“You too.”
Veronica made her way out of the hotel and then back to her car, her mind reeling with the revelations she’d just made. Joel really was as nice as his profile made him out to be. He was even more gorgeous in person, and he smelled divine.
She made it home, having begged off her nightly drink with Steph. She wanted time to process this afternoon’s date without having to be interrogated by her best friend. She made herself a quick supper of grilled cheese and soup and then grabbed a notepad and a box of colored pencils.
She dated the first empty page and then wrote Joel’s name next to it. She needed to jot down the pros and cons of their date. She started with the pro column, stating what she liked about the date in blue pencil, and then switching to a green pencil where she added her personal thoughts and reflections.
1. Joel matched the pictures on his profile. So, he wasn’t trying to lure anyone to a date using old pictures, or pictures when he used to be fitter, or whatever.
2. He seemed genuine. He was remarkably humble and down to earth. Not what I was expecting at all.
3. He admitted to getting paid to endorse the app. He didn’t try to hide that fact, so maybe it was just a simple business deal to help an old friend.
4. He’s really, really handsome. Joel Marketis may have gotten older, but his looks have only gotten better. He’s fricking hot!
5. Meeting him in person wasn’t as awkward as I had assumed it would be. That might not be the case with a complete stranger. In a way, I felt like I already knew Joel a little bit, so I was a bit more at ease, but it was still weird showing up to meet someone like that.
6. We both knew a little bit about one another before we even agreed to the date. There was no having to impress someone on a dance floor or charm them in the bar to get invited on a date. This was relatively simple. I have to admit I do like how convenient this was. Impersonal? A bit, but easy compared to the bar roulette.
7. We each drove ourselves to this first date, and that meant there was no pressure to perform or try to meet some hidden expectations the other person might have had because they paid for dinner. No awkward goodnight kiss, or stilted conversations outside my apartment. I didn’t feel pressured for anything. Refreshing.
She thought for another moment and then switched to a red pencil to list the cons of the date. This was much harder, and it took her several minutes before she finally came up with something to write in that column.
1. Lack of time. The date hadn’t lasted long enough for her to really get to know the real Joel. Surprisingly, I would really like to spend more time with him. But short first dates are probably best in case it gets awkward. You don't want to be stuck having dinner with someone who's a complete bore, or creep.
She tried to produce other points, but there didn’t seem to be any. Frustrated, she put the pencils away and looked at the list she’d created once more. “Well, that’s not the kind of information I need to be getting.” She pushed the notepad away and gave herself a good talking to.
You can’t like this guy. He’s a lot like the typical male you fall for — tall, dark, and handsome — but you have a goal in mind. You can’t let yourself get distracted. Admire him and lust after him if you have to, but girl don’t go falling for another ass.
Veronica was a realist when it came to her shortcomings, and she knew Joel hit all the buttons on her checklist. If she was going to get anything good to use against the dating site, she needed to keep her emotions in check.
Her phone chimed, and she frowned when she saw the message from Joel.
J: I had a really good time. Let’s do it again. Soon. How about tomorrow night?
Veronica’s fingers hovered over the phone, and then she pulled them back and sat on them. She could almost envision him waiting for her reply, but she needed to do some heavy thinking first. Did she really want to get involved with Joel? That was the question she needed to answer.
Chapter 7
The next day…
“Veronica, could you please come to my office?” Senator Tompkins's voice penetrated her mental musings.
“Yes, sir. I’ll be right there.” She grabbed a notepad and a pencil and headed for her boss’s office. He was seated behind his large desk, and she rapped her knuckles on the door frame before he gestured her forward and stood up to watch her walk across the carpeted floor.
“That was quick. I didn’t take you away from anything…”
“No, sir,” she told him with a smile. “I just finished putting together the notes you wanted on House bill 49C.”
“Good, good. Have a seat.” He waited until she’d sat down and then resumed his own seat. “I wanted to see if you’d managed to make any headway on that matter you brought to me earlier. The online dating applications?”
Veronica shook her head, “Not really.”
“Well, I have a few minutes. I did a little digging and found that there is a rising number of reports of harassments, thefts, and assaults taking place in which the victims belong to an online dating app. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough cases all coming from the same website to act at this time. I’m wondering what your plan is?”
“Well, I decided that I needed to research them a bit more thoroughly before I could devise a plan.” She wasn’t sure why she didn’t disclose that she had not only joined one of the sites but had also gone on her first date through them.
“That’s a good idea. Once you feel like you have something concrete, bring it to me, and I’d be happy to look at what you’ve collected and see if any holes need plugging.”
“I’ll do that,” Veronica told him.
“Well, that’s all I wanted. I should head over to the capital and see what nonsense they’ve come up with now.”
