By the time they were alone again, Lee detected a bit of unease in the spaces between their words. With Roman, it was often helpful to pay attention to what he didn’t say. But Lee was in no hurry. He simply nursed his watery coffee until Roman was ready to speak.
“So…one of the old geezers back at the office is retiring, and this knucklehead from the mailroom got promoted to take his place.”
Lee nodded and sipped his coffee.
“The mailroom,” Roman muttered.
Layla brought their plates. Lee ate lightly at the diner since his meals were included at the dorms, but the Sugar Bowl’s pie crust was a lot flakier than he could get on campus, where everything was slopped together in bulk and the students either didn’t know, or didn’t care. By the time he’d captured the last crumbs of pastry on the back of his fork, Roman was ready to say what was really on his mind.
“That job would’ve been mine, if I had my MBA.”
And now Lee saw the real issue. There was an obvious solution—he’d often noticed Roman was tacitly intrigued by his lesson planning—but Roman had needed to come to the decision on his own. Lee gave his coffee an extra squirt of sweetener syrup and stirred, acting as if his interest was merely casual.
In a rush, as if he’d possibly rehearsed it a time or two, Roman said, “The thing is, I can fit my jobs around the program if I juggle ’em, but there’s no way I can afford both rent and tuition.”
Lee nodded.
“And so I was thinking—look, stop me if I’m out of line—if I enrolled, Polytechnic Sixty-Two wouldn’t stop me from moving in. With you.”
Funny, how Lee had cataloged such a great variety of tells Roman gave when he was nervous. The tightening of his jaw. The jiggle of his knee. The way his eye contact didn’t quite click. Then again, maybe it was no surprise these things weren’t apparent at first glance. There were so many things Lee had been blind to.
“We’ll keep a ledger,” Roman hastened to add. “I’ll pay you back.”
“And have a reputation as a money-grubbing Boomer come back to haunt me by charging rent to the man I love? My students would never let me live it down.” Their eyes met. Roman wanted to protest, Lee could tell. “Although, you’re not entirely off the hook. I fully expect you to pick up the tab for lunch.”
Roman smiled, a fleeting thing he tried to quell, though sometimes Lee did manage to get a glimpse. “You drive a hard bargain, Professor Kennedy.”
“I do my best.” After all, haggling was expected, and Lee was keen to adopt the local sayings and customs. He’d spent far too many years shielding himself from the Algorithm and avoiding what might be. Now that he could truly immerse himself in the experience—now that he was free to finally live—he could embrace his life, as it truly was, in all its colorful imperfection.
-end-
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ABOUT THIS STORY
OFTEN, WHEN I get stuck in my writing, or a scene just feels flat, I’ll retire to paper and pen, and journal about “five different ways this scene could be different,” or some other riveting theme like that. But what I do to give myself a little spark of inspiration is open a dictionary, stick my finger inside, and pick a random word for each point. Sometimes the words I land on are so silly, it makes it very hard to write a potential scenario around it. But that’s okay. The whole idea is to get myself thinking in a new, and hopefully more interesting, direction.
There are also plenty of apps and websites out there that will generate random words, photos, names, and other useable bits that can be cemented into the mosaic of the story. I find the finger-in-book method works best for me at the moment. But tomorrow I might fall in love with a randomizer app. The specific source doesn’t matter, as long as it gets the ideas flowing.
Imperfect Match started as a palate-cleanser of a short story I intended to crank out between two larger novels. It was inspired by the random word prompt utopia and elope. In the original short, I had Lee meet Roman and elope away from the utopia on his sister’s wedding day. But then I sat on the story for a while, because it seemed like this tiny glimpse of Lee in that moment—the one in which he realized why he’d been dragging his feet in regard to the Algorithm—was pretty pivotal, but I wanted to explore more of his world.
Now, I can’t imagine the story without all the colorful settings from the District: the bookshop, the Bonfires, the cafe and Polytechnic Sixty-Two.
Random fact: I named the university after a public grammar school near my grandmother’s house, School 62. I thought nothing of it when I was a kid, but looking back now? A bunch of numbers—what a drab and utilitarian way for a city to name its schools! I see on Wikipedia that School 62 closed in 1980, and nearly all of the Buffalo numbered schools are defunct now. Times change.
There’s something about Lee Kennedy I find really endearing. I suppose it’s the fact that he was willing to do whatever it took to be true to himself, no matter how daunting the learning curve might be. It was an absolute joy to arrive at the point where he earned his students’ respect, and blossomed into a man who finally had something other than a tax write-off and a sperm donation to offer a potential partner.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE is more likely to show up at a bonfire than a wedding, though she is easily swayed by cake.
Visit jordancastilloprice.com to see what else she’s got up her sleeve.
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