Page 1 of Fluffed and Folded

CHAPTER 1

Somehow Eli never factored pain into the equation. He supposed he should have. There was probably a life lesson in there, if he was inclined to search for it.Something much longed for never arrives without pain.He didn’t feel like pondering Confucius-level depths, though. Mostly because he was in too much pain.

He’d wanted braces for as long as he could remember. His childhood had been happy and relatively free from trauma. His parents and siblings were warm and loving. Theirs had been a peaceful home. So peaceful that he might not have noticed the poverty, if not for his teeth. Crooked and with a prominent overbite, they had been the bane of his existence. So much that he had overcompensated on the friendliness and good cheer as a distraction. If he was making everyone laugh, they couldn’t laugh at him.

He had only asked his parents for braces once. The pain in their expression when they told him it was an impossible pipe dream was so distressing that he never brought it up again. Instead he waited and plotted, first achieving his college and career goals, and then saving toward his own orthodontia. Even on his own it had taken him years to finally save enough. Howdid people do it when they had more than one child? Did those kids understand what a luxury it was to have straight teeth? Eli did. A painful luxury, he now realized.

Still, he didn’t complain. Not when they put the braces on and he couldn’t eat solid food for three days. Not when they tightened them or added rubber bands. Not when one of those rubber bands popped free in the middle of an important client meeting and pinged the client in the nose. Nope. The braces were a pain in all the ways, but one Eli didn’t take for granted. When all was said and done, he would have nice teeth.Finally, and before his thirtieth birthday, too.

He spotted his landlord and tried to offer her a friendly smile that probably came out as a tortured grimace, but she didn’t notice. Not that she ever noticed Eli, not that most women who looked like her did. Eli didn’t mind, though. He had no designs on his landlord, for a number of reasons. Not only was she out of his league, but it was a league he had no desire to join. Too much work, too much drama. His insecurity over his mouth had made him a longtime observer of people. What he observed about the pretty people made him want to abstain. While other guys might lust after a perfect body and face, especially if it came with an entire apartment building, Eli had his eye on other assets. Maybe he was the one guy in the entire universe who searched for inner beauty. He had no idea if that was true, but it seemed so. He liked nice girls, funny girls, smart girls. Not ugly; he wasn’t quite that magnanimous when it came to the opposite sex. But cute was better than hot, in Eli’s experience. Also more attainable. Like tended to stick with like. Eli wasn’t repulsive. When his teeth became perfect, he didn’t delude himself that he would suddenly rise into the next social strata. He didn’t want that. All he wanted was to feel more confident in his current sphere, to not wonder if his smile held him back, if it was the thing women focused on when they looked at him.

If he were being honest, he wanted a girl like his friend Josie. Not Josie specifically, although he’d certainly given her a pause when she was between boyfriends recently. He liked a lot of things about Josie. She was funny, smart, and warm. But the thing he liked most was that he felt so comfortable around her, could be completely himself. Josie had never made his janky teeth an issue. It was such a non-issue with her, he wondered if she’d ever even noticed. She was that type, too. The kind who also searched for inner beauty.

And yet look where she wound up,he thought. Her current boyfriend, Tristan, was one of the pretty people. Eli liked him okay. But he was suspicious of him, certain he would drop Josie and move on to a fellow pretty person, once the newness and novelty wore off. It just wasn’t feasible to maintain a relationship with someone so far outside the zone.Like should stick with like,he reminded himself as his landlord made another pass by him, this time with a loaded laundry basket in tow.

Eli should offer to take it for her. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. He didn’t, however, and not merely because his mouth was killing him. It was mostly because the woman hadn’t noticed him standing there, even though she’d passed him twice. To her, he was probably like a piece of furniture, maybe not even that noteworthy. Who knew what went on in the minds of the pretty people?

Not Eli, that was for certain. Wincing, he touched a finger to his jaw and headed to his apartment.

Darby didn’t like the term “gold digger.” Even less did she enjoy that fact that, in the most technical sense, it applied to her. Marriage to a rich older man for thesake of his money hadn’t been foremost in her mind when she met her husband. It just sort of worked out that way. How was she to know, as an eighteen-year-old waitress at a tiny truck stop in the deep south, that her life was about to become a country song? All she knew was that Ham had wooed her with the promise of security and adventure, two things her young life lacked. The adventure hadn’t quite panned out, but the security ended up being true.

