Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [18]
“Tissue?” flirts a voice behind him.
Marcus turns to address the woman possessing this studied, seductive voice. She’s attractive in a way that most men would find attractive, but Marcus isn’t most men. According to the name tag pinned to her shrunken black suit jacket, her name is Jonelle. Marcus free-associates professions for Jonelle: She’s a clinical therapist. A perfume spritzer. A masseuse. He instantly regrets falling into the trap of snap judgments and tries to make up for it with a smile. He also takes a tissue, out of courtesy, but he doesn’t use it.
“You seem lost,” Jonelle says.
He knows Natty would lose his mind if he were here right now, as he always does whenever Marcus gets approached by an attractive woman. He would be particularly amused by Jonelle’s reversal of the standard hot-girl gambit.
“You can’t go out in public without some hot girl asking you for the time, or directions, or what’s good on the menu,” Natty once pointed out.
“So?”
“Hot girls are always coming up with excuses just to strike up a conversation with you,” Natty said. “It’s just like the awkward dialogue before the fuck scenes in porn.”
Marcus shrugged off his friend’s observation not because it was untrue but because the truth was an embarrassment. He has been chatted up by attractive women since the onset of puberty, even more so now that he has stumbled into his current state of dead-sexy dishevelment, which earned him the nickname “The Slutty Professor” by the smitten first-year females who pass by him on campus. He isn’t really a professor, of course, but because he’s nearly a decade older than the youngest students, he might as well be. (Had most of their affair not taken place during the summer, when few students were on campus, the moniker might have shifted to describe the infamous anthropology professor. But Marcus doesn’t like to think about how close it came to that.)
Before he even started orientation at Princeton, Jessica warned Marcus about the nicknames. She knew they were inevitable for someone destined to become such an obtrusive, potentially empyreal presence on campus, and she even used them as evidence as to why she couldn’t possibly be the girlfriend—or fiancée—of a twenty-three-year-old college freshman. But Jessica failed to predict just how many women would be compelled to call him by a code name. For a tight-knit study group whose members daydream about him every Monday and Wednesday between 1:30 and 2:50 P.M. during REL 382 Death and the Afterlife in East Asian Cultures, he’s “The Wounded Buddha.” A chattering clique from one of Princeton’s oldest and most pretentious secret societies refers to him as “The Mark,” which is not a misspelled foreshortening of his name but a synonym for “target” because there is big money to be won by the lucky Ivy girl who lands him in bed. Marcus wouldn’t know about any of this if it weren’t for Natty, who benefits greatly from his friend’s refusal to sleep with anyone whose birth doesn’t predate the 1990s, and whose ever-present proximity to Marcus makes him the first and most logical choice for girls who want to save face (“Who does Marcus think he is? He’s not that hot!”) with a fallback fuck.
If not for Natty, these girls would barely register with Marcus. He’s too preoccupied by the ones in his past with whom he shared a genuine—if brief and debauched—connection. Forty-something girls, or so he has been told. He must rely on secondhand information because his teen years were dominated by drugged-and-alcoholic fugue-state fuckery Forty-something is a number that he honestly cannot confirm but has never tried to deny. He suspects the real number is maybe half that tally, if only because he cannot live with the idea of so many girls (now women) once fucked and