The Big One (Second Chance Romantic Comedy) Read online

  The Big One

  Katherine Hastings

  Published by Flyte Publishing, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 by Katherine Hastings

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  ISBN: 978-1-949913-11-8 (Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-949913-10-1 (ebook)

  FIRST EDITION

  Editing by Tami Stark

  Proofreading by Vicki McGough

  Published by Flyte Publishing

  www.katherinehastings.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DOOR PENINSULA PASSIONS SERIES

  THE OTHER HALF EXCERPT

  OTHER BOOKS TO READ

  THANK YOU FOR READING

  DEDICATION

  To my husband, Marty. He’ll always be “The Big One” for me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ellie

  “Another,” I mumbled, pushing my face deeper into my folded arms. The bar smelled like stale beer and whiskey, something I hadn’t noticed before since I normally sat upright when I came here. Having my nose pressed against the worn wood wasn’t a good look on me, but the copious amount of alcohol and the heavy weight of my burdens made my head feel like a two-ton boulder.

  “Ellie,” my sister Nita said while she stroked my hair and then slid her hand down to rub my back. “As much as I understand, I don’t think you need another.”

  “All of them,” I said into my arms. “I need all of them. Jack, José, and Jim. They’re the only boyfriends I need.”

  “Amen, sister,” Louie said from my other side, and his hand joined my sister’s on the opposite side of my back. “Ellie, you do whatever you need to do so you can forget that douchebag, Allen.”

  “Louie,” Nita warned, “she has had plenty. I’m all about getting drunk, but I think it’s the time for this breakup process to move from puking and hangovers to ice cream and movies.”

  “Another,” I moaned again. “That’s what I need.”

  Even though I couldn’t see them, I could feel Nita’s concerned eyes raking over me. My mom used to give me that same piercing stare when I was making yet another terrible decision, like that time I insisted chopping my long hair into a pixie cut. “We’ll have another round,” she finally said with a sigh.

  “Coming right up, Nita,” Bruce, our regular bartender, replied. Anticipating my desire to drown my sorrows, he had been smart and kept the bottle of Jack on the rail just in front of me. I heard him pick the bottle up and the shot glasses clanking on the bar. The soothing sounds of the booze filling the little glasses boosted my spirits just a bit. “Hang in there, Ellie,” he said, pushing the shots forward.

  Lifting my head, I frowned and gave him a nod. He pursed his lips that sat between the full beard and the mustache matching the bun knotted on top of his head. “Thanks, Bruce. You’re my hero.”

  “I’ll go get my cape,” he teased and set the bottle back down behind the bar.

  I noticed the fourth shot glass sitting butted up against ours and arched an eyebrow. “You joining my pity party?”

  “Let me join you in drowning the pain.” He lifted his shot glass as we grabbed our own. “Here’s to feeling single, seeing double, and sleeping triple... if you’re lucky.” With a wink he clanked his shot to ours and I tipped mine back, letting the comforting liquid burn a trail down the back of my throat.

  Louie choked his down, sputtering and coughing while he pushed the glass away. “Good God, Ellie. Can we at least switch to something that tastes good? RumChata? Tequila Rose? Champagne?”

  “Champagne? Who does shots of champagne?” I asked, spinning to see him.

  He shrugged, his lips puckering while his meticulously groomed eyebrows rose in a challenge. “Classy people. Like me.” With the flick of his wrist, he ran his fingers through his golden coif with a flourish.

  I lifted my finger and shook it at him. “Champagne is for celebrating. We are not celebrating. We are mourning. Mourning the loss of yet another dead relationship. Another year of my life wasted. Another failure to add to the growing list of terrible decisions I can’t seem to stop making. That calls for whiskey. Really bad whiskey. I deserve to be punished.”

  Nita huffed. “Ellie, you did nothing wrong. You don’t need to be punished! Allen is the cheating asshole that needs to be punished! I’m looking forward to the day you let me off my leash and I get to castrate that son of a bitch.”

  I spun to meet her. It may have been my foggy vision from the booze, but she looked the spitting image of my mom tonight... more so than usual. Perhaps it was the disapproving look she’d inherited along with all my mother’s other spectacular features. Nita got the thick, black hair, the chocolate eyes, the perfect nose and those plump lips that my mother had used to grace the cover of magazines back in the seventies. Even though we were sisters, and most people recognized it without delay, I had gotten my father’s caramel colored waves and green eyes. At least we both got our mother’s breasts, I thought, peeking down to look at them.

  “Are you checking out your tits?” Louie laughed. “They’re still there and fabulous. Allen didn’t take them with, I promise.”

  “They are pretty fabulous.” A droopy smile lifted the corner of my lips before returning to the frown they’d been shaped in since I caught Allen in bed earlier today with that girl he swore he wasn’t cheating with. “And I do deserve to be punished.” I returned to my original train of thought.

  “Why would you think that?” Nita reached out and placed her hand on my arm.

