Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 90736 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90736 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
“Hello,” Portia drawls. “You’re freaking adorable. Look at you with those freckles and that auburn hair.”
“Freckles and auburn hair—every man’s wet dream.” My voice is droll, and I take the next several seconds to ignore them so I can smother on the first of my face serums. “Not.”
“Girl, freckles are hawt.” Danny snaps his fingers, the same way he does every time he’s trying to punctuate a point, startling RuPaw. “Have you never heard of a freckle pen? Please.”
“You should be working at a fashion magazine, not a dating app,” Portia tells him to butter him up. “You’re so good with makeup and shit.”
He preens under her compliments, smoothing back the imaginary long, silky hair that isn’t there. “Obviously.”
“And you.” Portia turns her attention back to me. “How dare you talk about yourself that way—you’re gorgeous. Don’t let New York change you, even if you are only there and back. If you were out by yourself sitting at the bar right now instead of back at the hotel talking to us like a loser, you’d be getting hit on left and right.”
I doubt that but take her word for it. “Thanks.”
“Seriously, if that man has a set of functioning eyes, he’ll be contacting you.”
“Too bad we don’t have the app up and running yet, we could see if he was on it,” Ava teases. “Then you could swipe on his sexy ass.”
“I don’t know if I’d have the guts to swipe on him even if I did see him on an app.”
I don’t have the heart to tell them that even though I had the idea for Kissmet, a different kind of dating app—one where you answer questions at setup and select more filters—I haven’t used one in years. There were some things about them I did not enjoy: the bots, the fake accounts, the catfishing, the men who claimed they were single but were actually in relationships.
Of course, I’m not saying it was all negative. But I did burn out trying, and failed to connect with anyone, and all my first dates were just that: one-hit wonders. Not that the men were always the problem.
It’s me.
I was the problem—it was me.
One guy was too nice. One brought me a cookie his aunt baked. One was too short; one was way too tall. High-pitched voice. Mama’s boy. One had three cats; another traveled too much for work.
Not necessarily bad things, just not . . . right for me.
No chemistry.
“I want to meet someone the old-fashioned way,” I tell the group.
There’s a collective laugh from my laptop screen.
“What does that even mean, the old-fashioned way?” Ava says. “I mean, seriously. We aren’t our grandparents. We aren’t going to meet our partners playing darts at a bar, or meet them at a square dance, or accidentally trying to get into the same cab with them at the same time like you see in the movies.”
“Wait. What?” Portia looks surprised. “Are you saying that’s how your grandparents met? They met at a barn dance? Or are you making that up, because a barn dance sounds pretty fucking cool.”
Ava rolls her eyes. “I’m making that up to prove a point.”
Portia’s shoulders sag with disappointment before she turns her attention back to me through the screen. “Your point is, there’s no such thing as the old-fashioned way anymore. The way we live and work is nothing like the way it used to be. We don’t even live how our parents lived anymore—my mom didn’t have a cell phone until she was a sophomore in college, or so she’s constantly telling me. So if you meet a guy on the street who seems like a decent dude, and he’s good looking too? Go for it.” She stretches her arms above her head, already in her pajamas for the night. “Your odds of meeting someone in New York while you’re bopping around alone are higher than if we’d have gone on that trip with you.”
“How do you figure?” Ava takes the question right out of my mouth. “Because. We would go out in a group, and men these days . . . not just men in New York . . . are far too . . .”
“Chickenshit.”
“Cocky.”
Danny and Portia speak at the same time, and we share a laugh, launching into another debate about men and sex and dating, and as they speak, my mind wanders back to the guy from the park, in his tight Mickey Mouse shirt, his ball cap pulled down over his eyes but not so low that I didn’t catch the perspiration on his brows earlier at the elevator banks.
We’re in the same hotel.
He is literally somewhere above or below me at this very second.
Seriously, what are the chances of that happening?
I twist open the blue jar of moisturizer I brought along and stick my finger into the white paste. Put a small dollop on my palm and rub, rub, until it gets warm and goes clear, then wipe it on my skin.