Valentine's Day Is Killing Me Read Free

wasn’t because he was a Greek major, like he told me. It was from the condom brand! Yerrrgggh!”
    “Anything sounds bad,” Kara Jay said, “when you put it like that.”
    “And you! You have no perspective when it comes to this stuff! What was it Sean told you on your first date? ‘Make yourself at home—my apartment is your apartment, my penis is your penis.’”
    “He grew on me.”
    “Like a foot fungus!”
    “What about Bradley? Bradley was okay.”
    “Ha! He spent the entire date talking about all his super-secret Army exploits, which of course he couldn’t tell me about because they were soooo secret (shyeah!). Then he started babbling about his Klingon costume for the convention, and how he was going to dress up as Data for the Star Trek convention…and then…then! Two days later, a Princess Leia costume shows up in the mail for me. After one date! Exit, stage right.”
    “But you have to admit, he was nice. You—”
    “I’ve had dates tell me I could order anything I want. Thanks, jackass, I know that. I’ve had first dates present me with written proof they have a clean bill of health…like that was going to be a huge issue. I mean, can I at least finish my risotto before I have to read about a guy’s white count?”
    “Okay, so you’ve had some bad experiences. We all have.”
    “You’re blissfully married to your high-school sweetheart, you jerk.”
    “Well, I meant ‘we’ in the…uh…universal sense. Right! I—”
    Her computer binked at her again and she swung around in her chair to see the latest horror.
     
    From: Scott Wythe
To: Julie Kay About
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2006 4:22 PM
Subject: How about dinner?
     
     The new proof looks terrific. My boss is thrilled. (I.T. guys, you should be thrilled, too.) How about dinner? You’ve probably got plans for tomorrow, but how about Friday?
     
     If you refuse, i’m gonna keep writing u letters like this and u will be sorry, grrrrl!
     
     
    “Oh dear God,” she breathed, hypnotized by the screen.
    “What? What?” Kara Jay squawked in her ear. “Is it the I.T. guys again? Have they mobilized? Did they feed your computer another virus?”
    “No, it’s…a guy I work with, the new guy down in Marketing, asked me out for tomorrow night.”
    “Well, there you go!”
    “He says he’s sure I’ve got plans for tomorrow so maybe we could get together another time.”
    “It’s nice that he’s not assuming you’re a mean, lonely freak,” Kara Jay observed.
    “I’m not lonely,” she said defensively.
    “But you’ll let the other two slide? You are a freak. A freak who doesn’t have a date for tomorrow. And you work with him! So that’s not a blind date at all. It doesn’t break your dumb dating rule.”
    “It is. I’ve never laid eyes on him. Eight thousand people work here, you know, and most of us aren’t here in the main building. He could walk right up to me and slap me in the face and I wouldn’t know him.”
    “Wait,” her sister said, and chuckled.

Chapter Five
     
     
    Julie Kay spotted the crowd outside Tables of Content and hesitated. Typical V-Day mob, all right. All googly-eyed couples and starchy waiters. She definitely should have followed her instincts and stayed home. There was nothing wrong with being single, dammit! Why didn’t married people get it? Why had she weakened? Why was her bra itching? Why had she swapped her comfortable gray clogs for black flats?
    Well, there was nothing for it. Time to bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns, pick your annoying cliché. It was only one night, anyway. How bad could it possibly be? It couldn’t be worse than the Republican who brought a shotgun along. Or the model. Right? Because the chances of topping her worst date records were so slim as to be—
    The dying wail of a siren cut the air and an ambulance screeched up to the curb. She heard someone yell out, “You’re too late—the poor guy’s dead!” and someone else