Page 1 of With Any Luck

My mom always said that the Love family is lucky.

Not big luck, mind you, like lottery or sweepstakes winnings, but small luck. Like beating a rainstorm by five minutes every time, sometimes getting upgraded to business class on flights, and scoring close parking spots in crowded superstore lots. We’re lucky in the small ways that, in the end, don’t reallymatter.

It’s a curse, really.

Because you’d think we’d be lucky in our namesake, too.

By all accounts, we should be.

My grandmother was a famous matchmaker, my mother is a renowned romance novelist, my sisters are paragons of advice on relationships—one an advice columnist, the other a sex therapist. When we were younger, my sisters ran a kissing booth that was known town-wide. Kids swore they found their soulmate after a peck from Lila or Rose. But what did thirteen-year-olds know about love? That’s what the parents always said, shaking their heads.

It didn’t matter; my sisters would open up their booth when summer turned sticky and most mouths tasted like strawberry Popsicles, and they earned enough money to take us out to the movies, with a large popcorn and a drink split among the three of us.

I was never part of the kissing booth. Maybe if I had been, the subsequent history of my first kiss, and second and third and tenth, wouldn’t have been quite as shocking. No, “shocking” isn’t the right word, but neither is “heartbreaking.” I learned, after the third kiss, that the family curse is real. And I am, in fact, lucky in everything exceptthe one thingI want:

Love.

Because you see, the Love women excel at matchmaking and romance, just never for ourselves. We are fated, like my grandmother, my mother, my sisters, and me, to be the personbefore. The rebound, the partner at the beginning of rom-coms who is rarely named because they are always what the main characterdoesn’tneed. They are the utterly forgettable Before.

“I know it sounds crazy,” I told my soon-to-be best friend the first day we met at college, “but I’m the kissbeforeyou find your true love.”

Rhett had taken me out for coffee after a particularly harrowing first day of statistics, and he was so nice and charming I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. I had to warn him. Besides, we both would’ve bombed that class if we hadn’t sat beside each other and whispered answers we spied from the prospective cum laude graduate seated in front of us.

I still don’t know if he believed me, but he just smiled and shrugged. “I’m not looking for anything, either, unless you’ve got a cheat for the exam on Friday?”

I sucked in a breath between my teeth. “Oof, sorry, can’t do, champ. You just friended the wrong girl. This brain? Full ofTwilightquotes and omegaverse lore, not math.”

“What’s omegav—shit, I don’t have enough,” he added under his breath, counting the change he’d poured out of his wallet. “Uh, I’ll buy for you. I’ll just get a water.”

“Oh no. Hold on.” I glanced around the floor of the café around us. A sliver of something silver peaked out from beneath the bakery case, and I grabbed the quarter and held it up. “That’s enough, right?”

“You seriously just found that on the ground?”

I shrugged. “It’s a curse.”

He laughed at that. “No, you’re lucky,” he remarked, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek as I grinned.

“Something like that,” I replied.

And that was that.

We don’t see each other romantically. (Which is a good thing, because Rhett goes through partners like a sadistic game of Russian roulette: Which one would end up stealing his credit card and stabbing him in the thighthisweek? And I am, as previously stated, a pariah to love.)

We are well and thoroughly best friends.

So when Rhett called me up ten years later and asked me if I wanted to be his best man, how could I say no? Never mind that he only knew Carmilla for six months—and again, his track record with partners is ...suspicious, at best.

But what was I supposed to say? “Hold off, tiger, you’re jumping without a parachute?”

No. If my best friend’s going to jump, I’m at least going to be his spotter.

Andwow, how I am regretting that decision now. Maybe if I told him to “Pump the brakes, champ, you’re falling too fast,” I wouldn’t be face down on a couch with the most killer headache imaginable from a (hopefully) killer bachelor party that I couldn’t remember, and my best friend wouldn’t be missing.

-Yesterday-

Everything started out just fine, I’ll have you know. I mean, as fine as anythingcouldbe the day before the biggest commitment of his life.

Rhett met me at the airport, and so we took a car together, and almost the entire ride he fidgeted and twisted his engagement ring on his finger, peering out at the wintry, barren landscape of Connecticut in February. He was nervous. His jaw was perpetually clenched, and he didn’t point outeverycow we passed in a pasture, which was the most telling. He loved pointing out random farm animals on road trips.

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