The Hot One

She’s a dating guru.

Penny scoops her Chihuahua mix into her lap. “Look, dating might be Crazylandia, but we can help you through it,” she offers. Penny’s happily engaged, and Nicole is single and just plain . . . happy.

“What better day to get back in the saddle than when you see your college boyfriend?” Nicole adds.

I roll my eyes. “Nicole, if only the world could be as cool and calm as you when it comes to exes.”

She stabs her finger against the menu. “But you can. If you really cared about his situation, you’d have looked him up a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. You only mildly care because you saw him out of the blue.” She pats my hand. “Find the will to resist looking him up.”

I furrow my brow. “In theory, that makes perfect sense. In reality, I’m all about expunging toxins from the body, and that man is some kind of toxin.”

Nicole tosses her hair back and laughs. “Oh, you win.” She mimes rubbing a pair of shoulders. “Maybe you need to massage him out of your system, too.”

“Let’s not go that far,” I say. Though I am a big believer in confronting the knots in your muscles, since I’m a massage therapist by trade. That mantra is also how I like to approach life—don’t avoid problems; work through them.

“If you need to look him up before you start dating again, then by all means, let’s purge him.”

Penny grabs her mobile device from her pocket, sets it on the table, and clicks on the Facebook app. She hovers her finger above her screen. “Are you ready to go down this rabbit hole, Delaney? You want to find out what he’s up to?”

I nod. I need to know. I need to shut the door permanently on Tyler Nichols. Now that I’ve bumped into him, I want to get him out of my system once and for all.

“Like a cleanse,” Penny mutters as she taps his name into the search bar.

“Exactly. I’m going to the juice bar of Facebook to begin my detox,” I say, feeling strangely good about this plan. My girls are right. Time to move on. Time to try again.

After a few quick searches, Penny looks up and declares, “Got him!”

She turns the screen to me and I brace myself, expecting a mélange of casual shots of that gorgeous devil of a man.

But his profile photo is . . . not him at all. It’s a cartoon cat shooting rainbows from his eyes into a bowl of cereal.

I point, barely able to make words. “What the hell is that?”

Curiosity seizes me, and I click on it, but there isn’t any info about the laser-eyed tabby. I toggle around his profile page for his relationship status.

Single.

I gulp, but then I remind myself he could be a single father. His status only proves he’s not with the mother of his child now. I click on a few more images, and quickly realization dawns on me. Against all my better judgment, I smile. I smirk. I grin. For some odd reason, I find myself ridiculously happy that I jumped to a big fat conclusion.

“She’s his cousin’s kid,” I admit softly, the smile tugging my lips higher. Why does this fact make my shoulders feel light? Make a butterfly or two try to flutter around inside me?

Penny claps. “Yes! That is great news!”

Nicole gives her the evil eye. “Why are you clapping? Because he didn’t impregnate someone?” She grips my shoulders protectively. “That doesn’t mean we can let our girl ride that ride again.”

I push aside that little flurry of happiness. Ignore it. Shove it back down. So what if he hangs out with his cousin’s kid? Doesn’t mean I should be all smiles and giggles. “That’s right. No rides will occur whatsoever,” I say, adopting a stern expression.

Penny stares at Nicole, and my two best friends volley like tennis players. Apparently, I’m the tennis ball. Or rather, my love life is. “Why is that such a bad thing to get together with an ex? I reconnected with Gabriel,” Penny says, since her fiancé is a man she met ten years ago then lost touch with until they reunited recently.

“Different,” Nicole says crisply. “You and Gabriel were star-crossed lovers, classic missed-connection style. You were destined to reconnect under the stars.” She turns to me and arches an eyebrow. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Tyler the reason you didn’t go to law school? Something about a debate competition?”

The fresh, sharp memory of that last debate with him grapples me by the waist, yanking me to the ground. I’d made my choice shortly before then, but that competition was the nail in the coffin of law school for me.

“Not really.” I wave off this moot discussion. “Guys, I’m not getting together with Tyler. That’s not even in the cards. I simply wanted to know if he was single, a father, or something else. Now I know, and it all helps with closure. I’m not even thinking about him anymore.”

The waitress comes by and we order. When she leaves, I clasp my hands together resolutely. “Let’s do this. It’s time for me to start dating again.” If I’m ending this one-way thing my mind has had for Tyler, it’ll be far easier if I’m back in the saddle.

Nicole thrusts her arms in the air. “Victory! And I have someone to start with right away. This guy I work with. His name is Trevor, and he’s kind of a hottie, and he’s also quite smart,” she says, then rattles off a list of traits, pointing out that Trevor and I have a lot in common. Penny chimes in with a suggestion that I go out with her fiancé’s business partner, and soon enough my girls are deeply enmeshed in matchmaking games.

As they chat about my romantic fate, my phone buzzes, and I grab it. A Facebook message icon flashes on the screen. My heart beats faster, and it’s the oddest sensation. Like a wish against my better judgment.

I swipe and discover a message from him.





2





Tyler



* * *



When you went out with someone for a year, spent nearly every night with them, attended college hockey games together, grabbed late-night snacks at Josiah Carberry’s, watched reruns of CSI under the covers, pelted each other with snowballs on the quad, and then fucked her in the dorms, in the showers, behind the stacks, in your car, in a cab, in your buddy’s dorm, under the covers after CSI, in her roommate’s closet, and once in the history lecture hall when you snuck in after hours, you get to know someone.