Read Online I Like You Just the Way I Am by Jenny Mollen - Free Book Online

machine to take a turn. His disturbingly long spider legs angled out on either side as he whisked the joystick around. He crushed level four. And five, and six, and seven. I realized I wasn’t dealing with some cocky asshole who was going to try Neil Straussing me into fucking him. He was an actual, bona fide geek—maybe even a Rain Man.
    “Hey, guys! Isn’t this place great?” Chad said with an earnestness that made me wonder how we were even friends.
    The three of us were escorted to a table in the back of the room. The dinner was innocuous and the conversation light. Lance talked a lot about manifest destiny and all the things he loved about Batman.
    I drunkenly got fingered by my agent’s assistant in an attempt to spite you, I thought to myself, watching him show Chad a wizard trick with his straw.
    Once we finished, Lance asked if I could drive him back to his apartment several blocks away. Reveling in the fantasy that he didn’t have a car, I obliged. This poor, innocent fool needed my compassion. Sure, he was relatively good-looking and had a job far more stable than mine, but that was no reason for me to like him. I’d shown him that I was irreverent, engaging, and uninhibited, and now it was time for him to never see or hear from me again. Unless, of course, it was on TV and I was riding Brad Pitt naked in flattering lighting that didn’t make my boobs look like penne pasta noodles.
    When we pulled up to his place, he brazenly invited me inside. Taken aback, I agreed. Mainly just so I could rub my perfume all over his couch, pretend to be interested in his Lord of the Rings boxed set, and then leave him with the hug that would launch a thousand hard-ons.
    His apartment was clean and sensibly decorated. Knowing I wasn’t there to hook up with him, I didn’t do my usual “excuse myself to the bathroom and make sure he doesn’t have a Valtrex prescription” routine. Instead, I plopped down at his desk and started fucking with some sort of model spaceship he was building.
    As he sat on his couch watching, I knew there was no way in hell he could resist falling in love with me from afar. And so, after accidentally twisting off the forward fuselage and crew cabins, I apologetically put his spaceship down and stood up to leave.
    At that exact moment, Lance’s home phone rang. His answering machine responded before he could.
    “Hey, Lance, It’s Kate. I’m just listening to the Strokes and thinking about how we used to fuck all the time to this album. I’m sooooo wet right now.” Beeeeeep.
    The fuck!? Did I just hear that correctly? My mind started spinning.
    “I. Um. Wow. I swear I haven’t spoken to that person in at least—”
    I stood there flabbergasted for about thirty seconds, trying to process what I’d just heard before finally asking, “Who has sex to the Strokes?”
    Bright red, Lance looked at me and shook his head, speechless. Like Pac-Man, he was backed into a corner. And so, sandwiched between the Ghost of Girlfriend Past and the Ghost of Girlfriend Future, he did the only thing he could do. With one of his long Inspector Gadget hands, he reached out and pulled me into an embrace.
    My perspective on Lance had changed suddenly and completely. Before the phone call, he was a total geekbot. After the phone call, he was a stud—or, at least, he was someone attractive to someone other than me. That meant he had someone else to think about besides me, and that I couldn’t allow. Passionately, I kissed Lance with my best “you’ll never forget me” semi-tongue kiss.
    Then, I must have fallen into some sort of K-hole, because it wasn’t until a mortgage, two dogs, and four years of speaking Klingon later that I woke up and realized I was still dating Lance.
    Unlike with Kate, Lance’s ex—the one he passed on meeting me for, the one he bought Christmas presents for after being aware of my existence in the world, the one I’d found only one picture of on his hard drive—he and I sadly