I Pucking Love You

by Pippa Grant

  Never mind if he actually hurt her.

  I clear my throat. There’s no good way to ask what I suddenly have to ask, but it was dark in the fridge, and I could’ve missed something with all the teeth chattering. “Did I force myself on you?”

  “What?” She spins and looks at me, eyes wide. “No. No. I wanted—I was a willing participant. I just…don’t want to anymore. With you. I’m one-and-done. Boom. We’re over. Sorry. Should’ve warned you. You can go back to your business now.”

  One and done.

  Jesus Christ on a goat.

  I’m hardly a paragon of commitment, and I make no secret that I don’t do relationships, but this is extreme. Why the hell wouldn’t Muffy—oh, hell.

  Oh, hell no.

  “It wasn’t good for you?” I sputter.

  Her face goes the same shade of maroon that I put on every game day. “Of course it was. It was very good. The best I’d ever had.”

  Fucking fucknuggets.

  It wasn’t good for her.

  “We’re doing it again.” Jesus. Where did that come from? I can’t do it again. I can’t even get it up. “This time I’m eating your pussy. All of it. Like seven times.”

  “That’s a very kind offer, but no, thank you.”

  “That’s a very kind offer? Are you serious? I offer to go down on you, and you come back with that’s a very kind offer?” Holy shit. “You faked it.”

  She cringes like it’s her fault, and I want to hit something.

  “You did. You faked it.” I look down at my dick and silently ask him if he knew.

  Can’t see him through my pants, but I think he rolled his eyes and asked me how long it was going to take me to catch up.

  And now I’m wondering how many women have faked it.

  How many of them have I left unsatisfied, thinking I was master of the female body when really, I was a notch on a bedpost, and not one worth the time it would take to scratch that notch in?

  Shit.

  My dick knows we suck, and he’s given up on life. No more nookie for us. He’s done. Called it quits. Told me to go do other things that I do well, and leave the orgasm-making to dudes who know how to actually play a woman’s body.

  Wait.

  That can’t be right.

  I’m fucking awesome.

  “Have you ever…you know…with another guy?” Maybe it’s not me.

  Maybe it’s her?

  But if it’s all her, why do I feel like I’m going to throw up all my cheese?

  Her face contorts and the maroon stain spreads down her neck. “And this conversation is officially over. Goodbye, Tyler.”

  “Hold up. I think I deserve an answer here.”

  Sugarbear moos at me, which sends the chickens squawking all over again, and then the dogs—the actual dogs—come running over while Muffy tries to step around all of us. “Um, no, actually, as my therapist constantly reminds me, the only person I owe anything to is myself.”

  My sister Allie uses her therapist’s wisdom all the time too. If Muffy thinks she can my therapist her way out of this conversation, she’s wrong. “Then could you do me the honor of telling me if I need to work on my game, or if this is maybe not all my fault?”

  “That’s a conversation for you and your own therapist. And possibly your former conquests.”

  Dammit. Allie hasn’t used that one on me before. “Why do you need a date to this thing so badly that you’d ask to borrow Nick in disguise?”

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I need to get home and change before I’m late to my next appointment.”

  “Cod Pieces?”

  “Client. My job at Cod Pieces is complicated, and I’m not explaining it to you. I’m a matchmaker. I match muffs. And I need to get back to it.”

  “Great. You’re hired.” What the hell am I doing?

  “I choose my clients. I don’t pick you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t fit what my clientele is looking for.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Matches to their misfitness.” She finally turns to face me again, and she gestures up and down my body. “You’re a highly-paid, naturally-gifted, attractive professional athlete who can carry on conversations about solar panels, DNA, and Shakespeare. You play Pokémon and watch Dr. Who, which puts you on the geeky side of a sliding scale of personality types, but considering your profession, it adds depth to your character rather than pigeonholing you. Also, you could probably make three phone calls and get a chance to hang out on the set of Dr. Who if you wanted to, which means you operate on a completely different plane of existence than my clients who might still live with their parents, have a stutter, lack fashion sense, or miss social cues. You don’t think the ideal woman exists because you don’t want to settle down, and if you did think the ideal woman existed, she’d probably be a size two, love to run through the mountains with you on a spring morning, spend the afternoon drinking kombucha at a coffee shop while you debate if Wayne Gretzky or Stan Lee would be a better dream dinner companion, and then go to a baseball game in the evening as much to be seen and support fellow professional athletes as because you want to actually watch the game. Also, she’d give the best blow jobs, she wouldn’t mind trying butt stuff, and she’d appreciate when you make her breakfast in bed but probably never tell you that your scrambled eggs are too runny for her taste, because she’s so grateful you’d lift a finger to try. Sound about right?”

  Not all of it, but too much of it. I do like my eggs runny. “I’m not a superficial asshole who only cares about size. And my sister Staci used to stutter, and my sister Keely has the worst-smelling feet of anyone you’ve ever met, but I still love them both. I’m not surrounded by perfection. I’m real as fuck.”

  I don’t add that I fucked her too—her being Muffy, not one of my sisters—and she’s not anything like the perfect puck bunnies she described—who don’t exist, by the way—because she’d probably throw back that since I don’t want forever, I’m not all that picky.

