Page 1 of Love or Leave (Mapleton #4)

one

T hirty-six hours had passed since Cara Keller officially dumped the only boyfriend she'd ever had.

She had severely underestimated the time needed to recover. In fact, she'd only set twenty-four hours aside to move through the stages of grief and get back to her normal life.

But she hadn't accounted for the verbal abuse Cooper had slung at her.

He hadn't wanted to continue their relationship. It had basically been dead on arrival, anyway. But the words he'd used had been… harsh.

He'd said she was annoying. And too dorky for him.

And unlovable.

Then he asked her to email him the concert tickets she'd bought him for his birthday.

She'd given herself an additional twenty-four hours after that last insult triggered some deep-seated trauma from her formative years.

The worst part was that she agreed with him, even if his delivery had been unnecessarily mean. Not about her being unlovable—though the insult stung—but dorky? Oh yes. And annoying? Most likely.

Which was why she'd spent the final twenty-four hours of her post-breakup wallowing period reassessing her life.

She'd always been unapologetically herself.

And it had got her exactly where one would expect—thriving career-wise but failing miserably in her personal life.

She'd tried to shed her previous nerdy self by getting a glow up with a new hairstyle and wardrobe, and she'd thought it worked when Cooper had asked her out.

But it turned out she'd just slapped some lipstick on a pig.

If she was ever going to really connect with others, she'd have to leave the comfort zone she'd built around herself, and that was going to take some real outside-the-box thinking. Which, unfortunately, happened at four-thirty in the morning, and Cara was not a morning person.

Now, almost a full twelve hours later, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Cara found herself squinting her eyes at the bright glare coming off the three computer screens on her desk.

The screens had fried her overtired eyes and brain.

Normally, she'd push through the fatigue with a double macchiato and go home well after dinner, but not tonight.

Tonight, she had plans.

She glanced over her shoulder at her professor, whose desk ran along the opposite wall in their cramped, windowless office, and saw that Dr. Tanaka was still working away on her own three screens.

Cara had put off telling her about needing to leave early, not because Dr. Tanaka wouldn't let her go, but because she would pry into Cara's decision, and then spew every unsolicited thought from her brain without thinking.

Cara powered down her computer and stood from her ancient desk chair. It let out a loud mechanical creak. "I have to leave early today," she said.

Dr. Tanaka stopped typing and popped her head up from her own computer screens, then twisted, causing her own chair to let out a matching mechanical creak. She pushed her glasses higher on the bridge of her nose with her middle finger. "You don't leave early."

"Normally, no."

Dr. Tanaka narrowed her eyes. "Why is today an anomaly?"

"Actually," Cara said, packing her laptop into her bag. "Every Monday is going to be an anomaly for the next six weeks."

"You need to check your definition of anomaly," Dr. Tanaka said in her sarcastic tone. "Which you can do after you tell me where you're going."

Cara tucked in her chair as she said under her breath, "Golf."

Dr. Tanaka leaned forward, her mouth slackening, before she scoffed and shook her head. "I thought you said golf," she said with a laugh.

Cara took a deep breath, then exhaled. "I did. I'm a golfer now."

Dr. Tanaka's eyes bulged out of their sockets. "That's a sport."

Cara shrugged. "More of a hobby."

"But why?"

Cara really didn't want to go into what brought her to the conclusion that golf was the answer to her problems. It had all made perfect sense at four in the morning.

Taking up a sport would accomplish her two primary objectives.

One, she'd be trying something new, which would be a good first step to reinventing herself. And, two, she would meet men.

Real life men.

Not the catalogue of creeps she'd found on the dating apps since her breakup.

She'd googled “how to meet men” and read a suggestion that she join some kind of sport. Seeing as the only two local sports that were still open for registration were volleyball and golf, she decided it would be safer to choose the sport where the ball wasn't being spiked at her face.

"Because it has to be easier to hit a ball that's not in motion."

Dr. Tanaka pulled her glasses off and squeezed the bridge of her nose. "This is because of that degenerate you broke up with, isn't it?"

Cara winced, but didn't deny it.

"Golf won't fix your life, Cara."

Cara stuck her chin in the air, as if the insult didn't bother her, even though she was fooling no one.

"Maybe not," she said. "But I've gathered endless data that says what I'm currently doing isn't working, either."

