Chapter 1

My name is Rachael Hayes, and this is the story about when I started dating my first older man. Before this, I had only dated people my own age or younger. I never realized what “age and experience” could do for a girl...

My move to Los Angeles had been difficult and painful and I was extremely lonely there at first. I had moved to Los Angeles soon after leaving college when my mom suddenly got sick and passed away. I wanted to get away from all the bad memories and get a fresh start. I had always wanted to see Los Angeles, and with nothing to hold me in Ohio anymore, I thought the change would do me good.

I’d never had much trouble making friends. I was pretty popular in high school – you know, I was a cheerleader, part of the Prom Court for homecoming, and all that. I had a couple of different boyfriends during those years (both younger than me) and never missed a dance. When I got to college, I quickly adapted and jumped right into college life. Ohio State University wasn’t all that far from my hometown, so it felt very familiar to me.

While in college I had a crush on one of the professors. It was an English literature class with Professor Hamilton. He was an older man but very distinguished; he always reminded me of Sean Connery. He had the same graying beard, the same cool calmness, he even sounded a little like him! I loved going to that class – I don’t know if I learned much, but my attendance was perfect!

After I graduated from college, I went back home and was planning on going to work at one of the local papers. But that’s when Mom got sick and passed away just as I had started working. My father had long since divorced mom and remarried, moving to Alabama someplace, and so with no one left to stay in Ohio for, I packed up and headed west.

At first, the idea of Los Angeles had seemed so glamorous. Single, free, twenty-three years old, and in one of the world’s great cities. But California was not what the TV commercials and travel brochures claimed it was. It was not all sunshine, beaches, and hunky guys.

And it wasn’t like the beach movies of the ‘60s either; there wasn’t a party every day and romance every night under the full moon. Instead, the part of Los Angeles I knew was a dirty, overcrowded, and dangerous. It wasn’t at all like the friendly hometown I left.

I learned quickly where I could go and what I could do. I wasn’t in the inner city, but I wasn’t living in Beverly Hills, either. I was fortunate to be able to find a small, one-bedroom apartment in a secure building – there was a four-digit access code you had to punch in to get in the lobby, then each apartment had their own keyed lock and deadbolt.

Any visitor or deliveryman would just use the intercom to be let in. So I felt safe once I was home. Also, I lived on the third floor so I didn’t have to worry too much about creeps peeking in my window from the street! The people in the building kept to themselves, too. No one said hi to anyone and just went about their business. Well, except for one man who lived across the hall from me.

He was a big man but very sweet. A former cop and bouncer, I didn’t worry about anything once I was home. He looked out for the new girl across the hall and said if I ever needed help to give him a call.

I landed a job at a small newspaper where I thought I could put my Journalism degree to good use. I had interned at a paper about the same size as this back in Ohio over the summers and so I felt comfortable applying for the job.

But once I was hired and began working there, I quickly realized like Los Angeles itself, the closed-off, dog-eat-dog world of professional journalism hit me square in the face! And this little newspaper felt more like a pressure cooker with its hyper-competitive atmosphere.

My college classes and even the internship did not prepare me for the high pressure, fast-paced world of big-city journalism. The idea of a friendly newsroom where we all worked to make the paper the best there was – you know the Mary Tyler Moore television news only in print – faded into a new reality. If you don’t get the stories and interviews and get them first, you don’t keep your job long!

So we fought with each other for stories and for the best interviews. And shared more than a little contempt for each other. Some of the top reporters for the paper even went as far as hijacking stories and those they couldn’t hijack, they would try to torpedo or at least hamper and cause them to miss the deadline. Anything to “one-up” their fellow reporters – it was a tough, mean-spirited business!

One day I came to work and to a big surprise – our little newspaper had been sold! Of course, this sent a wave of panic and concern that we would all lose our jobs. But the company had a meeting where we met the new owner of our newspaper and he calmed all of our fears by assuring us that no one would be fired.

The former owner just wanted to retire, so he sold the business. Somehow I thought that with new blood at the top things would change, and it would get friendlier and more relaxed. The new owner was well-backed financially, so the I foolishly thought pressure to keep the paper running wouldn’t be as bad.

However, even though we had a new owner, we had the same extremely competitive, spiteful cutthroats on the news floor. So nothing changed – there was just a new ass to kiss!

One exceptionally bad day I found out just how vicious my fellow coworkers could be. I had been working on a story – a good story – for some time, trying to get an interview with one very reclusive head of one of the local gangs. For whatever reason (I still to this don’t know why) he took a liking to me and trusted me.

We had an interview set up in a couple of days when I found out one of my co-workers had swept in and not only scooped my interview, but had put lies in his ears not to trust me and that I was only looking to slant the story and the interview against him and his gang. It took some doing, but I was eventually able to convince him that all he had heard about me was untrue, but I had lost the story. And I needed that story if I was going to advance in the company.

After work that day, my bus ride home was especially lonely. I was surrounded by millions of people, yet I didn’t have a single friend within a thousand miles. It felt very odd to be surrounded by the bustle of the city, yet so totally alone.

The anonymity was both palpable and painful. I looked out the window of the bus as I rode, looking at all the people passing by in their own vehicles and at the houses and buildings along the way.

