do it,” Erin says and bangs a fist on the table. This is a way to move on that’s fun. You are single and you are hot and you deserve to have a grand old time on the dating circuit.”

  I scoff. “I am not hot.”

  “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” Hayden asks. “You’re a babe, McKenna. You’re tall and you’re thin and you have good boobs.”

  Erin jumps in. “And you have that blond hair and your crazy, wild greenish-blue eyes.”

  “My hair isn’t even natural! Guys, stop it, please!” I insist, covering my face with my hands, embarrassed by their compliments.

  I hear heels clacking across the floor. Then I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “You are McKenna Bell.” It’s Julia. She’s one year younger and has always been my biggest champion. “You are going to do this. Not only is this exactly how you’re going to get over that d-bag, but this is bigger than you. This is bigger than all of us. You are Title IXing when it comes to the sport of dating. Remember in high school? You were the one who lobbied the school district for girls to play baseball, not just softball. And you didn’t even play softball. You’ve never even played sports. You’re the ultimate girlie-girl. But you did it because you have always been the biggest champion of Title IX.”

  In twelfth grade I petitioned the high school to let girls play baseball. I wanted to show that girls could handle the hardball, they could take the heat. It took nine months of campaigning, researching, petitioning and being the squeaky wheel. The school decided girls could play baseball in June of my senior year. Sure, I never caught a screaming fast baseball in a well-worn catcher’s mitt, and probably never could. But that didn’t matter. The girls who came after me did, and girls at Sherman Oaks High School still play baseball today. I know because I’m one of the biggest donors to the girls baseball program at my alma mater. They’ve won three championships in the last ten years. They rock.

  “This is no different,” Julia continues. “This Trophy Husband quest. It’s about leveling the playing field when it comes to the sport of dating younger and hotter. This is your turn at the plate, and you’re damn well going to take it.”

  “I am?”

  “You are.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am so sure I’m beyond sure.”

  I take a deep breath and nod. I can do this. I’ll treat it like a sport, a game, a project because those are things I can handle. Dating for a cause is far more manageable than dating for me. There’s no safety net there. Here, I have a built-in shield. Maybe dating for sport is precisely how I should get back in the game.

  The game of love.

  “So no more guys your age. No more older guys,” Julia says.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Todd was too old for you anyway. He was, what, five years older?”

  “Six,” I mutter. Todd’s thirty-three.

  “And guys older than you are now officially verboten. Got that?”

  I nod dutifully at my sister.

  “Raise your right hand,” Julia instructs.

  I do as told.

  “Repeat after me. I solemnly swear, under penalty of breaking the girlfriend code that I will not date a man older than me.”

  I repeat her words.

  “Because you are the poster child for this movement, and you are getting back on the goddamn dating wagon and finding yourself a much younger, much hotter, much more fun man. Like Dave Dybdahl. Because Dave Dybdahl wants you, Dave Dybdahl asked you out, Dave Dybdahl wants you to call him right now.”

  Julia whips out her cell phone from her back pocket and plunks it onto the table. “I have speaker phone and I’m not afraid to use it. So get out your little camera because I know this is going to be a blog entry tomorrow on how to dress for a date with a hot young thing.”

  Hayden flashes me a contrite look when Julia mentions the camera, but I give her a reassuring wave, as I stand up and run next door to grab my computer and shoot on the iCam. Then in true junior high sleepover style – we might as well be in our jammies giggling and munching on popcorn all night long – I call Dave Dybdahl and ask him out, the computer cam capturing only my end of the call since he’s still the innocent.

  And the innocent says yes.

  Chapter Three

  “Have you played the newest Halo?”

  Before I can even turn around to see where the voice comes from, I laugh.

  “Have I played the newest Halo?” I repeat as I consider the video game shelves at the electronics store on Lombard Street where I’ve been contemplating buying Modern Warfare, which is next to Halo. “Am I breathing? Am I a sentient human being? I played it and saved the world from destruction in twenty-five hours, thank you very much.”

  Then I turn to my questioner and Holy Mary Mother of Hotness.

  I drop the Modern Warfare box along with the camera box, and my jaw might have fallen to the floor too. I contemplate reaching down to the floor to pick it up so I don’t die from the embarrassment of checking him out. Because my questioner is tall, trim, with light brown hair, kind of surfer boy length, and these crazy green eyes, the sort of green that’s like the color of the sea, if the sea were green, only really it’s blue. But you get the idea. His eyes are like Hawaii. He’s wearing cargo shorts, flip flops, and a black Nor-Cal tee-shirt that shows off the right amount of tanned, toned arms. He’s so cool and casual, and it’s completely my favorite look for a guy.

