“Why don’t you tell us how you really feel?” Holley drawled. “It’s not, like… random. Mom is helping us, don’t forget.”
Right. Bookworm’s Books Matchmaking Service had the entirety of Bronco’s booked out for this stupid little dating thing I’d been roped into.
I didn’t want to organize it, never mind be a freaking part of it.
“That’s true,” Kinsley said. “And if your date is really bad, I promise we’ll get you out of there.”
I wrinkled up my face. “No.”
“Please.” She put down the box and grabbed my hands. “I swear we’ll find you someone good, and if there’s nobody we think you’ll like, we’ll match you to someone we already know you get along with so you can have a fun dinner with a friend.”
“If you put me with Tori as some joke—”
Holley burst out laughing. “Oh, my God, no. Saylor, we know you were both hammered that night. Don’t worry. We won’t be jerks. Well, not that much.”
I stared at them both, sliding my tongue across my teeth. I was not happy with this. I wasn’t even close to being happy, but judging by the looks on their faces, I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.
Screw that.
I had no choice in the matter.
Oh, joy.
CHAPTER TWO – SAYLOR
RULE TWO: NOBODY WIGGLES THEIR EYEBROWS ANYMORE. JUST MAKE THE DIRTY JOKE AND MOVE ON.
“I really think you need to speak to someone about this.”
“I don’t need to speak to anyone.”
“Yes, you do. This isn’t normal.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing right with you either, Grandma.” I put her cup of tea in front of her and took the other armchair. “Why are you buying the ducks a bed? They’re not dogs. They don’t need a bed.”
She stirred a cube of sugar into her tea. “I don’t want them to get cold feet.”
“They’ve been through three months of winter in Montana already. It’s not going to get much colder than it already has,” I said dryly. “I just think you’re getting too attached to them and it’s not healthy.”
“Not healthy? Saylor Louise Green, you broke up with a boy and dyed your hair pink. That’s the very definition of unhealthy.”
“Actually, it’s perfectly normal.” I toyed with one of my pink braids and flipped it over my shoulder. “Changing hair after a break-up is something women have done for decades.”
“Not in my decades,” Grandma replied. “You know why? We didn’t date like hussies back then.”
“I didn’t know you dated at all in the eighteenth century. Weren’t you all married by age thirteen?”
She stared at me. “Your sass is going to get you in trouble one day, young lady.”
“You’re right. I should be a demure little wallflower who never says what’s on her mind.”
Grandma snorted. “Like that’s ever going to happen.”
I grinned. She was right. I could try and rein it in, but all that would achieve would be a build up of sass that would eventually have to come bursting out.
Knowing my luck, it’d be in a random place. Like in front of a cop. And get me arrested.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Oh, don’t look at me like that.
It’s not my fault I was drunk and underage.
I was tricked into it, I tell you. Tricked.
I honestly have no idea how I’ve gone through my life the way I have with my best friends not being criminals or something. At one point in my teens, my mother genuinely thought I would be tried for murder.
Proved her wrong, didn’t I?
There was still time, though, and plenty of people who needed a good smack with a heavy rock.
I liked to keep my options open.
Being a serial killer could be a very lucrative career path if the sheer number of documentaries on Netflix were anything to go by.
Grandma yawned. “Did you bring the treats for my ducks?”
With a sigh, I picked up the brown grocery bag and put it on the coffee table. “Broccoli, spinach, corn, lettuce, strawberries, and the last of the plants from Kinsley’s vegetable garden.”
Her face lit up like I’d just told her she was busting out of the senior home and she dove into the bag. Honestly, there were kids out there with less enthusiasm about Christmas morning than my grandmother had about her now-weekly delivery of treats for her beloved ducks.
A check of the time confirmed I had to go, and I said as much as I stood up. “I’ll see you this weekend?”
“Ooh, that’s a giant strawberry there! Quackie Chan will love that!”
And of course she was ignoring me.
I kissed the side of her head. “Unpack that bag in your room, not in the main room.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something hidden in Kinsley’s plants.” I grinned and grabbed my purse, then wiggled my fingers to say goodbye.
On the way out of her room, I heard a tiny, “Ooh, rum! Yay!”
Laughing, I shut the door before anyone else heard her and I was busted for smuggling illegal substances into the senior home.
I scooted out of the building before I was waylaid by anyone else and got into my car. Thankfully there was no fresh snow on the ground and it wasn’t all that icy, so my drive into town wasn’t as difficult as it’d been just two mere weeks ago.
I parked on the street outside the store that held all the party supplies. It doubled as a craft store, since White Peak wasn’t exactly known as a party hotspot. Holley had put me on order pickup duty, and I was already pretty sure I was going to want to vomit over all the lovey-dovey heart-shaped paper chains I’d seen her looking at on the website.
The bell over the door dinged when I walked in.
Did everyone have these damn bells? I hated those things. They were like wind chimes. Totally unnecessary.
If you needed to announce your arrival and departure, you should have been an airplane.
The store was decorated for Valentine’s Day in a way I was sure most people would find tasteful. I, however, was not most people, and it wasn’t tasteful in my opinion.
Why did we need to decorate for Valentine’s? It was nothing more than a day for people who were in relationships to brag about it while single people ate a gallon of ice cream and masturbated to free porn.
Or so I was told.
Ahem.
I approached the counter and internally groaned when I saw Margaret Miyazaki behind it, smiling at another customer. The woman was lovely, really, a real sweetheart. The problem was that her one remaining single child was her beloved son, and for the past several months, she’d developed a rather unhealthy obsession with getting me to be his date.
This was problematic for two reasons.
One: I was not attracted to Austin Miyazaki. At all. We couldn’t be more different in terms of our personalities, and any attempt at dating would be a lesson in failure. He was a wonderful friend, but neither of us were interested in anything more than that.
Two: I was absolutely sure the guy was gay.
No, I didn’t have a gaydar, or whatever people called that thing these days. Was that even a term now? Was I stuck in MySpace land? Was that too two-thousand-and-five of me?