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  Dylan tapped the screen. “Take a look at her.” He smiled smugly as Mike’s eyes raced across the screen. They’d been waiting for a long time. Too long. His roommate’s expression told him everything he needed to know. Score! It might finally be time.

  “Do you really think that’s some sort of code for being up for a threesome?” Mike asked, eyebrows arched. “I don’t know, Dyl…I think it’s just some sort of joke she’s making. You know how nervous and weird people can be when they try to distill their entire life into a few sentences.”

  Dylan chewed on the inside of his cheek. Bad habit. “Good point. Well, even if she isn’t into a nice ménage arrangement, she is one fine woman.” A low whistle escaped from his lips. “I have a project on my hands now, don’t I?”

  Mike nodded, peering at the screen, eyes lingering. “You are going to have a lot of competition.”

  Dylan snorted. “Like I give a fuck. May the best man win.”

  Mike went silent, then grinned, his fresh-faced boy-next-door look morphing into a Wall Street trader’s predatory smile that made Dylan suddenly uncomfortable for no reason he could pinpoint. “Yeah. I hope he does.”

  ***

  Ding! The little chat box on the online dating site lit up like a Christmas tree. Laura sucked the last mouthful of her coffee and gaped at the screen. You have got to be kidding me, Laura thought. Already? She clicked and read a message from “9inluvr”:

  Hey, babe. I live in the city and so do you, so let’s hook up for some FWB action.

  She snorted. Oh, sure. Just like that. Yer a catch, Bud. A real romantic.

  Ding! This one was from some guy named Dylan. Before she read the chat she looked at his profile.

  Well hellooooo there, Mr. Firefighter. A thin line of drool formed at the corner of her mouth, an instant response to the picture before her. It was a professional picture, the guy wearing no shirt, a fireman’s hat perched at a jaunty tilt. Like a stripper’s picture in a firefighter’s role. Oh, God. I can’t date a stripper, she thought. He’d have nicer g-strings than mine.

  But no – he was a real firefighter. The picture, he explained in his profile, came from a charity bachelor auction he was in. Bachelor auction? How much had he gone for? As she studied the picture she figured it had to be a solid four figures. Hell, she was ready to empty her life savings for a night with this guy.

  On a whim she Googled “Dylan charity bachelor auction firefighter” and her drool increased so much she would soon need a bucket.

  Oh, holy hell. The image search showed the same man, whose name was Dylan Stanwyck, in firefighter’s pants, boots, a fireman’s hat and suspenders, perched on the floor of a fire station right next to the pole. He was leaning on one elbow and had smears of soot on him, with well-oiled muscles and a smug-ass grin. Whoever set up that photograph needed to be recruited for her company’s marketing department because damn – she was ready to use up every available dollar on her credit cards to get a night with him.

  Maybe she could save a bunch of money and just set herself on fire. Or her car. It probably wasn’t worth much, but if she found out his schedule and whether he’d be the one responding…

  And he was pinging her on the dating site? She dropped her coffee and scrambled to write back in the chat room.

  “Hi,” she said, all inspiration and creativity vanishing as the heat forming between her legs apparently melted her brain.

  Hi. I’m Dylan. Nice to “meet” you. :)

  Think, Laura. Think. Man, where was Josie? Of all the times for that girl to be on time to go to work. She needed help figuring out something witty to say.

  Hi. I’m Laura. Nice to “meet” you, too!

  She wrote back. Then he answered:

  You’re probably on your way to work analyzing businesses, or businessing analysis, or whatever it is you do ;). I was hoping you might be interested in going out? We can do coffee, maybe? Or go to a nice tapas bar?

  Tapas! Her favorite! But wait – Josie always said any guy who likes tapas must be gay. Laura checked the photo again. No way. And even if Dylan was gay, she would still sleep with him. Cute, polite, and loves tapas?

  Tapas sounds great! When?

  Dammit! Now she sounded too eager. And then he waited. And waited. No reply. Shit! Maybe he was having second thoughts. Or she sounded like a moron. Or he realized he didn’t like tapas after all. Or he really was gay. Or this was his cat impersonating him. She began to pace, willing the chat bar to ping. If she stared hard enough, maybe it would come – now! No, now! Or…now!

