Dating Without Novocaine Read Online Free PDF

his head and saw me, and I felt my cheeks heat. I smiled weakly at him, feeling like a dog caught eating the cat’s food, and he gave me an uncertain little wave and then kept going.
    Damn. He probably thought I’d been lying about the appointments, to avoid eating with him. I folded up the Willamette Week and the A&E section, and picked up the clothes, feeling like a clod. I shouldn’t have dawdled here, when I knew there was the danger of his coming by and seeing me. Stupid, stupid.
    Why did emotions have to create so many delicate webs of pain, so easy to blunder through? And how many would be destroyed, both my own and others, by the time I’d found my Mr. Right?
    Maybe there was a reason love and war were so often mentioned together. In both cases, the casualties were legion.
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    â€œThis is you, the Page of Wands,” Cassie said, pointing to the tarot card in the center of the layout. We were sitting on the floor of Louise’s eighth-floor apartment, later that same day. Louise had invited us over to dinner, and Scott would be coming by in time for dessert. The apartment was filled with the scent of baking lasagne, likely made with five or six exotic cheeses and half a dozen vegetables I’d never heard of. Louise liked to try recipes from trendy cookbooks.
    Louise was already looking more healthy now that she was working days: the shadows were gone from beneath her eyes, and her skin had a touch of color beneath her darkening freckles.
    Louise’s apartment is in a new-ish building in the heart of downtown, the rent partially subsidized by her well-off parents, who slept better at night knowing that their daughter was in a safe place, with security cameras in the halls and a man at the desk in the lobby. Counselors at crisis lines did not make much money, and Louise would be living somewhere like I did if not for her parents. I envied her modern bathroom and the balcony with a view, but I liked where I lived with Cassie and wasn’t sure I’d trade.
    â€œWhy the Page of Wands?” I asked Cassie.
    â€œPages are for young women with lots of creative energy. They tend to be action-oriented.”
    â€œOkay.” I shuffled the deck, the oversize cards awkward in my hands, and then Cassie laid them out in what she called the “gypsy spread.” My question for the cards was what my love life would be like in the next four months.
    â€œThese cards on either side of you represent aspects of yourself,” she said. “Seven of Swords—you have plans, but don’t know how to put them into effect, or whether they will succeed or fail. The Emperor—you are taking action in the real world.”
    â€œThat fits well enough.”
    Cassie looked up at me with a grin, henna-red hair loose and slightly tangled, that and her elflike eyes making her look very much the part of the fortune-teller. Louise sat to one side, arms crossed over her chest, observing with a half smile on her lips. She claimed to not believe in spirits or supernatural forces, and said that the only useful thing about tarot cards was that they served as a good projective test for people’s psyches. You saw in the pictures what your personality allowed you to see, and nothing more.
    Me, I chose to believe the cards only when they told me what I wanted to hear.
    Cassie went through the aspects of the past that hadbrought me to the present situation, and then the “forces beyond my control.” Among them was a card with an angel standing with one foot on the ground, one in the water.
    â€œTemperance,” Cassie said. “Sometimes this means that your angel is near, helping to guide you.”
    â€œShe is?”
    Cassie shrugged. “You would know better than I. The interpretation of the cards is more for you to figure out than me.”
    â€œDo you believe in guardian angels?” I asked, curious. I didn’t, but why then did I always get teary-eyed when I watched