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“Never look a gift horse in a mouth?” he said with a raised brow.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”
He shrugged. For a moment she thought she saw hurt flicker across his face, but she dismissed that as improbable as winning the lottery. “Well, it was worth an ask. Let me know if you change your mind.”
“Sure,” she said, not meaning it. And judging by his raised eyebrow as he lifted himself out of her chair, he believed it as much as she did. Though he still said “Later” with a smile as he walked through her door.
He has a nice butt, Marsie thought as she spun her chair back to face her computer. She opened the document she and Beck had worked on for hours. The short profile put a lighter spin on her personality, as did the carefully crafted answers to the shorter questions like, “Favorite movies.” For example, they decided not to include Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the last book she’d read, even though it was. And a reread at that. Beck had told her to pick a novel, so she’d included the latest Jonathan Franzen, even though she’d hated it.
* * *
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Beck’s hand holding a glass of red wine was the first thing Marsie saw when her friend opened her front door. Marsie shifted her purse higher onto her shoulder, grabbed the glass and had taken a sip before Beck had the door fully open.
“Hey, that was my glass,” her best friend said once the door was fully open.
“No, it wasn’t,” Marsie said as she stepped inside and slipped off her shoes. “You’re still wearing lipstick. If this had been your glass, there would be lipstick on the rim.” She set her bag on the console table by Beck’s front door and dug out her laptop. It was a Lenovo laptop, because they came in orange and she liked orange. Maybe she should have a reason for this preference, like that it represented processing power or battery life. But she allowed herself one bit of silliness in her life, and her laptop color was it. Once her laptop was safely tucked under her arm, she took a long sip of the wine, then stopped to take a deep breath and let the alcohol warm her throat on the way down.
When she looked up, her friend raised an eyebrow and nodded to the glass, which had a near perfect kiss of Beck’s pink lipstick staining the crystal. “You must have a lot on your mind,” Beck said.
“I do.” Marsie took another drink. She needed the wine more than Beck did. “Do you need help with dinner?”
Beck laughed softly and shook her head. “No. But you can pour me another glass of wine.”
“In charge of booze. I can handle that tonight,” Marsie replied, taking another sip before following her friend into the kitchen.
The kitchen smelled like a dream of garlic and tomatoes and pork as a pot burbled away on the stove. “You make the best food,” she said, sliding onto a bar stool. She minded her responsibilities though, pouring a glass of wine for her friend before adding more to the purloined glass. She was the checklist queen and knew that checklists worked best when you took care of the important stuff first.
Beck filled up a big pot of water, put it on the stove and turned on the gas. She chuckled when she turned around to grab her wineglass. “You don’t want to wait until after dinner?” she asked, nodding toward Marsie’s open laptop and the printouts of her Excel spreadsheet on the counter.
“As of five tonight, thirty men have looked at my profile, five have winked at me—whatever that means—and two have said, ‘Hey.’ Action is required.”
“You could have written something in return.” Beck’s fingers trailed along her granite countertop as she came around the island and looked over Marsie’s shoulder. “You’re smart. You don’t need me every step of the way.”
“Ha. You weren’t at the bar for the disastrous date I had the last time I tried this all by myself. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.”
“That’s an n of one,” Beck said, mimicking one of Marsie’s favorite phrases, the thing she said whenever anyone tried to generalize to the entire population based on a small sample size.
“Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to waste any more time kissing frogs. There has to be a prince for me out there somewhere.”
