“Of course, she loves them,” Penny says. “They’re so good I’m convinced they’re hatched from magic chickens who lay enchanted eggs.”
A chuckle bursts forth from my throat. I can’t help it.
“You really do think they have magic yard birds out back?” Penny asks playfully, pointing to the swinging screen door of The Charming Breakfast Spot, as a waitress saunters inside.
I nod. “Absolutely, a whole shed full of charmed creatures serving up food for us,” I say, since I don’t want to explain that this makes me think of my naughty nicknames for Tyler. His cock was magic and his tongue was beyond enchanted.
“So, what do you say?” Penny continues. “Should we look him up?”
Nicole answers before I can, gesturing at me like I’m exhibit A. “It’s not like she’s been pining away for him all this time.” She sets her green-eyed gaze on me. “You haven’t even mentioned him in ages. Who cares that he has a kid? Who cares if he’s married? You don’t care about him anymore.” She bangs a fist on the table to make her point. Her dog Ruby raises her snout in alarm and Nicole gently strokes the animal’s long nose as she talks. “You’ve moved on. So let’s focus on the opportunities in front of you. Like breakfast.”
That’s Nicole for you. The woman never dwells on the past. She has a saying that exes are exes for a reason, and they should stay that way.
“Or,” Penny suggests, “we could focus on breakfast and encouraging Delaney to date again.”
Nicole beams at the mention of dating. “Yes, that too.”
I shake my head. “Please. You know the last time I tried dating—it was a parade of mama’s boys, players, and far too many unsolicited dick pics, and I wasn’t even on a dating site.” I cringed at the memory of the collection of appendage imagery that appeared on my cell phone. “I can’t go there again.”
“Nonsense. There are plenty of good men in the city.” Nicole slaps the menu on the table. “And plenty of men who have been trained not to send dick pics without permission.” She leans in closer and lowers her voice. “But admit it. A cock shot can be nice from the right man.”
I roll my eyes. “Nicole, is that the topic of your next column? Nice Cock Shots and How to Score Them?”
Nicole wiggles her eyebrows. “But of course. It’s a critical skill for the modern woman navigating the minefield of online dating.”
Nicole writes a dating column, but it’s more like a humor column, and it runs on several prominent women-centric lifestyle sites. She covers key topics for today’s single ladies, from whether to go full bush, landing strip, or bare as a baby’s bottom, to how to pen the ideal breakup letter, especially one you don’t accidentally send from a secret ghost account you use to spy on the men you’re dating from the same online site. That happened to one of her readers, and Nicole guided the distraught woman to not only remedy the error but actually patch up with the guy.
She’s a dating guru.
Penny scoops her Chihuahua mix into her lap. “Look, dating might be Crazylandia, but we can help you through it,” she offers. Penny’s happily engaged, and Nicole is single and just plain . . . happy.
“What better day to get back in the saddle than when you see your college boyfriend?” Nicole adds.
I roll my eyes. “Nicole, if only the world could be as cool and calm as you when it comes to exes.”
She stabs her finger against the menu. “But you can. If you really cared about his situation, you’d have looked him up a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. You only mildly care because you saw him out of the blue.” She pats my hand. “Find the will to resist looking him up.”
I furrow my brow. “In theory, that makes perfect sense. In reality, I’m all about expunging toxins from the body, and that man is some kind of toxin.”
Nicole tosses her hair back and laughs. “Oh, you win.” She mimes rubbing a pair of shoulders. “Maybe you need to massage him out of your system, too.”
“Let’s not go that far,” I say. Though I am a big believer in confronting the knots in your muscles, since I’m a massage therapist by trade. That mantra is also how I like to approach life—don’t avoid problems; work through them.
“If you need to look him up before you start dating again, then by all means, let’s purge him.”
Penny grabs her mobile device from her pocket, sets it on the table, and clicks on the Facebook app. She hovers her finger above her screen. “Are you ready to go down this rabbit hole, Delaney? You want to find out what he’s up to?”
I nod. I need to know. I need to shut the door permanently on Tyler Nichols. Now that I’ve bumped into him, I want to get him out of my system once and for all.
“Like a cleanse,” Penny mutters as she taps his name into the search bar.
“Exactly. I’m going to the juice bar of Facebook to begin my detox,” I say, feeling strangely good about this plan. My girls are right. Time to move on. Time to try again.
After a few quick searches, Penny looks up and declares, “Got him!”
She turns the screen to me and I brace myself, expecting a mélange of casual shots of that gorgeous devil of a man.
But his profile photo is . . . not him at all. It’s a cartoon cat shooting rainbows from his eyes into a bowl of cereal.
I point, barely able to make words. “What the hell is that?”