Page 9 of Her Age Gap Match

I looked down at her—one of the only people I ever actually looked down at, which was especially funny given she was into jiu jitsu and always said she would protect me from intruders if necessary.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, shaking her head. “Just like…fell asleep to this Ted Bundy documentary and I had a dream your boss set me up with a guy who wanted to eat soup out of my skull.”

I stared at her.

“Do you want some tea?” she asked.

I frowned. “You’re not going to serve it to me in a skull, are you?”

She snorted. “No, you dork. I’m just up and you’re up and want some company.”

We both laughed as I followed her down the hall, grabbing a fluffy robe off the coat rack by my door and snuggling up into it. Stevie was in what appeared to be a llama onesie, the hood staring at me upside down.

“Sophie would never set me up with a cannibal, right?” she asked. “Like—that’s a screening question?”

“We do a very thorough intake process,” I said. “Cannibalism would almost certainly come up.”

“Good.” She filled the kettle and set it on the stove, then turned around and leaned against the counter with her arms crossed. “So why are you actually up?”

“I told you. Just couldn’t sleep.”

She stared at me, eyes narrowed behind her glasses. I had lived with this woman for four years; she looked at actual dead bodies professionally and remained perfectly composed.

My poker face was not going to work on her.

“Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t a bad dream exactly.”

“What kind of dream was it?”

“Stevie—”

“Was it about Whiskey Daddy?”

I groaned, covering my hands with my face, and not for the first time I scolded myself for ever telling Stevie about Johnny. We’d been drunk one night and she’d been asking me about if I ever had a thing for clients, and I’d blushed and said, Well, there’s this one guy and she’d said Ooh, tell me about it, and then she’d never let me live it down.

“He has a name,” I said.

“Yeah, but John is so boring,” she said. She turned back to the counter to grab mugs and tea bags. “What happened?”

I sat down at the tiny kitchen table and chewed on my lip, clasping my hands in front of me.

“Well…he had his fourth failed date this week,” I said. “Which—to me is just crazy⁠—”

“Because you have a thing for him.”

“Right, we’ve established that.” I groaned, resting my head in my hands now. “But then Jasper—because Jasper loves to meddle even though he’s a data scientist and not a matchmaker—comes up to me after our weekly meeting and hands me this piece of paper. He took off age gap boundaries in the system and turns out…me and John are a perfect match. Like, 99%.”

That actually made Stevie turn around.

“No fucking way.”

“Yes fucking way,” I said.

“That’s—” She shook her head. “Poppy, that’s insane. How high do those scores usually go?”

“We’ve had three cases in the whole of Bloom’s lifetime that have a match index that high,” I said. “And all three of them are now married with kids.”