The Match (It Happened in Charleston 1)

I gaze longingly at Charlie curled up at my feet. There’s so much comfort in him resting. If he is resting peacefully, it means I’m safe too—no danger of a seizure.

“He won’t live as long as you.”

My eyes fly up to Jo, and I take in her smiling face. If I had another pillow, I’d throw it at her too.

She laughs. “I’m sorry! I was just tryin’ to lighten your heavy mood.”

“By telling me my dog is going to die?!”

She shrugs. “My humor is dark.”

I shake my head in a mock reprimand and sink back into my corner. I wish my couch was this big and comfy, but that tiny loveseat was hard enough to fit in my apartment.

“Joking aside, I have no idea how you’re still single, Evie. You’re gorgeous. Funny. Driven. Leggy.”

Epileptic.

“As it turns out, men don’t really like to approach a woman with a dog wearing a bright-blue vest and a patch sewn on that says, “Hi, I’m single, and occasionally I lose consciousness and convulse on the ground.”

I can see in Jo’s eyes that she wants to make a sarcastic joke about the patch reference, but she refrains and instead says, “I wish there was something I could say to make it better. But I know there isn’t.”

Reason #12,345 why I love Jo. She understands people because she’s a good listener. She’s been listening to people with every disability under the sun for the past five years of working for Southern Service Paws. She understands that sometimes people just need to talk and be heard—not fixed.

“Can we change the subject?” I ask, feeling a little too spent from this day to go down a deep, heartfelt tunnel.

“Sure.” She pulls her legs up onto the couch to mirror my position. I swear she looks closer to thirty than seventy. And yet, she’s sixty-five years old. “Tell me how your meeting went today.”

I groan. Maybe I should just go home. Apparently, there is no acceptable topic for me and my I-hate-everything mood tonight. “I wished him good luck trying to walk with his head up his butt.”

Jo’s mouth falls open just as I suspected it would. “Gracious, girl! Why’d you say that?”

I skew my face up and then shove it into the collar of my t-shirt to hide. What I said to Mr. Broaden was so unprofessional and a drastic overreaction to what he said. Sure, he was a class-A jerk to me, but I shouldn’t have responded the way I did. I should have smiled politely, thanked him for his time, and then went home and stuck a hundred pins in the voodoo doll I made of him. Instead, I cast a bad light on our compan

y.

“Well, in my defense, he was rude to me first. But still, I shouldn’t have said what I did. And definitely not in front of his ten-year-old daughter.”

“All right, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to pop some popcorn, and then you’re going to start from the beginning.”

And that’s what I do. I tell her everything. Well, almost everything. I leave out the part about him being ridiculously hot and me replaying the scene in my head a hundred times, except changing the course our conversation took and ending it with us making out in the corner. She doesn’t need to know any of that.

When my monologue is finished, Jo laughs and tells me she would have done the same thing. But I don’t believe her, because she treats the company like it’s her baby. She’s helped train over sixty dogs that have literally changed people’s lives—giving them freedom in ways that medicine never could. She would never have let one stinging comment from an attractive guy undo her like it did me.

Jacob Broaden struck a nerve inside me. It still hurts.

Before I leave, Joanna and I discuss the plans I made that day for the fundraiser, and then I spend the rest of the night continuing to obsess over that five-minute conversation in the coffee shop. I teeter between embarrassed of my actions and spitting angry that he would say something like that to me, because:

1) YES, I am hard up for money, and how dare he point that out.

2) Everyone knows that car salesmen are probably the most annoying humans ever, so I take great offense to that comparison.

3) He was right.

I was pushy and obnoxious. I was acting like I would be fired if I didn’t meet my quota, because something in me actually does feel that way—not that Jo would actually fire me, but like I constantly need to prove my worth by helping every single person struggling with a disability. Every time I match someone with one of our dogs, I feel like I’m earning my keep in this world. Like maybe, one of these days, my parents will see the grand total of people I’ve helped and finally say, “You know, Evie, I’m glad you took your own path in life. I’m proud of you!”

I pop that dream bubble and move on.

Later that night, after Charlie and I are back in our own little corner of the world, we spend our time curled up on my tiny loveseat, watching Friends reruns while I eat sherbet ice cream out of a mug. I think Charlie has a crush on Rachel, because any time she comes on the screen, his ears perk up. Your ears never perk up for me like that anymore, buddy.