Love the One You're With(8)

“Ollie, until you’ve had to suffer the indignity of running into an ex while buying Vagisil or asking a stranger for a tampon, I’m thinking maybe you don’t quite have the proper intel or the proper parts for this,” Julie said kindly.

Oliver gave a shudder and raised his palms as though to say, I’m out.

Exactly, Grace thought. Being a woman was messy business.

“So who’s it going to be?” Camille asked, her eyes flitting among Julie, Riley, Grace, and Emma.

“How about a little more information?” Riley said, sitting back in her chair and playing with a long strand of shiny black hair. “Is this, like, an article swap? Our stuff goes in Oxford, and one of their monkey reporters gets a page in ours?”

“Sort of,” Camille said, tapping her nails against the table. “We’d be very transparent about what we’re up to. Alex and I were thinking that we’d take one of my girls and one of his guys and send you on a couple of dates. Three, at the minimum. Each of you will write an account of what you’re thinking. First impressions, assessment of the other person’s first impressions. You’ll analyze how the conversation went, what the other person’s thinking … all without actually discussing the article itself.”

“Sounds very natural and non-awkward,” Grace whispered to Riley.

Camille spared her a brief glare before continuing. “Stiletto will more prominently feature the female perspective about the date, but with an inset on what the guy was thinking. Oxford will do the same in reverse.”

“What’s the objective?” Emma asked. She had one of those slightly husky, soothing voices, like a jazz singer or a sexpot, with just a touch of southern. Great. A sexy, smart, composed southern belle.

“Now, here’s the part I think you ladies will like,” Camille said. “Alex and I were thinking of making it a competition of sorts.”

“Go on …,” Riley said, tapping the tips of her fingers together like a cartoon villain.

“Well, the goal here is to show that both Stiletto and Oxford aim to provide an accurate representation of what goes on inside the other side’s head. Women reading Stiletto want to know that the advice there is actually going to resonate with the guy in their life. Oxford is the same—what’s the point of all their tacky ‘How to Please a Woman’ sex advice if women don’t agree?”

Grace hid her wince. Camille’s words cut a little too close. Wasn’t Grace guilty of this very thing? Of smugly writing article after article like some sort of expert on men, only to be blindsided by her own man?

“I’m not disagreeing that we need to accurately represent the opposite sex,” Julie was saying. “But how is this a competition between Stiletto and Oxford? Who decides who wins?”

“The readers,” Camille said, as though this was completely easy and obvious. “We’ll have the digital team get some sort of poll up on our respective websites. After each his-and-hers article is printed, they can vote for who’s ahead in knowing the opposite sex. For example, if the male columnist writes that the female columnist completely ate up his compliments on her hair color, and she writes that he’s an insincere oaf who was making fun of her roots, the women pull ahead. Similarly, if the woman insists on paying because she thinks he’ll appreciate it, and then he writes that she was a pushy ball-buster, the guys get the edge. You see? Everyone knows dating is a game. Now we just see who wins.”

Nobody said a word.

It was contrived. A little weird …

And yet intriguing.

“Julie’s out,” Camille was saying. “Mitchell will have my head if I put her on a real-life date for a story.”

“And he knows firsthand how that turns out,” Riley said. “He ended up having to buy a ring the size of a baseball.”

“So, Riley, you in?” Camille asked.

Riley blinked her cat shaped blue eyes in surprise. “Me? This? But it’s so … tame.”

Grace leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands while smirking at her best friend. “You could just slather the guy with bacon-flavored lube. Sex it up a bit?”

“There will be no lube,” Camille said with a sharp finger jab. “And no sex. This is a dating column, not a prostitution ring.”

Riley faked a big yawn.

“Fine,” Camille snapped. “Emma? You up for it?”

Grace’s spine slowly straightened. Whaaaaat?

She understood why Riley had been Camille’s first choice—this sort of battle-of-the-sexes thing was a perfect fit for Riley’s snarky, bold style. And she understood why Julie was out of the running—an engaged woman doing a first-person dating project wouldn’t work.