Not the Girl You Marry Read online

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Andrea L. Manka

  Readers Guide copyright © 2019 by Andrea L. Manka

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  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Christopher, Andie J., author.

  Title: Not the girl you marry / Andie J. Christopher.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Jove, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019001227| ISBN 9781984802682 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781984802699 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H7628 N68 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001227

  First Edition: November 2019

  Cover art and design by Colleen Reinhart

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Bud Manka, the prototype for the Nolan men.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  Readers Guide

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I started writing Not the Girl You Marry in late 2017. Blasted by the bleak state of the world whenever I turned on the news, I was craving some of the lightness, humor, and hope of my favorite romantic comedy films. And I wanted to see myself—a biracial woman who has been through the wringer when it comes to dating—coaxed into believing in love again. I wanted to write the kind of hero that I would fall in love with if he walked off the pages—someone kind, considerate, smart, aware of his privilege, and with enough of an edge so as not to be a pushover. (I’m still waiting, by the way.)

  But despite my intention to write a light, frothy tale centered on a biracial woman, I ended up writing a book about love and belonging—about a woman who never believed she could have that for herself realizing that she could make a space where she truly felt at home.

  Despite my close-knit, loving family, like Hannah, I’ve struggled with feeling worthy of love and belonging. At least while I was being unapologetically myself. I am part of the “Loving Generation,” the cohort of children born to mixed-race couples shortly after the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which struck down state laws that previously outlawed interracial marriage.

  Growing up in Minnesota, with my mother’s white family, surrounded by mostly white classmates, my racial identity always felt like a slippery, vexing thing. And even though my parents thought of me as “mixed,” plenty of other people viewed me as “black.” But I never felt black enough to call myself black. This made the pernicious, frequent, rude question that biracial people face (“What are you?”) extremely fraught to me. If I said I was mixed or biracial, would black people take that as a sign that I thought there was something wrong with being black? If said I was black, would someone ask why I wasn’t like what they thought a black person should be?

  I came to dread the question until it came from a six-year-old child I was tutoring as part of a mentoring program in college. She looked me over carefully and said, “You’re not white, but you’re not black. What are you?” Simply knowing that she saw me as me, not a projection of her own ideas—her curiosity made my answer easy.

  I’m both—black and white. I’m mixed.

  That exchange didn’t mark the last time I felt awkward answering questions about my race or felt like my otherness prevented me from feeling like I truly belonged anywhere. But that moment did mark a turning point in my determination to define myself for myself.

  Hannah is similarly determined at the moment she meets Jack. She’s much more secure than I am in her racial identity, but her atrocious dating experiences have led her to define herself as not the kind of girl men want to marry. In relationships, she’s felt intense pressure to subsume her own desires to those of her partners, but she just can’t seem to do it. But the moment she meets Jack, she feels seen for who she is. And even though they both spend most of the book pretending and obfuscating, Hannah finds a place with Jack, and with his family, where she belongs.

  I want readers to find lightness and joy in Hannah and Jack’s story. And, more importantly, I hope that my readers see themselves in Hannah, whether in terms of race, personality, career goals, or even her bleak outlook on dating. If just one person identifies with her, then I know I’ll have done my job.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ON THE THIRD DAY of ninth grade, Jack Nolan asked Maggie Doonan to be his date to the Leo Catholic freshman dance. He blackmailed his older brother, Michael, into dressing up as a chauffeur and driving them in their father’s baby-shit-colored Lincoln Town Car. Then he sweet-talked Mrs. Jankowski at the flower shop into finding lilacs in Chicago, in September, just because Maggie’s sister had told him that they were Maggie’s favorite flower.

  After that, Maggie Doonan hadn’t needed any more convincing that he was the perfect half-formed man for her. And the fact that he was an actual, honest-to-God choirboy had convinced Maggie’s father not to even bother threatening him with the shotgun that still resided in the Doonans’ front closet.

  At the time, Jack had no idea what kind of power he had unlocked.

  Two years later, he and Maggie had sullied the back seat of the baby-shit-colored Lincoln Town Car in unspeakable ways. And, two years of near constant shagging after that, he’d watched her get in her parents’ SUV to leave him for
Harvard.

  Watching Maggie’s tearstained face drive into the distance had broken Jack’s heart. But he’d been the only guy in his high school friend group to leave for college with valuable sexual experience not involving his right hand.

