Girl of Averages

By J. A. Hailey

LOVE PLAYS BY ITS OWN RULES.

Mark Walters, of the mansion on the corner of Walters' Drive, is a young man with everything.He has the looks, he has the money, and he has the Lamborghini.

But he is also a good guy. So, when he meets a relatively plain young girl, he knows how to behave around her, without making her feel bad about how poorly she compares with the fashion models he seeks to have as girlfriends. She is average, though there's nothing really to pinpoint in the body parts. It is just that she is like the billions of normal girls out on the streets of the world, who have nothing going for or against them on the looks front.

 

As he's the guy with everything, he has to be careful to not let this girl fall in love with him. So, because he is a decent human being, he micromanages the relationship, in a way to keep her safe from the heartbreak of hopeless love.

But togetherness is a complex soup, and love never knocks!

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. A. Hailey
• Release date: Dec 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223722434

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J. A. Hailey

COPYRIGHT AND MORAL RIGHTS BELONG EXCLUSIVELY TO THE AUTHOR.

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©2023 Indiependent Publishing

This is a work of fiction. The characters and events described herein are imaginary, and are not intended to refer to specific places or to real persons, alive or dead. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embedded in critical reviews.

1

"Your love is your wealth, she said, slightly breathlessly, walking fast. Cling onto it, as hard as a miser clings onto money."

She had peculiar takes on so many things.

"You benefit from my love, as the object of it," I pointed out.

She shook her head in agreement, nodding in time to her steps. It’s always good to be around a wealthy person.

"That would suggest my love is your wealth," I argued.

"Go ahead and get rid of your love for me. Then see how little difference to me, and how poor you become."

"I can’t get rid of my love for you."

Lucky guy, aren’t you? Gonna be rich forever.

And you? I continued protesting. Do you have no benefit from all the love that’s in me?

"Benefit’s an entirely separate thing. I’m in love with you, and I’m also loaded. I just don’t go boasting about it. It’s my wealth, and it’s bad manners, besides counting as downright unkindness, to go flaunting it in front of have-nots and the poor."

We were walking in a Manhattan side street, being pushed by a stiff, bone-chilling breeze on a freezing grey morning. It was the week after a hurried return from a lovely European holiday, and my girlfriend had taken me for an early-morning venture, to work on setting up a system for the homeless to access rudimentary breakfast of bread and cheese.

I couldn’t bear it, and stopped her walking, turning her to face me, her hair blowing into my eyes. She was holding onto a crust of bread she had broken from a loaf, and was nibbling while walking. I moved her hand away from her mouth to kiss her, knowing she would push her last bite of crust into my mouth.

It’s still early, I said, chewing, after a rather messy kiss. I’ll be taking you back into bed for an hour, maybe two. When you’re young, fit, and in love, you can do it often.

She nodded, agreeably. Sure thing, Mark. You get to wallow in your wealth, and I get to enjoy mine.

Noticing a clearly homeless old woman, covered in a jumble of clothes, and sitting on some steps, she stopped directly in front of her. The laundry beside the precinct. You must know it, she said. The woman nodded that she did.

From tomorrow morning, you can get bread and cheese for free.

The old woman looked at the crust in her hand. "And now?" she hopefully asked

If you walk really fast, and get to it in a couple of minutes, you’ll get.

The old woman immediately got up to leave. "Then, where are you going in the opposite direction?" she asked.

"Not going. Being taken. By him, to his counting house."

Where he can count out all his money? asked the old lady, beginning to walk in the direction of the laundry.

My girlfriend wasn’t the flighty type, instead the opposite, with deadly focus on the things she focused on, and though I now knew I had her irreversible agreement to haul her back to the apartment, and count out all the nickels and dimes that made her, I still took her hand in mine, to lead her in the right direction.

To the counting house.

2

You may have picked-up my name, Mark.

I am the youngest son of Michael and Cynthia Walters, of New Jersey. And yes, we are the Walters of Walters’ Drive, the family of the mansion at its corner. To say that we are wealthy would be an understatement, because the fact is that we are filthy rich.

