Breaking the Ice

Chapter 10

10

“I’m joining a convent.”

“That’s nice. Let me know when you’re ovulating and I’ll bust you out.”

“I’m being serious, Bec. I’m having absolutely no luck with men.”

“So the date with the aeronautical engineer didn’t go well?”

“It was terrible. He was this really super intelligent guy, like a genius or something.”

“Sam, you have an IQ of 135.”

“Yeah. He asked me mine so I told him.”

“And?”

“He was horrible. It was like he had to prove he was smarter than me. He intellectualized everything. Honestly, I needed a dictionary to understand half the crap that was coming out of his mouth.”

“Sounds heavy going.”

“It felt like an episode of Survivor instead of a date. Outwit. Outlast. Outplay. Except the food was better. Desserts to die for.”

“How was the kiss test?”

“Oh please. Kissing was beneath him.” Samantha groaned. “It’s driving me crazy, Bec! I’ve been on seven dates, which is a lot of kissing. And nothing. From Colin the White to the intellectual giant… nothing. I work in a shop where I’m surrounded all day by books with lots of sex. I work with a guy who is sex on legs and my damn clock is ticking so loud I can barely hear myself think!”

“So, have sex with Nick. He did offer.”

“No. I told you, he’ll be back in Canada soon enough being God’s gift to hockey and he doesn’t want babies. He’s a friend. And that’s all.”

“A sex-on-legs friend. I’ve googled him.”

Of course Bec had. “It’d screw things up.”

“Maybe it’d make things better.”

“No. No fucking with men outside the demographic. It’s very important. I even wrote it on a Post-it. And besides, I like having him as a friend. I get lots of insider information on men. We have fun. I do not want to stuff that up.”

“Okay, okay. So… who’s next?”

“A funeral director.”

“Oh, Sam…”

Vincent the funeral director was just plain creepy. His handshake was cold and limp and he looked like he was wearing cadaver make-up. Nick was going to die laughing.

He had to be punking her now.

She really needed to talk to him about vetting her blind dates better. What was wrong with his brothers? Didn’t any of their wives say: Oh no darling, you couldn’t possibly set anyone up with Vincent, he sleeps in a coffin . Or maybe they were just sick of having a stiff around to dinner and glad to ditch him on any unsuspecting female.

And when it came to the inevitable kiss test, she just couldn’t do it. He was zeroing in and she couldn’t bear the thought of lips as cold as his hands touching hers.

She made a big show of thanking him and held out her hand, pumping his vigorously. He gave her an insipid smile and left and Samantha started to think that eerily white teeth perhaps weren’t so bad after all.

It was quiet in the apartment as she let herself in, quiet enough to hear her eggs shrieking in despair. “You like me just the way I am, don’t you, Godzilla?” she murmured as she walked into the kitchen to chat with her rather unusual-looking goldfish.

His bowl sat at the end of the kitchen bench and Samantha thought again how she really ought to buy him a bigger house. A tank, even a small one would surely make Godzilla’s proportions less noteworthy. Maybe if she removed the toys it’d have a slimming effect?

“Here,” she said, uncapping the fish food bottle and sprinkling a few flakes.

Godzilla lumbered to the surface, mouthed at it a little, stared at her with a black fishy eye and swam away. “I know, I know, I’m an enabler.”

Oh God, how sad. She was standing alone in her apartment talking to her gland-challenged goldfish. She had way too much time on her hands these days. At least when she’d worked for Bob she got in so late most nights she’d been too tired to realize how pathetic her life was.

Samantha threw herself down on her couch and stared at the wall, depressed as hell. If she had a baby her life would be different. The yearning to fill the emptiness with someone in her own image intensified until it was a physical ache in her chest and she flicked the television on to distract herself from the pain.

A doctor was pointing to a chart hanging on his office wall of the female reproductive system, explaining the anatomy to a couple and where their baby was going to be implanted.