  Finally:

  Uh, this might seem too eager, but I don’t care. I am free tonight. I work a 24 tomorrow, so this is my last chance for a few days. I don’t mean to be rude, asking you on short notice, but…please tell me you’re free tonight.

  Yes! Yes, yes, yes, she wanted to write. But she needed to play that stupid game, the dance of meeting someone new. Her turn to wait. She reread his message. What was a 24? She puzzled over that one as she chewed on her cuticle, pulling on it until it bled. Brilliant! Screw up your manicure when you have a hot date tonight, Laura.

  Might have. Might have. Don’t put the cart before the horse.

  I am free. Prince William is now taken and so I have an opening in my busy social schedule.

  She hit “Send” before she could change her mind. Too cheesy?

  LOL. Sounds great. Meet me at Tempo Bistro after work. At 6?

  Tempo Bistro? The most expensive, chi-chi restaurant in town? Not tapas, either – something she couldn’t quite remember. Asian fusion? How on earth could a firefighter afford that? Not your problem, Laura. And she was making terrible assumptions. She needed to assume they were going dutch. Good thing she was a careful saver.

  ’lo?

  The chat window pinged. Geez, Laura. Get out of your head. She typed furiously:

  Sounds even better. I’ll see you there and you know what I look like.

  And he replied,

  Oh, yes. :P

  What was that supposed to mean? Her eyes swept over the clock – now she had eight minutes to shower. Damn! Laura just shook her head and walked to the bathroom, stripping naked by the time she crossed the threshold and turned on the hot water.

  Sliding under the spray was bliss, the beads of water trailing their way down her body, her hair wet and ropy within seconds, the curl relaxed and the strands stretching long enough to tickle the top of her sacrum. Eh – why not leave the ad up? Who knew. Maybe she’d attract a better breed of guy. Or, at least, a different kind. She eyed the shower head – did she have time? Eight minutes?

  More than enough for the last guy she dated.

  Just enough time for some intimate attention from Mr. Showerhead, though. Josie was wrong. It wasn’t her battery bill that was getting expensive. Her water bill, on the other hand…

  Good thing her vibrator was waterproof. As she soaped up she was cognizant of the time, knowing she had minutes to finish. Pulling up the old standby fantasy always worked. Two men, luscious and thickly-muscled, both in the shower with her. Mmmm…

  The extra tip of her vibrator slid along the soft, sensitive skin of her clit as she perched one foot on the tub, opening up for access to slide in her fantasy lover, who was soaping her body with his sculpted, large hands, hands that smoothed over her curves, cupping her ass to pull him toward her, sliding his enormous cock in her while the other nameless, faceless lover kissed her, hard, his tongue lashing against her and exploring as the spray rolled down in rivulets between them, gathering at her folds and adding to the tease on her clit.

  Her passage tightened as she imagined him bending down, on his knees, his tongue now lapping where the vibrator’s little antennae tweaked her, not her own hands moving the thick shaft in and out but the lovers’, four hands at once on her as one mouth descended on her eager, red nub, the other man thrusting her up against the shower’s wall, her body ready for more.

  She tensed, knowing she was so close, craving all these hands, mo
re than enough for two men who wanted and needed her, the familiar muscled cresting of her climax so innate she barely cried out, the release perfunctory but oh, so welcome.

  And, now, the guilt. Because how could a “normal” woman really want two men at once? As she absent-mindedly rushed through the rest of the shower, quickly washing off her trusty toy, a persistent voice said, You, Laura. You.

  She really did. Some wishes were never meant to be, she sighed inwardly, drying her hair and rushing to get dressed.

  Just a fantasy that got her off.

  ***

  It didn’t help that she felt like there was a huge discrepancy between what she saw in herself, and what she saw in the pictures of Dylan, and what she saw when she did a search for him online. This guy was a catch; not just a catch, but a catch. Like, the difference between catching a good-sized bass in a great lake versus catching a giant, enormous marlin. He was outstanding. There was no other term for it.

