by Flynn, Avery
Brittany Stuckey—AKA Britt the Ball Buster, according to some of her players—wasn’t just a state champion high school boys’ hockey coach and one of the handful of female boys’ hockey coaches in the country, she was also the Stuckey family titleholder for taking absolutely, 100 percent no shit from anyone. The anyone in this case being him. And fact that he was a grown man and a professional hockey player with the Harbor City Ice Knights meant nothing. He would, as she often told him, forever be her little Caleb Cutie—a nickname that proved a mother’s love blinded her to her offspring’s physical flaws—and she would probably treat him as such until the day one of them got hit by the number six crosstown bus.
He turned to Peppers, a man he thought would have had his back despite the video-recorded smack talk that had been blown all out of proportion. “You called my mom?”
“Yes,” Peppers asserted, not bothering to slow his pace as he marched from one end of the room to the other as if he were still in the locker room giving his team a what for in between periods. “Because she was a crucial part of this rehabilitation plan to fix your fuck-up.”
Caleb slouched down in his chair. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Really?” Lucy asked from her seat behind her desk, snark dripping from her voice. “Do I need to play the video again? I can because every media site on the face of the earth has posted it. Bad Lip Reading even did a mockup of it.”
Yeah, and he would have laughed his ass off at anyone else who’d been caught running his mouth in public like an idiot. Objectively, it was funny. It wasn’t every day almost the entire first line of a hockey team bitched and moaned about the team, their playing, the coaches, and the quality of puck bunnies they banged. They’d sounded like spoiled assholes, which he totally admitted wasn’t 100 percent not the truth.
Fuck, the next words out of his mouth were going to hurt.
“Okay,” he said, avoiding eye contact with every person in the room. “It was dumb.”
“Dumb?” his mom said, how-in-the-hell-did-I-birth-this-idiot thick in her voice. “You told the entire world that the key to your sweet defensive moves was the number of puck bunnies you banged before a game—and on top of that, how you call them all honey so you won’t have to bother remembering their names!”
He flinched. Yeah, that was not a good look. He was a privileged asshole who—truth be told—had exaggerated both the abundance of babes in his bed and his lack of memory skills. Still… “I’d had some beers and was talking shit with my boys. And it should be noted that I did the right thing by taking an Uber instead of driving.”
His mom rolled her eyes. “That’s called doing the bare minimum to adult properly.”
The room went silent except for the mental buzz saw revving in his ears so vividly that he could smell the diesel fumes. He clenched his teeth hard enough that his jaw ached so he wouldn’t snap off a nasty retort at his mom. That wouldn’t get him anywhere. She hadn’t gotten where she was because she backed down from fights. He’d inherited the trait, but he’d learned that sometimes the best way to win was to appear like he wasn’t fighting at all. Guerrilla warfare. Psyops. Subterfuge. When it came to winning a war with his mom, those were the only ways to go.
Never mind that he was a twenty-eight-year-old professional athlete with a mortgage, a retirement plan, and a degree in sports management that he’d use to open his own company when it came time to hang up his skates for good. To his mom, he would forever and always be Caleb Cutie who’d fucked up again. It was fucking exhausting trying to meet Brittany Stuckey’s expectations, and he was so done with it.
Lucy, who’d been uncharacteristically watching the goings-on with her mouth shut, broke the tense silence. “Here’s what it comes down to, Stuckey. You embarrassed yourself. You embarrassed the team. You embarrassed Harbor City. This has to be fixed. You are going to have to change the narrative and give everyone something else to talk about besides what a dickhead you are—that is, if you want to keep playing for the Ice Knights.” She gave him a second to digest that bit of yes, it’s been confirmed you’re an asshole, and if you don’t fix it, you’ll be playing in the reindeer league at the North Pole. “And that’s why you’re going to give the media a story they won’t be able to stop talking about. You’re going to let your mom be in charge of your dating profile on Bramble, and you’re going to film video segments about each date.”
