Charming as Puck(27)

“Speed dating? So the pain is over sooner?”

“I’ll go with you.”

I tilt my head at her.

Her deep blue eyes don’t blink back.

“I thought you were too busy to date,” I say slowly.

She shrugs. “Sometimes you have to scratch an itch. And sometimes you realize you don’t want to wake up in your forties after putting so much into building a career that you forget to build a life.”

She is the oldest of our group, so I shouldn’t be surprised. “You think we can find our someones at a game bar?”

“No, but it’s a good start.”

“Kami. Give me one more chance.” Muffy gives me the puppy dog eyes, the ones that say you know I’m trying, and I can’t move out from living with my mother until my business gets more successful, and you have to throw back a lot of worms before you catch the shark, which is an odd thing for her to say, except it’s Muffy, so it kind of makes sense.

“The odds are against us,” I tell Muffy. “Even at speed dating, we’d probably come away more disappointed than excited.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Alina informs me. “I’m no math genius, but you’ve barely started looking. Plus, you’re smart, you’re pretty, and you’re sweet. You’re like the holy grail that all men are looking for.”

Some of the adrenaline from the wine bar rolls back onto the shore, with a few extra surf crashes added from the residual fury I’m feeling toward Nick. “I don’t want to be wanted for being smart, pretty, and sweet. That’s so…so…generic. And it sets expectations really high that I’ll stay smart, pretty, and sweet. I don’t feel sweet. I don’t want to be sweet. Sweet is passive and gets stepped all over because sweet never fights back. And one day I’ll have crow’s feet and liver spots. Which means all that will be left is smart, which we all know is code for boring, because who wants to sit around and listen to Aunt Kami talk about how she made smart decisions all through her twenties and thirties and that’s why she’s alone with just her sixteen dogs and her four cats, two parakeets, and a token sloth?”

“Oh, can I have a sloth too?” Alina asks. “They’re stupidly cute. Did you see the stuffed ones at—never mind.”

“There’s also the not-normal factor working against us,” Maren points out.

“Did you just say we’re not normal?” Muffy asks.

Sugarbear moos—I mean, barks like she, too, is offended.

“No, I’m saying we have a skewed version of normal,” Maren replies, quite politely, because I think we’d all agree that Muffy isn’t normal, though I’ve always loved her for marching to the beat of her own kazoo. “We’re so far from normal, we wouldn’t know normal if it knocked on the door and informed us it was normal.”

I open my mouth to argue, except I started my week by finding a home for a calf that was put in a professional hockey player’s condo, and I just punched one of my best friend’s ex-boyfriends for calling me a bitch and insulting my cousin on a blind date.

“That’s crazy,” Muffy says. “You four are all totally normal.” She shoots a glance at Felicity, the ventriloquist married to a giant of a silent hockey player, and adds, “Okay, most of you are normal.”

“How many women do you know who have half of a professional hockey team in their contact list?” Alina asks, clearly agreeing with Maren’s assessment.

Muffy opens her mouth, peers at the four of us, then closes it with a frown.

“Exactly,” Alina says with a sigh. “That’s not normal. And Maren’s two degrees of separation from Beck Ryder.”

“Former boy banders who are now underwear models don’t really count, do they?” Maren wrinkles her nose.

“Boy bands totally count,” Muffy says eagerly.

Maren rolls her eyes. “Everyone on the entire planet is at most six degrees of separation from some kind of celebrity. But I’ll give you that we talk to more men with six-packs and swollen bank accounts in any given week than most women do in a lifetime.”

“I see tons of normal men at work,” I say.

“Would you date any of them?”

“It’s really not right to date patients.”

“Your patients are animals,” Alina points out. “I don’t think it’s unethical for you to date doggy daddies. You’re making excuses.”

I sink lower in my seat, disrupting all three of my dogs, because she’s right.

Brown-haired, green-eyed hockey goaltenders are my biggest weakness, and they’re in short supply. Which means if I’m serious about finding a future, I need to get out there and look more.

Dixie climbs out of the pile to lick my face while Tiger dashes for another round of playing with the sleepy cow-puppy.

“Do you think hypnosis would help me get over him?” I ask.

“I think speed dating will help you take the first few steps,” Maren replies. “Plus, we get to do it over Skee-Ball. Even if the dudes are duds, we get to have some fun.”

“All right. Speed dating it is.”

Felicity gives me a funny look but stays silent.

Actually, she’s been really silent for most of the time since she walked in the door.