LITMIR.BIZ

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if there’s anyone even worth bothering about.”

      I clicked my way to the search page, and filled out the obvious criteria of age range and marital status. “We can search by words in the ads, too.”

      “‘Vegetarian,’” Cassie said.

      “No!” Louise and I said in unison. “No vegetarians,” I said.

      “Why not?”

      “They’re high-maintenance eaters,” I said.

      “Thanks a lot.”

      “Oh, Cass, you’re fine, you don’t make a fuss. But for dating—I don’t want some guy taking me to organic restaurants. And how could I bring a vegetarian home to Mom and Dad?”

      Scott paused in his Tater consumption. “They’ll only let you marry a carnivore?”

      “Omnivore. It would just be too embarrassing. Can you see it? ‘Sorry, Dad, Jeremy won’t be eating any barbecued spare ribs. Could you grill this soy burger for him?’ I’d never hear the end of it.”

      Cassie was still looking pouty. “I don’t see why you should be embarrassed for someone else’s eating habits. If he’s fine with it, you should be, too.”

      “I’m too immature to separate my identity from my date’s,” I said.

      “As if maturity had anything to do with it,” Louise said. “None of us can do that. I certainly can’t.”

      “That’s a chick thing,” Scott said. “Guys don’t care what a girl eats, or what others might think of her taste in clothes, or anything like that.”

      “Bullshit,” Louise said.

      “Louise!” I said, rounding my lips in fake horror at her language.

      “We don’t!” Scott insisted.

      “What a load of crap,” Louise said. “You guys care, you just choose different criteria.”

      “We do not.”

      Louise nodded her head, bouncing it up and down like a street fighter getting ready to brawl, her jaw thrust forward. “You want your date to have big breasts and long hair. You want her to have a nice butt that other guys will stare at.”

      “Hey, that’s got nothing to do with image.”

      “Sure it does,” I said, catching Louise’s thought. “The better-looking your girlfriend, the more of a ‘man’ you appear. You could look like a dead possum yourself, but if you had a beautiful woman on your arm other guys would assume you were something special. Even other women would assume it. They’d think you were rich. Either that, or…”

      “Or what?”

      “Never mind.”

      “Or what, Hannah?”

      “You know.” I cast a quick glance at his crotch.

      Louise affected a Texas drawl. “They’d think that was a mighty fine cut of swinging sirloin you had between them thar legs.”

      “Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that type of thing,” Cassie said, “being a vegetarian.”

      I spoke primly. “Some girls eat meat, some don’t.”

      Scott gaped at us. “And they say guys are bad. You three are worse than any group of men.”

      “Oh, we are not,” Louise said, swishing her hand dismissively.

      “My privates are not up for discussion.”

      “You were the one who insisted,” I said. “And why is it always referred to as a meat product? Sausage, salami, meat, sirloin, and having sex is ‘porking.’”

      “Because you women are the ones who spend all your time discussing it. In centuries past you were all in the kitchen. With the meat.”

      “Yep, that’s where we were. Toiling with the meat,” I said, and giggled, and saw Cassie and Louise bury their noses in their jelly jars. “But bread would have done as well. ‘My man’s got a fine loaf.’ I could see that. ‘I was up kneading it all night.’”

      “It wouldn’t rise,” Louise said. “I put it in a warm place, but nothing happened.”

      “Maybe my yeast wasn’t fresh,” I said.

      Cassie groaned. “Yeast. Oh, gross.”

      “I know, I’m terrible.”

      “You’re as bad as Scott,” Louise said.

      He spoke around the last of the Tater Tots. “Hey, I contributed nothing to this line of discussion.”

      “You’re guilty by association,” Louise said. “You two should write a horror novel together. You could sit for hours thinking up revolting images.”

      “Only if the monster was a dentist,” I said.

      “He could never fit his hairy paws into his patients’ mouths,” Scott said. “He could carry off an ornery seamstress, though.”

      “Yeah, right,” I said, and turned back to the computer, suddenly feeling awkward and wanting to change the subject. “We’re never going to get anything done at this rate.”

      Sometimes I got the littlest bit flustered around Scott. I knew he wasn’t flirting with me, I knew that, yet when a cute guy makes a comment about carrying you off, you start wondering things you have no business wondering about your best friend’s ex-boyfriend.

      “Put in ‘cooking,’” Louise said.

      “Okay.” I hit Search, and a few seconds later a list of names came up, some with a small camera beside them to denote a photo. “Here we go.” I clicked on the first name with a picture as Scott and Cassie joined us at the computer.

      A blank square came up, then the picture started to fill in, top to bottom.

      “A tree, so far so good,” Scott said.

      The top of a head appeared, dark-haired, then a forehead. A face, long and narrow. Neck. Shoulders.

      “Wait a minute,” Scott said. “Is he in the tree?”

      Louise put her hand over her mouth, laughing, as his lower body formed, and we could see his feet bracing him in position in the Y of tree branches. “What the hell kind of message is that supposed to send?” Louise asked. “‘I am a squirrel’?”

      “It’s kind of cute,” Cassie said. “Makes him seem boyish and playful.”

      “Thirty-four, software engineer—of course—never married, no kids, blah, blah, blah,” I said, reading, then hitting the scroll bar to move past the bare stats to the paragraph Squirrel Boy had written about himself.

      “‘Handsome, fit, creative professional seeks an active, petite woman to share wild times and walks on the beach,’” I read, then groaned along with the rest. “Walks on the beach, why do they always talk about walks on the beach? Strolls in the moonlight, candlelit dinners, snuggling in front of the fire. Why can’t they show some originality?”

      “Don’t forget ‘rainy nights,’” Scott said.

      “Those are a step above. It takes a slightly finer aesthetic sense to appreciate rain.”

      “What does he mean by ‘petite’?” Louise asked. “Does he mean short, or skinny?”

      I scrolled back up to the stats. Squirrel Boy was five-eight, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. “I’m guessing both. I don’t know many guys who want their date to be bigger than they are.”

      “Skinny guys sometimes like plump women,” Scott said. “It’s no good having your bones rubbing against hers.”

      I frowned at him over

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