He couldn’t breathe, and a throbbing started in his head right behind his eyes. “That’s not gonna happen.”
“You want to make this whole perception problem go away so you can start the next season on the first line again instead of the bench because the front office wants to make an example of you?” Lucy asked.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping it would stave off the ache making him think his head might explode, and nodded. “Yes.”
“Then it’s gonna happen,” Lucy said. “Lucky for you, Bramble is totally on board with using your redemption story to promote their launch next month. As the founder told me yesterday, if they can make you dateable, then anyone is game.”
Ouch.
“So here’s how it works,” she continued. “Bramble requires a five-date commitment so that everyone really gets a chance to know each other. However, each party must reconfirm their interest after each date, which they will plan for you up to date three.”
His headache was only getting worse. “Five dates?”
“Stop whining, Caleb.” His mom gave him the look. “What’s that in comparison to being able to reach your goal?”
That would be the goal he’d had since before he could remember—getting his name engraved on Lord Stanley’s cup. The Ice Knights were his best chance at that, and he wasn’t going to fuck it up any more than he already had.
“Got it,” he muttered. “Five dates.”
“After each date, you’ll do a little here’s-how-the-date-went chat with your mom. Bramble will use that footage in their launch-week ad campaign to show that anyone can meet their match using the app.”
Oh God. Would this nightmare ever end?
“And I already filled out most of your profile for you,” his mom added, handing him an iPad with the Bramble app open on it.
God’s answer? No. It’s only gonna get worse. Enjoy your time visiting hell, sucker.
He didn’t want to, but he looked down at the screen anyway. She’d filled out the basics, giving him a fake last name.
“Smith?” he asked his mom. “That’s not suspicious at all.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Would you rather go with Pain in the Ass?”
Sighing, he went through the rest of it. It was, like any good lie, as close to the truth as it could be. “Do we have to add a picture?”
“Nope.” Lucy shook her head. “They don’t have photos or job listings in an effort to eliminate unconscious bias in dating, on the theory that users will be more open to the person on the inside that way. Bramble wants to do as much as possible to limit who you are from influencing how your dates go. That means you cannot tell your date who you really are or why you’re doing it. Everything has to be authentic.”
All he could hear in his head was the sword-wielding guy from his mom’s favorite movie talking about how that word didn’t mean what the bad guy thought it did. “Except for the fact that I’m lying about who I am.”
“There’s a price to be paid if you want to reach any goal,” his mom said, using the one phrase she said to him growing up almost as much as she told him she loved him.
She wasn’t wrong. He’d made sacrifices to get to the Ice Knights. Someday, his body would expect payment, and he was okay with that. All of this publicity stuff made his stomach churn. This whole thing just kept getting more and more fucked-up.
“So how do they match people up?” he asked.
The grin on his mom’s face should have warned him of a fresh, new hell. “So glad you asked.”
She reached over and clicked on a question mark icon. A new tab o
pened filled with—he scrolled down and down and down—at least a billion questions.
Kill me now.
“You fill out those, the app will match you with a few possibilities, and then I’ll pick out your new girl.”
That buzz saw in his ears? It turned into mortar fire, deafeningly loud and almost certain to fuck up his world. He looked at Lucy and Coach Peppers, desperate for another option that wouldn’t put his mom in charge of his dating life. When they met his gaze without blinking, he turned back to the woman way too happy to have her control-freak fingers all up in his life.
“Whoever you pick, I’m not going out with her past date five,” he said. “This is a publicity stunt only. Nothing more.”
“No one is saying you have to or that you should,” Lucy said. “The point of this little exercise is to change the narrative and clean up your image. What is more wholesome than a boy’s mother helping him pick out a date?”
Had he fallen into a parallel universe where it was the total opposite of reality? His mom was in charge of his love life? “That’s not wholesome. It’s creepy and wrong.”
“Well unless you have a better plan to fix this disaster,” Peppers said from his spot across the room. “Then you’re stuck with it.”
