The Unlikely Fiance

Chapter 1

THE PHONE rang as Clarissa Langston settled herself in front of the empty canvas in her little studio at the two bed roomed apartment she shared with her older sister, Sidney. She humphed loudly and blew away the blond lock that curled down to her nose then rolled her eyes. Just when she was getting comfortable...

Ring!

These were the times when she wished she had the supernatural powers of telekinesis then she would have pulled the phone closer to her. Argh! Who would call her on a Sunday morning? People were either busy nursing yesterday's hangovers or at church.

Screech!

The longer she waited for the phone to stop ringing, the louder the friggin thing got! How many rings was it to the answering machine again? She eyed the phone venomously again. Now that she thought of it, maybe X-men's cyclops had a better super power. That way, she could just liquidate the screecher and get on with her work.

She turned back to the blank canvas. What was she about to do again...oh yes, she was about to paint that friggin--

"Clarie!" A drowsy sexy female voice droned through the answering machine. "I know you are there. Pick up the phone. I can see you..." the voice drawled.

Clarissa hid behind her canvas. Sometimes Sidney made her believe she actually had a super power. She always knew what Clarissa was up to.

"I know you are in front of your canvas again. You are going to paint him again, aren't you? I love you, Clarie, but what you are doing in plain creepy and it's a characteristic of a stalker. You guys broke up six months ago. You need to move on!"

Clarissa could hear that her sister was hungover. She must have gone home with some guy again.

Sidney Langston was everything Clarissa wasn't. She was the hot and sexy older sister that every guy friend she had wanted to bang. She was very beautiful, tall with a model body. She even had a good job and a fancy car. Men queued up like the way you'd queue up in front of a club just to go out with her. She only chose the men with cash and her slutty behavior paid the rent of their cozy little apartment, paid for her car insurance and took her to the expensive holiday locations around the world. The worst part was that the men actually wanted to pay for everything for her and she had no humble bone in her body to refuse.

"Clarie, baby, put down the brush, get out of the apartment and get yourself a social life. I know being an art teacher in some prestigious school for some snotty-nosed rich kids sucks but you are a beautiful, young and single woman. There are--" She yelped and giggled and suddenly her message was muffled with a lot of mhhhs and ahmms.

Clarissa made a comical expression of disgust. She didn't even want to know about her older sister's sex life. Now, that actually coaxed her to get up and hang up the phone but as she reached the land-line, the answering machine beeped to show the end of the message. She released a sigh of relief and turned back to the canvas. Rubbing her toes at the back of her other leg, as sighed and dropped the brush and the paint palette.

"Oh, Julian. How come I can't forget you like the way you forgot me?" She sank back on her stool, pulled her feet up and hugged them then continued staring at the blank canvas. "Am I really that clingy? Do I love too much?"

At twenty three, Clarissa had suffered what she called a never-getting-back-together breakup with her boyfriend of four years. They met in the first year of college and he taught her about love, sex and everything else in between and now he felt that she was too immature for him so he decided to get married to someone more growed up! Maybe she was but she wasn't sure what made her immature. Was it the fact that she confronted him about cheating on her with her friend? Or maybe it was when she poured red wine on his crisp white suit on a friend's wedding when she caught him making out with the maid of honor? She didn't know.