She’d heard other women talk about those things as a problem. She was never with a guy long enough for him to get all riled up about staking his claim.
The trouble with men was that they lied. They cheated. No matter how they seemed at the start of a relationship, they ended up as one hundred proof SOBs one hundred percent of the time.
Lissa plunged her spoon deep into the Cherry Garcia. It came up empty. Amazing. Were they downsizing the containers?
No problem.
She’d planned ahead. That was the thing about being a trained chef. You know how to manage your supplies.
There was a pint of Chunky Monkey stashed in the freezer.
How could a woman be smart enough to hide ice cream and not smart enough to know that men were not worth her time and trouble?
Well, her brothers, brother-in-law and almost brother-in-law excepted, of course. Jacob. Caleb. Travis. And now, Marco. And, soon, Zach would join the ranks.
Great guys, all of them.
Lissa rose to her feet and went to her tiny kitchen.
Maybe there was a planetary limit on the number of decent men available. Maybe Earth’s quota had been reached. Maybe the Wilde men and the Wilde-Men-by-Proxy were it.
“Maybe you need that Chunky Monkey,” she said, dumping the empty Cherry Garcia container in the trash and opening the door to the freezer.
She’d never had any luck with men. Not even with boys. Look at the Tommy Juarez fiasco and yes, that had been kindergarten and no, it wasn’t foolish to go back that far because lesson were lessons no matter when you learned them.
Tommy had planted a kiss on her cheek while the whole class was playing Duck, Duck, Goose. The very next day, he’d called her a turd bird and kissed Deanna Hilton instead.
Lissa peered into the freezer.
And what about Jefferson Beauregard the Third in high school? Quarterback. Captain. A total hottie. Her steady for eight months until she’d caught him in the girls’ locker room—the girls’ locker room—screwing the brains out of one of the Becker twins, and what a stupid description that was because neither of the Becker twins had brains to be screwed out of and if that sentence had a dangling participle or whatever, she just didn’t give a shit.
Where was that Chunky Monkey?
“Come out, come out wherever you are,” Lissa said, poking past frozen chicken stock and frozen herbs and frozen something-or-other that she hadn’t labeled and who knew what in hell it was now?
How she’d ever gone steady with a boy named Jefferson Beauregard the Third was beyond her. She surely hadn’t loved him.
Yeah, but he’d said he loved her.
And of course, who was she kidding? She’d loved him. Puppy love, but still…
And she’d given him her virginity.
Well, OK. She’d been eager to give it to somebody.
Her sisters had clung to theirs as if they were characters in a Victorian novel instead of modern-day Texas females. Not her. She’d been ready, willing and eager to find out what sex was like, and—
“Gotcha,” she said triumphantly as she took the pint of Chunky Monkey from where it had been hiding behind a loaf of oatmeal bread she’d baked last week.
And, she thought, popping the lid and tossing it into the sink, she’d found out what sex was like.
It was OK. All right. Fine. Just, well, just no big deal.
It still was and there was nothing wrong with that; it was only that she’d kind of expected it to be mind-blowing, the way books and movies said it was, the way her very own sisters said it was, not that Jaimie or Emily actually talked about what sex was like with their guys, but when Em spoke Marco’s name, when Jaimie spoke Zach’s, you could almost hear the sizzle.
No problem.
Lissa headed back into the living room and sat down on the sofa.