  He hands me the boxes I just dropped. “Here you go,” he says, and I wish his fingers had just brushed mine. I’d take any sort of contact from him, even the barest trace of an accidental one.

  “Thank you.”

  He smiles back at me immediately and then makes a little bow. “Twenty-five hours. Wow.”

  I’m a tad competitive so I can’t not ask how he did. Plus, I’m totally digging his nearness to me right now. He’s too hot to let walk away. Translation: he’s blazingly beautiful and I want to k
eep looking at him. “Okay, I’ll take the bait. What about you? How many hours?”

  He waves a hand in the air.

  “Oh c’mon,” I persist. “I told you.”

  “Fine,” he says, then lowers his voice to a whisper. “Seven hours.”

  My eyes go wide. “Get out of here,” I say, and give him a quick push on the shoulder, like a teenage girl would do. Oh, those are nice sturdy shoulders. Too bad I’m not smooth enough to let my hand linger on his shoulders, or drop down to his chest. Right, yeah, because that would work — feeling him up in the middle of the electronics store. But still, it’s a nice image to tuck away in the mental files.

  He just shrugs casually.

  I shake my head. “No, that’s not how it works,” I say playfully, enjoying the exchange with the perfectly handsome stranger behind the warm green eyes. “You can’t just drop a little nugget like that and not give me the goods. Tell me how you got past the Forerunner Mission, because I was stuck there for hours, getting killed over and over.”

  I listen intently as Video Game Guy begins detailing his tactics, talking with his hands, moving his body back and forth a bit to simulate Master Chief’s movements, the main character in Halo. He has a nice body. Wait, he has a fantastic body. He has the kind of body that women driving cars slow down for. He has the kind of physique that turns a gal into a gawker. The way his tee-shirt falls just so tells me all I need to know about the flatness that lies beneath.

  Then I remind myself to pay attention and focus, because it’s rude to just stare at his belly instead of his face, especially when his face is so very lovely too. So I nod as he shares his gaming secrets.

  I wasn’t always into video games. In fact, it’s not really accurate to say I’m “into” video games, per se. I’m not a gamer geek, though I did have a fondness for retro games growing up, since my parents used to take Julia and me bowling on Saturday and the Silverspinner Lanes boasted all the original arcade games like Qbert, Frogger, and, of course, both Pac-Mans. It’s just that, well, I developed a particular predilection for shooter games after Todd left. I know – probably just a completely random little coincidence. And, to be fair, the video game habit didn’t kick in the second he dropped his Vegas voicemail bombshell.

  The first few months, all I did was cry at night in Ms. Pac-Man’s fur, asking myself what I could have done differently, what had gone wrong, how I’d let him slip away. Was I not adventurous enough? Interesting enough? Pretty enough? Young enough? But it wasn’t until I showed up for a Fashion Hound shoot in jeans and a wife beater tee, that I knew something needed to change. My videographer, Andy, took one look at me, and said, “We need a change, and we need a change fast. I have never seen you in monochromatic clothes before and your nails aren’t even polished. You’re a damn fashion blogger.”

  Then he told me when his last boyfriend had dumped him for another guy that he turned to Halo rather than self-loathing, and that made all the difference in the world. “Look, it’s not like you and I are going to go out and shoot things for release, and that’s why these games are perfect. It’s like punching a pillow. Same idea – gets your anger out – but a hell of a lot more satisfying.”

  With my cheeks dry, all the tears sucked out of me, Andy took me to the electronics store and I bought my new therapy. A gaming console. At the end of each day, after I’d shot my videos, dutifully answered every email, and sketched out ideas for the next show, that little cluster of anger I’d been harboring was banging around, begging to be let out. So I’d turn that sucker on by ten most nights, and spend the next hour pumping bullets into bad guys. I was trigger happy, delighted to dispense ammo into whatever creatures came my way, gleefully, indiscriminately letting bullets fly, talking back to the screen: “Take that, you cheating scum.”

  I don’t think I was talking to the game.

  “What other games do you like?” the cute guy asks, and something about the question startles me. Maybe because it’s so normal, and he seems legitimately curious. Then, there’s the simple fact that we’re having a conversation in the middle of an electronics store.

  “Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly,” I say with a completely straight face since I know he wasn’t referring to board games.

  But he picks up the baton easily, raising an eyebrow as he asks, “Clue?”

  “Of course. And it was always Mr. Plum in the library with the candlestick.”

  “Interesting. Because Miss Scarlet was pretty wicked with that rope in the ballroom, if memory serves. What about Chutes and Ladders?”

  “Let’s not forget CandyLand either.”

  “What was your favorite candy destination in that game?”

  “The vintage game, right? Not that new King Candy imitator?”

  “As if I’d even be talking about that game,” he says playfully.

