Oh, God. She dropped her head to her hands with a groan. That was a terrible sign. Terrible. On paper, Trevor was the perfect man. In person, he was nearly the perfect man.
And therein lay the problem.
Math, her father had always said, was an abstraction of reality. Abstraction made understanding both the problem and the solution easier and clearer. Logic led you from the problem to the solution. And the key to making sure the solution could be applied to the real-world problem you were trying to solve was in making sure the assumptions you made when abstracting from the real world and applying to math were correct.
She looked to her spreadsheet. Every last row and column was an assumption. There were assumptions about what she wanted. Assumptions about how important those wants were in relation to other wants. Assumptions about the men she was browsing online for.
Any one—or all—of those assumptions was wrong.
She sat back in her chair, looking at both the pictures of men on the screen and the spreadsheet laid out next to her laptop.
The assumptions she knew best were the ones she had made about her own wants. Those were the ones she needed to examine first.
No, what she needed to do first was call Trevor and cancel their date.
She gave the phone sitting on the table next to her laptop a long side-eye. Then she took a deep breath. Then she straightened her shoulders and grabbed the phone before she could talk herself out of the uncomfortable task. She sped through her contacts until she came to his and hit the call button as quick as possible.
It was like ripping off a bandage. Only worse, because, she was hurting someone else in the meantime. And the person didn’t get a chance to brace himself.
“Marsie, hello.” Trevor sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her, though there was a tinge of uncertainty at the periphery. “Is there anything wrong? We’re still on for our date tonight, right?”
“Well, actually, that’s what I’m calling about. I’m just not...”
She scrambled to think of how to say this nicely, even though she knew that, really, there was no way to say this nicely. This was one of those situations where you had to accept that you were going to hurt someone. The goal was not to be a jerk about it and linger. Or be dishonest.
“I don’t see us turning into anything, and I didn’t want either of us to waste our time tonight. I didn’t want you to show up at the restaurant under false pretenses. You’re a great guy. You’re everything I want in a partner, but... But there’s no spark.”
She closed her eyes against the reality that she’d just used those words. She didn’t even believe in spark. But she did believe in a connection, and she didn’t have it with Trevor.
“No spark?” He sounded confused. “I thought we got along really well.”
“We do. But I can’t imagine us being anything other than friends.”
“Why are you telling me this over the phone?”
She bit her lip. God, this was hard. Sometimes, it seemed easier to be single than deal with the messy, illogical bounces of another person’s emotions. But whenever she thought that way, she would remember how nice it had been to share a bed with Richard. And how much nicer it would be to share a bed with someone she loved deeply.
“Like I said, I didn’t want to waste your time tonight. You were going to show up at the date with an idea that we would go further.”
“I wasn’t expecting sex, if that’s what you’re implying.” Suppressed anger deepened his voice.
“I didn’t mean that. Kissing, maybe. Or hand-holding. Whatever you were thinking might happen, it was going to be further than I was interested in going. We would arrive with very different expectations and, well, I didn’t think that would be fair to you.”
Trevor was silent long enough that Marsie worried he had hung up on her, which didn’t seem like him at all.
Of course, they hadn’t had their third date yet, so what did she know about what kind of guy Trevor was in his heart.
“Okay,” he said finally. “That hurts, but I appreciate your honesty.”
Marsie sighed with relief. Even though she wasn’t interested in going any further with Trevor, it was nice to know that she hadn’t been wrong about the kind of guy he was. Both for his sake and the sake of the woman who did fall head over heels for him, but also for selfish reasons. It meant her good-guy radar wasn’t horribly off.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Because she was. Both for herself, that she had to keep dating and keep hunting, and for him, because she’d hurt him.
“Yup. Me, too.”
They were both silent for a couple seconds. Then she heard Trevor take another breath in and what he said next surprised her. “Do you want to get dinner anyway?”
“But it wouldn’t be a date. And you want a date.”
“Well, yeah. I’ll be honest with you. You’re hot. You’re smart. You have an interesting job. We seem like we rub well against each other. But this was only going to be our third date. I’m interested, but not fully invested yet. I’m hurt, but not crushed. And I’d be interested in being friends. Everyone I know who has done online dating said it was also a good way to meet friends. I’d like to give that a shot.”
“No agenda?” This was not the reaction she had expected, though she was pleased with it.
“Other than being friends? No. No agenda.”
“Dinner is still on, then.”
“Great. See you in a couple hours.”
Marsie signed off the phone, relieved. Then she shoved her spreadsheets and laptop to the side. She needed some time away from them before she had the mental space to rethink everything she’d ever wanted in a partner.
* * *
MARSIE RETURNED FROM her dinner with Trevor relaxed, happy and certain that she had made the right decision. Trevor had been much more enjoyable to talk to when she wasn’t fretting about the fact that she couldn’t imagine kissing him. Despite their different career paths, they shared similar stories of growing up in a single-parent household—Trevor had only had his father around—and the push to be the best at all cost.
