The Girl Who Wrote The Dating Manual

chapter twelve

The day we left the cabin and started back toward Hamilton, it snowed.

            Soft, fat snowflakes fell from the gunmetal-gray sky and coated the ground in ice, meriting salted tires and gridlocked chains to ensure maximum safety. We hugged the family goodbye, and I left feeling well rested, happy and warm, bundled up in a ski jacket, jeans and fluffy boots.

            Tomorrow was my twenty-first birthday, and Jamie, Ava, Chance and I had decided to go out for celebratory drinks that night.

            Since Christmas, I had instigated some rules in my life. I had specifically told Chance no more kissing—I was eliminating the opportunity for more hickeys, and I had already told Chance I wasn’t looking for a relationship. Over Christmas I had come out of my shell, but I’d made it very clear to Chance I wasn’t looking for a relationship. He’d accepted it, albeit a little reluctantly, but knew that ultimately, it was my choice.

            At about ten o’clock Friday morning, we left the Donoghue cabin, Chance and Jamie on our heels as we skidded down the dirt tracks and onto the desolated road.

            “So, did you have a good time?” Ava asked, flicking on the central heating to stop us from dying of hypothermia thanks to her car’s crappy inability to shut the driver’s window all the way. The crown of her black hair was dotted in small snowflakes from the wind, and I shivered, hunching down in my jacket.

            “Yeah,” I replied through chattering teeth, rubbing my bare fingers together to get some feeling into them. “It was great. I missed your family.”

            “I take it you’ll be coming back for summer, then?” she enticed, wiggling her eyebrows.

            “Anything to get away from my twisted family,” I mumbled, glancing out the window. In the rearview mirror I could see Jamie’s clunky car moving at our speed, and snow-covered pine trees dotted the side of the road. It was a beautiful sight, a perfect New Year.

            As a rule, I’d also ignored all of my parents calls, which totaled thirty-one. I knew it was stupid to ignore their calls—giving them the cold shoulder would fix nothing between them—but I just wasn’t ready to hear their excuses yet. There was a lot in life I could tolerate, but doormat women weren’t one of them.

            ‘What are doormat women?’ I hear you asking from the back. They are women that allow themselves to get trampled, flipped upside down and completely rebuffed, only to come back for more. Women needed a backbone, and one of my personal peeves was a woman who couldn’t stand up for herself. I hated sexism, and any form of it set me off. I hated men and women alike who believed women should be in the kitchen all the time. Women weren’t the weaker sex at all, and I hated people who thought they were. So many women allowed themselves to be degraded and walked all over, and I wouldn’t be one of them.

            My mother, however, seemed to have no problem with being a doormat woman.

           

            You see, my mother had a penchant for men who needed to be saved. You know, dames in distress or whatever the term is. If a man seemed damaged and needed fixing, Marie Sinclair (nee Witham) was more than happy to be their Florence Nightingale.