by Pippa Grant
I bolt sideways out of my seat so I don’t knock William over, upending my bowl of oatmeal all over the vinyl floor, which Rufus, my so-dumb-you-can’t-help-but-love-him mutt cat, promptly dives into like he’s Scrooge McDuck and it’s a pile of money.
Or like it’s a pile of poo and he’s that kind of a dog.
“Rufus!”
He peers at me like I’m the dumb one, yowls, and then flips over to start bathing himself with his ass still planted firmly in the pile of oatmeal.
Mom and William share a look. They both shake their heads, grab their coffee cups in sync, and force bright smiles at me while William settles back into his own chair.
“It’s an auspicious start to the day when you spill your oatmeal,” Mom declares.
“I spilled my oatmeal the very morning a sniper missed me by two inches when I was fighting the war,” William adds.
Mom grips his gnarled knuckles. “You brave man! And to think if you hadn’t spilled your oatmeal…”
His weathered face takes on more wrinkles as he squints thoughtfully. “Or maybe that was the morning I got married. Getting harder to remember what’s what up in the ol’ ticker.” He taps his head, like that’s his ticker, and I wonder how much I could make if I sit at a light-rail stop downtown and play a kazoo for cash.
Surely enough to take a few dimes off my student loans. Or maybe enough to be able to afford a closet to rent somewhere else.
Do people rent out their closets?
I’d ask some friends, but I’ve already gotten in trouble asking friends for help.
See also: My silent business partner has asked me to attend her father’s funeral.
Back in Richmond. Where I spent almost four years studying at Blackwell College of Medicine.
Yep. I’m gonna puke.
I do stuff like spilling my oatmeal and getting my boobs Heimliched by old men on a regular basis. I’ve been trying to run a matchmaking service called Muff Matchers for a few years now. I hang out with criminals and my mother. I work basically sixteen hours a day, have screened half the men in our lovely city of Copper Valley, which sits to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia, and rejected all but about seven of them as potential suitors for my clientele for reasons that range from being rude to the staff to telling me that a woman who’s larger than a size four doesn’t take care of herself.
Yes, while talking to me.
Related: I am definitely above a size four.
My point? I have a very high tolerance for the unpleasant.
But going back to Blackwell?
Where The Incident happened?
No.
Even my therapist would tell me this is a terrible idea.
But if there’s one person I can’t say no to, it’s Veda. She’s believed in me for years. Our first year of med school, she was the only one with the patience to sit with me and quiz me for hours over the biochemistry class that I struggled with hardcore. When I left school, she was the only person to reach out and check on me, and she’s probably one of the best friends I’ve ever had who isn’t related to me.
We text at least weekly, and every few months we meet for lunch or dinner halfway between here and Richmond. Occasionally she comes all the way over here, and we do drinks and complain about our jobs and our families and our dating lives, and tell each other that we’re fabulous, even though we know we’re not.
She pushed me to start Muff Matchers when I started telling her about my idea, offered investment money to help me get it off the ground, and she’s never asked a single thing of me in return.
Until now.
And all she’s asking is for something a friend would do, so naturally, I can’t refuse.
You don’t leave your friends hanging in times of need, and if I’m who she needs for support during her dad’s funeral, in Richmond, with all of his colleagues and current and former students from Blackwell, where he was the dean, then I’ll be there.
What’s the step after puking?
I might have to do that.
“Muffy, I know you like partying, but if it’s going to leave you green in the gills every morning, maybe you should cut back to two or three nights a week instead of five or six,” Mom says.
“Especially since she won’t let you go along,” William says to her.
“Right?”
They both roll their eyes.
If Mom knows I’m not partying, but instead working as a night manager at a fast-food fish restaurant, she’s doing a good job of keeping up appearances.
And if Tyler Jaeger rats me out to my cousin, he’s dead.
My job at Cod Pieces isn’t exactly what it looks like.
Unfortunately, Tyler Jaeger is exactly what he looks like.
A spoiled hockey player who’ll flirt only long enough to get what he wants, then get out as quick as he got in.
And I mean that in every way possible.
“Don’t step in the oatmeal,” I tell Mom and William. I grab my phone, tuck it into my bra, and remember I haven’t yet put on a bra when my phone clatters through my shirt and lands on my cat in the oatmeal.
Rufus streaks off like a demon, bouncing off the walls and leaving clumps of oatmeal everywhere.
So maybe I’ll be playing kazoo at the light-rail stops to pay for the cleaning I owe Mom in her house now.
And a new phone case.
This one will be caked with oatmeal in all of its cracks until my phone’s dying day, and that assumes its dying day isn’t today, which is a distinct possibility considering there’s probably oatmeal creeping up the plug-in jack.
At least I can’t answer Veda’s text. Positive side, right?
Not immediately, anyway.
And that’s good.
It means I have time to come up with a plan.
Not much time—the funeral’s on Monday, with a viewing Sunday night—but some.
Maybe I can fake appendicitis. Or an accident that leaves me in a full-body cast. Or my own death. With my contact list, surely I can find someone who knows how to get me new identification and can hook me up with a ride to a tropical island where I can sleep on the beach and pay for food by bussing tables at a greasy spoon.
