“Your mustache twitched.”
I pretend to look over his shoulder and say, “Hey, who’s that guy talking to Riley?”
“Who? Where?” The big dummy walks away, successfully distracted.
The deejay announces that the pairings for the first slow dance are about to begin and introduces Maddie March.
Maddie glides to the microphone in a pink velvet gown with a fur neckline and stole, looking like some kind of pink snow queen.
“Good evening, everyone. I want to thank the chamber of commerce for allowing me to sponsor this year’s dance, and thank you all for humoring me. As you know, this year’s event is a mixer, in which I’ve paired everyone up for the first dance on a hunch. I hope you will all take this in the spirit in which it was intended and have fun with it. Dance and enjoy yourselves. And if it’s not match made in heaven, come see me and show me your ticket, and I’ll give you a 25 percent discount on my complete, in-person matchmaking service.”
Maddie continues to explain further how everything works, but all I’m doing is looking around the room, scanning for any sign of Ari.
I don’t care who I get paired up with at this point. All I want is to see her.
“Okay, everyone. Let’s see who you got!”
I crack open my fortune cookie and shove the pieces into my mouth, dreading reading the name that Maddie has set me up with.
“Ariana Little,” it reads.
I should have guessed it was her all along. It makes sense. We already know each other through mutual friends. Maddie’s seen the way I look at Ari at Magpie nights. She saw the way I stared at her when Maddie was trying to talk to me.
But when I look around the room, I don’t see Ari anywhere.
She said she was wearing that pink dress.
I walk up to someone wearing a long pink dress with a slit up the side, but when the woman turns to me, it’s not her.
“Looking for someone?”
I spin around and finally see the pink I’ve been looking for.
But instead of a low-cut dress and high heels, it’s a pink hoodie, snow-damp hair. And she’s wearing the damn coat I gave her, unzipped.
“I need to talk to you,” she says. “But I don’t want it to be a date.”
“You don’t want to date me. I get it.”
“Listen. I’m terrible at this, and I just don’t know how to put it into words.”
I know part of the problem is that she doesn’t need to be doing this out here in front of the whole town at a singles mixer.
I grab her hand. “Let’s go somewhere private so we can talk.”
Chapter
Ten
Ari
“I thought you wanted to talk.”
I can barely get the words out. Foster, in his brand new suit, looks good enough to eat, and the sight of him makes me tongue-tied.
His hands cup my head like the other day, and he’s letting his thumbs stroke my wet cheeks.
“You’ve done enough talking for the both of us,” Foster says.