  And she’d be correct.

  She nods. “You’re right. You have everything together.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you have no reason to need to be my fake date to a fu—few things, and no reason to sign up for Muff Matchers’ services.”

  “And that’s exactly why I’d be your perfect date. We screwed. You ghosted me. We have zero future romantically. No one will mistake me for one of your clients. And we can still be friends. I’m hot as balls and every other woman there will be jealous you have me on your arm.” What am I saying?

  What the hell am I saying?

  And why is Muffy looking at me like she’s a squirrel and there’s a garbage truck barreling down the road at her and she doesn’t know if she should go left or right, but she knows she’ll get squished if she doesn’t decide?

  She makes a vague gesture with her arm that might be I’m trying to distract you or it might be some kind of weird help signal and she’s hoping Kami’s watching from the window to come save her.

  Seriously, it reminds me of my sister Brit’s Who shall rescue me from this wanker? gesture that she created after my sister Staci set her up with a friend’s brother and no one realized he’d made it his life’s mission to be the world’s grossest photographer.

  You don’t want to know. Trust me.

  Muffy blinks twice, sucks in a loud breath, and then nods. “Okay. Great. I’ll text you the details.”

  “Do you still have my number?”

  She mumbles something that might be a yes or a no. I can’t decide.

  “No problem. I still have yours.” I whip my phone out and text her, and her phone audibly dings in her pocket.

  So she didn’t change her number.

  That’s good.

  “Anything else I need to know before we do this?” Other than that I’ll have a few hours alone in a car with her to convince her to tell me exactly what it was I did wrong so that I can figure o
ut how to fix my broken dick?

  “Don’t you have practice on Monday?”

  “I’ll get out of it. We can leave right after morning skate on Sunday.”

  Her squinty doubtful face tells me she knows it’ll be an uphill battle for me to convince Coach to let me out of practice.

  And that almost has me smiling.

  I do like a good challenge.

  “Great.” She doesn’t sound like it’s great. “I have to go. Thank you. It’s very kind of you to come with me to Veda’s thing. Dixie! Tyler has treats! Get Tyler!”

  Kami’s cocker spaniel takes a running leap to dive at my crotch while Muffy weaves around the other two dogs and heads back to the house. I oof and try to calm the dog down, watching Muffy’s hips swing the whole time.

  She’s infuriating and fascinating and perplexing.

  And I want to be done with her, but the truth is, I don’t think I can.

  Not when I think I need her to help me solve my little problem.

  7

  Muffy

  It takes me longer to get ready for my meeting and then my shift than it should, because I’m hyperventilating about taking Tyler with me to Veda’s dad’s funeral.

  On the one hand, we’ve hung out off and on for a year, he’s seen me naked—kind of, I mean, since it was sort of dark in the fridge—and we’ve screwed, which means faking intimacy shouldn’t be difficult.

  On the other, despite my assertion to him that I didn’t want to hear from him, he ghosted me.

  The sex was ho-hum. Whatever. It happens, right? Doesn’t mean it would’ve always been ho-hum.

  But he didn’t call.

  He didn’t text.

  He didn’t use the contact me form on my website, which I know he knows about, to drop me an email.

  He didn’t ask about me. If he had, Nick would’ve told Kami, who would’ve told me. I mentioned the kind part, right? Kami doesn’t press, but she does have eyeballs, and if she thought I wanted to hang out with Tyler and he wanted to hang out with me, she would’ve mentioned if he talked about me.

  She didn’t.

  Which means he didn’t.

  I might’ve claimed I ghosted him, but that was my wounded pride talking.

  Better to be the one who walked away, right?

  And now, I’ll probably have to tell him why I left med school, because other people who know—or at least strongly suspect some vague version of the truth—will almost certainly be there, and while I seriously doubt any of them spend any time thinking about me on a regular day, I don’t know if any of us will be able to look at each other without me thinking about why they’re practicing doctors now and I’m not.

  And if I’m going to hyperventilate before we make it through the doors to the funeral parlor for the viewing, much less to the graveside services the next day, Tyler deserves to know why.

  But, since I’m running late, this is a problem for tomorrow.

  Or Sunday.

  Sort of like booking two hotel rooms is also a problem for tomorrow.

  So I finish getting dressed, call to Mom that I’m heading out to dinner and a party with friends, and I take off to attempt to succeed at my dream job.

  I mean, the dream job I found after I gave up the dream of being a surgeon. And let’s be honest here, does anyone who knows me think I could’ve actually been a surgeon?

  Surgeons have their lives together.

  I don’t.

  Plus, Dr. Muffy Periwinkle?

  Please.

  No one would’ve come to me for anything anyway, except possibly to inspect their stuffed animals’ upset tummies after a tea party.

  My therapist says the name is what you make it, not what makes you, but I wouldn’t have hired me. And now I’m filling a niche need in the world for special people who don’t know what they’re worth, even if it’s a struggle, and even if I’ve had to get creative in finding potential dates for my all-female clientele. I have a purpose. It’s not in physically fixing people’s hearts, but in emotionally fixing people’s hearts.

