Love in All the Wrong Places

  Love in All the Wrong Places

  Audrey Harte

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Copyright

  No portion of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, any place, events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The subject matter is not appropriate for minors. Please note this novel contains profanity, explicit sexual situations, and alcohol and drug consumption.

  Love in All the Wrong Places

  Copyright © 2013 Audrey Harte

  Published by Audrey Harte

  Cover art © by Ronnell D. Porter

  All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  This is dedicated to my loving fiancé, family and friends who have always supported me and believed in me no matter what, and to my little sister, who is one of the greatest artists and creative minds I’ve ever known. This is also dedicated to my dear friend Kimberly, to whom I owe more than I can say. Without her, I would still be just dreaming about writing a book instead of actually making it a reality.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “When did I become this desperate?” Annie muttered to herself, shaking her head in disgust as she clicked on yet another ad in the personals section of Craigslist Los Angeles. She had already spent a good chunk of her lazy Saturday afternoon reading close to thirty postings in the Men Seeking Women category and was about ready to consider taking a vow of celibacy or maybe start batting for the other team.

  The very first ad she read was posted by a guy who wanted to meet a young, physically fit Asian girl to be his submissive. Really? She was almost tempted to forget the whole idea right then and there. But she enjoyed a challenge and wasn’t going to give up that easily, so she bravely clicked on the next ad. It had been posted by a guy who wanted to “420” (i.e. smoke weed), have sex, order pizza and watch a marathon of Breaking Bad – hardly her idea of the perfect first date.

  Sighing dejectedly, she continued to skim through the ads, but none of the postings she read contained anything of substance. Some of these guys appeared to have maybe a third grade reading level at best.

  There were the obligatory pictures of nearly naked guys striking various poses in their bathroom mirrors, but her girlfriends had warned her to expect some ads like these. One guy had his jeans shoved down around his thighs with his hand barely covering his crotch — classy. Another guy really “let it all hang out” and posted a picture of his dick hanging out of his boxers. Turning slightly green, she quickly clicked forward to the next ad as she shuddered with a grimace. Blech.

  Unlucky in love, Annie had been on a dating losing streak pretty much all her life. In high school, she’d kept herself pretty busy playing sports and working a part-time job, so she hadn’t really dated until her junior year. That relationship ended when her boyfriend was accepted to Emerson College and moved across the country to study music in Boston. In the end, she didn’t blame him for his decision, but at first, she wished he’d been willing to at least attempt a long distance relationship before breaking up with her.

  When she was nineteen, fresh out of high school and still extremely naïve, Annie met Mark, a young struggling actor six years her senior who had just moved to southern California from St. Louis, Missouri.

  Mark was tall, dark, mysterious, brooding and very sexy – the typical bad boy mothers warn their daughters to stay away from. He always wore a black leather jacket and aviators, smoked American Spirits, and loved Glenlivet single malt Scotch whisky. He had piercing steel blue eyes that stared intently at you from under thick brown eyebrows, a strong square jaw that warned you how stubborn he could be and floppy chestnut brown hair that he would run his fingers through and toss to the side, like Johnny Depp in 21 Jump Street. Like most actors, he was more than a little caught up in his own appearance.

  Introduced to each other at a mutual friend’s Fourth of July barbeque, they stayed up talking to each other that entire night. He told her that he was crashing on a friend’s couch until he was able to get a job and could afford to get his own place.

  Annie and Mark began to spend a lot of time together and only days after they first met, she found herself inviting him to move in with her until he got on his feet. Having just signed the lease on her very own apartment for the first time, she found the idea of playing house with him massively appealing.

  Her first impression of him was that he was very romantic and sweet; it didn’t take him long at all to charm the pants off of her, literally. Everyone she knew always said that in a new relationship, it was completely natural to have a lot of sex, sometimes several times a day. Being a very sexual person herself, she was very much looking forward to that part of their new relationship. She adored Mark and craved more than anything to be loved and cherished by him.

  However, things don’t always go the way you planned. Annie would do almost anything for the people she cared about, not to mention for the man in her life. She wasn’t sure if it was a byproduct of the Asian part of her heritage, but nonetheless, she was a nurturer and liked to take care of people. She was also very sensitive and needed to have her love returned.

  So when Mark barely touched her in the six months he lived with her — maybe once a month — she didn’t know what to think. All she could assume was that she was undesirable to him. And if that was the case, then maybe she was undesirable to all men. Deep down she knew better than that, but being too emotionally caught up in the situation made her self-conscious and paranoid.

  A reasonably attractive girl, she’d never lacked for male attention through high school. But although Mark had professed his undying love to her on several occasions and used a bit of his meager savings to get her a promise ring, the continued lack of response from him was quickly destroying her self-esteem. His bizarre and unwarranted behavior was making Annie question her own judgment.