She sat back down at her laptop with a glass of wine and a new sense of confidence—both about herself and about her algorithm. She was on the right track with her thinking. Her assumptions were close.
Faces came up on her screen after she signed into the dating website. She clicked on the first face that came up, and this time she didn’t evaluate the guy against her algorithm, she evaluated the algorithm against the guy and made notes about anything in his profile—good or bad—that wasn’t reflected in her algorithm.
To fix her problem, she needed more data.
She was too busy thinking about the notes she’d just made to pay much attention to the next picture she clicked on. It wasn’t until the full profile picture loaded that she realized it was Jason’s online dating profile.
JSN0562 was his handle. Not very inventive, but she wasn’t one to talk. Hers was DeeDee10, which was supposed to represent that she had her doctorate in economics and be an actual name, rather something like kitten or snowy or whatever.
It had been a bitch to think of something. Anything clever had already been taken. God, she’d even talked with Beck about what her profile name might be communicating.
Beck had told her she was overthinking it.
She pulled her mind away from her own online dating insecurities back to Jason’s profile. She should click away. It felt like she was invading his privacy by looking at his profile. She knew him. She didn’t need to see what he said about himself.
Instead, she peered closer at his picture. The photo had been taken straight on his face. His hair was clipped close to his head, almost as short as his scruffy short beard. One of his eyebrows was slightly raised, like he hadn’t been completely comfortable to have his p
icture taken. Looking straight on, his nose was a little crooked, like he’d broken it when he was a kid.
It was cute.
Even in the picture, his eyes seemed to see right through her, like they did in person, freezing her to her chair and making her want to look back, forever. And, like in person, the person he seemed to be seeing through the computer screen, sitting in her chair, was better than she thought. When he looked at her in that way, even through a picture, she felt like less the sharp, abrasive, too-smart economist who corrected people’s statistics at parties—even though she knew she shouldn’t—and more like a person a stranger would want to approach and talk to.
When he looked at her like that, she felt like she might be the person he seemed to think she was.
She ran an index finger down her spreadsheet. Her algorithm had no space for that look, whatever it was. She couldn’t even put a name to it. You couldn’t measure something you couldn’t name.
After a sip of wine for nerve, Marsie turned back to her screen. Jason described himself as good with his hands, “A bit of MacGyver without the spying. I’ll fix anything you’ve got for me.” She smiled at that description of himself, which was probably true and had a bit of his usual cheek. Apparently, he liked hockey—they never talked about sports—but couldn’t skate. If she thought about it, she should tell him that she was the opposite. She could skate, and knew nothing about hockey. He described himself as a country boy—which she did know—but that he liked living in the city and going to the museums, especially the downtown science museum.
His profile told her a lot about him that she hadn’t known, but it didn’t say anything about the things she did know about him. It didn’t say anything about how much he liked to read, about his sense of humor and his kindness.
Neither, frankly, did her algorithm. She pulled the hard copies of her notes closer to the computer and wrote “Jason” at the bottom of the page. Then, not sure why she was doing it when she knew the likely outcome already, she scored him.
His profile picture was cute. She would probably have given it a one, but she knew that his butt was also cute, so she upped it to a two. He was shorter than she preferred. His TV interests were nothing like hers, and she sure as hell wasn’t interested in watching hockey. He listed his education as “some college,” which was more than she thought he had, and made her wonder what that meant. His career, of course, was nothing like what she wanted in a partner.
She looked at the score she gave him for that. Beck was right. She was a snob. The zero score she had written for education didn’t account for the fact that he was clever, interesting and curious, something most of the men she’d been on dates with—men with an education on par with hers—couldn’t claim.
Where was she wrong?
She reread Jason’s profile from top to bottom. He probably hadn’t analyzed every word of his description as she had. Like working through any implications of the TV shows she liked. Or considering what her favorite places to hang out said about her.
He hadn’t overthought the whole damn thing, because he wasn’t the kind of person who overthought things like she did. It was one of the things that made him so relaxing to be around. When he was sitting in her office and they were drinking their coffee and chatting, all the little details that usually worried her fell away. Suddenly, she could do with her life what had always been so appealing about math—strip away the pointless bits and work with the truth.
Like his curiosity, that quality wasn’t anywhere in her spreadsheet.
But she could measure some parts of his profile, points besides the facts of what someone did and what they said they liked. She could measure how light their profile read. Was it breezy? Did it seem effortless? Not that she had any room to judge! Even if there were only a couple sentences, were those sentences she could imagine talking with?