  “Because I knew he was a shit. I knew it, but I ignored every instinct I had, as well as that nagging little guy on my shoulder.” I swatted away the imaginary voice of reason I envisioned shaking his knowing head at me mouthing ‘I told you so’. “I knew it and I just pretended everything was fine.”

  “Ellie.” Louie’s voice softened, and I turned to meet his sympathetic gaze. “You don’t deserve to be punished. You trusted him because you’re a good person. He’s the asshole. You’re the victim here. Stop beating yourself up, okay?” He slid a hand under my chin and lifted it up.

  “I just feel so stupid,” I said and let my head flop back down onto the bar, burying my face and wishing it wasn’t summer so my head could rest on a cushy winter sweater instead of on the bare skin of my exposed arms. “So, so stupid.”

  “What can we do?” Nita asked, returning her hand to my back. Being two years older, she’d adopted the caretaker role. She patched up my scraped knees as a child, held my hair the first time I puked from getting drunk, and pulled me up from the depths of my despair after every breakup. All of them. And that was a lot since I had such a bad habit of dating shitty men.

  “Nothing,” I answe
red with a sigh. “I just need to let the failure soak in and then dust myself off and march with confidence to the convent where I belong.”

  “Oh, honey.” Louie laughed. “No joining a convent. If you do, we can’t come visit because that thing will burst into flames the second I step through the door.”

  A trickle of a laugh started in my throat and then snuck out through my nose in a snort. Louie’s accompanying chuckle started and fueled my own, with Nita’s joining the party after mine deepened. Soon the three of us rolled with laughter and I felt the first layer of pain sloughing off, like a snake sheds its skin.

  “Thank you.” I sat up, still sputtering out bits of laughter. “I needed a laugh.”

  “It’s funny cuz it’s true,” he added, waggling his eyebrows and causing me to laugh harder.

  “It is true,” Nita said with a shrug and a laugh before taking a swig of her cocktail.

  “I’m so sorry I’m such a downer, you guys. I promise I’ll get it out of my system tonight so we can go back to our regularly scheduled show of laughter and shenanigans soon.”

  “Take all the time you need.” Nita looked at me and smiled. I always felt better when she was around. She was my protector, my best friend, and my partner in crime. There wasn’t a day that went by I wasn’t grateful to have a sister like Nita at my side.

  “Not too much time, though,” Louie said, quirking a brow. “We’ve got that club opening to attend next weekend. I’m expecting you back and badder than ever and wearing those new stilettos we just bought. I need a dance partner.”

  “What? I’m not good enough to be your partner?” Nita scrunched her brow and narrowed her eyes.

  “Oh, you’re good enough. But if I know you, you’ll ditch me in five seconds when the first stud in a suit catches your attention.”

  “I could say the same for you,” she quipped and curled her lip in a smirk.

  “Touché,” he responded with a laugh.

  “See!” I huffed out a sigh and shocked myself with the potent smell of whiskey that slipped out with the breath. “You guys don’t get attached. No relationships. No messes. No muss no fuss. Why don’t I just do that?”

  I saw the exchange pass between them before their laughter conjoined like Siamese twins. “Because it’s not who you are,” Nita said, stifling her laugh. “You’re Ellie. The good one. The one who will get married, have kids, and make our parents proud. I’m too busy trying to pay off my law school debt kicking ass in court to have time for a relationship. If I have any chance of making partner before I’m forty, then relationships are a luxury I don’t want or need. Hot sex, a few laughs, and I’m out the door.”

  “And I have plenty of time for relationships, I just don’t understand the allure. One man for the rest of my life, or even the rest of the month?” His face puckered like he’d slammed another shot of Jack. “No, thank you.”

  “Maybe I could do that, though. Just like you guys. Love ‘em and leave ‘em!” Lifting my chin, I straightened up and slapped a look of confidence on my otherwise devastated face.

  “Love ‘em and leave ‘em? Honey, anyone who uses the term ‘love ‘em and leave ‘em’ doesn’t have what it takes to actually do just that.”

  “True that.” Nita laughed and lifted her glass toward him.

  “Ellie, you will find your person. The one. The person to make all these idiots melt away into a distant memory. And when you do, Nita and I will be green with envy and perhaps reconsider our scandalous ways. You just need to have faith. You’ll find him.”

  I let out a defeated sigh. He wasn’t wrong. The two of them could move in and out of men without a second thought, but I needed meaning before I took a man to bed. A relationship. The promise of something that would last longer than one night. Until tonight, I’d never considered that to be a bad thing. Yet here I was feeling envious I didn’t have what it takes to just bang some guy in a bathroom and head out for late night munchies with my crew.

  “Remember when I first met you, what was it, two years ago now?” Louie asked. “You walked into The Silver Spoon, all doe-eyed and innocent, asking if we needed a server.”

  I nodded. I remembered it. It was a pivotal moment in my life.

  “I looked you up and down and thought there was no way you could be a server.”

  “You did?” My eyes widened. “You’ve never told me that!”

