The Matchmaker Meets Her Match by Jenny Jacobs

information from clients was about as annoying as listening to them spill their guts, but it had to be done.
    “Did you go to Henry’s last night?”
    “No.”
    Rilka nodded, and ate her own half of the bagel. Now what? She kept quiet.
    “I was pretty tired after work, didn’t feel like going out,” he said, taking another swallow of juice.
    “Sure.”
    “Then I had trouble sleeping,” he said, which matched Rilka’s experience of life perfectly. “I finally fell asleep at dawn and when I woke up it was time to get over here for my appointment.”
    Rilka nodded again. She’d visited a couple of websites after their first meeting, to learn a little more about people in his situation. Pain was a common problem, as was depression, not to mention other causes of insomnia. She didn’t think Jeremy would be impressed with her research, so she just said, “I hate insomnia.” She had experienced it herself a time or two, especially lately. “But it gives you a good excuse to watch the home shopping network.”
    Jeremy grinned and she could feel his mood lighten. It was hard to have a dark night of the soul in front of a sarcastic bitch, she knew. Probably explained why she was such a sarcastic bitch: self defense.
    “Can never have too many automatic slicing machines,” he said.
    “Exactly. Why use a knife when you can clutter up your counter with an appliance that’s hard to use and hard to clean.”
    His mouth was full of bagel, so he just nodded without responding. Then he slurped more juice and said, “So have you got me a date?”
    “Not yet,” Rilka said, sorry they had to move on to business when she wanted to keep talking about something else.
    Jeremy did not seem impressed by her industriousness, so she added, a little waspishly, “Give it a chance.”
    “Patience shall be rewarded?” He was back to being a pain in the ass. Not that she really minded. She preferred Jeremy’s pain-in-the-assness to Deputy Deane’s disagreeability or Marcus’s pained smoothness. She wondered what that said about her.
    He shifted in his chair and looked at the bagel crumbs on the tabletop. He reached over and picked up her plate and napkin and used the napkin to sweep the crumbs onto the plate. She was pretty sure he wasn’t being an OCD housekeeper, although you never knew.
    Then he unlocked the wheels on his chair, put the plate in his lap, and brought it over to the counter. Rilka didn’t say
I can do that
, because obviously he knew that and she didn’t say
My house and my dishes to deal with
, because frankly if he wanted to come and do her housekeeping every day, she wasn’t going to kick.
    He kept his back to her and said, “Is there really someone for everyone? Even me?” He said it lightly, like a throwaway line, but she could tell it wasn’t a throwaway.
    His words echoed Duncan’s so closely she was tempted to tell him the same thing she’d told Duncan.
One day, you’ll see her and you’ll know
. She realized suddenly that she’d gotten that insanely irresponsible line from Marilyn. It hadn’t been true for Marilyn, despite what she wanted to believe. And it wasn’t true for other people, either.
    And Jeremy was not Duncan, readily reassured by platitudes and aphorisms. He was a grownup, despite his obsession with getting laid. He would know a lie when he heard one, and then he wouldn’t trust her. And there might come a time when she needed him to trust her, and so she did something unprecedented in her entire matchmaking career: she told the truth.
    “I haven’t got the slightest damned clue.”
    • • •
    Jeremy hoisted himself into his truck, then folded the wheelchair and stowed it behind him. How many weeks had it taken him to perfect the art of getting from chair to truck and from truck to chair? A lot. And Nate saying,
Why not use the prosthetics?
like you just popped them on and everything went back to normal. And yet you couldn’t go back to normal. You had to find a new