Or maybe I need to finally face my past and do for Veda what she’s always done for me, which is to be there when needed.
But first, I need a shower and to head out to work.
My clients won’t match themselves, and if I don’t meet a few new men, I won’t either.
4
Tyler
Practice is a bitch.
Klein doesn’t look like he’s hurting at all for all the shit he drank last night, but my fried fish and chips are sitting in my gut like I’m as old as my brother, who’s retired from the Marines and about old enough for a mid-life crisis, instead of a well-oiled machine of hockey greatness with the false sense of immortality that those of us not yet thirty are blessed with on a normal day.
Rooster’s skating laps around all of us.
Duncan Lavoie, our team captain and one of the oldest guys on the team, is at the top of his game, despite giving me I know you stayed out past curfew glares every time we pass each other on the ice.
He was fun my rookie year. But then the old captain retired, Lavoie took over as the team leader, and now he’s Mr. Wet Blanket.
He needs some quality time at the bunny bar.
The married dudes on the team are all doing their married dude thing, hanging out together and talking shit about whose kids and wives are the best.
Meanwhile, I woke up in the middle of a dream that Muffy was giving me a hand job, even though her hands were fried fish pieces, and I had the closest thing to morning wood that I’ve had since—
Fuck.
Since Muffy and I hooked up.
This is why you don’t hook up with chicks you’re actually friends with, idiot, my junk reminds me.
I tell it to shut up. Muffy and I aren’t friends.
We merely know how to be friendly when we�
�re around each other.
After practice, I’m throwing things into my locker, debating going to lunch with Klein and Rooster, when Lavoie sits down next to me.
He’s in a towel and nothing else, which is pretty normal for the dressing room, but he shouldn’t be giving me that look if he’s not in full pads.
It’s the look of I know something’s bothering you, and if you don’t work it out, your game’s gonna go the way of your dick.
My shoulders bunch. I’ll take the shithead out if he says anything wrong right now.
“Wanna talk?”
My molars crack and my dick snorts with bitter laughter. No, we don’t want to talk.
He leans forward, casually draping an arm over his thigh. “Your game’s about as fine as it usually is, and I saw your whole family on the news yesterday and they looked happy, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess this asshole attitude is about a woman.”
First, still don’t want to talk.
Second—what was my family on the news for? “Maybe I miss my sisters.”
“You wanted to be on a yacht with all four of them, plus your sister-in-law, serenading all the passing boats with your favorite disco songs?”
Hell. West marrying a billionaire party girl heiress with a heart of gold in Miami is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to my family.
Lavoie’s grinning. “I can’t keep your sisters straight, but one of them flashed the Coast Guard.”
“Did not need that mental image.”
Rooster pauses next to us. “She single?”
“They’re all married, asshat, and even if they weren’t, you’d only be going near them over my dead body.”
“Uh-oh. Cranky Jaeggy’s back.” Klein sits on my other side. “Ares know you got the thorny side of a rose up your ass?”
“Go easy on him, partner.” Rooster, also in nothing but a towel, props a leg up on the bench, letting his junk hang out. “Had a rough go of it getting overwhelmed with two willing ladies last night.”
“Did not.” Jesus. I’m a six-year-old again.
“Is this about Muffy?” Klein asks.
“What the hell?”
He shrugs. “You had a boner for her for most of last season, then the two of you got all cozy that time she showed up at the bunny bar, and now none of us have seen her since.”
“Is Muffy the one with the hot mom?” Rooster asks.
Lavoie shoves him. “That’s disgusting. Put your junk away.”
“Dude. Get your eyes checked.” Klein’s making a face like he wants to puke.
I can’t make my own face stop twisting in horror. “I really hope you’re thinking about a bunny.”
“Muffy’s not a bunny?” Rooster switches legs on the bench, but we can still see his dick dangling under his towel. “Huh. That’s a good bunny name.”
“No, man. She’s the matchmaker. Muff Matchers?” Klein’s still making faces, but he’s not gagging anymore.
Rooster snaps a finger. “Yeah! That one. With the hot mom. She set me up with this chick who could quote Aristocrates or something right after I got here.”
“If you don’t quit calling her mom hot, we’re telling Murphy,” Klein mutters.
“Not saying I’d tap that. Just saying she’s got confidence. That’s hot.”
I grab my coat and shove my arms in it. “You have issues.”
“I ain’t the grumpy-grumplebottom here. I’m a simple hockey god who knows the best things in life come to those who believe. We live in magical times, my friend. Internet sex and make-your-own-funnel-cake kits exist.”
Rooster slaps me on the back and heads across the dressing room to his own locker.
Lavoie looks at Klein, then at me.
I make the don’t ask me gesture, turn, and run into Ares Berger.
If we’re all hockey gods, Ares is the king of all of us. They call him The Force on the ice, and I’m pretty sure they’d call him the same even if he were a smaller man.
As it is, he’s six feet, nine inches, and over three hundred pounds of hockey-loving muscle and heart. I got called up from the minors when he was injured two years ago, and nothing will make a man get better faster than knowing he’s trying to fill Ares Berger’s skates.