When I got home that night, it didn’t feel like home. Instead, it felt more like a prison. There were no bars on the windows but I still didn’t feel like I was free. I knew that I couldn’t go out – I wouldn’t have any place to go anyway. And I didn’t know anyone that I could call and talk to.

Even my friend across the hall was gone for a few days. Here I was in the City of Angels but it was my own private hell. I was surrounded by more people than I could even get my head around, yet I couldn’t be more alone if I was on a deserted island.

I didn’t have to work the next day, so I decided to have a little pity party – just me and my best friend, a bottle of cheap white wine I picked up on the walk from the bus stop. To tell you the truth, this wasn’t my first pity party.

I had learned that I could find happiness – however temporarily – at the bottom of a wine bottle. So I usually kept a bottle on hand for those rough days I’d just as soon forget. I wasn’t a drunk, don’t misunderstand. It’s just that a glass or two of wine took the edge off and helped me unwind on rough days.

However, after this incident of being shot down by what should have been a coworker, it was more than a rough night. I’d had a perfectly rotten day and had no one to talk to about it. No one to hold me and tell me it would be all right and no one to give me the support and encouragement I badly needed at that time.

And so that night, on a drunken, lonely whim, I decided that I would use my journalism talents for my own use for a change. I figured if I couldn’t find anyone in this big city, then I would help them find me. And so I made a profile on one of those online dating sites that seem to be so popular. I had seen an ad for one of them on television while I was downing my fourth or fifth glass of wine and the more wine I had, the better the idea seemed.

Online dating didn’t have a negative connotation to me. Lots of people used them, I knew, and while there was a certain amount of risk in meeting a stranger you had only “met” online, it wasn’t any more dangerous than meeting the old fashioned way.

At least online dating opened up more possibilities and you could narrow the field from those that responded depending on what you were after. You could learn a little about each other before the actual first date and if he (or she) wasn’t what you were after, you wouldn’t waste time and money on a date with no hope.

So I wrote what at the time (and state of mind I was in) seemed like a good profile, uploaded a few select pictures of myself, and answered a few questions to submit my own profile. After I’d hit send and became “one of the thousands that use online dating services” as the advertisement said, I decided to have a look at some other profiles to see what I could find.

I scrolled through a few pages and found a few that had potential. But it was late, I was more than a little drunk now, and it had been a very tough day. So I turned off my computer, downed the last of the bottle of wine and stumbled into the bedroom passing out as soon as I hit the bed, clothes and all.

The next morning I woke up when the sun had moved around far enough to shine into my window and my face. Thankfully, although I don’t know how, I woke up without a hangover. I lay in bed trying to think of a reason I needed to get up. Suddenly I remembered the profile I had created in my drunken stupor.

My first instinct was to log on and delete it before someone saw it, but I figured that by now it was probably too late to stop it anyway. So I made a cup of coffee to help me wake up, then I took a shower, changing out of my wrinkled work clothes into something more comfortable.

Coming back into the living room, I checked my emails as I always do and there I saw that I had fifteen new messages. I didn’t know fifteen people in the whole world that would email me! Curiosity finally won out, and I logged to my email service to see who could be sending me messages.

I had a couple of spam emails (I have a “disposable” email address that I use when I think I might get spam from a company or something – a trick that one of my professors taught me. That way, I know I can just dump the contents when it gets full without going through each email!), and I saw the address of the online dating service in several of the messages as well.

I started looking at the dating service messages just to see what was out there. Most of the messages were either very short, just saying “Hi there, wanna go out?” or something equally mundane and uninspired. Others were written as if a teen girl had written them with spelling errors and “text speak” verbiage. If you can’t spell out the word you or are, then you need to get off the dating circuit and go back to school!

There was one gem hidden among the messages, however. It was from someone calling himself Thomas1076. He was a forty-one-year-old man living only an hour away in Santa Ana. He was an amazing writer, educated and intelligent, and he had a way with words that made me sit up and take notice. Literally.

I had been going through these other clown’s messages, getting bored and losing hope in finding anyone, when I opened his message. He caught me right from the first few words. I sat up in my seat and began reading his message more intently. His letter was quite thorough and he wrote several paragraphs about himself, his interests, and what he was looking for out of this dating thing.

Then he went into the things he found interesting about my profile. We found we had several shared interests; he loved great music, especially classic rock and roll, he appreciated all the books and authors I loved, and he loved to go out to eat. It was basically a perfect first message!

I read his message a couple of times before logging out. I made myself some breakfast and thought about the day. But my mind kept going back to the email from Thomas. I couldn’t seem to get him out of my head!

Finally, I logged back in and sent a reply to his amazing letter, telling him how much we seemed to have in common and more about what I was hoping to find out of this online dating idea. I was careful not to go into too many specific details just yet, keeping things a bit general until I knew him better.

I told him I was originally from Ohio and that I was in Los Angeles as a journalist. I told him a bit about my past – that my Mom died right after I came home from college and that my father had left us years ago so I had no one in Ohio to miss. Of course, there was the obligatory description of what I looked like – you know the “statistics” as it were, and I told him all that.