I Pucking Love You (The Copper Valley Thrusters #5) - Pippa Grant Page 0,7
my boobs Heimliched by old men on a regular basis. I’ve been trying to run a matchmaking service called Muff Matchers for a few years now. I hang out with criminals and my mother. I work basically sixteen hours a day, have screened half the men in our lovely city of Copper Valley, which sits to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia, and rejected all but about seven of them as potential suitors for my clientele for reasons that range from being rude to the staff to telling me that a woman who’s larger than a size four doesn’t take care of herself.
Yes, while talking to me.
Related: I am definitely above a size four.
My point? I have a very high tolerance for the unpleasant.
But going back to Blackwell?
Where The Incident happened?
No.
Even my therapist would tell me this is a terrible idea.
But if there’s one person I can’t say no to, it’s Veda. She’s believed in me for years. Our first year of med school, she was the only one with the patience to sit with me and quiz me for hours over the biochemistry class that I struggled with hardcore. When I left school, she was the only person to reach out and check on me, and she’s probably one of the best friends I’ve ever had who isn’t related to me.
We text at least weekly, and every few months we meet for lunch or dinner halfway between here and Richmond. Occasionally she comes all the way over here, and we do drinks and complain about our jobs and our families and our dating lives, and tell each other that we’re fabulous, even though we know we’re not.
She pushed me to start Muff Matchers when I started telling her about my idea, offered investment money to help me get it off the ground, and she’s never asked a single thing of me in return.
Until now.
And all she’s asking is for something a friend would do, so naturally, I can’t refuse.
You don’t leave your friends hanging in times of need, and if I’m who she needs for support during her dad’s funeral, in Richmond, with all of his colleagues and current and former students from Blackwell, where he was the dean, then I’ll be there.
What’s the step after puking?
I might have to do that.
“Muffy, I know you like partying, but if it’s going to leave you green in the gills every morning, maybe you should cut back to two or three nights a week instead of five or six,” Mom says.
“Especially since she won’t let you go along,” William says to her.
“Right?”
They both roll their eyes.
If Mom knows I’m not partying, but instead working as a night manager at a fast-food fish restaurant, she’s doing a good job of keeping up appearances.
And if Tyler Jaeger rats me out to my cousin, he’s dead.
My job at Cod Pieces isn’t exactly what it looks like.
Unfortunately, Tyler Jaeger is exactly what he looks like.
A spoiled hockey player who’ll flirt only long enough to get what he wants, then get out as quick as he got in.
And I mean that in every way possible.
“Don’t step in the oatmeal,” I tell Mom and William. I grab my phone, tuck it into my bra, and remember I haven’t yet put on a bra when my phone clatters through my shirt and lands on my cat in the oatmeal.
Rufus streaks off like a demon, bouncing off the walls and leaving clumps of oatmeal everywhere.
So maybe I’ll be playing kazoo at the light-rail stops to pay for the cleaning I owe Mom in her house now.
And a new phone case.
This one will be caked with oatmeal in all of its cracks until my phone’s dying day, and that assumes its dying day isn’t today, which is a distinct possibility considering there’s probably oatmeal creeping up the plug-in jack.
At least I can’t answer Veda’s text. Positive side, right?
Not immediately, anyway.
And that’s good.
It means I have time to come up with a plan.
Not much time—the funeral’s on Monday, with a viewing Sunday night—but some.
Maybe I can fake appendicitis. Or an accident that leaves me in a full-body cast. Or my own death. With my contact list, surely I can find someone who knows how to get me new identification and can hook me up with a ride to a tropical island where I can sleep on the beach and pay for food by bussing tables at a greasy spoon.