Dr. Tanaka searched Cara’s eyes for a moment before shaking her head. "Golf is dreadfully boring. The outcome is always the same. The ball goes into the hole, sometimes with slightly more efficiency."

Cara nodded as she slung her computer bag over her shoulder. "Still better than volleyball. And who knows, maybe my husband is there waiting for me."

"But he'd be a golfer," Dr. Tanaka said, her nose turning up.

Cara rolled her eyes. "I have to go where the men are to find a man. It's a matter of matching trajectories, like…" She paused a moment to develop a metaphor that Dr. Tanaka would understand, and a second later a lightbulb went off.

"Like traveling to Mars," Cara finished. "You can't just hop on a shuttle and take off. You need to wait for the planets to align and aim for where Mars will be when you get there."

"And the men you want are on Mars?"

Cara lifted a shoulder. "Mars is overflowing with men. I'm bound to be compatible with one of them."

Hopefully.

She didn't need perfect compatibility. Just someone who wanted the same things as her, and who she liked to hang out with. But she had to admit it would be helpful if she knew what she was looking for. How do you find something if you don't even know what it looks like?

Most people her age at least knew who they were and what they wanted out of a partner. All Cara knew was that she was lonely and wanted her person. Someone to hang out with and talk to and laugh with and have fun. Someone to have kids with, to have the family she always wanted.

But first, she needed to gather more data. Test more waters. Find out what she could tolerate, and what she couldn't. And golf lessons were the perfect start.

"I always thought terraforming Mars was a fool's errand," Dr. Tanaka said, picking up her Dr. Who Tardis mug and warming her hands around it. "If you have the technology to turn Mars into Earth, why not just fix Earth?"

Cara narrowed her eyes and tossed her professor's opinion around her brain, wondering how that fit into her analogy. "Are we still talking about golf?"

"No, my brain stopped making sense of what you said a while ago."

Cara nodded. "Well, then, I better get going. My shuttle lands in thirty minutes and I don't want to walk in late and have all the Martians stare at me."

Dr. Tanaka gave a dismissive wave and turned back to her computer. "Try not to injure yourself."

"You can't injure yourself at golf."

"That's the consensus, but then again, golf hasn't met the likes of you."

Welp, her worst fears came true.

Cara walked into the golf center three minutes late. The instructor in the center of the tiny room stopped whatever speech he'd been giving and looked at her, causing the mass of heavily cologned Martians, all wearing slightly different versions of the same polo shirt, to turn and stare at her.

She swallowed the dread and awkwardly lifted the corner of her mouth as she shuffled toward the group, pressing between two guys and trying to blend in.

"Are you here for golf lessons?" the instructor asked, with a look of disbelief in his eye.

She’d worn black yoga pants and a hoodie since it was a chilly night and she knew they'd be outside for almost an hour.

Apparently, that wasn't the correct choice.

"Yes," Cara said.

He narrowed his eyes and made a show of looking around her. "Where are your clubs?"

Cara's heart stopped.

Shit. She didn't want to admit she didn't own clubs.

"Sorry, I forgot them," she said, getting ready to turn around a book it out of the place.

The instructor stopped, rolled his eyes, and dropped the clipboard by his hip. "This is an advanced lesson. Are you sure you belong here?"

Advanced? Sweet fucking hell.

Panic sweat trickled down her neck and she wondered if she should admit she'd never played golf before. She couldn't remember seeing anything about the lesson being advanced. Why had she signed up in the middle of the night?

"I-"

"She can borrow mine."

Cara twisted toward the deep voice beside her and found a handsome man who was radiating the sort of confidence that only comes from being comfortable with your surroundings. He threw a bright smile at her, then a wink.

"Thanks," she said, trying to hold back her smile from taking over her face.

"Just stick with me," he said.

She took in his built frame and his dark, warm complexion.

Don't mind if I do.

"Fine," the instructor barked, interrupting her salacious thoughts. "Don't forget them again."

Cara nodded, and once the instructor went back to his speech, she turned and gave a mock wince to her savior. His smile doubled, then he turned and focused all his attention on the instructor. She started feeling pretty damn good about this whole golf thing.

After several torturous minutes of listening to golf jargon she didn't understand, the instructor beckoned everyone to follow him out the back door to the driving range.