For the Love of Mollie

Mollie covered her head with her pillow to muffle the screeching sounds coming from her alarm clock. It was six-thirty in the morning, and there was no point in slapping the snooze button.

"Okay, I'm getting up," she moaned at the inanimate object, pulling the pillow away from her face and leaning over to shut off the alarm. Through sleepy, bloodshot eyes, she sat up, turned on her bedside lamp, and cracked her neck, loosening the kinks there as her unruly curls fell in front of her face. She pushed it away and yawned. Like every morning before she took a shower, her hair felt like a bird's nest. It was her lot in life to deal with uncontrollable hair, hips too wide, and a stomach too round.

But no longer. She'd made a promise on her thirty-first birthday last week to work out at the gym a minimum of four days a week, get down to a lower double-digit size or possibly, if by a miracle, a single number. So what if she came out of her mother's womb a size ten? She was going to work her butt off to reach a weight she could be proud to announce to anyone. Then maybe Juan Carlos Mosino, the sexy masseuse -- Mister Sex on a Stick, as her friend Suzy called him -- would finally see her as more than a friend, and the sexpot she'd always longed to be.