Free Missed Connections by Tamara Mataya

hair, blue eyes—
    Not me then—I’m a brunette with hazel eyes. I close them now, regret washing over me at the look on Jack’s face when he left. I came off like a judgmental bitch. Pushing away the shame, I focus on the next ad.
The tattoos on your legs were amazing, but the one on your pinky finger drove me wild.
    The places where Jack touched my body suddenly tingle. Wild? His hands drove me three blocks past teenage fangirl insane.
    I hate how all I want is more.
    You can’t have more. He left for a reason.
    I shake my head and click on the next Missed Connection.
    It’s a vain attempt to distract me from how shitty I feel about the things I said to Jack.
    And the discomforting fact that maybe I really don’t know him at all. The worst part is that now I may have ruined our friendship as well.

Chapter 8
    Our main client base is made up of hipster-yuppies—a fairly new breed of people who are a mixture of crunchy granola and corporate successes. A perfect blend of both worlds, becoming more common as the world turns more corporate and greener at the same time. You can find them riding their bikes to work in their suits and getting baristas to pour seven-dollar coffees into fancy eco-friendly thermoses. They’re about the environment, not spirituality like Ziggy and Fern, and boy, do they care about money…as I learned when Ziggy overrode my scheduling and double-booked two of them this morning. They took turns bitching about the egregious waste of their time and money for ten minutes.
    The days that suck the worst are when Ziggy decides to try his hand at reception. Without supervision, he’ll check the messages—and he always screws them up. Unless I want to spend hours trying to decipher Ziggy’s messages or search the schedule and hope I stumble upon the change, I’m forced to wait for Ziggy to reappear and tell me what his hippie shorthand means. But before that, he’ll come out and wonder why I haven’t dealt with the messages yet, as though I should just know what he meant by a misspelled name and nine digits of a phone number.
    Unfortunately, last week when I responded that one of the scheduling conflicts was not my doing, I got a lecture about being defensive. Judging by Ziggy’s and Fern’s reactions, being defensive is one of the worst things you can be. I thought being a shitty secretary was worse. Apparently not.
    At the law firm, I was responsible for drafting and filing contracts that were worth millions of dollars. It was stressful, but the work I did was important. That, and the partners I worked with didn’t screw up my efforts and then treat me like an idiot when things went wrong. If you caused a problem, you copped to it, simple as that.
    The fact that Fern and Ziggy care more about an agitated tone than the truth is highly aggravating. Tiny bubbles of annoyance float through me, but there’s nothing I can do. Even if I know better and my way is more efficient, Ziggy is the boss, and it’s his place. At the end of the day, what he says goes.
    Though sometimes, I’d like to punch him right in the aura.
    The laundry leaves too much time with my mind unoccupied. I haven’t been able to get Jack’s kiss out of my head. He has no idea how close I came to shoving him into my bedroom and then breaking in the apartment one room at a time. He’s definitely better off financially than I imagined, but he’s found a way to party for a living. He’s still not a safe dating prospect, but even if he were, I’m pretty sure he’s never going to talk to me again. I should have softened my words.
    Morosely, I toss the last towel onto the shelf and head back to my desk to fill out Ziggy’s next client’s receipt so it’s ready to go when they’re done. I fucked up. Even though I have my reasons, I owe Jack a huge apology.
    Phyllis is curled up in a chair in the corner. She clears her throat as soon as I sit down. “Um…” I can feel that she wants me to ask what’s up, but I hate