What's Life Without the Sprinkles - By Misty Simon Page 0,8

Someone she could wear heels with, instead of those ugly flats she’d just been sporting. He didn’t let himself think about her as a real woman often because he didn’t want to mess with their friendship, but she looked damn fine in a pair of heels. As for Peter, if she wasn’t overly concerned, then he guessed he wasn’t either. He’d be there to protect her, as he always had, but with Claudia sometimes you had to let her fight her own battles.

Justin whooped from the backyard. Time to play with his favorite guy and forget about Claudia and her date. She was a big girl and had known her mind for a whole lot more years than he had. He just hoped there was something worthy in Edward that he couldn’t see but that worked for Claudia.

****

Claudia spritzed the back of her knees with her atomizer and, to allow the scent to air out, walked around in the black flats that went horribly with her flirty, asymmetrical skirt. She hated flats, but after their third date, she’d caved and bought the terrible shoes for the first time in her life. Edward was an inch shorter than Claudia, and she didn’t want to tower over him.

She would never tower over Nate.

The doorbell rang, slicing neatly through her thoughts. A glance at her watch told her it was Edward. He was exactly three minutes early, as he always was. And she had become just as predictable. Add that to her list of things that had gone wrong in the past ten years. That damn list seemed to grow every day.

Walking on the hardwood floor through the apartment on her way to the front door, there was no satisfying clacking of pencil-thin heels to remind Claudia she was a woman going on a hot date. Instead she felt twelve years old, listening to the muffled shuffle of her horrible flats.

Claudia pulled the heavy oak door of her upstairs apartment open and stared at Edward. The regular script would begin in a moment.

He didn’t disappoint.

Step One. “Hello, Claudia. My, you look lovely this evening.”

Step Two. Edward checked his watch and tapped a finger to the glass face. “Well, we should be going if we want to make the play.” This was the only part that ever changed, the location of their date. Even his voice never altered from the singsong cadence. For all she cared he could be selling the hottest thing in vacuum cleaners.

And Step Three. A perfunctory kiss on the cheek delivered far enough away from her lips so as not to be the least bit tantalizing. Then they were out the door.

With her hand resting lightly on Edward’s elbow, Claudia was escorted down the wooden steps of the outside staircase and led to the dull brown four-door sedan. She had nothing against sedans, she drove one herself, but this car was so blah. The interior was also brown, and Claudia felt as if she were being swallowed by a huge puddle of suffocating mud. Suffocating was a good word when applied to Edward, but she’d successfully ignored giving in to that thought for three months. She wasn’t going to succumb now. Especially since it was all Zoe’s fault that she was finding flaws in Edward. Flaws she hadn’t had a problem with before. Damn Zoe’s cake speech and the way Nate had taken her off guard with his body to die for when she’d just wanted to anonymously fantasize.

Edward started the car with a methodical movement of his hand, and they were off. She tried to break the rhythm of the night by talking right away instead of waiting for him to make the first conversational move as he liked, just to see if she could shake things up a bit. He wasn’t a bad person or a mean man, but damn it, she wanted fireworks and spontaneity. Cake instead of three-day-old cookies.

She wished she’d never heard of cake. It was plaguing her now.

She tried to settle into the familiar rhythm of their once-weekly date and found herself just a half beat off.

Thirty minutes later, over lobster bisque and wine, Claudia concluded Zoe was right, though she’d never tell her and inflate her ego. Although she was reasonably sure Edward did not in fact wear a toupee, she was thinking he might have had hair plugs put in. How had she not realized that in the three months they had been dating? If she were honest with herself, Claudia would