Fuck him anyway, Samantha thinks. She’s on her bike, angry. How come the guys who are the biggest assholes are always the ones who think so fucking highly of themselves? If I could just meet one guy—one guy—who was a real asshole and just knew it, I’d get such a fucking satisfaction out of it.
She exhales through her mouth forcefully, exasperatedly. She’s aware that her array of potential satisfactions, romance-wise, has nearly been depleted. She’s no longer asking to meet the perfect guy, she’s no longer asking even to meet a guy who’s not a piece of shit—right now she’d settle for just meeting someone willing to admit that they’re shit. That’s a bad sign.
So what? she thinks. She pushes herself through the memorized sequence of landscapes that line the way back to Laura’s, angrily—pedaling! pedaling! So things on the romantic end aren’t going so well. Big fucking deal. There’s always a new boy waiting just inside the next coffeehouse, another goateed sketchpad-bearer just waiting for a petite guitar-playing beauty to wander along and admire the stupid charcoals he did of his ex. She’ll admire, he’ll suggest that maybe he could draw her sometime, she’ll demurely accept, they’ll set up a time in a couple of days, she’ll go to his apartment (she can practically see the shelf full of beat-up Kerouac books and the candles jammed into the necks of old Merlot bottles now), he’ll suggest that he could get a better “sense of her form” if she took off her shirt, one thing will lead predictably to another, and romance will blossom anew. Inevitable as fucking rain. Never mind that Dmitrovitch was like the first lover she’s had in this accursed town who was doing something a little more interesting than trying to construct a reputation for themselves as the University area’s Alpha Hepcat. Never mind that at all. That’s not the point. The point is that as long as she lives in a two-bit city like this one there are always going to be guys, and so dissatisfaction on the romantic front is always liable to be transitory: if she’s going to be alone it’s going to be for like two weeks, and she thinks she’d be better served, frankly, by taking this opportunity to focus on some of the other major points of dissatisfaction in her life at the moment.