Having his balls dipped in battery acid sounded like a better idea to him at the moment, but he had no real alternative plan to offer. This parental guidance–type date looked like the best option.
His toes itched as bad as that time when he’d skipped using his shower shoes at training camp, and his headache went from rumba throb to death-metal hammering.
He turned to Coach and Lucy. “And you guys are behind this plan? Really?”
“Seeing you dating a woman your mom picked out is a story that will grab the media’s attention away from that video,” Lucy said.
Okay, surely the one other man in the room would see the implausibility of all of this. “Coach?”
The older man shook his head and gave him a pitying look. “You got yourself into this pickle. You gotta get yourself out of it.”
Translation: You are so screwed…so very screwed.
He couldn’t agree more.
…
Zara Ambrose was no longer on a first-name basis with tequila, and the damn worm could call her Ms. Ambrose, too. It should have been calling her Mrs. Gatsley, but then that turd Kevin had jilted her six months before the wedding. She’d made the mistake of a three-day girls’ weekend where she and her besties had fallen in with a wild crowd with names like Patrón, Jose Cuervo, and Cabo Wabo. She wasn’t sure which tequila shot had landed her at the Hummingbird Bistro a week after that bender, but she cursed it all the same.
Her gaze went between her closest friends, Gemma McNamara and Roxy Hamilton, as the three of them sat at a corner table with a view of the hostess stand, and she let out an annoyed huff. “I can’t believe you guys made me fill out that stupid dating app questionnaire.”
“Made you?” Gemma snort-laughed. “Oh, honey, you practically tackled me before tearing the phone from my grasp and filling it out yourself.”
Okay, that part might be true. She remembered Gemma mentioning that a friend of a friend was looking for beta testers for the app’s soft launch. After that it was fuzzy, but she could still remember locking her arms around Gemma’s waist—which was as high as she could comfortably get, since at five-ten her best friend loomed over her by almost a foot.
Still, Zara wasn’t ready to go down alone on this one. “One of you should have stopped me from being so pathetic.”
“You mean honest about your five-foot-nothing-self’s needs—someone to reach the stuff on the top shelf at the grocery store and dust the cobwebs from your vagina?” Roxy asked at her normal not-even-kinda-quiet volume.
Zara sank down in her chair. “Don’t say that so loud.”
“Girl,” she said, raising an eyebrow and her glass of red wine. “You’re the one that typed it and sent it out for God and every horny fuck-boy on that app to see.”
She covered her face with her hands and sent out one more prayer for a fire-breathing dragon to incinerate her on the spot, because that’s exactly what she had done. She’d read it so many times—her horror growing each time—that she had the damn thing memorized.
Assholes Need Not Apply
I don’t expect fairy tales, but are a few not-self-made orgasms with a guy who makes my heart flutter really just a pipe dream??? My shithead of a fiancé dumped me after I supported him (including rent) while he went through medical school and finished his residency. My life was on hold for him, and now I’m ready for a little—really, a lot—of fun with the kind of guy who isn’t a total asshole. Too honest? Too bad. Life is too short for jerks with combovers and dudes who don’t know their way around a lady garden.
“It was the tequila,” she mumbled through her fingers.
“Nice try.” Gemma laughed and peeled Zara’s hands away from her face. “It was your secret desire bubbling to the surface because of the perfect storm of that shithead Kevin using you like the parasite he is and God’s gift to the lime.”
Roxy handed Zara a glass of wine—white because she was the queen of nervous jitters. “And the fact that you were with Mr. Inch Dick since college and somewhere deep inside you, oh Miss Grudge Holder Extraordinaire, you knew he wasn’t the man you wanted. More like he was the guy Daddy said you shouldn’t want.”
That was true, but she didn’t feel like having that thrown at her—or thinking about the dad she’d pretty much cut out of her life years ago—so she grabbed on to the one thing that she could argue. “I don’t hold a grudge.”