  I call Veda on my drive to check in and see how she’s doing and reiterate my promise to be there on Sunday, which I have to do over voicemail since she doesn’t pick up.

  Not surprising.

  She’s planning a sudden funeral for her father, whom everyone thought would live to be at least two hundred years old, after he came down with salmonella poisoning. And I’m pretty sure she has complicated feelings about all of it.

  She and her dad weren’t all that tight since he refused to accept that she’s bisexual and always thought she should be working harder and succeeding faster than anyone else, but publicly, she was his pride and joy for following in his footsteps. We bonded over mutual father issues.

  And that’s all I have to say about that.

  My client arrives at our meeting mere seconds before me, which I know because I pull into the parking lot at Cod Pieces in time to see her walking through the door.

  Fingers crossed that my instincts are spot-on with wanting to introduce her to D’Angelo. Since I started here two weeks ago, I’ve had a lot of time to talk to him, and if ever there was a good candidate for Muff Matchers’ first male client, it’s D’Angelo. People are forever asking him if he plays basketball since he’s a tall Black guy, but he has as much interest in team sports as an armadillo has in fashion. His parents enrolled him in tae kwon do classes when he was ten to try to help smooth out his klutziness, and he’s here at Copper Valley University with an undeclared major and a serious love of all things Star Wars. Also, he’s a few years older than his fellow freshmen, since he worked at the family business while his grandpa was sick instead of enrolling straight into college after high school.

  This match is my best chance at making a match without having to stretch into questionable territory for digging up male prospects.

  I toss a Thrusters hoodie over my Cod Pieces polo and grab my messenger bag, which has a Muff Matchers new client box inside it, and I scurry into the dining room.

  Lauren, the day manager, waves at me and taps her watch with her eyebrows raised in question. I point to a table and mouth I’ll wait and I have a meeting at the same time, which is most likely impossible to interpret, since I think I actually mouthed I’ll meet a waiting, which makes zero sense.

  But since she’s a client and the reason I’m here, she speaks Muffy well enough.

  She’s an engineering student in her third year at CVU, and she only works here as a manager because she’s worked here so long that she makes more than she would filing papers for the admissions office. The night manager quit unexpectedly while Lauren and I were having a meeting about potential prospects, and since I worked at a Cod Pieces in high school, it was easy to offer to help her out for a few nights.

  And honestly? Making a little extra cash isn’t a bad thing. This job might be the only reason I make my student loan payments this month, hence why I’m not asking her if she’s found a replacement for me yet.

  And fish and chips four nights a week?

  I’m possibly here for this.

  Okay, I’m definitely here for this.

  Just like Tyler was last night.

  Also, now I’m thinking about him again.

  I’ll be your date, Muffy.

  Why?

  Why the hell would he do that?

  Better question—who else can I find to take to the funeral so I can let him off the hook?

  And why do I keep picturing Tyler stepping between me and my former classmates and professors, or whispering something in my ear that makes me laugh, or offering to bench press the casket when someone else’s date tries to prove he’s stronger than my hockey-playing, Aristotle-spouting, Pokémon-loving, one-night date?

  Tyler would totally do that.

  I’ve seen him.

  Granted, he was being spurred on by his teammates and had had enough alcohol to flatten a non-hockey-playing person, plus, it was a fake casket at a Halloween party, but he did it.


  Also?

  He’s a professional hockey player with a super famous, billionaire party girl sister-in-law. Tyler’s in the gossip pages a lot. Everyone will know who he is. There’ll be zero doubt that I have an actual hottie by my side, and we do know each other well enough to sell the idea that we’re dating.

  My client interrupts my internal musings by setting a powder-blue Cod Pieces tray on the table between us, and I pretend I don’t want to lean over and inhale the amazing scent.

  You’d think a year of working here in high school would’ve ruined fried fish.

  Nope.

  Still love it.

  I paste on a bright smile. “Hi, Brianna. Thanks for meeting me here.”

  She’s twenty-five, also a freshman on campus with an undeclared major after recently leaving the Army, and worried she’s too stubborn and not feminine enough to find a man.

  We could literally be besties, but it probably wouldn’t be healthy for either of us to continue to stew in our lack of direction in life.

  Not that I’m lacking a direction.

  I’m simply lacking actual skill at any direction I’ve tried, until a recent string of small victories with Muff Matchers that were entirely more difficult than they should’ve been.

  Brianna sits, bends, and sniffs deeply over her fish, which is wrapped in foil stamped with Sir Pollock, the Knight Fryer, the franchise’s well-known cod mascot. “Oh, baby, come to mama. I missed you while I had to fit into a uniform.”

  Confession: I slept with Tyler Jaeger because he looked at me the way Brianna is looking at her fish.

  And not just once.

  The looking part, I mean. Not the sleeping part.

  Every time I saw him from the time Kami hooked up with Nick a year ago until Tyler and I got together at that secret club, he would look at me like he wanted to lick me from head to toe. And then he’d talk to me.

  Hey, Muffy, had any cognitive stimulation lately?

  You play Pokémon Go? Trade you Pokéballs.

  Muffy, need your opinion. Does this shirt make my arm muscles look too big?