Even more extraordinary, I’m wearing a skimpy, silver-sequined camisole under my winter coat, tight black jeans, and boots with stiletto heels that zip all the way up to my knee.
I look like a girl.
A real girl, the kind who drinks too much pink champagne and giggles with guys in dark corners and makes out with a stranger at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
I look the part, and if I have anything to say about it, come midnight, I’ll be locking lips with someone I barely know.
The thought is way out of my comfort zone—and vaguely repulsive, to be honest—but I’m committed to this plan. I need to banish the memory of Mick Whitehouse’s kiss from my thoughts, and if making out with other guys is the only way to make that happen, I’m ready to pucker up and say “smooch me.”
Still, I’m so anxious I haven’t been able to sit still all day and I’m starting to get dizzy from all the deep breaths I’ve huffed in and out in the past ten minutes.
“Don’t be nervous.” My friend, Kitty, gives me an encouraging thump on the back as we hurry down Main Street, past restaurants filled with people lingering over their New Year’s Eve dinners. “You’re going to have so much fun!”
“You swear Melody doesn’t mind that you’re bringing me along?”
“Not at all,” she says, dismissing my concern with a wave of her arm. “She’s excited to catch up with you. She’s great, I promise. Girlier than my average friend, but fun and sweet. And once you’re her people, she’ll always have your back. You two will get along like peas and carrots. I promise.”
“Cool.” I exhale with a smile, trusting Kitty to give it to me straight.
We reconnected last year when Kitty, the only female mechanic in town, miraculously brought my one-foot-in-the-junkyard truck back to life. We started talking as I settled the bill, discovered a mutual love of 5Ks and old cars, and gradually became good friends.
It helps that Kitty knows what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated profession, and that she isn’t the sort of girl who neglects her friends when she hooks up with a guy.
She and her boyfriend, John, moved in together a few months ago, but Kitty and I still run together every week. And she enlisted John—a fellow cat lover, and total sweetheart—to feed my cat when I’m working a seventy-two-hour shift. And when I was on vacation, too.
Kitty is the kind of girl I can really talk to, and I wish we’d been close sooner. But back in school, she and Melody were joined at the hip and I wasn’t all that interested in girlfriends.
I spent my afternoons running wild with my three cousins—Buddy, Billy, and Buck—on their forty acres. We rode four-wheelers, hunted squirrel, and built forts out of the various construction gig odds and ends my uncle hoarded in his barn. By the time my aunt and uncle moved to Alabama, taking my cousins and partners in crime with them, I was too busy proving myself in my new job to worry about forming new bonds.
Gradually, my co-workers became my friends, and later on, my family, and I stopped trying to have a social life outside of the Bliss River Fire Department.
And I was perfectly content that way.
Still, I’m glad Kitty and I reconnected. It’s good to have a girlfriend my age, especially when it comes to tracking down New Year’s Eve parties and eligible, kissable guys.
“All right, brace yourself,” Kitty says as we round the corner near the bowling alley and start toward an apartment above a shuttered bodega where the New Year’s Eve party is clearly already in full swing. “Melody invited fifty people, so it’s going to be crowded. And hot. I guarantee you’ll be glad you wore a sleeveless shirt.”
“Right,” I say, my mouth suddenly feeling dry, yet sticky at the same time.
The apartment is still a block away, but I can already hear the pulse of club music. People are dancing in there—dancing, the only thing more stress-inducing than kissing. I’m not a bump and grind kind of girl. I’m a stand-in-the-corner-and-roll-my-eyes-at-the-people-dry-humping-on-the-dance-floor kind of girl.
Hopefully I’ll be able to find a guy who feels the same way and avoid any embarrassing wiggling in public.
A guy.
Ugh. A strange guy I’ll have to make some kind of conversation with before the kissing starts.
I swallow hard. “I can do this, right?”
“You can totally do this, and I’m so glad you’re here.” She gives my arm a squeeze as we head up the stairs toward the second-floor apartment. “With John out of town at that stupid convention, I was dreading making an entrance alone. And don’t worry, I’ll stick close.”
I nod and try to smile but fail.
Now that I’m seconds away from being surrounded by other twenty-somethings—twenty-somethings who have social lives and party on a regular basis instead of hanging out at dive bars with firefighters a decade older than they are or snuggling on the couch with their cat every Saturday night—I’m starting to wonder what the hell I was thinking.