Great – an IVF documentary. Just what she needed.

Suppressing the urge to hurl the remote at the television, she switched it off in disgust, preferring the wall and its flocked velvet wallpaper to yet another reminder of her empty womb. Although suddenly, it seemed to be taunting her as well. Why had she never noticed how strikingly similar the pattern was to the chart she’d just seen on the TV?

The beige and green swirls, which she’d always assumed to be floral in origin, now looked like empty uteruses flanked either side by a fallopian tube which curled at the ends, just like the chart, to cup what looked alarmingly like ovaries.

The more she looked at it, the more obvious it became.

She’d never really given a thought to the wallpaper before other than to wonder what the hell they were thinking in the fifties. But it went with the original Lino and Laminex in the kitchen and the ancient locks on the double-hung windows and suited the whole retro feel to the building. To have renovated with more modern décor, as many of the tenants had done over the years, had seemed wrong.

But, oh dear God! She was surrounded by fallopian tubes. On every wall! The empty velvet uteruses mocked her. The bud-like ovaries stared down at her accusingly. Listen to your eggs , they seemed to bellow.

“Screw you,” Samantha muttered belligerently as she glared defiantly at the walls.

She would not be intimidated by crap 1950s décor.

“I have a bone to pick with you,” Samantha said, marching through the shop to the back room the next morning. She was even crankier about the Vincent debacle after a fitful night’s sleep where visions of baron velvet uteruses had danced in her head.

Nick looked up from lifting a box of books. He was wearing soft faded jeans that hugged his thighs to perfection and a navy tee that showed off his very nice biceps. A pen was wedged between his teeth and she had a sudden image of him holding a dagger there instead.

“Another disaster?” he asked around the pen as he set the box down.

“You have got to be kidding me! Nick, where are you getting these guys from? Surely there must be one out of all the men your six brothers know that is… I don’t know… normal!”

If she thought he might sympathize, she was wrong. He was trying and failing – miserably – to suppress a grin.

“Bad, huh?”

“Have you ever met Vincent?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“No. He’s supposed to be a great guy. Edward plays golf with him.”

“He’s creepy. ”

“No. His job is kinda creepy. You shouldn’t project what he does into who he is.”

“Project?” Samantha’s eyes almost bugged right out of her head. “If someone had asked me to draw a picture of an undertaker, I would have drawn Vincent.”

“But I guess the question is… does he kiss like an undertaker?”

Samantha narrowed her eyes at his poorly disguised amusement. “This is not funny.”

He cleared his throat and attempted to look serious. “Of course not.”

“I didn’t kiss him,” she said finally when Nick continued to stare at her and then raised his eyebrow in his I’m waiting way.

“Oh, poor Vincent.” He wagged a finger at her. “That’s discriminatory.”

“It is not!”

“You kissed all the other ones.”

“I did not. I didn’t kiss intellectual giant. Besides… you haven’t met Vincent. Blind Freddy wouldn’t kiss Vincent.”

“You kissed Colin of the incredibly white teeth. When you didn’t want to.”

“Blind Freddy would have kissed Colin.”

“What if Vincent had made your eggs want to get up and dance?”

“Vincent would be more likely to put them into cryogenic deep freeze.”

Nick laughed and it echoed around the store, pushing into every dark corner of the back room. Why couldn’t she meet someone like him? Someone normal . Who wanted to have babies. Surely there were still men out there like that in the world?

“I think it’s time you personally vetted the men your brothers think are suitable. I want someone halfway decent, Nick. I’m getting older every day. My eggs are dying as we speak.”

“Have you ever thought that you’re just maybe being too fussy? There seems to have been something wrong with every one of them. Let’s see.” He held up his hand and ticked them off as he went. “We’ve had freaky white teeth guy. Boring as bat shit guy. Too short guy. Too tall guy. Needed to be medicated guy. Wouldn’t shut-up guy. Intellectual giant guy. And Vincent the creepy guy.”