  “I did. But not because you’re not capable, or anything like that, it was because you had a kindness to you. A kindness that can be easily squashed in the industry. But here you are, two years later and you’re still you. All smiles, and warmth and goodness... even nasty Chef Brian can’t dampen that Ellie spirit that we love so much. And if Chef Brian can’t, then neither can that asshole, Allen.”

  I scoffed. “Serving is nothing compared to teaching teenagers. Chef Brian is a breath of fresh air compared to those rotten little monsters.”

  The day I met Louie was the day I decided to leave my teaching job at the High School. After another day of enduring their cruelty, I sat in my car fighting tears for an hour before admitting to myself I hated teaching. It was the day I realized all those years in college studying to be a teacher would end up wasted. My dream since childhood of shaping youthful minds and passing on knowledge had slowly been chipped away until nothing remained but a horrific nightmare. The students were cruel and unyielding. Since the pay wasn’t enough for an apartment of my own, I slept on Nita’s couch. That fateful day I knew all those school loans I hadn’t even touched would be money tossed out the window. When I stopped to pick up dinner at The Silver Spoon on my way home, I looked around the restaurant and wondered what kind of pay a server at an upscale restaurant in Chicago made. It turns out, sadly, a lot more than a teacher.

  That night, Louie brought me my carry-out order. When I asked, he said they were hiring. I interviewed the next day, got the job and put in my two-week notice. A month passed before I told my parents that I would be throwing away four years of studying to be an English teacher to be a server at a fancy restaurant instead. But it paid the bills, I met my bestie Louie, got my own apartment, and it allowed me to stash some money away to pay off my loans and go back to school... this time to do something that didn’t involve adolescent human beings hell-bent on shredding every ounce of my sanity and self-confidence.

  “What I’m trying to get at here,” he continued, “is that no matter what life throws at you, after a short mourning period, you dust yourself off and light the world back up with that smile of yours. Allen is just another bump in the road, and I know you’ll be back to your giggling self in no time.”

  “Thank you, Louie. I know. I know I’m being a baby about this. It’s not even Allen that I’m so upset about. Honestly, I didn’t love him or anything. It’s the time. I feel like I wasted so much time.”

  “You’re still young, Ellie,” Nita chimed in. “You’re twenty-eight. Twenty-eight is the new twenty when it comes to meeting men, getting married, and having babies. Now that the human life-expectancy isn’t forty, what’s the rush? You’re right where you’re supposed to be.”

  I nodded. “I know. It’s just that when we were young, I thought I would be married with a couple of kids and winning Teacher-of-the-Year awards by now. Here I am. Single, childless, and I’m not even a teacher. I feel like I’m starting all over.”

  “Starting over just gives you the freedom to go after what you really want, Ellie,” Louie said. “You have a clean slate.”

  “Bruce?” I called to where he was checking his phone at the end of the bar.

  “What’s up, Ellie?” he answered, setting it down and heading our way.

  “Can I get another round of shots?”

  “Of course.” He reached for new shot glasses.

  “Seriously, Bruce. Just use the same ones we already used. No sense in more dishes for you!”

  “That’s why I love you guys.” He smiled and pushed our previous shot glasses back together.

  “That an
d we tip like crazy,” Louie joked.

  “Well, that too.” Bruce smiled.

  After filling the shot glasses, I lifted mine up and encouraged them to do the same. “Here’s to me going boldly and fearlessly into this new phase of my life. No more excuses, no more fear. Go big or go home.”

  “Cheers to that!” Nita slapped the bar and lifted her glass to mine. Bruce and Louie followed suit, and we slammed our glasses back in unison.

  The slight recession of my buzz reversed, and I felt the warm tingles return to my body. “Whoa,” I said, bracing my hands on the bar. “I felt that.”

  “Seriously, Ellie. No more Jack. At least pick a decent whiskey,” Nita scoffed.

  “Amen,” Louie agreed.

  “Sorry, guys. I’ll take it easy on us next round.”

  “Do you know what might cheer you up?” Louie asked.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Window shopping!”

  “Tonight? It’s late. Not a lot will be open.” I shook my head.

  “I’m not talking about clothes, baby. I’m talking about men! Let’s go on Tinder and see what’s out there!”

  “Yes! Let’s window shop!” Nita clapped and leaned in to where Louie was pulling out his phone.

  “God, no!” I protested. “I’m not ready to start dating!”

  Louie rolled his eyes. “I’m not talking about dating. I just want to see what the yummy man selection in straightland looks like these days. Don’t you want to get excited about what’s waiting for you when you’re ready to sashay out into the world again?”

  My head shook furiously. “No. I want nothing to do with men ever again. I’m done with new men. They are all liars, and cheaters, and I’m done.”

  “No new men? That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Louie frowned.

  “None. Nada. Zilch. It’s just me now. And I don’t need a new man. I’ve got you guys.” I smiled and tossed an arm around each of their shoulders. “Every single man I’ve dated has been an asshole. I’m cursed. Done.”