Chapter 5
Chapter 5
“Which one are you going to pick?”
I chewed the inside of my lip, my partially eaten orange and almond syrup cake sitting on a plate on the table in front of me. I looked out of the Cozy Cottage Café window at the street, watching as cars and pedestrians passed by.
I weighed up my options. I had agreed to the pact, I had made the decision to find The One, and I’d gone on the three dates with three different guys, just as I’d said I would. Objectively, the date with Coleman had been great, but I could not get past the whole mortician slash dead bodies slash “I carve coffins for fun” thing with him.
Then, there was Nash. We had got on so well, and he seemed like a great guy, but there was that dog slobber situation I found incredibly off-putting, and I doubted I could ever kiss him without thinking about it.
And finally, Blaze. Nice guy, easygoing, possibly a sandwich or two short of a picnic, but possibly the best of the lot.
Three different guys, three different reasons not to date any one of them.
I turned back and looked at the sea of eager faces around the table, awaiting my verdict. Both Paige and Bailey were here with Cassie and me, having left their barista, Sophie, to “woman” the café counter, as they had put it.
“None of them.” I closed my eyes, expecting the worst from my friends.
“What?!”
“Why?!”
“But they all seemed so good!”
“Are you crazy?”
A quieter voice said, “Well, that doesn’t surprise me.”
I snapped my eyes open to look at Cassie. “What did you say?”
She was sitting back in her chair, looking squarely at me. “I said, that doesn’t surprise me.”
I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to hear it, but I knew Cassie was right. By deciding not to see any of these guys again, I wasn’t surprising my friends in the least. I was doing precisely what they would be expecting of me: a swift cut and run, no turning back.
I hung my head. “I wanted it to be different this time.”
Paige, the sweetest one of us, reached across the table and placed her hand on my arm. “We know you did, honey.”
“What was wrong with these ones, then?” Cassie asked, her voice deflated, as though I had let her down. Which, I guess, I had.
I sighed.
“How about you start at the top?” Bailey suggested. “Tell us what went wrong with each date, and we might be able to help you.”
Cassie harrumphed. I shot her a withering look. “Not helping.”
She leaned forward in her chair, her features softened. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . we’d all hoped you would find him, that’s all.”
I nodded. Me too .
“So, Coleman. What was the deal with him?” Bailey prompted.
“Coleman’s a mortician,” I stated glumly, thinking of him standing next to his coffin.
“And?” Bailey led.
“And . . . he’s a mortician .”
Bailey scrunched up her face. “I’m confused here. You knew that before you went on a date with him.”
I widened my eyes. “Yeah, but I didn’t know know it, you know?”
“I can see that,” Cassie said, cutting off another forkful of her raspberry and chocolate cake. “That would totally creep me out, too.”
“What happened with him?” Paige asked.
As everyone ate their respective cakes, I told my friends how the brunch date with Coleman had gone well—my mind doing overtime on Coleman’s profession aside—and then how we had gone to his funeral parlor. I thought of Coleman’s coffin. “The thing is, it was really beautiful. He’s obviously very talented and has a great eye. It’s just . . .” I shuddered.
Cassie chuckled. “You know what? If we rule the flirty mortician out, I won’t lose any sleep over it,” she said to Bailey and Paige, who both nodded their assent.
“What are you talking about, ‘rule him out’? He’s already gone, dead in the water, over,” I replied, a little confused.
“Well,” Bailey began cautiously, her eyes darting from Paige, to Cassie, and back to me. “You know how we decided Josh was perfect for Paige, even though she didn’t think so at the time?”
“Yeah, how wrong was I?” Paige said with a grin.
Concerned I knew exactly where this was going, I replied, “Yes, but this is an entirely different situation. Paige agreed to us finding her a guy: I haven’t done that.” I furrowed my brow, my eyes shooting between my friends.
“True,” Paige said with a nod, her head cocked to the side. “But, you said you wanted to find The One, and you went on these three Last First Dates.”