Samantha winced. She sounded like a total flake. Or a snob. “Look, I’m not after an Idris Elba or a Chris Hemsworth. I just want an ordinary decent guy who wants to have babies.”

“ Any of those men would qualify, Sam. So what’s the problem?”

He was right. On the surface they were all excellent candidates. So what was the problem? There was no… spark . Was it so wrong to want that? If she was going to let her eggs and his swimmers get intimately acquainted then couldn’t there at least be some lust involved?

“I guess I want to have the wow factor,” she admitted.

“Sam…” He leaned in a little, grabbing her whole attention. “That’s not something you can orchestrate. Maybe if you stop trying to force it?”

Samantha stared into Nick’s eyes. His beautiful brown eyes. Now, he would make gorgeous babies. “No.” She shook her head and moved back out of the intoxicating presence of his personal space. “I haven’t got time for my moon to be in Capricorn or whatever the hell it’s going to take to meet eyes across a crowded room.”

“I bet it’ll be worth the wait though.”

Samantha sighed. “You don’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Nick was unprepared for the sudden glower of heat in her glare as she folded her arms. “It’s okay for you,” she muttered. “You travel from city to city with your damn hockey stick, you stay in five-star hotels and get into all the swanky nightclubs. And that’s fine because you love that life and settling down isn’t something that even enters your head.”

“Pretty much.”

“Right. Same. Until I saw Gary with his pregnant fiancée and it was like life knocked me over the head with my biological clock. Even worse, now I’ve got so much more time on my hands I’m actually warming to the idea of motherhood. My eggs are cheeping like hungry chicks waiting for their mother to return to the nest. It’s kind of loud inside me at the moment.”

“Crowded too.”

She shot him a quelling look. “I have estrogen, Nick. Loud estrogen. I can’t drift through my life waiting for that special person to find me. I’m running out of time. I need to hunt him down and drag him back to my cave.”

It dawned on Nick then that Samantha was the kind of woman he’d avoided all his adult life. Or this stage she was going through, anyway. He could take one look at a woman and know if she was a Samantha in one second flat. Samanthas had desperate stamped on their foreheads in writing visible only to men on the make.

“Not for nothing, but the I-want-your-babies act tends to scare more men than it catches.”

“I know that. Which is why I’ve chosen an older age bracket. They’ve been there and done that. They well and truly regret that they didn’t let some woman snag them years ago. They’re not trying to wriggle off any hooks. They want to be landed.”

Nick blew out a breath. She’d obviously given it a lot of thought. And maybe she was right. Maybe men needed a period of freedom and after they’d had it were content to settle.

Was that what was in store for him? If he didn’t recover from this injury and his career went down the tubes? The thought made him shudder.

“I don’t know, Sam.”

“Trust me, I’ve worked with that age group. They’re ready. The single ones complain all the time about how they can never find a woman who wants to settle down. All I need now is someone decent to work with. Find me someone decent, Nick. There must be somebody. ”

“You want me to personally vet your dates?”

“If they’re coming from a family recommendation? Hell yes. Your brothers have appalling taste. Even I have better taste in men.”

“Alright. I’ll check out any prospective guys more thoroughly.”

“Oh no, I want more. I need an escape hatch. Next blind date, you’re coming with me.”

“Uh… okay?” That sounded like a very bad idea. “Isn’t three a crowd?”

“Not at the table . You can sit nearby and if it turns out to be another disaster, I can signal you and you can come to my rescue.”

“That’s a really dumb plan.” And he really didn’t want to watch some guy drooling in his entrée over her.

“Nuh uh. Being stuck with disaster number nine would be dumb.”

“How, pray tell fair lady…” She quirked an eyebrow at his choice of words. Yeah, okay, maybe he was reading far too many Ritas… “Do you plan on executing this little plan?”

“ I’ll worry about the logistics. You just find me someone normal.”