Free Jenny Lopez Saves Christmas by Lindsey Kelk Page A

couldn’t Sadie be more helpful? Or, you know, any help at all? Why couldn’t the power just be working? Why couldn’t Stephen just give me the business without making me jump through his dumb pitch hoops, and why couldn’t I find the perfect man to pay half the mortgage on an amazing West Village townhouse and fill me full of babies?
    â€˜Calm down, Jenny,’ I told my reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘Everything happens for a reason. This is all making you stronger for some greater purpose.’
    Only I didn’t feel stronger. I felt tired and hungry and cold and I was definitely getting a headache. I was considering burying my face in the snow when my phone dinged into life. It was a text message. It was a text message from Joe. Okay, I looked up at the sky and acknowledged the miracle, not terrible timing. I stared at the house waiting for the lights to come on. Nothing. We were on a ‘one miracle at a time’ schedule.
    â€˜Holy Mary mother of God, please don’t let this be a photo of his junk,’ I said, closing my eyes and holding my phone to my heart.
    I’d talked to my guy friends: I knew they only sent pictures of their peen so you’d send your own PG-13 pic in return, but it really was such a turn-off. However awesome a penis might be, photogenic it was not. Giving myself one last supportive glance in the mirror, I unlocked my phone and opened the message.
    Ah. So, it turned out there was something worse than a dick pic.
    Right there on the screen, underneath my sexy Santa selfie, was the word ‘THX’.
    It wasn’t even a word. It was three letters. He couldn’t even be bothered to type out the word ‘thanks’. I’d been dissed and dismissed with an abbreviation. My heart and my self-esteem were sinking deep into the bottom of my hiking boots when three flickering grey dots appeared at the bottom of the screen. He wasn’t done! He was writing something else!
    â€˜Some guys aren’t great texters,’ I reminded myself quickly. ‘Some guys are better in person.’
    But then the little grey dots disappeared and no message replaced them. I waited, counted to ten and then to twenty. But still nothing. Somehow, Joseph C. Davies had found the only way on earth to make his message worse – he had thought about saying something else and then decided I wasn’t worth the effort.
    â€˜Let this forever be a lesson to you,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Never sleep with a guy on the first date and never send a selfie of yourself in a sexy Santa costume. You dumb-ass.’
    Christmas could suck my dick.
    Once upon a time I’d prided myself on knowing exactly how to play any guy, but at some point during the last couple of years I’d completely lost my way. Part of me blamed online dating, part of me blamed Apple for the invention of the iPhone, but a big part of me knew I had just got distracted. It was easy to invest yourself in flirting in your early twenties when nothing mattered. Dating was fun and easy, boys were dumb and easy, there was no pressure. Now everything mattered. Every day I woke up and heard the tick-tick-ticking of my biological clock, a sound so loud the only thing that drowned it out was the desperate cry of the crazy cat lady within wailing ‘I’m so lonely’ at the top of her voice. But I still couldn’t work out the magic formula. Someone had changed it without telling me, and no matter how many ingredients I threw into the pot, I couldn’t get it right. I was so busy with work, with my friends, with online banking and online shopping and working out with my headphones in, I’d completely forgotten how to interact with guys unless it meant swiping right or left.
    As per, the universe didn’t give me too long to feel sorry for myself and my phone began to ring in my hand, Erin’s face beaming up at me out of the handset.
    â€˜Hey, are you there?