  I’m about to answer, when he puts his hands together as if he’s praying and says in a whisper, “Please say Ice Cream Floats. Please say Ice Cream Floats.”

  I laugh, the kind of laugh I haven’t felt in a while, the kind that radiates through my whole body and turns into a huge grin. “Of course. I wanted to live at Ice Cream Floats.”

  “I was all set to build a chocolate and licorice home in Ice Cream Floats. And this reminds me that I need to stock up on the classic games too. But I don’t think they sell them here.”

  “I came here to stock up on a new camera.” I pat the camera box. Then I dive into my best infomercial voice. “Did you know that when a cat pees on your camera it can’t be resurrected?”

  He shrugs his shoulders confidently, quirks up his lips. “Actually, I could fix your camera.”

  I give him a quizzical look.

  “I can fix pretty much anything.”

  “Wow. That’s impressive.”

  “Want me to try?”

  “You really want to?”

  “I do. Yeah,” he says, as if he’s digging the prospect of repairing the damaged device. “I really enjoy that kind of challenge. It’s kind of like a game to me.”

  “The Fix-It game.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If you really want to, I’m not going to say no. I have it with me – it doesn’t smell anymore, I cleaned it – because I wanted to make sure to get the same model.” I reach into my purse and hand him the plastic bag with Chaucer’s victim in it.

  “I can have it back to you in a day or two.”

  “Great,” I say, and smile, as I stand here looking at his fabulous face.

  “But I would need your info to get it back to you.”

  Correction: As I stand here stupidly looking at his fabulous face. “Duh. Of course.”

  I give him my first name and number and he programs it into his phone.

  “It was fun talking to you, McKenna,” he says, then extends a hand. “I’m Chris McCormick.”

  We make contact, and I’m not going to lie – there’s something about the feel of his strong hand in mine that just seems…right. Maybe it’s the firm grip, or his soft skin, or the way his eyes light up as he smiles while shaking my hand. I don’t want to let go. I want to go all black-and-white movie and have a simmering moment where his eyes smolder and, like magnets, we can’t resist. He pulls me in, dips me, and plants a devastating kiss on my lips.

  The kind of kiss that can ruin a girl for any other kisses for the rest of her life.

  Chris McCormick is gorgeous, in a pure California sort of way, like sunshine and blue skies, like the ocean and its tides, but he’s too confident, too steady to be young enough for my project. I bet he’s, gasp, close to my age. I need to stay focused on my mission

  “And if you want any more Halo tips, you can find a ton on Craigslist,” he says.

  “Craigslist!” I practically jump up and down in excitement, reminded of my overarching mission to find a Trophy Husband. “That’s it. Craigslist! Thank you so much. I gotta go.”

  I head to the front of the store, plunk down cash for my camera, take a quick peek
back at the Halo expert as I do, because it’s a crying shame with that face, those eyes, that hair. Then I scurry back home.

  Once at home, I open my laptop, and hop on over to Craigslist. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? You can find anything there – new job, new couch, new BOYFRIEND. And I have Hayden’s evil cat Chaucer to thank. If that dastardly feline hadn’t peed on my camera then I wouldn’t have wound up in the electronics store and I wouldn’t have run into Chris McCormick, the Video Game Guy, with emerald eyes and a stunning smile, and I wouldn’t have gotten the great idea to check out Craigslist, thanks to him. This is brilliant. This is epic. Finding a man-boy will be a piece of cake on Craigslist.

  So I type the URL in and click on “Bay Area,” while my blonde half-horse, half-dog, trundles on over and parks herself at my feet with a heavy sigh. She’s probably counting down the hours until it’s time for a swim in the San Francisco Bay, her internal doggy clock permanently calibrated to the rhythms of our day. I scratch her ears, then pet her head.

  I start the Craiglist search with the Personals section and type “trophy husband” into the search bar. Hmm. Only one post with “trophy husband” in the whole Bay Area?

  “I am 50 years old and am a successful stock trader. I am looking for a younger guy to share my good fortune with. Send a picture for mine. Be between 18 and 30 years old. I often travel to Europe, Asia, and Moscow on business and would love to bring you along. Must not have hang ups about being showered with gifts and being a trophy husband. I am a bottom as well.”

  This is it? The lone ad for “Trophy Husband?”

  I soldier on and try “boy toy” this time, and it returns several options. I tap open the first entry because it boasts a promising subject line: “Young guy looking for assertive older womam.”

  So the young guy didn’t exactly spell woman correctly. But let’s hear him out.

  “Extreme satisfacktion for the rite woman. Hansome male seek to belong to the woman who need to have nothing but the finest at her cummand. If your fantasy is to be in the company of a beeuutiful, intelligent and discrete, sexy man than you is getting warmer.”