“And you did agree to the pact. Both times,” Cassie added with a wry smile.
“So?” I shook my head.
“So, we’ve agreed you need to give one of these guys a second chance,” Paige said.
“You’ve ‘agreed’ this?” I was incredulous.
“That’s right, and we’re not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Cassie added, crossing her arms in that “don’t mess with me” way I knew from work. She might have been one of my best friends, but she was also my boss.
“But . . . but . . .” I protested, doing my best fish impersonation as I tried to think of how to get out of what was rapidly becoming a dating intervention—not the friendly catch-up with my besties I’d anticipated.
“We think we need to help you push through this fussiness thing you’ve got going on, Marissa. That’s why we want you to decide which one you’re going to date and go on another date with him,” Bailey said.
“With an open mind, of course,” Cassie added, and Bailey and Paige both nodded their agreement.
“It’s the only way,” Paige said.
I blinked at my friends. “And you all agree?”
“Yes,” they said in unison, nodding, like a group of Muppets—well-meaning but misguided Muppets, that was.
I pushed my plate away, my appetite gone. I bit my lip. “And you won’t accept that I just test ran these guys and not one of them was right for me?”
“Nope,” Cassie said as the others shook their heads in agreement. “But, you can rule out Mr. Mortician, if you like. We’re good with that.”
I thought about Coleman. Yes, ruling him out was a must. I literally ran away from him, after all. I’m not sure a girl can come back from that sort of thing.
At least the other dates weren’t quite as . . . horrible.
“That leaves Nash and Blaze,” Cassie said.
I thought about the two remaining guys. My date with Nash had been great, right up until that possible dog slobber transference situation at the end, that was. The thought of Dexter’s saliva mingled with Nash’s and mine still made me want to hurl. I moved on to Blaze. He may be “thick, strong, and thirsty,” but he was a nice guy, extremely hot, and we’d had fun on our date, albeit with a little too much talk about working out and “improving” my body.
“Okay. If I have to do this—and I want you all to know I’m doing this under duress—I’ll go on another date with . . .” I paused for dramatic effect, like they do on TV. “. . . Blaze.”
We would get married, have good-looking little bodybuilders, and live happily ever after. Although, with the milk we’d go through, we may need to invest in a cow.
“Oh, yay! He is so cute!” Paige exclaimed.
“Dammit! My money was on Nash,” Cassie exclaimed.
“What? You bet on this?” I asked, incredulous my friends would do something like that to me.
“There may have been a small wager placed,” Cassie said with a small shrug, looking embarrassed. I watched as she reached into her purse, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to Paige. I then watched as Bailey did the same.
“Thank you very much,” Paige said, folding the bills and slipping them into her own purse.
I regarded my friends, openmouthed. “You guys!”
“We wanted to make this interesting,” Cassie said unapologetically.
“Spying on me going on three dates in one day wasn’t interesting enough for you?” I asked, my eyebrows raised in question.
My friends merely grinned back at me. Clearly, it was not.
“All bets aside, I’m surprised you’re going with Blaze,” Cassie said.
“You’re just bitter you backed the wrong horse, Cassie,” Paige replied with a smug smile.
Cassie furrowed her brow. “No, it’s more than that.” She looked at me as she sunk her fork absentmindedly into what remained of her cake. “I’m curious, what did you two find to talk about on your date?”
“Oh, lots of stuff. Music, what we like to do in the weekends, what we drink . . .” I searched my brain for more.
“Working out?” Cassie asked, playing with her fork.
“Yeah, there was a bit of that.” I twisted my empty coffee cup in its saucer.
No, there was a lot of that. My mind began to whirr, whipping me into a frenzy about how little Blaze and I had in common, how boring the whole bodybuilding thing was to me, and how little interest I had in eggy milk smoothies. Ugh .
Blaze may be as hot as an Arizona summer, but you couldn’t base a relationship on that. Could you?
