But it bought her a week of not thinking about Jason—too much. And no matter what they found in their research, no one would be able to argue that she hadn’t thought through the research, that she wasn’t organized.
All those algorithms, all that thoroughness that Jason had been so angry about was welcome here.
Welcome, but hollow without the cup of coffee he would set on her desk with a smile.
With a heavy sigh, she closed her email, saved all her spreadsheets and signed out of her computer. Then she reached into her drawer for her purse and headed for her car.
If she had the calendar right—and she did—tonight was Jason’s poker night. She wasn’t invited this time. Maybe she would never be invited again. Jill had no reason to pick her over Jason.
She hoped Jason would win a lot of money off his friends. Enough to take himself out to a nice dinner, though she wasn’t so magnanimous that she wanted him to take another woman out for that nice dinner.
She was eating alone. He could, too.
Her car was the only one in the parking lot. At least during the week there had been other workaholics here with her. Now, she was alone, without even her fellow spreadsheet-lovers to share her sad life. Even Françoise, who she could usually count on to be here later than she was, had gone home.
She got into her car, exhausted for the first time this week. Work had been a nice distraction, but she was going to go home, and unless she wanted to face that she was working all weekend to keep herself from thinking about Jason, she would need to find something else to entertain herself with.
Beck wasn’t even in town to keep her company.
At least it was spring. She could garden, even if it meant she was trimming her grass with kitchen shears to keep her mind off her mistakes.
And then, like a bad dream, her car wouldn’t start. The engine wouldn’t engage at all. Her battery was probably dead and she might be able to jump it, but there was no one else in the parking lot to lend their car.
Or their jumper cables.
She called her roadside maintenance. The person on the other end of the line was nice, sympathetic even, about the fact that the tow truck might not be available for an hour and a half. She checked her phone. According to the rideshare app, there was something happening downtown and so there was surge pricing throughout the Triangle.
As an economist, she recognized the genius of surge pricing.
As a consumer, it irritated her.
Jill didn’t play poker with the guys. She actually avoided coming downstairs on poker night. And, Marsie thought, she and Jill were still friendly. The other woman had sent her a couple texts over the past week, like nothing had happened with Jason. Her and Kenny’s house wasn’t far from the office, nor was it far from Marsie’s house. Jill might be willing to come get her and drive her home.
Marsie could get her car tomorrow. The hassle would give her something to do.
She pulled her phone out of her purse and made the call.
“Hey, Jill?”
“Marsie? How are you?”
“I have a favor to ask,” Marsie said then explained.
She was only a little surprised when Jill said, “Sure. Be there in about fifteen minutes.”
Relieved, Marsie leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
* * *
JASON WAS COMING out of the bathroom when he heard Jill say, “Be there in about fifteen minutes.”
“Leaving during the poker game?”
“You mean the poker game I don’t attend.” She shook her head. “Marsie said her car won’t start. I’m going to give her a ride home.” Jill cocked her head. “I don’t know why she didn’t call you.”
Jason checked his phone, just in case he hadn’t heard a call. “No call. But I’ll go get her. I’ll tell the guys to cash me out, and I’ll settle up whatever money is owed later.”
He was headed for the basement stairs when he heard Jill ask, “Why didn’t she call you?”
From Jill’s point of view, it was a perfectly reasonable question. She knew that he and Marsie had gone on a date. She didn’t know that they were effectively broken up. He hadn’t wanted to tell her. Frankly, he hadn’t wanted to tell anyone.
If he told someone, then it was true. But Jill was asking, and he didn’t have an easy lie at the tip of his tongue—and Jill wasn’t the kind of person you lied to.
“Marsie and I aren’t... I guess we went on one awesome date, and then we broke up.”
Jill lifted an eyebrow. “She didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“I didn’t realize...” Jill was a good person. Marsie was a good person. Marsie had wanted to contact Jill, and of course she would follow through on doing it. She was Marsie. “That’s good actually. Two good people being friends.”
Her eyebrow raised again. “Sounds like it makes you nervous.”
“Maybe a little. Not that I would lie to you about anything that happened between Marsie and me, but it would have been nice to have that option.”
“Jason,” she said, exasperated. “The only reason I can imagine you even thinking about pulling the wool over my eyes is that you did something wrong. So what did you do?”
“I broke up with her.” As he told Jill the quick version, her face went from shocked to angry to sympathetic. “And that’s why she didn’t call me,” he finished. “But I’ll still go pick her up.”
“Are you going to pick her up and drive her home in silence, or are you going to talk to her?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. I don’t know what to think about her algorithms, but I don’t like being ranked so low.”