I suppose, filthy would best describe our wealth, because my great, great, grandfather, the one who north-washed us, came up from the south, where our family was the main descendant-branch of a rather big slave-owning cotton dynasty. He sold out, packed up, and moved north, about a hundred years ago, with so much money, that he was able to buy practically a section of New Jersey.

It is not as though we live off the properties, although they could come in handy in lean times. Otherwise, we have a number of family businesses, in real estate, construction and trading. Those are all successful, but, of course, the properties do not lie idle, contributing by earning rent. There are apartments, shops, and other types of properties, including a recently constructed shopping mall, though we operate no business in it.

Everything is looked after by my father and Lee, my eldest brother. I have no involvement in the grand picture, which is entirely their territory, and concentrate on the job given to me, as titular head of the real estate side of things. I, of course, have a fair share of ownership in everything, in proportion, as would be conferred through family rights.

So, money is an issue. We have too much of it.

I have done college, but only to get a degree, to be a graduate, with no profession in mind. Grandpa, who lives in the mansion, with grandma, had often told me, when I was in the middle of my school years, to go easy on the studies. You are not going to look for a job, and it would be stupid to even set up a business of your own, he had observed. Your goal should be to learn how to look after the things we already have, and to manage what we have got going. But there’s no hurry about that either.

That was our attitude to life, and so I had gone through the education stages, without any pressure to gain anything more than the label of educated. Accordingly, I had been a mid-range student throughout, although I would occasionally surprise everybody, family, students and teachers alike, by briefly ranking extremely high in something or the other, before sliding, under the encouragement of my family probably, back into mid-table anonymity.

That’s the information on my education taken care of, and though I went through the system without getting too much of it, I did manage to do somewhat better on the parallel side of academia, in sports and social life.

I was fairly good in all the sports, and in the final year of school, even made it into the football team.

I continued being active in football in college, but with no need to excel, as earning was no driver, I found no reason to push myself in what was becoming an increasingly dangerous sport, when no longer played with childhood friends. I gave up competing, and played for the sheer enjoyment of the game, whatever it was, as I was into them all.

Thus, because I have generally been active on the physical front, I am a fit person. I have all the muscles in the right places, and am able to hold my own in a nonprofessional rough-and-tumble.

Separately, at a couple of inches over 6-feet, and with the right BMI, I am considered to be rather good-looking, and have always been a popular person, with a huge circle of friends. It is not possible to be like that, unless socially adept, and considered good fun to be with. The only caveat to this self-assessment is that, because of the money generally on me, I will always have to wonder if the slightly good times I offer is a factor in my popularity.

I had my first proper girlfriend when I was seventeen, the same as her, and we were together for an entire year. Of course, she was in the same school, and in class with me, and was also the loveliest girl in the class. She was tall, blonde and truly beautiful, with all the right curves, good boobs, great butt, long legs, and an absolutely provocative walk.

It was just so enviable being me, especially the life of no expectation and no pressure. And maybe also no purpose.

By expectation, I mean I was never being groomed to become something different to whatever I have turned out to be. It was grandpa again, with the words. Know your aims, your goals, he had advised. "You are not trying to become one of them, and you don’t need to acquire the things they need to acquire, whether education or whatever. Your goal is to become one of us, and you have a head start in that, through the good fortune of being born one of us."

In that, I reckon, some of our old attitudes shone through, via the DNA of ancestry itself, of being a slave-owning family. Those people merely passed themselves on to their descendants, transferring properties, people and attitudes, training their children to be like them.

I may be giving an impression that my grandfather is some sort of bad man. In reality, he is not at all as callous as he sounds.

We abandoned every link to our old slave-owning selves, a hundred years ago, and are absolutely ashamed of the family’s involvement in such a disgusting thing. Grandpa was the first of us to return to the south, going right back to the small settlement that has appeared, on land gifted by his father, roughly in the geographical center of our old holdings.

In this tiny hamlet of only black people, direct descendants of slaves held by our ancestors, he had got our family financially involved in supporting the school and the little medical place they had going. Our family now also offers a few annual scholarships for higher education, but I do not have the details of that.

Once a year, we visit and meet the committees that run the trusts. When a child, I had been taken along a number of times, but by then, because the Internet had already arrived, the visits were more to do with meeting the people, like connecting rather than working.