Veronica took that as her cue to leave and excused herself from his office. She returned to her own and sat looking at her phone for a long moment. She hadn’t taken time to respond to his last message, and she did so now.
She opened the messaging app on her phone and then sent back a reply to Joel –
V: Saw your message. What did you have in mind for tonight?
She started to put her phone down when it immediately chimed, and Joel answered her right back.
J: Baseball. The Nationals are playing, and I have some great seats. Interested?”
V: Sure, that’d be nice.
J: Great. Text me your address, and I’ll pick you up at 6. Game starts at 7.
Veronica sent him her address and then realized her workday had ended sometime between the time she’d entered the senator’s office and messaged Joel. He would be picking her up in an hour and she needed to get home. This time, she was going to make a concentrated effort to look like she was going on a date.
She sent a quick message to Steph, letting her friend know something had come up and she couldn’t meet her for drinks this evening and then hurried to where her car was parked. She only lived a mile from where she worked, but it still took her almost fifteen minutes to get to her apartment complex due to the heavy traffic.
She wasted no time and took a two-minute shower, and then began re-applying her makeup and doing her hair. She had only five minutes to spare once she’d donned a form-fitting pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, a red Nationals sweatshirt, and a pair of red leather tennis shoes. She gave herself a cursory glance in the mirror and smiled at her reflection. Not bad for only having a few minutes. You clean up real good, girl.
The doorbell announced Joel’s arrival, and she pushed the intercom button. “I’ll be right down.”
“Great.”
She grabbed her purse and locked the door, taking the elevator and finding that she was looking forward to the night ahead. They’d already gotten the first meeting jitters out of the way, and she gave him a ready smile when he opened the door for her.
“Wow! You look amazing,” he told her with a warm smile.
“Thanks. You look pretty amazing yourself.” He was wearing jeans, a dark red
polo shirt with a Nationals jacket over the top. He was also driving a cool Toyota truck, and she hardily approved the vehicle choice over the sports cars that so many professional athletes seemed to prefer.
“Nice truck,” she told him as he opened her door for her.
“Thanks. I like it.”
They made it to the ballpark in record time, and he guided her toward the lower level where their seats were located. “Hungry?” he asked when a vendor stopped by to take their orders.
“Very.”
“Hot dogs and fries?” he asked with a grin.
“We’re at a ballpark, of course,” she told him with a broad smile.
“Two hot dogs and two fries. Oh, and two of those bottles of water.” Joel handed over her food and then settled in the seat next to her to watch the game. “This should be a good game. The Nationals are on fire this year. If they keep playing this way, they’ll end up in the World Series.”
“That would be pretty amazing. I haven’t watched many of their games this year, but I always know how they’ve done since my office is comprised of several guys who never miss a home game.”
“I try to make as many as I can, but once football season starts, it gets more difficult.”
They ate their hotdogs and watched the game. Veronica allowed herself to let her hair down and just enjoy being a person on a date at a baseball game. Here she wasn’t an aspiring young lawyer; she was just a girl enjoying America’s favorite past time – baseball. She cheered and jumped up and down with the rest of the crowd when the Nationals scored four points in a row, laughing when Joel spontaneously hugged her and spun her around. When the umpire behind the plate made a somewhat shaky call a few minutes later, Veronica had no problem standing with the rest of the fans and yelling at the man in blue to get his eyes checked. Joel laughed at how upset she was, and she joined him, realizing how caught up in the game she’d become. It was a fun way to spend the evening and having someone to share it with made it even better.
Joel joined her for the seventh-inning stretch, slinging his arm around her shoulders and swaying back and forth with the rest of the fans as they all sang, “Take me out to the ball game.” She sang along, not caring if she was on key or not, to the songs they played over the loudspeaker between innings. She danced and more than once, she caught Joel watching her with a silly smile on his face. A time or two he even joined her. When the jumbotron zeroed in on them doing a little two-step in the stands to a country song, Joel smiled and waved and then dipped her low at the end of the song to the raucous applause of the crowd.
They were having fun, and she saw no reason to waste a perfectly good opportunity just to have some fun. This was what she’d always imagined dating would be like and had never experienced before.
*****
Joel couldn’t take his eyes off Veronica. She was having a ball as she fully embraced whatever was happening around her. She wasn’t pretentious like so many other women he’d taken out. He couldn’t think of even one of them who would have sung along with the silly ballpark songs or gone through the motions of the Macarena without a care for how silly they might look. Not that Veronica had looked the least bit silly doing the moves. Just the opposite, in fact.
When she’d swiveled her hips in time to the music, Joel had been hard-pressed to keep his hands to himself. His favorite moment came at the bottom of the eighth inning. The Nationals were up to bat and only leading by one point.