“Yeah,” she said with a nod. “I wouldn’t, either. But it’s interesting to me that she thought to put you in the algorithm in the first place. And then that she kept trying to make your profile fit. It’s almost as if she knew she liked you and was testing her algorithm to see if it worked, not to see if you could pass it.”
“She said she was trying to make me pass.” Thinking that he’d failed her most basic of tests had hurt. Like he’d been stabbed in his pride, piercing his heart.
Jill shrugged. “I don’t see why a woman who wasn’t interested in a man would put all the effort into making him fit an algorithm she believed in.”
“Why the algorithm in the first place?” Why couldn’t she just have noticed and known that she was interested in him? Why the games?
“I’ve listened to you talk about spark enough times to stop asking you why. You needed something to hang on to, to use as you figured out what you wanted.”
“Spark’s different,” he said, though he couldn’t say why.
Which, of course, meant she asked, “Why?”
“Because it’s not judging people,” he insisted, though of course it was. His arguments were dissolving the ground from under his feet. He felt unstable, but to stop insisting he was right felt like a bigger risk.
She barked out a laugh. “It’s absolutely judging people. Hers is math. Yours is metaphysical. While she was deciding that you didn’t meet hers, you were deciding that she didn’t meet yours, either.”
She was right, so he sighed. It was easier than admitting he was wrong. “It still hurt.”
“Of course it did.” She shrugged. “And maybe I’m wrong about what Marsie was doing with those algorithms. Maybe she was judging you and finding you wanting, and what you discovered on those pages was that your future would end when she realized that she shouldn’t settle.”
He winced.
“But you won’t know until you ask her,” Jill said. “And I told her fifteen minutes, so you’d probably better speed if you’re going to make good on my promise.”
Jill hadn’t needed to say that. Jason was already reachin
g for his keys and heading out the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A KNOCK ON the driver’s window made Marsie jump and she had to squint before her half-asleep brain caught up with what she was seeing outside the car.
Not what.
Who.
“Jason.” She scrambled forward, reaching for the car unlock button and hitting the lock button first. Then she hit the window buttons, which did nothing with her dead battery.
Finally she got her door open, breathless and feeling a little stupid.
“Someone call for a jump?” Jason said with a smile. Under different circumstances, she would imagine he was making a silly joke.
But that’s not the place they were at now.
And, in reality, she didn’t wish Jason hadn’t found the algorithm. Relationships were better when honest, and those algorithms were an honest part of her. She just wished she’d had a chance to tell him herself. To maybe better explain and let him see that evaluating things was just what she did.
If he was here, might she have a chance to explain?
“Um, I called for a ride, but I’ll take a jump. It’s a Prius, so I’m not sure if there are different rules for jumping it. Or even if the battery is dead. Can the battery die?”
His hands were folded across his chest as he evaluated her. He was wearing a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt that showed off the breadth of his shoulders. “I’ll be honest. I know nothing about cars. I’m supposed to, I’m sure, since I’m a fix-it kinda guy, but cars have never really interested me. I can change the oil in my truck, but I choose not to.”
“I don’t have jumper cables,” she confessed. “I’ve been meaning to buy some. For years.”
“A slight flaw in your otherwise perfect planning,” he said with a nod. “When’s your birthday?”
“What?” She was lost. Sitting in her car in the parking lot of her office with the man she loved, and she had no idea where she was.
Being lost wasn’t as scary as she’d imagined. Not with Jason here.
“I’ll get you jumper cables for your car for your birthday.” He looked a little sheepish. “But I don’t know when it is.”
“I don’t know when your birthday is, either. When we were work buddies, it didn’t seem important.”
“And we’re not work buddies now.” It wasn’t a question.
“No. I’m not sure we ever can be again.”
“Can we be more?”
Was there a word more lost than lost? Adrift?
Vulnerable?
“I think that’s something you need to answer,” she said finally.
“How about I give you a ride home?”
“I’d like that.” She paused, not entirely sure of her footing. “Can we keep talking? About being more?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m here for.” He held out his hand and she took it. He pulled her out of the car, not quite against him, but close. “And to give you a ride home, of course. I would do that even if we sat in silence.”
She locked her car door, then followed him to his truck and let him help her into the passenger seat.
“I’m sorry,” she said as soon as he climbed into his own seat and shut the door.
He turned his head to look at her, not starting the truck. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about, Marsie. You were being you. And you turn what you are trying to figure out into numbers, so you can better understand.”
She waited to say anything else until his engine had turned over and they were driving out of the lot. “But being me hurt you. And I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I was hurt. No one likes to think that they are being measured and come up short.”