The trips had nothing much by way of content; a few handshakes, a few hugs, a look-in at the old peoples’ home, a newly-arrived baby being shown, and fresh-looking children being handed cash in envelopes with a mix of dollar bills, everything concluded in the morning, and brought to an end with an afternoon community feast in the school premises.

In the years to come, I will probably sometimes be the family representative at this annual get-together. I am okay with meeting those people, who are actually very nice folks, contributing to general society, while moving along in this world. At the time of my last visit, I was already a middle-teen, and so have clear memories, with nothing negative in them.

When the first girlfriend and I parted ways, a couple of months after going to different colleges, I managed to get a model-level girlfriend. She was slightly older than me, and was no longer studying, but after about two months of going around with her, I dumped her for a genuine fashion model.

Following that, as my lifestyle started changing into that of a rich young man about town, age ceased mattering as a qualification, and it became just beauty. The one more beautiful could always take me off the one less beautiful, and it became a feature of my life for the next two years.

In that time, having gone through half a dozen girlfriends, I passed out of college with a degree, and was living in my own apartment in NYC. So, I was quite the flash young man about town, notorious for a roving eye, which invariably settled on lovely beauties.

Normal girls, howsoever passable they might have been, never even tried to get to me, as it was known that I was seeking only beautiful girls. At parties, if without a girlfriend at the time, I would broadcast my requirements. Must have a figure like that, I would say, using my hands to make the outline in the air. But must also have a lovely face. Here, I would generally name a couple of the most beautiful Hollywood stars for reference.

Okay, though I have never had that level of girlfriend, I successfully frightened-off unworthy hopefuls, as whatever I did have were always good enough to make it to catwalks, if not to the covers of fashion magazines.

3

In a period between kicking out the last girlfriend, and getting in her replacement, familiar territory, ground previously covered, I had been set up to meet what would be my first ever cover-girl girlfriend.

I had already seen her pictures, by downloading the magazine in which he had featured. It was not Vogue, or something at that level, but more regional, and though she was really very nice looking, I have to say that I had already had girlfriends in the same beauty bracket.

The go-between had directed me to a coffee place, on the outskirts of New York City, to meet this potential new girlfriend. She had offered me the opportunity of a date straight out, asking if she should attempt to get her to agree on meeting me at a nightspot. I had refused outright, and for those looking for pointers on the process of selecting beauties, here is the rationale.

A straight date at a nightspot, could hand you an opportunity to attempt to take her to bed that very night, and while that might be a goal of someone desperate, I am not at all living in any form of sexual desperation. I seek arm candy as companion, and the rest happens naturally.

Why I do not agree to nightspot meet ups, is more to do with lighting than with any other factor. They talk about how women look better through the eyes of a man who has been drinking. I think they call it beer vision, but I also want to add that, in my opinion, lighting would undoubtedly have a role in beer vision.

I have made my mistakes, and now know that the only way to check a female out, is to get to view her in bright light, preferably in daylight. However, daylight does not equate to sunlight. Direct sunlight can distort the features, and give the wrong impression about shades of skin color, skin tone, and practically everything else.

Thus, direct sunlight, while not as bad as lighting in a nightspot, also has many drawbacks when it comes to assessing the physical attributes of a female. Shadows; it is all to do with shadows, and when you are as particular as I am about physical features, shadows can completely mislead.

The very best assessment setup is, paradoxically, one in which sun and shade are both included. That would be a shaded area in absolutely bright daylight, most commonly found in the outdoor areas of roadside cafés.

Nothing beats those tables outside. And then, if you position yourself correctly, and keep a sharp eye out, you will also be able to see the female walking to you, and that, prior to intimacy, is the very best way to assess the body in totality, like the proportions of the various parts to each other, prior to the close-range inspection for facial beauty.

This first inspection is important to get right, for though any girlfriend can later be easily dumped, it is good policy to choose carefully, and try to get relatively long runs with each girlfriend. Otherwise, you could quickly gain a bad reputation, by littering the landscape with discarded females.

I was driving the Lamborghini, and it was my luck that a car pulled out and gave me the opportunity to park right in front of the café. There are many layers in the strategy of picking up a beauty for a girlfriend. I am talking of the acquisition phase, the