“You’re not sure about him now, are you?” Cassie asked, examining my expression.
“No!” My tummy began to churn. “What am I going to do? I don’t want to spend all my time at a gym, staring at my reflection in the mirror as I lift weights. And I do not want to drink a tuna smoothie, even if Blaze said they taste okay. Uh-ah, no way.”
Bailey pulled a face. “Why would anyone want to drink a tuna smoothie?”
“Exactly!” I replied. I shook my head, chewing the inside of my lip. “No, it can’t be Blaze. It just can’t.”
“That leaves Nash,” Cassie said.
“What was the problem with him? He seemed really good on paper. He was the one who was all manly and defended you at the construction site, right?” Bailey asked.
“Yes,” I replied begrudgingly, thinking of how dashing and sexy Nash had been that day. I let out a sigh. If it hadn’t been for the dog-slobber situation, he would easily have been the front-runner.
“So, what happened? Everything looked good from our vantage point, right, Bailey?” Paige said, and Bailey agreed.
I picked up my fork and pushed my cake crumbs around my plate. Without looking up, I said, “If I tell you guys, will you promise not to judge me?”
There was a chorus of “sure” and “yes” from my friends.
“Well, you see, everything had gone really well, you know? He’s a nice guy, maybe a little too into dogs, but we’d had fun. And I was thinking he might be The One, and then . . . well . . .” I paused as I struggled with how to say it. In the end, I simply blurted it out. “He let his dog lick his mouth, and then he kissed me.”
“Euw!” All three of them said, recoiling from me in horror—just as I had from Nash.
“Inside his mouth?” Paige asked, her own mouth dropped open in obvious repulsion.
“No. It sort of skimmed the outside of his lips, I guess.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows at me. “ Skimmed ?”
I shifted my weight in my seat. “Maybe? It was hard to tell.”
She threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, my gosh, Marissa! You’ve totally overreacted to this. You’ve freaked out over virtually nothing!”
I crossed my arms, knitting my brows together. “No, the dog did lick his face, and then he did kiss me.”
“There is a world of difference between a dog licking someone’s face and a dog licking someone’s mouth,” Cassie replied, shooting me an “are you insane” look.
I glared back at her, pushing away the uncomfortable feeling inside that she may—just may —be right.
“You know, Marissa?” Bailey said, breaking our staring competition. “All you have to do is ask him not to let his dog lick his face while you’re around.”
“I guess.”
I weighed up my options: I could either spend the next date, or ten, being asked to punch and squeeze and prod Blaze’s various muscle groups, or I could simply do as Bailey suggested and ask Nash not to let Dexter lick his face if kissing was ever on the table.
In the end, there wasn’t much of a competition.
I let out a heavy sigh, pressing my lips together. “All right. I guess I can do that.”
“So, you’ll go on a second date with Nash?” Cassie asked, her face lighting up.
“I’ll go on another date with Nash”—I smiled at my friends, hoping like crazy I’d just made the right call—“ without his dog.”
“And you won’t go making up problems out of nothing as an excuse not to date him?” Cassie asked, looking at me like a stern parent.
I pursed my lips. Begrudgingly, I admitted to myself I may have done that with the dog-slobber thing. I nodded.
“Awesome!” Cassie said with a glint in her eye.
I watched, slack-jawed, as she put her hand out and Paige fished around in her purse for the money. “Thank you, ladies,” she said to them both as Paige handed over their money.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
“A bet’s a bet,” Bailey said with a shrug.
“It’s not about the money. I really think you’ve made the right call in choosing Nash,” Cassie said, pocketing her cash. “That creepy mortician guy and Mr. Muscles weren’t for you.”
I drummed my fingers on the table. Nash . I was going on a second date with Nash, a Last Second Date. Despite my persistent repulsion at the whole Dexter-saliva thing, a couple of butterflies beat their wings in my belly.
Maybe Nash would end up being the guy for me?