AllFreeNovel
Share Us
1
“I have beenon so many dates that turned into pumpkins at midnight, you might as well call me Tinder-fucking-rella,” Vivien Wells announced as she walked in from the back door of Brewed Awakenings, the coffee shop she has owned with her sisters for the past eight years.
“Jar.” Without even glancing in Viv’s direction her youngest sister Audrey motioned to the swear jar that she’d started in an attempt to dissuade Viv from using bad language.
Each month, the money collected from Viv’s potty mouth was donated to a charity of Audrey’s choosing, which rotated between animal causes, sick kids, and women’s shelters.
Viv looked around and saw that there were no customers in the coffee shop. She’d agreed to go along with the swear jar but only when there were customers that could possibly overhear her.
“There’s no one here.”
“You didn’t know that when you came in.”
Viv considered making a case that whether or not she knew if there were any customers was not relevant, but decided she had bigger fish to fry. Instead of challenging her punishment she wrote $5 on a sticky note and slid it in the jar. Each word cost her a different monetary amount. The F-word was the big kahuna at a whopping five buckaroos. Shit was a mere dollar.
“I take it last night didn’t go well?” Audrey asked as she cleaned out the espresso machine and finally addressed what Viv had said.
“You could say that.”
“What happened?”
“Everything was going okay. He showed up on time. Was in the sweet spot of being attractive but not hot enough that he’d be high maintenance. We ordered a drink and he started complimenting me. At first, they were harmless. He said I had pretty eyes, pretty hair. Then when the drinks arrived, he slammed his Moscow Mule and ordered another one before the server left the table. That was red flag numero uno, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was nervous and just wanted to take the edge off.
“We kept talking and everything seemed normal. She returned with drink number two and he did the same thing, chugged it and ordered another. I decided then that I’d be leaving after his third drink came but before it did, he reached out and brushed the back of his knuckles against my cheek and told me, and I quote, ‘your skin is so soft I want to wear it as a robe.’”
Audrey’s face distorted in horror as she finally lifted her head and looked at Viv. “A robe?”
“Yep. A robe.”
“Was it… a joke?” Audrey asked, grasping at straws to make sense of the comment.
“Oh, no. I saw the gleam in that man’s eyes. Hannibal Lecter meant it. He wanted to wear my skin.”
“What did you do?”
“I called an Uber and got the hell out of there.”
Audrey shook her head, clearly still in disbelief. “How did you meet this guy?”
“Dating app.”
Viv had been meeting all of her potential suitors that way. She used to mine the pool of vacationers that came to Hope Falls, but since she’d decided she wanted something more than just a week or two of fun, she’d gotten serious about her soulmate search and had gone digital. After a year of online dating, she could confidently say that dating in the age of technology was not for the faint of heart.
It’s not like she had the bar set that high, either. She wasn’t that picky at all. She had one rule. No kids. Other than that, she was pretty open. Viv was the Queen of Spin. She could turn a negative into a positive as easily as writing a simple line down the middle of a subtraction symbol making the equation addition.
No job? He was ready for a new challenge.
Divorced? Obviously has no problem committing.
Served prison time? Who doesn’t love a reformed bad boy?
Audrey’s expression turned thoughtful. “Maybe you should try something other than dating apps.”
Viv knew that her baby sister was trying to be helpful, but her sister’s suggestion struck a nerve.
“Like what?” Viv asked. “Dating apps are all I’ve got. It’s hard out there in these streets.” Sensing her sister wasn’t quite getting just how difficult Viv’s situation was, she continued to defend herself by pointing out how each one of her three sisters’ origin stories of their fairytale HEAs were unique and not the norm. “We’re not all lucky enough to fall in love with a mystery man that took a bullet for us like Ava. Or be forced to fake a relationship on a reality television show like Grace. Or find out that the feelings for the person we’ve been in love with since we were four are not unrequited after all like you. I wish it was, but it’s not. Finding my person is taking a lot more leg work than any of you faced!”
Viv could hear that she sounded bitter as she listed off the ways all three of her sisters had fallen in love, but she couldn’t help it. She was frustrated. It seemed that life was falling into place for them and she just felt…stuck.
