Terms of Surrender. Leslie Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ www.mad-mari.com/2011/05/06/friday-contest

       Comment #114

      Promised I’d check in! I’m about to hit the hay but wanted to choose a winner from today’s sucky-date contest.

      Rachel from Boston wins an autographed copy of one of my books. Sorry to everyone else who entered, but I can’t even imagine what it was like to go on a date with a crazy dude whose opening line was, “I like to sneak into my mother’s room, steal her panties and dance around in them, like I’m Britney Spears.”

      Uhh…eww.

      Rachel, honey? Please tell me you didn’t let this guy know where you live. If you did, I hope you have a fresh supply of mace. And antibacterial soap. And a lock on your underwear drawer.

      Hmm. What’s more disturbing about this story? A grown man’s mother having Britney Spears-ish panties, or her son wearing them?

      Okay, gotta run. Please wish me luck on the job interview tomorrow. Can’t tell you more about it—as you know, I like to keep my Mad-Mari stuff on the down low, separate from my real world junk.

      But trust me, this job? Well, let’s just say it involves me swimming in a huge sea of testosterone.

      Here I go…diving in!

      Mari

      1

      MARISSA MARSHALL LOVED clear, sunny spring days, and, so far, this early May one was reminding her why.

      Having lived in Baltimore for five years, she was used to gray, smoggy skies during the cold, bleak winter, and hazy ones in the summer. Fall was nice, with changing leaves ranging from pale yellow to deep rust. But in spring, Maryland came alive.

      There was so much color. Cherry blossoms and azaleas dotted the landscape with pink and red. Lush farmlands erupted in mixed tones of new, freshly turned earth. With the soft green waters of the Atlantic, and the warm yellow sun drenching the robin’s-egg-blue sky with life, the state was an artist’s palette.

      Funny, though. Her favorite part of spring—the color she most enjoyed on a beautiful day like this—was no color at all.

      It was white. Just white. A sea of it.

      “Dazzling,” Marissa said. Though she’d been speaking to a woman behind the counter of the coffee shop where she’d stopped for a caffeine injection, she was looking out the window.

      Students from the U.S. Naval Academy, wearing their immaculate uniforms, filled the streets of Annapolis. Though now coed, the USNA’s student body was primarily male. So on this lovely Saturday afternoon, the town appeared full to the brim of handsome young midshipmen—aka middies—in their dress whites, all celebrating making it through another tough year at the academy.

      Women from all over the state flocked here on sunny spring days, just to have a good drool. Marissa among them.

      “God, how can you survive this much hotness 24/7?”

      The woman grunted. “They’re always broke. I don’t care how hot they are, I just wonder if they have cash in their pockets.”

      Marissa would probably wonder less about the contents of their pockets and more about what was in the rest of their pants. Anyone who didn’t have something dangling in their own pants would. As would danglers with same-sex preferences.

      The USNA might be renowned for its educational excellence, but a close second would have to be its military beefcake. Even Marissa, who had been single for so long she could call herself a sexual vegetarian, suddenly found herself craving a Manwich.

      She knew better than to ever take a bite, though. Uniformed beefcake might taste good, but the thought of that uniform got stuck in her craw, choking her. She might like looking at them, but she had no use for military men. Not after having been sired by one. Her father was about as affectionate as a jellyfish.

      Besides, lately, even men without uniforms had been few and far between. That, however, was her own fault. In her real life, she was an overeducated nerd who’d just completed a doctoral program from one of the most prestigious universities in the country—Johns Hopkins. So she intimidated most men.

      In her secret life, she was persona non grata with the male half of civilization due to her snarky books: Why Do Men Suck? and Thanks, But I’ll Just Keep My Vibrator.

      How strange that her blog, Mad-Mari.com, which she’d launched six years ago after a really bad date, had landed her here. What had started as an internet rant had grown into a website with tons of followers. Then came a book deal.

      As Mad-Mari, she was sassy and irreverent while venting about the hell called dating and relationships. She’d railed against cheaters, chauvinists and misogynistic assholes. She’d met lots of those in academia, not to mention in the military world in which she’d been raised. Meanwhile, she’d also been writing her much more proper, respectable dissertation which touched on similar topics, just in a scholarly, scientific way.

      In other words, no snark.

      Thankfully, she’d published the books under a pseudonym. Very few people realized that the infamous man-bashing internet star, Mad-Mari, was really Marissa Marshall, PhD, whose dissertation had been excerpted in a highly respected psychology journal and in a military magazine. And she intended to keep it that way.

      The barista set a cup on the counter. “Honestly, I’ve never been tempted to trade in my granny panties for something with cougar stripes—they’re practically babies.”

      They might be babies next to the fiftyish server, but not to Marissa. The oldest cadets were twenty-three or so, not that far from her twenty-nine. But in terms of life experience, they were a different generation. From age fourteen, Marissa had been thrust into adulthood, nearly raising her own younger siblings.

      There hadn’t been much choice after their mother left.

      While studying to earn her doctorate in psychology, she’d spent a lot of time trying to understand that. If pressed, she’d probably have to admit that trying to understand what drove people like her parents to do the things they did was one reason she’d settled on psychology from the day she’d started college.

      Oh, she got why the marriage had failed—her father was one of those chauvinistic misogynists she wrote about, cold and aloof. Not to mention a cheat, seeming to have a new affair on every base. But she couldn’t grasp how a mother could decide to pay him back by having an affair of her own, then leave her kids, keeping in touch only with an occasional call or card. Some things, she suspected, she would never understand, no matter how many degrees she earned or how many letters came after her name.

      “You have a good day. Try not to trip and fall into a pile of hot boys now, ya hear?” said the woman behind the counter.

      Not impossible, given her three-inch heels. “Thanks.”

      Stepping outside, she instinctively closed her eyes and sucked in a deep breath. She lived near the Inner Harbor, but the air didn’t smell nearly as potent. Downtown Baltimore lacked this fragrant mixture of saltwater, sweat and male.

      “Excuse me, ma’am,” a deep voice said.

      Her eyes flying open, СКАЧАТЬ