The fact that I’m still here, playing at the top echelon of pro hockey, instead of being sent back down to the minors when he got better, is a miracle I’m grateful for every day.
Okay, most every day.
Today, I’m pissy. Not even gonna deny it.
“What?” I grouse.
He doesn’t talk. It’s an Ares thing. And he’s gotten quieter since his identical twin brother retired this past summer—again—after playing his final season with us.
But Ares doesn’t have to talk.
He taps his temple. Then taps his heart. Then glares at me.
Yeah.
I get it.
Get out of my head. Let my heart guide me. Yada yada baloney bullshit that worked pretty damn well for two years, since the first time he told me the same when I was floundering right after getting here to Copper Valley and the Thrusters.
“Tomorrow,” I growl at him like he’s not the guy I respect the most on the team, and like I don’t care what he thinks of me.
Ares Berger is my hero and my mentor. I should not be an asshole to him.
He lifts a brow.
Probably means I’m about to find myself dangling by my ankles while he holds me up and tells me to my face to quit being an ass.
“Dick broke?” he asks.
“Motherfucker.” The bunnies talked. The fucking bunnies talked.
He taps his head again.
And right when I think I’ve escaped any more Ares wisdom for the day, he lifts me by the waistband of my training pants, squishing my useless dick in the process.
“Intervention?” Murphy calls while I thrash about, trying to get out of Ares’s grip without causing permanent damage to my nuts.
Half the dressing room snaps to attention.
“Intervention!” Klein whoops.
And it’s suddenly crystal-clear that an atomic wedgie will not be the worst part of my day.
5
Muffy
By lunchtime, I’ve been stood up, laughed at, and had my ear talked off by a guy who’s probably as good at day trading as I am at muff-matching, despite all the arrogance in his story about how he made a thousand dollars last week.
I’m also out sixty-three dollars and riding a caffeine high after seven back-to-back screening sessions where I might have stretched some truths of my own—like sharing my real name—for the purpose of doing my job. And all to decide maybe one of the seven men I met so far today would be worthy of a trial date with one of my clients.
But on the plus side, it’s time for my weekly Muff Matchers support group.
I’m gathered with five other women, three of whom are current clients, at a café next to one of those make-your-own-stuffed-animal places hosting a birthday party for a bunch of very loud preschoolers. The sounds are drifting through the shared wall, making Julie, the manager there who’s joined us for lunch, twitch like she’s still in the store.
Julie’s boyfriend dumped her at her family’s Independence Day cookout. She called me the next day, and after nine failed dates including one that ended with an ambulance on site, I re-evaluated my entire process, closed down the open applications on my website for men to apply, did something I swore I’d never do, and two weeks later, Julie and Gustav started dating, and they’ve been together for two months now.
Sometimes matchmaking is about letting the universe do its work.
Sometimes it’s about seeing something in a client that no one—not even the client—has seen before.
And sometimes it’s about finding creative ways to identify the right guy for a client, because the end justifies the means.
Julie still comes to my client support group meetings, because she was short on girlfriends outside of work. I like having h
er since she’s a success story, and I don’t have many, so I need to use what I’ve got, though things are improving.
“How’s everyone doing today?” I ask after we’ve been served. I send motivational emails to my clients daily, so I know a lot of the answers already, since they tend to email me back.
Still, talking and emailing are different.
“Sick of men,” Maren mutters. She’s an environmental engineer that I’ve been trying to match off and on for a year. She’s also my biggest source of guilt in my business since she’s also one of my cousin Kami’s closest friends, as is Alina, the woman next to Maren, who’s a cellist. Alina isn’t a client like Maren is, but she comes to the support group meetings anyway.
I have hopes of bringing her over to the Muff Matchers side.
And, you know, of not letting her down when it happens.
“Oh, no,” Julie says. “What happened?”
“I was putting gas in my car this morning, and this guy at the next pump started telling me how I should do it.”
“No!”
“Yep.”
Eugenie, who’s a massage therapist at the spa four stores over in the strip mall, snorts over her Reuben sandwich. She’s also not a client, but she joined our lunch dates after overhearing us a few weeks ago. “Did he try to explain to you how a hybrid engine works too?”
“Yes.”
Maren punctuates the word with a snort, and all of us groan.
Phoebe, who’s a contracts manager for the city, lifts her glass of tea. “To clueless mansplainers. May we never date them, never raise them, and find creative ways to reject them.”
I flinch a little. I’ve set most of my clients up with mansplainers—and worse—before, including one who was so bad that he mansplained mansplaining before a server intentionally dropped a plate of mashed potatoes in his lap. But my screening methods are improving, so I toast with them.
“How’s your job going?” I ask Phoebe. “Any word on the promotion?”
“Not yet, but I should hear soon.”
“You’ve got this,” Julie tells her.
“They’d be stupid to pass you over,” Maren agrees.
We spend the next hour talking jobs and friends and family and dates, offering encouragement and support to each other, with me taking various notes in my master Muff Matchers notebook, and steering the conversation when necessary, but it’s not really necessary.