Gemma and Roxy just laughed. Right in her face. Without hesitation.
She glared at them over the top of her wineglass as she took a drink. “Maybe I should rethink the plan I made in fourth grade to be best friends with you two forever.”
“Nice try, but who else would put on Spanx for you when there are neither pictures being taken nor any chance of getting the magic peen, if not us?” Gemma asked.
“Speak for yourself.” Roxy shook her head at their born-to-wear-pink, be-queen-of-the-Junior-League, and have monogramed everything best friend. “Spanx are the devil, and I’m not wearing them.”
“Either way,” Gemma said. “We are in this fancy-pants place to make sure your date isn’t a serial killer, because that’s what best friends do.”
Roxy flashed her signature up-to-some-shit grin. “And the chance to observe what will probably be an encounter of epic awkwardness is just a bonus.”
And this was the decades-in-the-making result of three nine-year-old girls having access to a Costco-size bucket of bubble gum and a shared desire for vengeance against the same bully. Tommy Heston had been forced to shave his head to get all the gum out. The three of them had ended up assigned in-school suspension. It had been totally worth it.
Even as she sat at a table, trying not to look at the hostess stand every two point six seconds to see if the one guy who’d messaged her and didn’t sound like a total creeper was there yet. Really, she wouldn’t be surprised if he was a total no-show. It wasn’t that she had her fingers crossed he didn’t, but who in their right mind would answer that ad?
A man in a custom suit and a pinkie ring walked in.
“Do you think that’s him?” Zara asked.
“Not unless you’re into threesomes.” Gemma nodded her chin toward the woman with the million-mile-long legs who came in behind him.
Okay, heart, stop trying to beat your way out of my chest. Chill the fuck out, nerves. We’re good. We’re…another man walked in, and her blood pressure skyrocketed.
“What about that guy?” she asked.
Roxy shook her head. “Nope.”
The guy was alone—and in a hideous puce-colored sweater—but she wasn’t here for fashion sense. “Why not?”
“He said he was six-two, right?” Roxy asked.
Zara nodded.
“That guy is maybe five-eleven,�
�� she said before taking a sip of wine. “That’s the problem with you being so short. After a few inches above you, everyone is just tall.”
It was true. At her height, people went from being normal-size to gigantic in the span of about three inches.
She checked her phone. It was eight minutes after seven. She’d treat this like a client meeting for her business—after ten minutes, she was out of there. That was the benefit of being seriously in demand; she waited for no one. And with that, she polished off her wine and gave a discreet nod to the waiter so they could get the check.
Gemma let out a quiet sigh. “And there he is. Oh, honey, you let me know if you want me to take one for the team here. He’s delish.”
Zara froze, and the wine sloshed around in her stomach. There was no turning around, only holy-shit-what-was-I-thinking panic. “How do you know it’s him?”
“Because I slipped the hostess a twenty to give me the signal when a Mr. Smith arrived.”
“I am friends with you for all the right reasons.” Roxy high fived Gemma. “So are you going to turn around and look, or what?”
She did a quick body scan. Yep, her muscles were still locked in place because they were, unlike her brain under the influence of tequila, totally unreliable. “I think we should ghost.”
“Nope.” Roxy shook her head. “Not gonna happen.”
“This is so weird, though. ‘Hi, we just met, let’s knock my cobwebs loose.’” Oh God, it sounded even worse when she said it out loud.
Gemma cocked her head as she pursed her lips together and regarded Zara with all of the pity she usually directed at one of the unfortunates on her home makeover show. “I’d recommend not putting it that way.”
Why was she doing this? She pressed her hand to her stomach in a vain attempt to calm herself.
Taking a deep breath, she looked at her two best friends. “Promise me you won’t leave.”
Gemma held her hand over her heart and held up her pinkie finger, the same sign they’d been making since they were girls. “We might fill you full of tequila, but I pledge on Tommy Heston’s formerly-luscious gum-filled locks that we wouldn’t ever abandon you.”
