“Muffy’s not a bunny?” Rooster switches legs on the bench, but we can still see his dick dangling under his towel. “Huh. That’s a good bunny name.”
“No, man. She’s the matchmaker. Muff Matchers?” Klein’s still making faces, but he’s not gagging anymore.
Rooster snaps a finger. “Yeah! That one. With the hot mom. She set me up with this chick who could quote Aristocrates or something right after I got here.”
“If you don’t quit calling her mom hot, we’re telling Murphy,” Klein mutters.
“Not saying I’d tap that. Just saying she’s got confidence. That’s hot.”
I grab my coat and shove my arms in it. “You have issues.”
“I ain’t the grumpy-grumplebottom here. I’m a simple hockey god who knows the best things in life come to those who believe. We live in magical times, my friend. Internet sex and make-your-own-funnel-cake kits exist.”
Rooster slaps me on the back and heads across the dressing room to his own locker.
Lavoie looks at Klein, then at me.
I make the don’t ask me gesture, turn, and run into Ares Berger.
If we’re all hockey gods, Ares is the king of all of us. They call him The Force on the ice, and I’m pretty sure they’d call him the same even if he were a smaller man.
As it is, he’s six feet, nine inches, and over three hundred pounds of hockey-loving muscle and heart. I got called up from the minors when he was injured two years ago, and nothing will make a man get better faster than knowing he’s trying to fill Ares Berger’s skates.
The fact that I’m still here, playing at the top echelon of pro hockey, instead of being sent back down to the minors when he got better, is a miracle I’m grateful for every day.
Okay, most every day.
Today, I’m pissy. Not even gonna deny it.
“What?” I grouse.
He doesn’t talk. It’s an Ares thing. And he’s gotten quieter since his identical twin brother retired this past summer—again—after playing his final season with us.
But Ares doesn’t have to talk.
He taps his temple. Then taps his heart. Then glares at me.
Yeah.
I get it.
Get out of my head. Let my heart guide me. Yada yada baloney bullshit that worked pretty damn well for two years, since the first time he told me the same when I was floundering right after getting here to Copper Valley and the Thrusters.
“Tomorrow,” I growl at him like he’s not the guy I respect the most on the team, and like I don’t care what he thinks of me.
Ares Berger is my hero and my mentor. I should not be an asshole to him.
He lifts a brow.
Probably means I’m about to find myself dangling by my ankles while he holds me up and tells me to my face to quit being an ass.
“Dick broke?” he asks.
“Motherfucker.” The bunnies talked. The fucking bunnies talked.
He taps his head again.
And right when I think I’ve escaped any more Ares wisdom for the day, he lifts me by the waistband of my training pants, squishing my useless dick in the process.
“Intervention?” Murphy calls while I thrash about, trying to get out of Ares’s grip without causing permanent damage to my nuts.
Half the dressing room snaps to attention.
“Intervention!” Klein whoops.
And it’s suddenly crystal-clear that an atomic wedgie will not be the worst part of my day.
5
Muffy
By lunchtime, I’ve been stood up, laughed at, and had my ear talked off by a guy who’s probably as good at day trading as I am at muff-matching, despite all the arrogance in his story about how he made a thousand dollars last week.
I’m also out sixty-three dollars and riding a caffeine high after seven back-to-back screening sessions where I might have stretched some truths of my own—like sharing my real name—for the purpose of doing my job. And all to decide maybe one of the seven men I met so far today would be worthy of a trial date with one of my clients.
But on the plus side, it’s time for my weekly Muff Matchers support group.
I’m gathered with five other women, three of whom are current clients, at a café next to one of those make-your-own-stuffed-animal places hosting a birthday party for a bunch of very loud preschoolers. The sounds are drifting through the shared wall, making Julie, the manager there who’s joined us for lunch, twitch like she’s still in the store.
Julie’s boyfriend dumped her at her family’s Independence Day cookout. She called me the next day, and after nine failed dates including one that ended with an ambulance on site, I re-evaluated my entire process, closed down the open applications on my website for men to apply, did something I swore I’d never do, and two weeks later, Julie and Gustav started dating, and they’ve been together for two months now.
Sometimes matchmaking is about letting the universe do its work.
Sometimes it’s about seeing something in a client that no one—not even the client—has seen before.
And sometimes it’s about finding creative ways to identify the right guy for a client, because the end justifies the means.
Julie still comes to my client support group meetings, because she was short on girlfriends outside of work. I like having her since she’s a success story, and I don’t have many, so I need to use what I’ve got, though things are improving.
“How’s everyone doing today?” I ask after we’ve been served. I send motivational emails to my clients daily, so I know a lot of the answers already, since they tend to email me back.
Still, talking and emailing are different.
“Sick of men,” Maren mutters. She’s an environmental engineer that I’ve been trying to match off and on for a year. She’s also my biggest source of guilt in my business since she’s also one of my cousin Kami’s closest friends, as is Alina, the woman next to Maren, who’s a cellist. Alina isn’t a client like Maren is, but she comes to the support group meetings anyway.
I have hopes of bringing her over to the Muff Matchers side.
And, you know, of not letting her down when it happens.
“Oh, no,” Julie says. “What happened?”
“I was putting gas in my car this morning, and this guy at the next pump started telling me how I should do it.”
“No!”
“Yep.”
Eugenie, who’s a massage therapist at the spa four stores over in the strip mall, snorts over her Reuben sandwich. She’s also not a client, but she joined our lunch dates after overhearing us a few weeks ago. “Did he try to explain to you how a hybrid engine works too?”
“Yes.”
Maren punctuates the word with a snort, and all of us groan.
Phoebe, who’s a contracts manager for the city, lifts her glass of tea. “To clueless mansplainers. May we never date them, never raise them, and find creative ways to reject them.”
I flinch a little. I’ve set most of my clients up with mansplainers—and worse—before, including one who was so bad that he mansplained mansplaining before a server intentionally dropped a plate of mashed potatoes in his lap. But my screening methods are improving, so I toast with them.