Page 5 of Stars At Dusk

Annoyance began to ripple through Harlow’s being. ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t order dessert?’

‘Precisely. You look like you need to lose some Ks. Extra sugar won’t help.’

Harlow felt a wave of red heat crash over her head.

‘Says the man who ogled my beautiful butt and tried to tap it! What in the actual?’

By this time, the waitress was beginning to look alarmed. ‘Should I come back -?’

‘Stay here, please,’ Harlow said slowly and deliberately, tamping down the urge to reach over the table and slap her date. ‘Because I need a witness while I rip this arrogant jackass a new one. First of all, Ziemer, my weight is none of your business. Neither is my fitness routine, food choice, or lifestyle. You haven’t got a stake in my health. As a scientist, I’m pretty across what is and what is not healthy. Yes I’m curvy. But I’m well within the Dunian health range for a woman of my height. I love what I wear, how I look, what I am and what I chow! I’ve worked hard, and I’m at the top of my field, so I deserve to eat the best. I’m also independent and proud of myself, so I paid my half on all our prior dates. You have zero right to comment on my body, weight, and choices. I’m an acquired taste. If you don’t like me, acquire some taste. Meanwhile, take yourself and your three-inch wiener and find some other emaciated, underweight, insecure pansy to try your small dick energy on!’

Harlow rose from the table slowly because she wasn’t about no drama. She looped her bag over her shoulder and pushed off. Slowly, deliberately, rolling her hips.

Ziemer was left ogling in shock at her curvy behind while she made a beeline for the restaurant’s reception desk.

‘Paying my half on table three,’ she announced at the droid payment station.

She swiped her wrist comm and abruptly took a left to the back of the restaurant’s adjacent bar. Which was conveniently hidden from sight by the dividing wall between the restaurant floor and the reception area.

From her vantage point, Harlow coolly scrutinised a flustered Ziemer while he paid for half the meal and hurried into his ostentatious gold Sable Sphinx custom flyer.

Moments later, she reappeared at reception, where her server was busy retelling Harlow’s story to a group of her fellow workmates.

The attendant gaped at the star of her saga. ‘I thought you left,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry I -.’

Harlow acknowledged her remorse with a smile. ‘You’ve nothing to apologise for. It’s me who’s sorry. I don’t usually behave this way, but I had to dump that loser. Please forgive me.’

The server waved off her apology, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘Honey, you did what you had to. You stood up for us girls with a little jiggle!’

That was when Harlow noticed the woman was also a curvy club member. She smiled.

The server grinned back. ‘What can I do for you, love?’

‘I don’t know when I’ll next be back,’ Harlow hedged her bets. ‘But would the kitchen be so sweet and make me a bag to go? Please? I’ll take the triple chocolate yuzu sorbet and coconut ice cake. Plus an extra large serve of super spicy potato curls with extra garlic butter slathered all over them if you can spare them.’

Fifteen minutes later, she’d paid, added a generous tip for her fave new wait person and strolled out of House M’Osia Axuma swinging her to-go-dinner bag. They’d even thrown a free mango, Curacao orange and fresh apple mocktail into the mix.Angels.

For a moment, she contemplated taking a fly-cab home. But her apartment was just a twenty-minute walk away. So she figured a stroll on such a lovely evening would do her a world of good.

It’d help clear her head of the idiot she’d just dumped to the curb. Perhaps give her some perspective for her life journey moving forward, for Harlow was DONE. She was DONE with men and their drama.

Ziemer had been the last straw.

He was 8th, no, 9th in a string of sorry-ass, self-obsessed jackasses who’d failed her in the last few years. She’d given them all a chance to redeem themselves. But, instead, they’d lied, cheated, manipulated, ghosted, gaslit, placed her on a pedestal, and ceremoniously thrown her off it.

One had even tried to slug her physically when she’d turned him down for a hookup, which he’d rage demanded in a play to sound dominant. All within the first 20 minutes of meeting him. The entitled sex maniac had lost a few teeth and sported a broken nose for weeks. Tonight, Ziemer had been lucky to escape with just a tongue-lashing, especially after his butt-tap attempt.

Being a busy woman with a purposeful career, staff to manage and contracts to complete meant she’d not freaked out yet about the lack of a great man in her life. Yet she wondered if she’d be one of those women who’d never find a connection with a man who was her peer; who challenged her, made her panties wet and shared her slightly-nerdy interests.

She’d tried dating men outside her profession but had found most somewhat lacking in the intellectual department. She’d given her colleagues in the science world a red hot go and got disappointed. Most reminded her too much of her sperm donor; snobbish, overbearing and interested only in nubile, foolish lovers whom they could easily manipulate.

She’d then opened her experience to dating entrepreneurs and ‘go-getters’ like Ziemer, only to be talked down to or ignored.

However, she knew the type of man wasn’t the genuine issue. The challenge lay with her and her alone.

It had taken years of therapy to discover that Harlow was attracted to the same loser personalities as her chromosome contributor. Men who wanted to dominate and control her.

It seemed she could never throw off the ghost of her past emotional and psychological abuse, and each time she was disappointed by men, she felt the familiar rush of failure bear upon her. The disappointment that her sperm donor had tried to beat out of her for years.

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