My Killer Blind Date
Chapter One
I’m filling out the Release Form to retrieve the body from the St Anthony’s Hospital morgue when my phone dings. Lodging the pen between my teeth, I set the clipboard down on the hospital mortician’s desk and pull the phone out of my back pocket.
‘Sorry,’ I mouth to the mortician sitting at the bar-height desk across from me – Jeff – who doesn’t even glance up from his typing.
It’s Georgina.
Aaaahhhh!!! Margot!!!! Ready for your big date?????
It takes me a second to process all that punctuation. And then it hits me.
Big date.
Oh … shit.
My stomach drops.
Totally!!!!! I type back, my fingers shaking, though I’m not sure how much of the adrenaline can be attributed to forgetting something so important, and how much to the prospect of having to go out. In public. With a man I’ve never met.
I add a few party emojis for good measure, because that seems like something a well-adjusted person might do, and hit send.
Hopefully, all those exclamation points and confetti images will put George off the scent, because she cannot know that I completely forgot it was tonight.
She’s been talking about setting me up for months, chipping away at my defenses in her cheerfully persistent way until I finally caved last week.
‘He’s a friend of Arjun’s,’ she said in the gushy in-love voice, as if of course all the good qualities of Arjun – her fiancé – would also be present in his friends.
‘And you know how it hurts me to see you living alone when Arjun and I are so happy, especially after—’ Then she pursed her perennially moist lips and made a pained face.
Zoe. That’s what she had been about to say. My closest friend – more sister than friend. George and Zoe never got along, but of course George has been completely sympathetic since Zoe’s disappearance in early December, six months ago.
The familiar sensations start. My heart pounds. My palms burn like I just smashed them to a hot iron. My head swims, as if I just took three tequila shots back-to-back.
Stay centered. You have a date to get to, or George will give you her ‘disappointed look.’
I stuff the phone back away. Time to wrap this up. I have forty minutes until I’m due for my blind date at Old Irving Brewing across town, and we haven’t even moved the body to the SUV. With traffic what it is at six p.m. in Chicago … yeah, not going to have time to change. Hope he loves flannel.
‘Whatever. If flannel is a make it or break it, it’s not gonna work out,’ I mutter under my breath.
‘Excuse me?’ says Jeff.
‘Sorry … nothing.’ I guess not under my breath enough.
Jeff’s desk overlooks a brightly lit lobby with two rows of bucket chairs bolted to the floor.
No windows, but a few fake plants bring an attempt at cheer.
I never tried to imagine what morticians would look like before I started this job five days ago, but if I had, I would have seen Jeff. Tall. Pale. Serious as hell.
I finish up the paperwork with a loopy signature at the bottom. Margot Estelle McKee.
‘Here you go,’ I say, pushing the clipboard across the desk. I hope I did everything right. Jeff slowly unclips the papers from the clipboard. Straightens them.
‘I see you work for Anderson I applied for the receptionist position. But it had just been filled. They offered me body transport like it was my lucky day, and, well, beggars can’t be choosers.
‘Yeah. Great. Let’s do it.’ I clap my hands together, like it’s no big deal to handle corpses.
No big deal at all. Should I mention to Jeff this is just my third corpse pickup, and I still basically have no idea what I’m doing? Also, gurneys are impossible to drive. My last corpse would’ve come out of my transportation efforts with a concussion. If they were alive for the ride, that is.
As Jeff leads the way to the metal drawer where the body I’m to retrieve is resting, I’m also realizing there’s no way I have time to drop the body off at the funeral home, move it into the refrigerator, file the paperwork and make this blind date.
If I’m going to make the date, I’m going to have to go straight there. Hmm. Do I need to worry about the body getting a bit too warm as I flirt?
Nah. It’s a cool night. The body has been refrigerated for long enough that it’ll take a while to reach room temperature. And it’s not like a dead body is going to tell on me if we take a little detour, right?
*
My date, Brian, runs a hand through his shaggy blond hair.
‘So Cooper – my friend who works for Meta – goes, like, – man, what’s this?
And then Buddy – you know, my friend who went to Harvard I mentioned earlier?
– holds up the bottle of hot sauce and is like, you mean you’ve never met this bad boy?
’ Brian guffaws, and I laugh politely as I try to mentally sort out all the friends and coworkers he’s name-dropped over the past three stories he’s told.
At this point, a diagram would be helpful.
He was seated at the bar when I arrived, as promised, with a Cubs baseball cap to identify him, his blond hair feathering out from underneath. I even scored a parking spot right in front of the restaurant, which was more good fortune than I’d had in a long time – it seemed auspicious.
‘Hi, Brian. I’m Margot,’ I said when I saw him, proud of myself for (probably?) seeming like someone who does this kind of thing all the time and didn’t cut herself off from dating a long time ago after years of truly terrible judgment.
He gave me a bro hug and immediately remarked on how tall I was. I almost made a joke about how tall morticians are, then decided it would be in questionable taste to introduce my current line of work so quickly. Also, I wasn’t technically a mortician. Just a driver. And that for less than a week.
We both ordered beers and agreed on a shared appetizer of truffle parmesan fries, which I admit I have eaten the majority of, since he’s dominated the conversation. A fair trade, all said. If he wants more fries, obviously, he’d just have to talk less.
He’s cute, in an objective, he’d-look-good-on-a-movie-poster kind of a way. Then again, that kind of thing has never really turned me on.
Give me a smoldering intelligence. Disarming earnestness.
Someone with a totally nerdy special interest. And, fine.
Forearms. I have a thing for forearms. Biceps too.
In fact, the whole scope of the man arm.
A preference that has led me astray one too many times, due to assholes often having great arms.
This, among other reasons, is why I stopped dating.
It gives me lizard brain – a term Zoe introduced me to that basically means those times when your brain reverts to its most primitive state.
When it comes to men, rational thought seems to flee.
I jump in too fast and fall recklessly – and disastrously – in love with the worst of the worst, sometimes over completely random things, like Paul’s smile, Sean’s singing voice, or the way Tom would scrawl haikus on napkins.
Paul was a cheater, Sean had an anger problem and now that I think about it, Tom was a cheater too. Hence the moratorium.
But back to Brian.
As he talks, I let my mind wander. Mmmm. What kind of fish would I compare him to? It’s a weird game I play, but ocean documentaries are kind of my thing, and it’s fun to match people with their fish selves. Maybe a Corydoras catfish? Happiest when they’re being social? Might be too early to call.
I nibble at a French fry as he launches into his next anecdote about a recent product launch at his software company and the new girl in marketing automation who completely screwed up an email blast, which could have meant gigantic fines for the company.
Brian, of course, was able to find a workaround.