  Her attempt at giving him the good ol’ oral alarm clock one morning resulted in Mark pushing her away from him and off the side of the bed where she fell to the ground with a heavy thump, bruising both her arm and her pride. Another time when she tried to nuzzle his neck and slide a hand down his leg, he pushed her hand away and got out of bed, accusing her of being sex crazed.

  She was horrified at his crude words; she loved him and just wanted to be able to physically express the way she felt about him. After confiding in a few of her guy friends who assured her that he was the one who was acting irrationally (they told her she was smokin’ hot and that Mark had to be out of his mind if he was not “hitting that as often as possible”), she began to wonder if he was gay or cheating on her.

  Meanwhile, she continued to pay for their rent, utilities and groceries. Every day she worked from ten in the morning until seven at night while he stayed at home “looking for a job”. She worked full-time as a Receptionist at a local salon and was usually exhausted when she got home from work. Even after working a full day while he sat around at home, she always cooked dinner for them. All she asked in return for him staying with her rent free was a little help around the apartment…do the dishes, take out the trash, nothing too crazy.

  One habit of his that she couldn’t quite understand was whenever he h
ad a phone call, he excused himself to step outside for a cigarette. She assured him that he was welcome to stay inside, but he continued to take his calls outside. Although it was a small apartment with very little privacy, it wasn’t like she was trying to eavesdrop. A partial wall divided the living room from the bedroom area; there was a gap of a few feet between the top of the partition and the ceiling and just an open doorway next to it rather than a door.

  Then there was the time she woke up in the middle of the night, noticed he wasn’t sleeping in bed next to her and heard what suspiciously sounded like someone jacking off. Annie had quietly stood up on the bed and peered over the wall into the living room where Mark was sitting at her computer desk, Skyping someone and…jacking off.

  Rushing into the living room, she confronted him, slapping him hard as he stood up from the desk, hurriedly shoving himself back into his pants. Bursting into tears, she fled to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her, falling to her knees. The sobs racked her body as she kneeled on the cold tile floor.

  She could care less if he masturbated, but she had definitely seen him Skyping with someone as he did so. In her mind, that constituted as cheating and she couldn’t believe he had the nerve to do it ten feet away from her with some online slut when he had been constantly rejecting her for the past several months.

  “Who were you Skyping with while you were jacking off, Mark?” she demanded angrily.

  “No one!” he shouted through the door.

  “Bullshit, I saw someone on your Skype window!” she shouted back.

  “I wasn’t talking to anyone. I mean, I was, but I was just talking to her, I wasn’t—”

  “Her? I knew it!”

  “It was just my friend Jessica, but I wasn’t cybering with her, we were just talking—”

  Annie got up and opened the door, glaring furiously at him. “You were just talking to another girl while you jacked off? You do know she can see you, right? Why would you do that with someone else when you can have me anytime you want? I thought you loved me and wanted to be with me, but you won’t fucking touch me!”

  “No, she couldn’t see me. I could only see her. My webcam is broken.”

  She snorted. “You really expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s true, I swear to God.”

  “Why were you jacking off while you were talking to her?”

  “I don’t know – I was just bored,” he said as he shrugged.

  Although she didn’t believe his lies and excuses for one minute, she dreaded the thought of being alone again. Too insecure to break things off with him, she ended up doing nothing.

  A few weeks after that incident, Mark finally found a job and an apartment and moved out. Whenever she went over to visit him, he was usually hanging out with Julia, his new roommate. She quickly began to feel like a third wheel rather than his girlfriend and started questioning whether something more was going on between him and his pretty new roommate. When she confronted him, he denied it and said that he and Julia were just becoming really good friends.

  Weeks went by and Annie still felt like something was off. The end of the year quickly approached and she asked Mark to go with her to a friend’s New Year’s Eve party. He declined, saying he already made plans to go out with a group of his guy friends.

  Upset that he didn’t want to spend New Year’s with her, she went to the party alone. She proceeded to get completely shit faced on too many shots of Goldschlager with Jason, a cute skater boy she met there, who was a great listener and paid her compliment after compliment, making her feel wanted again. She confided in him about her boyfriend troubles, telling him the whole story of how she met Mark, how he wooed her and moved in with her, then proceeded to reject her almost every time she attempted to be intimate with him.

  Jason ended up going home with her and after the drunken coupling was over, they both laid there for a while, just talking to each other. He was a complete sweetheart and told her Mark was crazy to not want to be there with her for New Year’s. As the words left his mouth, they heard a key turning in the lock. Mark was the only person who had a key; he was about to find her cheating on him as there was no other exit for Jason to escape through.

  “Oh my God, get in the bathroom,” she whispered to him frantically as she ran butt-naked through the living room and slammed herself against the front door just as Mark was about to come in.