  Still, he’d been sad.

  Until he met Katie Leong during the third hour of freshman orientation at the University of Michigan. She’d winked at him while they’d learned the fight song at some stupid mixer for first-year students. That wink had hooked straight into Jack’s dick and driven him to be the best college boyfriend ever—midnight burritos, romantic two a.m. walks to and from the library, and oral sex at least three times a week—six times during finals. Hell, he’d even started working for the school paper because Katie was going to be a journalist when she grew up.

  The only thing about his relationship with Katie that had stuck past her semester in Paris, and her subsequent new relationship with some French douche named Julian, was his career in journalism and a broken heart.

  But the broken heart had lasted only a few months—until he’d met Lauren James, his favorite ex-girlfriend. She was off-the-wall funny and could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.

  He and Lauren had lasted through their senior year at Michigan and a shitty apartment with six roommates in the Bronx while he’d studied for his master’s at Columbia and she’d waited tables at a craptastic Midtown tourist trap and raced to and from off-off-Broadway auditions.

  Lauren hadn’t even dumped him when he’d moved home to Chicago for a shiny new job. She’d saved her tips and flown out twice a month until she’d met a British director who wanted to cast her in an all-female West End production of Waiting for Godot.

  You’re the best man I know, Jack. Such a great guy. I’ll never have another boyfriend like you.

  No, she wouldn’t. Because she married the prick director after the very brief run of the show. That British guy hadn’t been a Boy Scout, and he for sure didn’t know all the best sex knots to tie.

  As he stood at the bar of a speakeasy in Wicker Park, after waiting fifteen minutes for an artisanal old-fashioned made with, like, artisanal cherries and orange peels scraped off with the bartender’s artisanal hipster fingernails or some shit, he’d been without a girlfriend for six months. It was the longest he’d ever gone, and that was why his buddies had thought it was a good idea for him to leave his couch—and the Michigan–Notre Dame game—to sit around and talk to them in public.

  He should be working tonight. In addition to not having a girlfriend, he didn’t have the illustrious journalism career he’d dreamed of. In a recent pivot to video, he’d become the online magazine’s how-to guy. His boss told him he was “too handsome to break real news,” but more important, he would be laid off if he didn’t shift with the times.

  Now his father grumbled about him “not having a real job” every time he saw him, and Jack kept his mouth shut because he was living in a condo his family owned. If he lost his not-real job, not only would he have to hold his tongue around dear old Dad, he would have to wear a sandwich board on the corner. Or worse, work with his dad. While his father could deal with his working a job outside of the family construction business, he wouldn’t be underwriting Jack’s lifestyle if he got fired.

  He loved his father—looked up to him—but they would kill each other if they had to work together.

  So, he was here with his buddies, trolling for ideas for his next bullshit column. Chris and Joey could be his guinea pigs for whatever he came up with. He’d grown up with them; they’d all graduated from Leo together. Unlike him, they were knuckleheads about women. The idea that they would need to stage some sort of intervention with him over the nonexistent state of his love life was freaking preposterous. As demonstrated by the fact that they were wearing suits for a Saturday night out in the hipster hell that was Wicker Park, so they could stand around a bar that served overpriced, fussy drinks while looking at their phones and not talking to any of the women actually in the room.

  Neither of them understood that for the first time since Maggie Doonan had put her hand down his pants under the bleachers at the freshman dance, he was kind of happy being alone. He could finally do the kind of shit that he liked—watch the game with a beer or five, sleep until noon, bring bread into the house without ruining someone’s gluten-free cleanse.

  For the first time in his adult life, he was figuring out what he liked instead of contorting himself into the kind of guy Maggie, Katie, or Lauren needed. And he meant to go on that way.

  Just the other day, he’d been thinking about getting a dog. Some slobbery beast—like a mastiff or a Saint Bernard. Lauren hated dogs. Which probably should have been his first clue that the relationship was doomed.

  Still, he scanned the dark bar to see whatever other unfortunate souls found themselves ripped from the warm embrace of their college sports or Netflix queues. No one looked quite as miserable as him, though. Not a single one of the long-bearded hipsters littering the red leather couches and old-timey booths looked like he’d flash a nun for a beer on tap.

  Looking around, he thought maybe his next video could be How to Not Ruin a Saturday Night Paying for $15 Drinks at a Douche-Magnet Bar. Name needed work.

