Free MAKE ME A MATCH (Running Wild) by Bobby Hutchinson

hate getting a membership for his birthday, and he’ll be worried about the money and try and get a refund—we’ll make sure he can’t—and then he’ll find some way to piss off all the women they line him up with. And all the while, Tessa will be there right under his nose. Don’t even mention her name to him if you can help it.”
    Karen hadn’t. She hadn’t even told either of them that both of them were coming to her place tonight. Knowing Eric’s track record, Karen was worried about Tessa. “Should we maybe give her some idea what we’re doing, see how she feels about it?”
    “No can do,” Sophie insisted. “They both have to figure this is their own idea if it’s going to work.”
    “But Tessa could get her heart broken, you know what he’s like with women,” Karen argued.
    Anna had been tapping frantically on her laptop as her sisters talked. “Listen to this,” she commanded. “I don’t have Tessa’s exact moment of birth, but even without it, she and Eric are compatible. Their relationship is in the ninth house; it has a fated feeling about it.”
    “There you go,” Sophie said. “Who are we to argue with fate?”
     
    Tessa wasn’t arguing, but Shelby Goodlight must have thought she was, because she kept going over and over the fact that the dentist Clara had lined Shelby up with had turned up for their second date wearing black dress socks with sandals, which Shelby considered ugly, ugly, ugly, no matter what Tessa might think.
    Tessa thought that after twenty-three minutes on the same subject, it was past time to move on, and that matching Shelby, who had an overbite, with a dentist could have been a bracing experience all round. Wrong again.
    “He also suggested I have my teeth bonded, whatever that involves,” Shelby was saying. “Then when I asked what the chances were of him giving my mother a discount on a root canal, he went ballistic.” Shelby raised her eyebrows and held her palms out in a go-figure gesture.
    “Dentists just aren’t sexy, Tessa. I know they make good money, but obviously they’re cheap, and besides you’d have to floss before and after, maybe even during, so don’t line me up with anymore, okay?”
    Tessa made ridiculous promises and sympathetic noises and Shelby finally left. Tessa ate a Zone bar to keep up her strength and to counteract the cigarette she’d smoked just before Shelby arrived. When the phone rang, she almost let the machine take it, but she told herself she did have a responsibility here. She sighed and picked up.
    It was her mother. Why hadn’t she followed her instincts?
    “Tessa, you busy?”
    Tessa sighed and steeled herself. “No, Mom, not at the moment.”
    Maria was a good mother, in the sense that she loved her daughter, cared what happened to her, wanted the best for her. The trouble was, she’d somehow gotten it in her head that since they were both single—she and Tessa’s father, Walter, had divorced when Tessa was twelve—and since Tessa lived in Vancouver again, they should be girlfriends.
    Maria had decided that every Friday night was their “date night.” Tessa was trying to break her of it, but it wasn’t proving to be easy. She loved Maria. You had to love your mother, but she didn’t see how this best friend thing could ever work, and she was right.
    The last time they’d been out together on one of these Friday night disasters, Maria must have read an article in Cosmo on what girlfriends talked about. Leaning across the vegetarian pizza they were sharing, she’d said, “Tessa, which vibrator do you think is worth buying?”
    What did you say when your mother asked a question like that?
    “It’s a matter of personal taste, Mom,” she’d managed to gulp. “And also on how much money you plan on spending.”
    It just wasn’t natural to discuss vibrators with your mother. Next thing, her father, also single, would be asking her advice on Viagra.
    “I’m calling about tomorrow night,” Maria said,