Poppy
Johnny Lawson was in my bed.
It was dark…hazy. His hands were on me, rough with real work, cool metal pressing into me from his rings. I couldn't quite figure out what we were doing, but his lips were by my ear and I felt so, so full.
I whimpered, his weight on me, between my legs. He was…he was inside me. God, he was inside me, and it felt so good.
“You,” I breathed. “You.”
“Good girl,” he chuckled.
The pressure intensified. I was thrusting my hips now, chasing sensation. “Fuck me, John,” I begged. “Please.”
“Come for me, baby,” he commanded. “Come, Poppy—”
My eyes snapped open, my lips parting as I moaned. Oh God…oh no, it wasn't him. I was just—I was coming all by myself in bed.
Coming from a very specific sex dream.
My hand flew down between my legs and I worked myself through it, rolling onto my side to bury my face in the pillows so I wouldn't disturb the neighbors. I was ashamed to admit that this wasn’t the first time I’d had this dream…
and not about this specific person either.
He was the only guy who’d ever made me come without ever touching me.
I was so gone and for him.
And the matchmaking report Jasper gave me had made it so much worse.
I let it settle for a second, the pleasure washing over me as I stared up at my ceiling. I really expected that I would just fall right back to sleep—that was what normally happened—but the ceiling became far more interesting than usual.
I growled and swung my legs out of my bed.
My roommate Stevie was a night owl, and I could still hear the TV running in the living room. She was probably passed out on the couch with some horrific true crime show serving as white noise; I figured that was a good enough reason for me to be able to stomp around if needed.
But I didn’t go out to the living room. Didn’t go to make myself a cup of tea or anything like that.
I went straight to the desk in my bedroom, sat down, and stared at the report.
What the hell was I supposed to do with this?
Damn it, Jasper…I didn’t have any course of action here.
I couldn’t just call him up and say, Hey, our system says we should get married, can we have crazy sex like right now?
I mean…he would probaby think I was nuts.
Even worse, he might take me up on it, then my job would be on the line and I might fall in love and then I’d be in love with a guy twice my age and never able to quit because I was sure he was so, so good in bed—
“Stop it, Poppy,” I muttered to myself. “You’re spiraling.”
I opened my laptop instead.
I could send an email. Emails were harmless. Emails had a subject line and felt professional, and you didn’t just come onto your clients in emails because that was crazy.
I opened a new draft.
Dear Mr. Lawson—
Deleted it. We’d been on a first name basis for two years.
Hi Johnny—
Better. Normal.
I wanted to reach out regarding your current pause status with Bloom. As we like to do with all paused clients—
We did not do that. There was no such protocol. I was inventing protocols at three in the morning in an oversized KU t-shirt, and yes I was breaking the rules, but I wanted to break them in as un-rulebreaky a way as possible.
As part of our ongoing client care process, our data team has flagged your file for a more personalized check-in during your pause period.
Jasper Ellison, our lead data scientist, has some observations about your compatibility profile that he felt warranted a follow-up conversation—and as office manager, I coordinate those discussions on his behalf.
I paused.
That was actually not bad. Jasper had flagged his file.
That was true. Jasper did have observations, also true.
I coordinated things on people’s behalf constantly, that was quite literally in my job description.
The fact that Jaspers observation was a 99% match result between Johnny and me specifically, and that I was coordinating this particular discussion at three in the morning directly following a sex dream, was context I was choosing to omit.
I kept going
If you’d be open to it, I’d love to schedule a brief coffee meeting at your convenience to discuss next steps.
That was simple enough. It called for a reaction. If he didn’t respond, that was fine; I was just an assistant, he would probably brush it off.
My finger hovered over the trackpad.
I sucked on my lower lip.
If I wasn’t going to push it now, I was going to lose my nerve—
I pushed send.
Immediately remembered it was three in the morning and I’d meant to schedule it and now I seemed like a psycho anyway, oh my god—
“Poppy? Are you up? Everything okay?”
Stevie’s voice at the door, sleepy and muffled.
“Yeah,” I called back. “Sorry, couldn’t sleep. Go back to bed.”
“I wasn’t in bed.” A pause. “Can I tell you about the weird dream I just had?”
My skin was clammy with anxiety, my hands shaking, adrenaline pumping. There was no way I would be able to go back to sleep now.
I stood and trudged over to the door, opening it only to come face to face with my roommate.
Stevie was even shorter than me—just about five feet, rail thin, with short black hair and thick-framed glasses.
She was a medical examiner for the Chicago PD, had studied forensic pathology at KU.
We’d met four years ago when we were two Lawrence girls both looking for roommates, and we’d never looked back.
I looked down at her—one of the only people I ever actually looked down at, which was especially funny given she was into jiu jitsu and always said she would protect me from intruders if necessary.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, shaking her head. “Just like…fell asleep to this Ted Bundy documentary and I had a dream your boss set me up with a guy who wanted to eat soup out of my skull.”