He’d been nice to her, caring, maybe even doting. Okay, she hadn’t beenin lovewith him, even when she told her mother she was. She’d most likely been in love with the picture he painted—a rich life in the big city. In the end, she had loved him. When he died of a heart attack, leaving her a widow at the tender age of twenty three, her grief had been far too real and far too painful. In the five intervening years, she hadn’t dated, not once. Somehow it felt wrong to move on, even though she’d now been a widow as long as she’d been married.

The security portion of the promise Ham made her turned out to be the best part of the deal. He hadn’t left her a grand fortune, but he’d left her enough, if she was careful. If she managed her rentals properly, she’d be comfortably set for life. Not extravagantly wealthy, but as she matured she realized she didn’t want that anyway. All she wanted was for the gnawing ache of poverty to leave her alone. Since marrying Ham, it had. Darby had enough to be comfortable, to provide for every need with a bit left over to sock away for emergencies or the occasional extravagance. As soon as she figured out what extravagance seemed worthwhile, she might actually use some of the extra. As it turned out, Darby was fairly frugal, which shocked no one more than her. In fact, she’d been more pragmatic and frugal than Ham, a detail he found endlessly amusing during their brief marriage.

With money in the bank and her future secure, she had almost zero desire to date, possibly ever again. Granted she’d only had limited dating experience before Ham, but she remembered there being a lot of drama and a lot of games. Darby wanted no part of either of those things. Men her age, still in their twenties, acted like babies. Either they still lived with their parents or were obsessed with video games or both. The ones who lived on their own seemed to languish in too-high opinions of themselves and ran away at the first hint of commitment. Why did they (wrongly) assume a woman even wanted commitment? Darby had become far too happy and settled in her singular life, too unwilling to give up half the bed, control of the remote, and anything else marriage required of her.

So even though it was embarrassing to tell anyone that she’d married a rich older man when she was barely eighteen, who subsequently died and left her set for life, it had been the biggest blessing of Darby’s life because it gave her something she could never have found any other way: freedom. Never again would she have to rely on another person for her wellbeing. And looking around at the pool of eligible candidates, why would she want to?

Mindlessly she dumped her laundry into the washer and turned it on, as if on autopilot, her brain happily ignoring the blood all over everything.

CHAPTER 2

“Ithink I’m going to do it.”

Josie and Eli had slowed their jog to a walk, for the sake of Gabe, who was in the middle of some kind of text battle with his current girlfriend. Not that Eli was complaining. Of the three of them, he was the least athletic. Long ago he had ceased to be embarrassed by how much better Josie was at running than he was.

“You are? That’s amazing. Good for you,” Josie exclaimed.

“Josie, do you have any idea what I’m talking about?” he asked, smiling.

“No, but I’m totally stoked,” Josie said, and he knew she meant it. She was that sort of person, who felt vicarious joy for others. Now she practically danced with it, bouncing a little, making her ponytail bob as she walked beside him. “What actually are you talking about?”

“I’m going to join a dating site,” Eli said, swallowing past his sheepishness as he darted a glance at Gabe. Relieved to see him still thumbing his phone, he relaxed a little. Gabe would judge him, probably harshly, but Josie wouldn’t, something she proved by grabbing his arm and giving it a hard yank that he translated to be enthusiasm and not bullying.

“No way, that’s amazing. Good for you. No,excellentfor you. Oh, please let me help you write your profile, please, Eli, please. I’ll be so good at it.” She clasped her hands under her chin and gave him puppy eyes.

“You’ll make me sound like a Disney prince,” he groaned.

“So?”

“So no woman wants that.”

She gasped, affronted. “Are you kidding me? Of course we do. Why do you think we watch those movies? That’s exactly what we want—sweet and charming and dashing. And you’re already all those things, so I won’t even have to lie.”

“That’s sweet, and I’ll think about it. I have some time.”

“Why do you have time?” she asked.

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