  His gaze stopped right next to Chris and Joey on the ass of a woman in a tiny black dress that didn’t match her gray moccasins. He didn’t give a shit about her sartorial choices because there was so much velvet-soft-looking light-brown skin between the shoes, which looked as though they’d seen better days, and the bottom of that dress, which made Jack’s lungs feel like they were going to combust. He hadn’t even seen her face yet, but he knew that she was like whisky in woman form; he felt his judgment cloud and high-minded ideas about bachelorhood vacate the premises. In his head, she was already like the first puff of a cigar. Just her gorgeous legs made his throat itch and burn. Forty or so inches of skin had him choking on lust.

  Thank freaking Christ the bartender showed up again with his drink. Jack knocked twice on the bar and, not taking his eyes off Legs, said, “Put it on Chris Dooley’s tab.” Jack was about to lose his wits to a woman, and it was all his friends’ fault for making him leave the house. They were buying his drinks for the rest of the night.

  He made his way back to Chris and Joey, still looking at their goddamned phones and not at the beauty next to them. No wonder they were constantly swiping and never actually meeting any of the bots populating most dating apps face-to-face. And no wonder Chris had been single since dumping Jack’s sister, Bridget, a year and a half ago. They didn’t pay attention.

  Considering the sister dumping, maybe Jack should have drowned Chris in the kiddie pool when they were five.

  But if they were aware of their surroundings, maybe Chris or Joey would be the guy getting to talk to Legs, and Jack would be left holding his dick. So, thank Christ his friends were idiots.

  It wasn’t until he was a few feet away that he noticed the other women with Legs. Both of the other women were knockouts, but they didn’t rate for him. Jack had homed in on Legs, and he would not be deterred.

  Maybe he could figure out how to keep things casual with Legs for the first three months or so. He doubted it. Once he’d tasted a little bit of a girl’s magic, Jack didn’t like to date around. He enjoyed flirting as much as the next guy, but he was—in essence—a commitment-phile. He liked having a girlfriend.

  Maybe he and Legs could get a dog. He could compromise and live with a French bulldog. Small and cute, but still a real dog.

  “Are you guys both swiping?”

  “Yeah.” Joey swiped left. “But I’m coming up empty.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Because of his affinity for having one lady for years at a time, Jack had never been on a dating app. He didn’t see the appeal. If he’d met Maggie on an app, he wouldn’t have been able to figure out that the lotion she wore smelled like lilacs. He wouldn’t have
known that Katie’s singing voice rivaled that of an angry tomcat, but that it was so charming he didn’t care. He’d never have clocked Lauren’s sassy walk across the stage in the production of Hello, Dolly! that he’d been reviewing for the Michigan Daily when he’d first seen her.

  And he would have seen Legs’s face first. To be honest, a picture of her face might be the only thing in the “pro” column for online dating. He needed to see if her face would captivate him as much as her rocking body did.

  “It means he’s not matching with any of the hot girls,” Chris piped in as he swiped right multiple times. “I swipe right on everyone so that I get more matches.”

  “But he matches with mostly dogs,” Joey said. “I’m not looking to get caught up with a girl so ugly I gotta put a bag over her head.”

  Yeah, he definitely should have drowned both Chris and Joey twenty years ago. Instead of clocking both of them, he pointed an angry finger in their faces. “Both of you are nothing to look at yourselves so you get what you get.”

  He ran his finger under his collar, longing for his worn Michigan football T-shirt instead of a stupid button-down. It was damn sweaty in this goddamned hole of a bar that didn’t have decent beer or a television.

  “Yeah, you’ll eat your words when you’re forced to swim in the waters of Tinder, loser.” Chris pointed back at him, finally looking up from his phone. “Then you’ll realize that it’s kill or be killed. The women on here are either bots or butt ugly.”

  That had to be the moment when Legs turned around. Jack could tell by the look on her—beautiful, gorgeous, absolutely perfect—face that she’d heard every word that his asshole, knuckle-dragging squad of buffoons had just said. Her eyes were so narrowly squinted that he couldn’t tell what color they were. Her nose wrinkled up and her red-lacquered lips compressed with anger. Couldn’t hide the fact that she was a knockout from all the angles. Not even with a raised middle finger partially obscuring her face.

  She was like a sexy, rabid raccoon. And he was a goner.