Dana?

  The week or so that Mark had stayed with me was a bit eye opening.  Every night, after I got off from work we would go out. I knew he was probably going stir crazy sitting around for most of the day, so I really couldn’t fault him. He kept telling me that I was living the dream working with so many girls, even though I never quite saw it the same way He would always ask me to invite some girls that I knew to go out with us, but I had reservations about that.  

  He didn’t treat women at the clubs we were going to very nicely, especially the waitress and bartenders. He was actually quite rude and cocky. At least I had warned Claudia and the others beforehand so they knew what they were getting into.  When it was the two of us, he was a lot more crude and candid. Between that and the fact that he has known me for so long, he was very opinionated about my situation.

  He told me that I didn’t like Rachel as much as I convinced myself I did. “She’s hot and fuckable, so you can use her for that if you haven’t already, but she is in a bad relationship right now and you want to ‘save her’. Those are the only girls you really go for. Girls that are damaged and that you think you can save.”

  I protested, but he called me out on it. He asked if there was any other girl that I knew of that I liked, but wasn’t broken. The only girl that came to mind was a girl named Dana that banked with us. She had lived in Massachusetts and we bonded about being from the East Coast. I found her to be very attractive and very friendly from the time I started working at the bank. When I first started at the bank as a lowly teller, I would flirt with her by sending lollipops to her through the tube in the drive through tube. Since that time she had been in a few relationships, but was currently single. I had found this out because she had come into the back to change her address earlier in the summer. She broke up with her boyfriend whom was a much older man, and was now paying the mortgage at her grandmother’s condo since she had decided to move to Florida.

  At the time, she was just starting to see a new guy and I was in the midst of my infatuation with Rachel. Nonetheless, she had given me some tickets to see some heavy metal band playing later that week at the Paramount and hoped to see me there. I don’t remember if Rachel and I were on the outs or if I was just trying to keep my options open, but either way, I agreed to go simply to hang out with her socially and keep myself on her radar. I never really thought I had a shot with her because in my mind, I had nothing I could offer her (Read: save her from). It didn’t matter. She apparently got into a fight with the guy she was seeing that night and didn’t go to the concert anyway.

  Now… with summer having wound down, Mark actually got me to think about her again, but this time, I had a different perspective.