I stared at her.
“Do you want some tea?” she asked.
I frowned. “You’re not going to serve it to me in a skull, are you?”
She snorted. “No, you dork. I’m just up and you’re up and want some company.”
We both laughed as I followed her down the hall, grabbing a fluffy robe off the coat rack by my door and snuggling up into it. Stevie was in what appeared to be a llama onesie, the hood staring at me upside down.
“Sophie would never set me up with a cannibal, right?” she asked. “Like—that’s a screening question?”
“We do a very thorough intake process,” I said. “Cannibalism would almost certainly come up.”
“Good.” She filled the kettle and set it on the stove, then turned around and leaned against the counter with her arms crossed. “So why are you actually up?”
“I told you. Just couldn’t sleep.”
She stared at me, eyes narrowed behind her glasses. I had lived with this woman for four years; she looked at actual dead bodies professionally and remained perfectly composed.
My poker face was not going to work on her.
“Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t a bad dream exactly.”
“What kind of dream was it?”
“Stevie—”
“Was it about Whiskey Daddy?”
I groaned, covering my hands with my face, and not for the first time I scolded myself for ever telling Stevie about Johnny.
We’d been drunk one night and she’d been asking me about if I ever had a thing for clients, and I’d blushed and said, Well, there’s this one guy and she’d said Ooh, tell me about it, and then she’d never let me live it down.
“He has a name,” I said.
“Yeah, but John is so boring,” she said. She turned back to the counter to grab mugs and tea bags. “What happened?”
I sat down at the tiny kitchen table and chewed on my lip, clasping my hands in front of me.
“Well…he had his fourth failed date this week,” I said. “Which—to me is just crazy—”
“Because you have a thing for him.”
“Right, we’ve established that.” I groaned, resting my head in my hands now.
“But then Jasper—because Jasper loves to meddle even though he’s a data scientist and not a matchmaker—comes up to me after our weekly meeting and hands me this piece of paper.
He took off age gap boundaries in the system and turns out…
me and John are a perfect match. Like, 99%. ”
That actually made Stevie turn around.
“No fucking way.”
“Yes fucking way,” I said.
“That’s—” She shook her head. “Poppy, that’s insane. How high do those scores usually go?”
“We’ve had three cases in the whole of Bloom’s lifetime that have a match index that high,” I said. “And all three of them are now married with kids.”
Stevie’s brow furrowed. “Oh…is it bad that this makes me kind of sad?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to marry Whiskey Daddy and have cute babies and leave me all alone.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “I am not going to marry Whiskey Dad—John.”
"You might," she said serenely, pouring the tea.
"He doesn't even—it's not like that. He thinks of me as the girl at the front desk."
"The girl at the front desk he stops to talk to for ten minutes every time he comes in."
I opened my mouth.
"You told me that," she said. "Drunk, but still."
I closed my mouth.
She set my mug down and sat across from me, folding her legs up under her in the chair, the llama hood flopping to one side. "Okay…so what are you going to do about it."
I considered lying to her and saying nothing. As if I hadn’t just sent an email off into the world at this ungodly hour. She clocked it before I could formulate a response though, laughing under her breath.
“You already did something about it,” she said.
“I just sent an email,” I said.
“Like—just now?”
“Right before you knocked on my door.”
“At three in the morning?” She leaned forward, mug steaming in front of her face, fogging up her glasses. “What did you say?”
“Something professional about wanting to discuss his case, which I thought sounded really good until I realized the timestamp was going to blow my cover.”
“Hey…” she started, trying for comforting—and utterly failing. “Maybe he’ll just think you’re a very dedicated office manager.”
“Or maybe he’ll say something about it to Sophie and I’ll lose my job,” I suggested.
Stevie sat back in her chair and wrapped both hands around her mug.
“Breathe,” she said. “He’s not going to do that. Sophie just put him on hiatus, and we both know he likes you.”
“We know no such thing.”
“We do,” she insisted. “He literally gets to every appointment early to talk to you. And out of anyone I know, you deserve a perfect love story.”
“That’s really sweet of you to say,” I said. “But…I’m worried.”
“Natural to be worried,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “If it helps—I’ve got another two hours on this Ted Bundy docuseries if you want to sit on the couch with me. Figure neither of us is getting much sleep, right?”
I nodded.
“But…” She gave me a pleading look. “Can I see the report?”
I sighed and shook my head, but I still got up and brought her the report. She was sitting on the couch now, the series running again, both our cups of tea on the coffee table. She patted the couch next to her and handed it over…and then I just settled in, drank my tea, and actually relaxed.
When I woke up, dawn was creeping through the window and Netflix was asking if we were still watching. Stevie was crashed on the other end of the couch.
It was Friday…the day after my whole life had blown up, maybe, all because of a stupid piece of paper. There might be an email waiting for me. There might not.
No matter what the outcome, things were about to change.
I just didn’t know exactly how.