The Perfect Score. Джулия Кеннер

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      Self-serve gas stations, for example. Okay, yes, sure. It’s nice not to have to wait for—or chat with—Tommy Tune Up, but Tommy’s absence from my life has caused me to burn oil on more than one occasion. I can fill up my car just fine, but those oil dipsticks are designed to be entirely unreadable by anyone lacking a Ph.D. in auto mechanics. It’s true! It’s like a nationwide conspiracy.

      And furniture…Don’t even get me started on furniture.

      I have vivid memories of wonderful wooden pieces being delivered to my parents’ house when I was a kid, hauled in on rolling dollies—fully assembled, mind you—by strapping young men working their way through college.

      So why had those buff Adonises not delivered my furniture? I’ll tell you why: Because some genius somewhere decided that they could draw a picture, include an Allen wrench and make me do it myself.

      Honestly, it’s enough to make a girl never want to have kids. Assemble toys on Christmas Eve? No thank you very much!

      My future progeny notwithstanding, at the moment I had two shelves and a filing cabinet to assemble, and no Adonis to help with the project. Oh well. I’m a self-sufficient female, right? Absent any other options, I figured I could handle it myself.

      I figured wrong.

      An hour later, I’d manage to assemble only the bare frame of the first bookshelf, and that after having to remove and reinsert the first set of screws and little connector thingamabobs. Had the instructions been in English, perhaps I would have had better luck. Instead, the manufacturer had included only poorly drawn pictures of the various steps. And I’m ashamed to say I don’t know how to translate hieroglyphics.

      Frustrated, I tossed the Allen wrench, then made a rude sound when it skittered over the battered wood floor to rest under the couch. That, I figured, was a signal that it was time for a break. Or to call in reinforcements. Or both.

      Buoyed by the thought of something cool and refreshing, I headed to the kitchen. I grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge, popped the top, then took a sip before I called Carla. True, she’d just left an hour ago, but she only lived a stone’s throw away. She’d gone home to put away her laundry and catch up on some housework before Mitch came back from his latest business outing. Considering the depths of Carla’s hatred for toilet bowl scrubbing, I figured my odds of recruiting help were pretty darn high.

      Again, unfortunately, I was wrong.

      “I really wish I could give you a hand,” she said, after I explained my dilemma. “But Mitch caught an earlier flight and he’s already in a taxi.”

      “Oh,” I said, knowing it was pointless to argue. Besides, I was happy for Carla. Happy and not the slightest bit envious. Nope. No green in my blood.

      I cleared my throat. “Right. Well, guess I’ll let you get back to it.”

      “You know, if John thinks it’s so important that you have office furniture at home, maybe he should have hired someone to put it together for you.”

      “Yeah,” I said, figuring that it would be more likely that pink pigs would fly by my open window. “True enough.”

      Carla sighed, obviously understanding what I hadn’t said: I’d never once defied my boss and I wasn’t about to start now. “Listen, Mitch will probably go home early tomorrow. I mean, he’s got to unpack, right? I could help you then.”

      “Great,” I said, but without a lot of enthusiasm. I hung up the phone before she clued in to my suddenly miserable state. If Carla needed shelves assembled, she had Mitch. Me? I had neither a considerate boss nor a studly boy toy.

      I leaned against the fridge and sighed, then took another sip of soda. The fact was, I was a neurotic mess. I mean, had I really announced to Carla that I wanted to up my score on a slut test? That was so not like me.

      I called Carla back and told her that. She immediately laughed. “Are you kidding? That’s exactly like you!”

      “Excuse me?”

      “In school, if you made a lousy grade, you obsessed about it until you got it right. That’s why you’re still working for ballbuster John, isn’t it? Because you can’t go somewhere else until you’ve made a huge success of that? Which is ridiculous, actually, because you never wanted to be the queen of reality television. But you’re giving your life to the job. You haven’t finished a new screenplay in months. It’s your dream, Mattie, and you’ve stopped chasing it.”

      We’d had this particular conversation about a million times, with Carla pushing and me pushing right back. I’d taken the job to further my writing career, and Carla damn well knew that. Today, though, I wasn’t in the mood to remind her. “This isn’t about my job. It’s about me. I mean, what normal person wants to up their Slut IQ?”

      “Whoever said you’re normal?” she countered. “And you’re being ridiculous anyway. You and I both know it’s not about being a slut.”

      “It’s not?”

      “Of course not,” she said. “You just want to cut loose. Honestly, Mattie, it’s about time. You said yourself that your sex life is boring. And it has been boring ever since your first date. Louis Dailey? I mean, come on! You could have done so much better.”

      I frowned at the phone. She had a point. I tended toward the safe guys. The nice guys. I wanted the spice in my life, but I think I was a little afraid that I was too…something for the bad boys. That they’d end up dumping me. And, yes, I was waaaaay too competitive to let that happen.

      So I ended up with guys that I ultimately dumped. Guys without the adventurous quality that I craved. The wrong guys—I knew it from the start—but I hooked up anyway.

      For years, I’d been living on the edge of a vicious—albeit comfortable—circle. Then Dex had gone and dumped me and my entire world view had shifted one-hundred-eighty degrees.

      “A wild fling with Cullen is just the ticket,” Carla said, apparently reading my mind. “He’s definitely the guy to spice up a girl’s sex life, but you know he’s not boyfriend material, so it’s not like you’d date him. So there’s no emotional risk, you know?”

      I did know. And it sounded delicious. In a super-scary sort of way.

      The truth is, I’ve always played life pretty safe. Studying my ass off in high school because I was terrified of a bad grade. A good college. An even better law school. Not because I wanted to be a lawyer but because my parents had pounded into my head that I needed a solid career. Hobbies—like my love of writing—were fine…so long as I didn’t take them too seriously.

      And so I’d emerged from school with a plan. Be an attorney. Get rich. Then do what I wanted. But I’d caught the Hollywood bug (to the chagrin of my mother who likes to pretend that Los Angeles is merely an economic center and not the heart of the film industry). I made the first unpredictable leap in my life—leaving law to take a television job.

      I’d had night sweats for weeks before finally making the decision, but even then, I’d played it safe. I hadn’t taken temp jobs to support my writing habit. No, I’d taken an executive-level job with a major production company for an extremely lucrative salary. I was secure, my mom was happy. And most important, I was safe.

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