Read The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay for Free Online

rests a fortune in chips. “Keep my streak going,” he calls to me and then is led away.
    My stomach jumps into my neck. The pile of chips is enormous. This guy just left a few hundred—no, thousand—dollars in a pile to be watched over by a complete stranger who just called him a mean name and then got him accosted by casino security. And he wants me to gamble with it?
    I think that’s what he said. And so does the dealer. She has already dealt me my first card. I sit down anxiously and take a look.
    The table is, thank God, just $20 bets. A fortune to me, chump change for this guy. I slowly, as slowly as humanly possible, start losing his money. Every time the bet comes to me I wait as long as I can possibly stand to make a decision, just to try to slow the hemorrhage. Everyone at the table looks annoyed at me. I keep asking stupid questions and trying to distract the person to my left into slowing down too. To this day I’m not entirely clear how the rules of blackjack work. But I just keep plugging away.
    Then, about a hundred bucks down, with me sweating bullets about if he’ll make me pay him back, and how will I ever come up with a hundred bucks after spending everything I had to throw this party in the first place, I hit blackjack. I don’t even notice until the dealer tells me. The whole table cheers for me and the dealer pushes over a huge stack of chips with her fancy chip shover. And Renee glares at me. And then I feel a tap on my shoulder and it’s a waitress with a drink for me “from the guy over there.” The guy over there is Ben Hutchinson, and he is sitting on a bar stool with his two new best friends in the world who are now slapping him on the back and laughing uproariously at his jokes. When he finally does look over at me, he mouths, “Lucky girl!”
    And I do feel very, very lucky. Ben Hutchinson, I learn soon, is indeed a dot-commer, though he doesn’t seem as douchey as I thought at first glance. He first tells me he’s a programmer, but in time I peel it out of him that he was a programmer, and now he’s a developer—and then a drink later it turns out he runs a development company, and I start to get it that the boy is pretty successful and maybe a little smart too. He cashes out his chips—more fun to make it than to lose it, he tells me as though he knows from some experience, and starts calling the fistful of bills they give him “our winnings” and says ridiculous things with a twinkle in his eye that I find irresistible. Things like “What should we spend our winnings on? Shoes? Jewelry? A nice suite upstairs?”
    Believe me when I tell you the boy has game. I tell him laughingly that I’m not that kind of girl, and he sobers his expression a bit, looks me right in the eye, and slowly, softly, cups my face in one large warm hand. “The best ones never are,” he says. I swear I hear the sound of my panties hitting the floor.
    I am just getting to the part where a Vegas wedding comes up in our conversation when I wake with a start. There’s some sort of commotion in my kitchen. It almost sounds like a pigeon got in. That happened a couple years ago—it flew in through the chimney and scarred me for life. Now whenever I hear a sound in my apartment, my first thought isn’t rape or murder, it’s rabies.
    I grab the broom I keep under my bed for just such an occasion. I jump out of bed with a thud and stomp to the light switch and flick it on, then come around the corner brandishing the broom and shouting, probably for my own benefit, “Get out of here, Mr. Birdy! This is my house!”
    And I hit Renee in the face with the soft part of the broom.
    â€œOh my God,” she shouts. “Oh my God, Lily! You are a psychotic crazy person and I fucking hate being your friend!”
    She looks tired and stressed. I know she doesn’t mean it, mostly. “I thought you were a bird.