Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Foster
The night may suck without Ari, but at least the food is good.
The seafood from Magpie is outstanding, but the bites are too small.
I shove a mini donut in my face from the dessert table, and Evelyn asks how I'm doing.
“Never better,” I say through a mouth full of custard.
“What are you doing?”
I turn around to find my best friend staring at me. His girlfriend, Riley, is elsewhere, probably helping Maddie with something.
“Grief eating.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Hey, have you seen Ari?”
“I’m sure she’ll be here. She needs to be. Riley told me she’s being presented with an award because of the decorations,” Rowdy says.
I look up at the ceiling, and my heart pounds at the memory of the other night.
“She’s pretty fucking amazing.”
Rowdy is staring at me with wide eyes.
“What?” I ask.
“You have a thing for Ari.”
“Shut up. Do you have any idea how loud you are?”
“I knew it,” Rowdy says. “That day I came to the store to tell you about Riley, and I told you Ari’s name. You had a thing for her already back then.”
“Bullshit.”
“Your mustache twitched.”
I pretend to look over his shoulder and say, “Hey, who’s that guy talking to Riley?”
“Who? Where?” The big dummy walks away, successfully distracted.
The deejay announces that the pairings for the first slow dance are about to begin and introduces Maddie March.
Maddie glides to the microphone in a pink velvet gown with a fur neckline and stole, looking like some kind of pink snow queen.
“Good evening, everyone. I want to thank the chamber of commerce for allowing me to sponsor this year’s dance, and thank you all for humoring me.
As you know, this year’s event is a mixer, in which I’ve paired everyone up for the first dance on a hunch.
I hope you will all take this in the spirit in which it was intended and have fun with it.
Dance and enjoy yourselves. And if it’s not match made in heaven, come see me and show me your ticket, and I’ll give you a 25 percent discount on my complete, in-person matchmaking service. ”
Maddie continues to explain further how everything works, but all I’m doing is looking around the room, scanning for any sign of Ari.
I don’t care who I get paired up with at this point. All I want is to see her.
“Okay, everyone. Let’s see who you got!”
I crack open my fortune cookie and shove the pieces into my mouth, dreading reading the name that Maddie has set me up with.
“Ariana Little,” it reads.
I should have guessed it was her all along. It makes sense. We already know each other through mutual friends. Maddie’s seen the way I look at Ari at Magpie nights. She saw the way I stared at her when Maddie was trying to talk to me.
But when I look around the room, I don’t see Ari anywhere.
She said she was wearing that pink dress.
I walk up to someone wearing a long pink dress with a slit up the side, but when the woman turns to me, it’s not her.
“Looking for someone?”
I spin around and finally see the pink I’ve been looking for.
But instead of a low-cut dress and high heels, it’s a pink hoodie, snow-damp hair. And she’s wearing the damn coat I gave her, unzipped.
“I need to talk to you,” she says. “But I don’t want it to be a date.”
“You don’t want to date me. I get it.”
“Listen. I’m terrible at this, and I just don’t know how to put it into words.”
I know part of the problem is that she doesn’t need to be doing this out here in front of the whole town at a singles mixer.
I grab her hand. “Let’s go somewhere private so we can talk.”