  He looked like something that was sculpted by an artist and the more that she thought about it and the more that she mulled over it, the more that she was excited about it – the more it turned her into a quivering, uncharacteristically nervous pile of goo.

  “I don’t think I can do this, Josie,” she said that night as she prepared for the actual date. Dylan had picked out a rather nice restaurant in a part of town that was above her pay grade, and she wondered how on earth he could afford it on a firefighter’s salary. But she wasn’t going to question it because maybe, just maybe, she had finally found somebody who was going to treat her properly. The way she had always dreamed of being treated, and not treated like a booty call or a person you’d settle for when you really want something more but settle for good enough.

  “You’re more than ready and you know it, Laura. It’s about time you found some guy who…” Josie looked at the screen again. “Oh, dear, I don’t think I remember what I was about to say because I’m about to burst into flames if I look at that guy one more time.”

  “He’s mine,” said Laura, baring her teeth in a fake show of territoriality. It wasn’t that fake, though. Some part of her meant it.

  “I can look. I know I can’t touch, but I know I can look,” Josie joked.

  Laura had picked out three different sets of clothes, being as meticulous as possible today, trying so hard to cover what she felt were definitely deficits. Big, enormous deficits. Calling her a fluffy woman would be a perfectly nice euphemism, if you didn’t prefer the term fat. Not fat in a derogatory way. Just fat as a practical, pragmatic way of describing how she was. It’s not like you get to be a size eighteen by meticulously eating 700 calories a day and never, ever doing anything wrong in terms of what you put in your mouth. She couldn’t stand it when people would claim that they’re fat because of their genes, they’re fat because they have a thyroid problem, they’re fat because – because, because, because.

  She owned it. She was fat because she put too much unhealthy stuff in her mouth, and even of the healthy stuff she put in her mouth, she put in too much. And she didn’t really mind it – she liked food. She really, really liked food. Enjoyed it. Savored it. Pleasured it. Found it to be a joy in her life.

  And she paid the price with the extra pounds, the padding – what a lovely euphemism that was, too. She liked her curves; the curves made her feel normal, gentle, open, emotional – bare. You couldn’t hide from a curve; you couldn’t hide from a love handle or from a padded hip or from a booty that made enough men blush and drool. She knew it was an asset (pun intended) to some guys.

  What she hoped, what she deeply hoped, was that to a guy like Dylan, maybe, just maybe, she could beat the odds and find in him someone who really valued someone like her. So far that hadn’t been the case. Online dating had turned out to be a giant nightmare of electrons that didn’t line up exactly the way that anybody had planned. She seemed to photograph well because she got an awful lot of come-ons and she figured maybe there was something to that.

  She was blonde, with a healthy glow in her face and a pretty decent smile with two dimples that appeared when she laughed hard enough. Her shoulders carried some of her weight, but it just made her look bosomy and big chested, and if she picked the right formfitting sweater she could come across a good twenty pounds lighter than she really was. That may have been part of the problem, though, because it was always that look that the guys gave her when she walked into the bar, the coffee shop, the plaza, the restaurant – whatever public place that they had planned to meet.

  It was that look, that fucking look.

  It was a look of surprise – and not of good surprise. It was the look of, oh, you’re not what I was looking for. Oh, you’re not what you look like in your picture. Oh, you’re a fat chick.

  Oh.

  Sometimes they had the decency to tell her the truth and to actually say those things aloud. Yeah, really – the decency. Because it was better to hear it up front, to her face, in her face even, than to sit down with that type of guy, to try to read the signals, the tilt of the face, the grin, the look in his eyes, the lack of a look in his eyes if he glanced away. All of the little tells, the way he held his hand, the way he fidgeted, the way he reached for his phone for a text that didn’t really exist. All of those sights and sounds and movements that added up to one thing.

  Rejection.

  So far, she had had a few one night stands, a few guys who were willing to fuck the fat chick. She didn’t turn them down because the offers were few and far between and because it wasn’t obvious that these were pity fucks – until it was glaringly, painfully, heartbreakingly obvious. Most recently, like she had told Josie, she was sick of it. Just sick of it. So this last ditch attempt at online dating really was the final attempt.

