FOR MONEY, I'LL MARRY YOU.......

01

👉👈

← JADE →

Jade had to be up in four hours.

Four hours did not enough sleep make, and her eyes were burning. But after the stressful day she'd had, her brain wouldn't shut down. At the end of a week of night shifts, her body was taking its time settling back into its normal rhythm, even after her first shift back in the land of the living today.

For about a minute, she'd contemplated going for a run-as if-but instead had eaten an entire frozen pizza. Migui, her terrier, had judged her from his place on top of her DVD player where he'd sat, accruing all the heat. There'd been narrowed eyes and everything. So, in a cheese-and-bread coma, Jade had watched a movie and waited for her eyes to get heavy.

And waited.

Eventually, she'd given up and gone to bed, in the hope it would lead to sleep.

It had not.

Which meant Jade had been left with three options: go for that run (really, never gonna happen), stare at the ceiling and count water stains, or do what she usually did when she couldn't sleep.

She'd gone for option three, which consisted of trolling the Internet in the twilight hours of the morning. It was a pastime that bordered on embarrassing, but the strategy was one that almost never failed her.

She scrolled through Internet forums and advertisements to find the funniest. One guy was selling a goat he'd "accidentally" bought Jade wasn't sure she wanted to ask questions there. The goat did look pretty cute. It was still a baby.

Migui would hate her.

That was almost enough to make Jade click reply and ask for it, but the image of a clawed-up goat and an unforgiving Migui in her tiny New York City apartment gave her pause.

She huffed and kept scrolling. That dog needed to stop ruling her life. She could barely afford to feed herself, yet here she was, with the same "beast' she'd adopted two years ago.

Someone was looking for a woman he swore he'd had a connection with on the subway. Apparently there'd been a spark.

Snorting, Jade scrolled on.

Spark. Sure. That, or he was stalkerish, and the poor woman had actually been edging away.

Though, that wasn't a fair thought. What if it had been love? Love that started on a dirty train car among all the germs and disdain? Did anyone ever find people on these missed connection posts?

She opened another page, tapped a wrong button and watched the screen go black before opening up to her front camera. Looking back at her was the three-chinned version of herself that made her want to weep, even as she snorted.

Front cameras were one of the worst inventions ever. Every time she turned it on, it was her face, looking like a thumb, that greeted her. She grinned to make herself look as hideous as possible and took the photo. Yup. She looked like a thumb. She sent it to her best friend with the caption:

Sally- why am I single?

That would give Sally a laugh when they woke up.

Because Sally was most likely asleep, like Jade should be.

It was now 3:21 am. This was getting ridiculous.

Exiting the messaging app, Jade ended up at an empty browser page again. What was she doing? Oh. Yeah. She typed into the search bar do people actually find each other through missed connections.

Her eyebrows rose.

Whoa.

There were a lot of hits. The first few articles listed announced that, yes, people did find each other that way. How romantic. And kind of gross. They could make a movie out of that crap.