The Dating Game (Alphalicious Billionaires 5)

“He said he couldn’t take me seriously because I was named after a seventies-style vagina. I swear I could kill my mom some days.”

“I like your name. You can do all sorts of fun things with your name.”

“No. Guys don’t want to date me at all because the first thing they see is my name and it makes them think of seventies bush and rotting old beavers in a time when people still called boxers beavers and it’s just a huge turn-off.”

“You could always give in and do online dating.”

“I’d rather invent a time machine and go back in time and force my mother to give me a normal name.” Muffy sighed. “God. Why does it cost so much to get all your ID changed? I would totally pick a normal name. Something like, Deanne or Stephanie or Amy.”

“Yeah, well Carla sounds like a name for the evil aunt, the kind who dyes her hair neon orange and gets a perm every other week and borrows her husband’s Hawaiian shirts.”

“Carla is a nice normal name.”

Carla shrugged. “Does it smell like burning in here?”

“Uhh…” Muffy paused mid pity party. She sniffed the air. “Yeah. It kind of does. Why? What were you trying to make before the popcorn?”

For someone who was so successful, had a Masters in Marketing, who ran her own boutique, who was confident being single, who took charge and who others followed effortlessly and looked up to, there were some things Carla couldn’t do. God, she’d burn her takeout even if she didn’t have to cook the damn stuff, she was that bad.

“Oh- yeah. I went through a couple of batches of popcorn.”

“How do you burn popcorn?”

“I think I overloaded the maker. It just came out all black.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t burn the place down. Remind me to call my insurance and up the liability part of it. If you catch the building on fire, the two million dollars isn’t going to go far.”

“We have mine too. So together it would be like, four million.”

“This is Chicago. Four million is going to cover like one single apartment and there are like sixty in here.”

Carla rolled her eyes. She nibbled at the popcorn and talked with her mouth full. “It was the maker’s fault. They could sue it.”

“You can’t sue for that. I think they would claim that it was user error and you’d be hooped.”

“Yeah, well, at least I got you to stop thinking about Steve. The guy was like three hundred years older than you anyway. It’s no big loss.”

“He was forty. I’m thirty. That’s only ten years.”

“Really? Guess I must suck at math.”

“You’re amazing at math,” she deadpanned.

Carla couldn’t help but crack a smile. “Relax,” she assured her, with one of those special Carla eye roll specialties that told the receiver just how much they were really loved. “You’re thirty. Thirty is young. No one has kids until they’re like forty anymore anyway. Not that you want kids. We have too much stuff to do first. You’re a great catch. You’re smart. You make a decent amount of money at the world’s most boring job. Best of all, you still have a tight body. Your tits haven’t even started to sag, so trust me, you’re good. Even with a name like Muffy. Steve is the one missing out.”

“You never liked him. And his old balls.”

Carla visibly shuddered. “Thank god I never had to see his old balls. It would have done me in. Death by balls. I can see the headline now. Death by hairless balls”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. There’s always online dating. We could make you a good profile, take a few grainy pictures, and best of all, make you a fake name. You wouldn’t even have to give them your real name on the date. Then you couldn’t get dumped by grey pubed men over something so stupid they should have their head examined to see if it’s actually hollow. Hey, maybe that’s why he shaved them all off. He didn’t want you to know how white they were.”

The bridge of Muffy’s nose burned again. She blinked so rapidly her eyelashes probably would have flown off if they were fake. But no, they weren’t fake. They were just her own bland boring eyelashes. She never wore falsies. She was an accountant. Accountants didn’t wear false eyelashes. Accountants looked exactly like her. They had brown mousy hair and skin that was a little too pale even in the summer and boobs that were probably a size too small and a flat ass and a skinny body and bland features that no amount of makeup was really going to dress up.

“I don’t want to die an old shrew,” Muffy moaned.

Carla licked her fingers again. Nice, long, tapered fingers with perfectly manicured nails. Carla was beautiful. Blonde. Stacked. Perfectly proportioned in every way that mattered. She had a natural disdain for all men and vowed she’d stay single until the day she died, so her looks were wasted. Muffy wondered if her friend would ever consider doing a body switch in the near future. She wished those things were doable, just like the time machine thing.