Bases were loaded, and they had two outs. The first pitch came and went in the dirt. The crowd supporting the Nationals cheered.
The second pitch came and appeared to be right down the middle, but still earned a call of “ball.” The crowd went wild, but those wearing Rockies’ purple were furious.
“Hey, ump. Need to borrow my glasses?”
“They don’t get any better than that, ump.”
“Hey, Mr. Umpire, you still awake out there?”
The third pitch was similar and earned another bad call.
“Boo!”
A chant rose amongst the Rockies fans as they headed into the top of the ninth inning and their last chance to even up the score and pull ahead. Joel watched as the Rockies mascot incited their fans to a spirit war.
“We’ve got spirit, yes we do. We’ve got spirit how about you?”
Veronica jumped to her feet, targeting the Rockies fans sitting a few rows to the right of them, and she loudly answered back with the rest of the crowd.
“We’ve got spirit, yes we do. We’ve got spirit how about you?”
The banter continued back and forth several more times until the Nationals fans declared themselves the winners by changing the end of the chant to “We’ve got more. We’ve got more.”
“I’m glad to see you’re not shy,” Joel told her on a laugh when she finally sat down.
“That was fun. I guess I have missed attending live sporting events. Who am I kidding? I never do anything fun these days. All I do is work.”
Joel nodded understandingly and told her, “You have to make time for things like this. The laundry, or work, or whatever will still be there. I had to make myself start taking time for me.”
“Guess I need to work on doing that,” she told him. “So, tell me one thing you did that was extra special.”
Joel thought for a moment and then smiled. “Last year, around this time, when all the trees are changing colors…I got to go up in a helicopter and see it from the air. It was amazing. The colors were so vibrant; it was kind of like a painting, almost surreal.”
“Wow, that sounds amazing. You were lucky to have seen the city from the sky. Boston’s a pretty special place.”
“I feel the same way.” He drove her home, and after walking her up to the door to her apartment complex and saying goodnight, he began to plan for the next time he would see her. He smiled as he began to think of ways to make her relax and have fun. Watching her enjoy herself was truly lovely and the best part of his week so far. Hell, the best part of his month. Sometime between ordering hot dogs and the seventh-inning stretch, he’d gone and fallen for the feisty brunette.
Chapter 8
The next day…
Joel couldn’t stop thinking about Veronica. He’d thought about it during practice but hadn’t managed to produce an excuse (or great enough plan for a date) to see her again this evening. He’d resisted the urge to ask her out again the previous night after he’d dropped her off, not wanting to appear too eager. Now he was regretting that decision.
The day’s practice had been an early one, and by one o’clock, he was driving away from the stadium with one goal in mind: finding a way to put a smile on Veronica’s face. He decided he needed to do something over the top and he recalled seeing her wistful expression as he’d described flying over the city and looking at the fall colors. That was a spontaneous adventure he could share with her and he made a quick stop by the town’s smaller airfield to see a friend of his who owned a helicopter tour agency.
“Hey, Branson, you around?” Joel called out as he stepped into the main hangar.
“Over here.” Branson came out from behind a helicopter, wiping his hands on a rag. “Oh, hey. Joel. What are you doing out here?”
“I came by to see if you had a slot open tonight?”
“Sure thing. For you?”
Joel nodded. “I want to surprise a new girl with a tour of the city and some champagne.”
“Sounds like you’re going for the kill. Add some strawberries,” Branson suggested.
“Of course. Anyway, I’m going to convince her into coming, so I’m thinking around four or shortly after that.” It was late fall, but the unseasonably warm month of September and the first part of October had slowed things down a bit. It was still getting dark earlier each day, and by six or six-thirty, the only thing they would be seeing would be the city lights. He was hoping to time this adventure to give her both the fall colors and the night sky.
“That works for me. Let me call Carla and hav
e her get things ready in the cabin. Bring your girl over when you’re ready to go.”
“Will do,” Joel shook hands with the man and then headed back to his truck. He drove to the edge of the field, and then an idea struck him. If he was going to get Veronica to spend the evening with him, he needed her to leave work early. He toyed with several ideas, but the only one that really made sense was if she was called away on some sort of emergency. It was a considerable risk, fabricating a lie to spend time with her this early on in their relationship, but he really wanted her to have this experience and figured he could apologize after the fact.
He sat at the edge of the airfield, weighing his options, and finally decided to head home and pretend to have been injured at practice. He needed a ride to the emergency room and couldn’t get ahold of anyone else. Branson was taking care of the helicopter and snacks, that meant Joel needed to take care of the flowers. He stopped by his favorite florist and purchased a dozen red roses. He waited to call her until he’d pulled into his parking spot, and then dialed her phone number.
The Right Swipe Page 6