  Dylan seemed too good to be true. Here she stood in front of Tempo Bistro at 6 p.m. sharp wearing a pencil skirt, really nice high heels, and a mohair sweater, the same one she had worn in the dating site picture, just so she could – in her own head, in her own internal thoughts – not consider herself to have been falsely advertising. What he would see in a minute was exactly what she had shown online.

  No less.

  No more.

  Her hair was pulled back in the same funny little ponytail and her eyes were sparkling with hope that she dredged up from deep, deep inside, and plunked down in front of him, ready to try once more.

  ***

  Getting ready for this first date with Laura had turned out to be a hell of a lot more complicated than it had any right to be. First of all, it turned out he got his dates wrong. His 24-hour shift was actually that night. Tonight. So he had to change shifts with Murphy, and Murphy, who wasn’t know for granting favors easily, not only extracted another 24-hour shift out of him, but also convinced him to give up his beloved Red Sox tickets for the next game. Dylan reluctantly gave it up, hoping like hell that this date was really going to be worth it, hating the sly grin on Murphy’s face.

  Hey, he was taking a chance that maybe it really was worth it. Four different clothing changes later, he finally settled on something that he hoped resembled “business casual” in the corporate world. She worked as a business analyst for some large nameless, faceless corporation and that meant that she probably had an expectation about what a guy would look like. Dylan’s general preferred state of dress was some old concert t-shirt from the 90’s, a pair of ripped up jeans and whatever pair of shoes were comfortable enough to pass muster.

  Wearing business casual pants, a buttoned-down shirt, and – tie or no tie? He had finally settled on no tie. He felt like a fraud. If he just added some penny loafers and a loose cotton V-neck that showed the top of his chest he would look like something out of a Macy’s ad, which actually would’ve been possible ten years ago when he dipped his toe in the world of modeling before realizing that most of the people in that business were douche bags and he couldn’t stand it.

  “Hey, who died? You look like you’re going to a funeral, man,” said Mike, walking into the roo
m looking pretty natty himself in a similar outfit, just without the black pants. Mike was wearing khakis and some kind of boat shoes that Dylan thought had gone out of fashion back in the 80’s, when he was a kid. The guy managed to make Superman look puny. He could have been a stunt man for The Avengers, minus the confidence. For whatever reason, Mike was a man without swagger. He just was, a steady presence that made Dylan feel complete.

  “What about you, man?” he challenged. “Why are you all dressed up? You got a hot date, too?” He narrowed his eyes and peered at his roommate, wondering. Nah, no way – he didn’t. Mike hadn’t gone out in eighteen months, not since Jill died.

  Mike grinned. “I wish. Meeting at the ski resort.”

  “It’s July!”

  “I know, but we start getting ready now, believe it or not. Some people actually plan out processes and don’t always fly by the seat of their pants.” He muttered the last sentence under his breath but clearly meant for Dylan to hear every word.

  Dylan just shook his head and said, “I like being a pantser.” Big grin. “Have fun.”

  “I’d rather be doing what you’re doing,” Mike replied, then paused, seeming to think over what he’d just said.

  “Me too,” Dylan laughed, grabbing his keys. “Don’t wait up for me.”

  “I’m staying overnight at my cabin, so no worries. You have the place to yourself. I hope things work out with Laura. That,” he paused, brow furrowed, “that could really benefit everybody, huh?” Mike winked and the two hugged, Dylan forced to reach up to the only person in his life taller than himself. And broader.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Dylan said, shaking his head.

  “Are you going to tell her about the money?” Mike’s voice was more defiant than usual, as if challenging Dylan to some sort of battle he didn’t even know was on the horizon. Dylan knew, though, that the tone in Mike’s voice was as much about his own demons; neither had ever expected this kind of surprise from Jill’s death. They would both gladly give it all up to have her back. Barring that, though, the money was certainly a welcome, if perplexing, change in their lives.