  “What the fuck? Annie!” he said angrily, trying to push the door open. “Open the damn door!”

  “Mark? What are you doing here? I thought you were going out with your buddies,” she stammered as she braced her body against the door, panicking as she quickly tried to think of a way out of the situation. But she was frantic and didn’t know what else to do.

  “We were done hanging out, so I came by to see you. Now open the fucking door!”

  Finally she gave up trying to keep him out and moved away from the door. She sat down on the couch and pulled an afghan around herself, staring down at the floor as tears started to roll down her cheeks. Mark burst in the front door, took one look at her sitting there half naked and shaking, and stormed off towards the bathroom where he saw Jason standing there with a towel around his waist.

  He didn’t say a word to either of them, but started to walk back out the front door. She was still sobbing and he stopped in the doorway to turn back and glare at her. “I can’t fucking believe you. What the hell, Annie?”

  “I don’t know why I did it, I’m so sorry.” She kept apologizing to him over and over again as the tears continued to pour down her face, but he just walked out of her apartment again and left her there crying on the floor. After Jason finished pulling his clothes back on, he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, said he should probably take off and walked out the door without a backwards glance.

  Devastated and alone, she cried herself to sleep, her heart aching. The next day, Mark came by to pick up the rest of his belongings that he’d left at her place and left again, barely speaking two words to her. Their joke of a relationship was officially over…until one night a few weeks later, when he called her crying, saying he desperately needed a friend to talk to. She consented and he came over soon after, stumbling drunk into her apartment where he fell down on the couch and started to cry again, pouring his heart out to her.

  He was devastated and had come looking for sympathy as he told Annie how he had met Jessica online a few months before he moved to Los Angeles. Mark had lied to Jessica, telling her that Annie was just a friend and that he was just crashing with her until he could get his own place. He confessed that every day when she would leave for work, he would use her landline to call Jessica and she would call him back to have phone sex.

  When he had finally broken it off with Annie after he found her cheating on him, he called Jessica to tell her he had moved into his own place. Only she told him she was no longer interested in pursuing a relationship with him.

  As fucked up and broken as she felt, Annie did the unthinkable and forgave him, allowing him to continue hanging out at her place. He would sit there depressed, going on and on about his lost love with Jessica. Never in her life had she seen a grown man cry that much.

  He was desperate, grasping at straws wherever he could; he even dragged her with him to a psychic because he wanted to look into buying a love potion to try to regain Jessica’s affections. It was at this point that Annie started to question Mark’s sanity. Was she really in love with this guy? Feeling sorry for him, Annie had even tried calling Jessica for him and appealed to her to give Mark a second chance, but Jessica just laughed, wished her luck and said she could have him.

  Torn by the guilt she felt for cheating on him, even knowing that he had betrayed her trust and cheated on her first, she still loved him. So she listened to him and sympathized and even welcomed him into her bed day after day.

  Ironically enough, he was finally willing to touch her again now that things were over with Jessica. But he would make love to Annie and
then lay there in bed telling her how much he loved and wanted Jessica, breaking Annie’s heart over and over again. It went on like that for weeks and she began to feel numb as she went through the daily motions of living her life one day at a time.

  Finally one day, she came to her senses and broke things off with Mark for good, telling him she couldn’t see him anymore. Of course, once she told him she was moving on, he stopped talking about Jessica and said it was Annie he really loved — that he just hadn’t realized what he had right in front of him all along. He even wrote a book of poetry and left it at her front door — super sappy, syrupy love poems. The more he persisted, the more disgusted she became with him until she couldn’t bear the sight or thought of him any longer.

  They met for lunch one last time and she told Mark she cared about him, but she just couldn’t be around him any longer. Continuing to see him, even just as friends, was not allowing her heart to heal and she needed more than anything to move on with her life. That was the last time she saw Mark.

  Fast forward through the next five years – years which only brought her more failed relationships and flings. Now she was finally turning to the internet to meet men. There were probably better ways to find Mr. Right, but she wasn’t a fan of the old cliché of trying to pick up guys in bars and clubs; the few times she’d tried had not ended well for her. Plus, one of her BFFs managed to meet her boyfriend of three years on the internet, so online dating seemed like an alternative worth exploring.

  Her friends recommended some other dating websites like E-Harmony, Match.com and Zoosk. Skeptical of paying for a dating website, she had decided to try the free route first. Her overall feeling after spending an hour on Craigslist was less than optimistic.

  “Annie,” a heavily accented voice called out. “Annie, I know you’re in there — I saw your car outside. Open up, girlfriend, it’s an emergency!” This time the voice was followed by an insistent pounding on her front door.

  Annie rolled her eyes and sighed, placing her laptop on the coffee table. “Geez, Alex. Yes, I’m in here. Don’t break the damn door down,” she huffed as she unlocked the chain and deadbolt.