She stuck her tongue out at the screen. Qualitative analysis had been her least favorite research study. But for true love and happily-ever-after, she would do it. Sink herself back into her first and only comparative literature class and be prepared to evaluate language.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WHEN THE HURRICANES got a second player in the penalty box, Jason grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. Playing badly was one thing. Fighting with other players because you were playing poorly was another, and the Hurricanes were starting to fight like they might score better if they had only two players left on the ice.
If his cell phone rang and the other line was the Hurricanes’ manager asking for Jason to step in as coach, he might tell them they didn’t deserve his expertise with the way they were playing. A man shouldn’t toss away the chance to step into his dreams, but his favorite hockey team wasn’t the stuff of dreams tonight. They were the stuff of nightmares.
Since there was about as much chance that the Hurricanes would call him as he would actually turn down the coaching gig, Jason grabbed his phone from the mess of newspapers on his coffee table, sat back on the couch and put his feet up. He would’ve gotten another beer to drink, but those were in the kitchen. He was in the living room. Easy choice, even though a beer was almost a necessity for signing into the dating app.
He scanned through the list of suggestions from the site. He’d seen—and been on dates with—most of the women before. They weren’t interesting. Not that he meant that personally. He hadn’t felt the slightest spark with any of them. They were probably sick of seeing his face in their selection of choices, too. The Triangle area of North Carolina had about two million people in it. Not enough of the single women in that group were using online dating.
Out of curiosity, he clicked over the section of the website where he could see who had looked at his profile. Making the first move was hard, so if a woman seemed even remotely interesting, he would email her. He’d been free with his emails before; talking with Marsie had only made him more willing to email.
If anyone shouldn’t think twice about sending a short email saying, “I’d like to get to know you a little better,” it was Marsie. She was smart, interesting, and occasionally she would raise her eyebrow and the corners of her mouth would lift and she went from pretty to as sexy as hell. In fact, if she would listen to him and be more open to who she dated—no more of this algorithm stuff and perfect match—he’d bet she’d never have another free night if she didn’t want one.
If she had even shown up in his suggestions and he didn’t know her, he would have...
Oh. Hey. There, in the list of female faces that had checked him out, was Marsie, looking seriously like she was trying to look like fun. He’d always wondered what she looked like when she was having fun—and he was pretty sure Marsie’s fun didn’t look like it did in this picture.
Marsie enjoyed herself when they got coffee or shared lunch, but that wasn’t the same as fun. He wanted to see something closer to how she was when she’d talked about working on her algorithm. Bright eyes. Flushed skin. Mouth open.
He moved the phone farther from his face. He was imagining what she would look like during sex. Which would be fun, but that hadn’t been where he’d planned to go.
Algorithm. She liked the word and got excited when talking about hers, but he was saying it to stop him from thinking about Marsie and sex. That kind of relationship wasn’t going to happen for them. Even if he thought they had spark, he didn’t fit whatever rules she had come up with for the kind of man she wanted.
And Marsie didn’t veer off course from anything she’d planned. He wasn’t even sure if she knew how.
Though, thinking about her excitement over her algorithm and her requirements, he wondered if the real problem wasn’t her rules, but that she loved the algorithm and wanted it to work. If she met a man who was her perfect match and he didn’t get the right score in her equation, would she consider him?
Ultimately, it wasn’t his problem, other
than that she was his friend and so he wanted her to find long-term happiness.
His finger hovered over her picture for several seconds. Marsie was very private about her dating profile. She didn’t want him to see or comment on it, so he’d never tried to find it.
But she found me first. It was a poor excuse, but enough for him to tap her picture and see more.
He skimmed her description of herself. She read like a stilted version of Marsie. Trying too hard, kind of like her photo. There was even an exclamation point, which he didn’t think she ever used in real life, either when she wrote or texted, but also in her daily tone of voice. In this profile, she was all softness and no interesting sharp edges. Like her photo, she was trying to be fun, but she was also trying not to be the type of person who’d get excited when talking about math.
She was hiding herself. There was no math excitement in her description, no hint that she was a big, fat nerd, but also no depth. She didn’t even include that she’d played online poker to put herself through grad school. And, given what he knew about Marsie from their regular coffee dates, she probably had a thousand other little surprises. None of which were in her profile. Not that he had any in his profile, but he hadn’t lived the same seemingly straightforward, but actually full of curves life that Marsie had.
He hoped his profile reflected the fact that he was a good guy. Marsie’s profile made her seem like she was just another cute girl, when she was far more interesting than that.
* * *
“HEY.” MARSIE LOOKED UP. Jason was standing in her doorway, two cups of coffee in hand. “I was fixing the plumbing in the kitchen and thought you might like a coffee.”
“Oh, God, yes. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Oh?” He slipped into her office. The short distance didn’t give her enough time to enjoy his rolling stride, but he was bringing her coffee and his T-shirt was tight around his chest. She’d enjoy watching him walk the next time they went together to get coffee.
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