LITMIR.BIZ

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within my grasp. “This is going to be great.”

      “Is it?” Louise asked weakly, and reached for the bottle of Diet Pepsi.

      “It’ll be an adventure!”

      “Wonderful.”

      Four

      Black Leather

      “H ey, Hannah, you should have stopped by my office today,” Scott said, closing our front door behind him. It was three days after our dinner at the restaurant. “This woman came in with an abscess under one of her molars. The infection went all the way down into the jaw, where it had eaten out a pocket of bone—”

      “Oh, God, Scott, shut up!” I said, covering my ears and ducking my head toward my lap in an effort to shut out the image he was conjuring.

      “I had to drill through her tooth, and when I did, this spurt of pus—”

      “I’m going to throw up.”

      “And the smell—”

      “Stop it!”

      “I second that,” Cassie said. “That is beyond gross. Jeez, Scott, you’ve been sucking ether too long if you think that makes interesting conversation.”

      “We don’t use ether. That went out in the fifties.”

      “You get my point.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s safe, Hannah. The beast has been silenced.”

      I glared at Scott, then spun ninety degrees in my desk chair and stood, going to snatch the grocery bag out of Scott’s hands. “What’s in here?” I asked.

      “Greedy thing, aren’t you?”

      “You went to Zupan’s? We’ll have to get out the linen tablecloth.” Zupan’s was the aesthetically pleasing grocery store a few blocks down from our house. Cassie and I usually shopped at Safeway, assuming that any supermarket as attractive as Zupan’s must be beyond our means.

      “That’s me, Dr. Deep Pockets. I picked up some things to make this torture more endurable.”

      I dug through the bag. Purple grapes, store-made brownies, red wine and Tater Tots. I pulled out the bag of frozen potato product and held it up, making a questioning face.

      “Don’t you like Tater Tots?” Scott asked.

      “Don’t they remind you of school lunches from grade school?”

      “If you don’t want any, it’s more for me.”

      Cassie took the bag from my hand and carried it into the kitchen. I heard banging as she dug out our one cookie sheet.

      “Did you get the photos scanned?” I asked.

      “I e-mailed them to you,” he said, flopping down onto the lumpy futon with its stained blue-canvas cover. He looked perfectly at home. Our nasty beige shag carpeting never kept him from sitting on the floor, either, and it didn’t seem to bother him that half our glasses were jelly jars.

      I would say that was because he was a guy, but I’d seen his place, a condominium on a bluff overlooking NW Portland, and I knew better. His taste went toward black leather furniture and lots of stereo equipment, and he had recently purchased a mission-style cherrywood dining table.

      Of course, all his furniture was buried under dirty clothes, magazines, dishes, and the unnamed effluvia of male existence, but the finer things were there, underneath. He’d once explained that he had to be so clean all day at work, he couldn’t stand to extend the effort to his home.

      That was dentists for you. Bunch of weird-os.

      Louise showed up, her dark brown hair flying in wild curls around her head, tossed by the wind. The touch of pink in her cheeks made me realize anew how pretty she was, and my eyes went to Scott, wondering if he ever regretted that things had not worked out between them.

      He seemed more interested in snooping through our bookshelf. I wondered whether he’d mention the guide to tantric sex that Cassie had recently added.

      “Hannah, I think I got another client for you,” Louise said.

      “Oh?”

      “Derek, at work. He’s lost a bunch of weight and needs some suits altered. I gave him your card.”

      “Is he the one who just got divorced?”

      “Uh-huh,” she said, and the corner of her mouth crooked in a smile.

      I raised my eyebrows. Scott stopped browsing the bookshelf, and Cassie appeared from the kitchen doorway, plate of Tater Tots in hand.

      “What?” Louise asked.

      “You tell me,” I said.

      “What? About Derek?”

      “Don’t say you’re going for a guy who just got divorced,” Scott said.

      “I’m not! Who said I was? I’m not interested. He has two teenage kids, you know. He’s too old for me.” She smiled like a naughty child. “Looks pretty good since he lost that weight, though. Oh, I’m just kidding,” she said before any of us could say anything. “You think I’m stupid? I have a degree in this crap, I know what not to do.”

      Cassie put the plate of Tater Tots down on the coffee table. “You’re the one who told us that counselors were the most screwed up bunch of people on the face of the planet, and not worth dating.”

      “That’s true enough.”

      I went over to the computer and woke it from sleep mode as Louise shed her coat and Cassie poured her a jelly jar of red wine. Scott went to work on the Tater Tots, squirting ketchup in a big puddle, and Cassie sat lotus-style and straight-backed on the floor and picked up a brownie. No one had touched the grapes, perhaps because they were fresh and unprocessed and therefore good for one. I tore off a small bunch and took them with me back to the computer desk, a few feet from the coffee table, just so they wouldn’t look scorned.

      “I don’t have to write my own ad, do I?” Scott asked as I connected to the Internet. “You three should write it for me. You know what women want.”

      I peered at him over my shoulder. “The idea here is to find your one-in-a-million match, not to score as many babes as you can.”

      “That sucks. Maybe I’m not ready for my one-in-a-million.”

      “Yes you are,” Louise said. “You’ve been messing around long enough.”

      “No I haven’t. I just got the BMW six months ago. I need to cruise! I need to impress chicks with my wheels!”

      “What are you, sixteen?” I asked.

      “I need to put the top down and leer at women on the sidewalks. I need to have hot tub parties.”

      “You don’t have a hot tub,” I said.

      “And your car is not a convertible,” Louise said. “And this is Portland. Who has a convertible? It rains too much.”

      “Don’t spoil my fun.”

      “Don’t you ever wonder what germs might live in hot tub water?” I asked as I logged onto the personals site I had chosen for our group experiment. “You think of hot tubs at apartment complexes, and what scungy people might get in there nude, oozing fluids left and right. And then it just stays there, bubbling. Don’t bacteria multiply in the heat?”

      “Hannah, yuck,” Cassie said. “I was going to go to Carson Hot Springs next weekend, too.”

      “Half a cup of Clorox might help,” Scott said.

      Cassie grimaced. “That’s just what I want, to breathe in steaming bleach. That is not why one goes to natural springs.”

      “It’s probably hot enough you don’t really

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