“You didn’t come up short. Not by a long shot. I was measuring you wrong.”
“Explain,” Jason said as they turned onto the main road.
“It’s even wrong to say that I was measuring you wrong. I was measuring everything wrong. And everyone.” She looked out the window for a brief second, then turned back to look at his profile, even as he was looking at the road.
If she was going to confess her stupidity, then she needed to do it the brave way, facing him. No hiding it. “The night that I spent running different algorithms and giving different weights to different measures and you never passed, there was a tingle at the back of my mind. A sense that something was wrong. Your profile was cute. I knew you and I liked you. How could those things not push the numbers over the edge, no matter how much I finessed the algorithm?”
“I’ll be honest, Marsie, this isn’t making me feel better.”
She shook her head. “But you see, I was measuring education and height and compatibility of television shows and what I thought of the last book you read. Nothing in my measurements told me that I feel stronger when you’re around. That you always have my best interest in the front of your mind. Nor that it gives me pleasure to have your needs at the front of my mind.”
In the back of her mind, she went through her decisions to create the algorithm and the characteristics that she had decided to measure. “It was fine for picking through people I didn’t know. I mean, you’ve got to have a reason to say yes to this guy and no to this guy, and my algorithm was as good as anything.
“But it was a terrible way to decide how I felt about someone I knew. Not just terrible, but cowardly. Cowardly because admitting to how I felt about you would mean I was admitting to the fact that my algorithm couldn’t find me the perfect guy. That all my plans and all my ideas and all my numbers weren’t anything other than a security blanket.
“And, God, that was scary to admit to myself.” She gave a wry chuckle. “And I feel like an idiot admitting it to you.”
He was silent for several seconds as he pulled into her driveway. Then he sighed, and it was heavy, and it was sad, and she worried that nothing she said would overcome what he had seen and how it had made him feel. “That’s a lot of information about you and about how I make you feel.”
He turned the car off, then turned in his seat to look at her. “But those papers were about me, and how you felt about me.”
Pieces clicked and clanked in her mind, the noises of hard stones, like the abacus her father had shown her how to use when she was five. Then the little stones stopped and the equation was solved. She had completely misunderstood both his question and her answer.
“All those things you do for me, I feel compelled to do them for you.”
The dark of night pressed in on them in Jason’s truck, broken only by the streetlights reflecting in the rearview mirror. An owl hooted in the distance.
“That was weak,” she said. “I can do better. You’re kind. You’re funny. You’re thoughtful. You’re the kind of guy who leaves a poker game to pick up the woman who caused him emotional pain. I want to be with that guy. When that guy is sad, I want to make him happy. And if I can’t make him happy, I want to be there to be sad with him. If his burden is too big to carry, I want to be an extra set of shoulders.”
Tears had pooled in her eyes, not sadness so much as an overflow of all possible emotions. She was sad that her actions had caused his pain and this conversation. She was grateful that she had the chance to have this conversation and to have a second chance. And she was as nervous as hell that she would screw this up.
“I want to share your joys, too. And I want you to be the person who shares my joys.” Then the truth hit her. “Last week, when I got the news about the grant, I could have shared the news with any number of people. I probably should have first shared the news with the people who will be working on the grant with me. But I was so happy that I got to share it with you first.”
She sniffed and dug in her purse for some tissues. Of course, she didn’t have any, but when she looked up, Jason had a box of tissues in his hand. She yanked
out four and blew her nose. “I want to be that person for you. Not because you have the right taste in movies, but because you’re you. And you are worth everything.”
“Well,” he said. He sat back from her, then leaned forward, all the time considering her. “That’s the prettiest apology I’ve ever heard.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be pretty.”
He smiled at her. “I know. But pretty words are part of what makes that apology come from you. And I love you.”
“Even the algorithms?” she asked, hopeful, but still uncertain.
“Especially the algorithms,” he insisted.
Silence filled through the truck again, but this silence was softer. Easy. Welcoming, even. This silence wasn’t hiding anything scary. It was just silence.
“Do you want to go in?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation, but he didn’t reach for the door handle. “Before we do, Jill made me realize something when she convinced me to come get you.”
“She had to convince you to come get me?” Not that she would blame him, but the thought that he might have had to have been talked into coming for her hurt a little.
“Convince isn’t the right word. When she said where she was going, I told her that I would come get you. What she convinced me of is that I should hear you out. That I clearly missed you—I’d told her on Saturday morning that I was coming over to your house in the hopes of starting a relationship with you, but I hadn’t told her that we’d ended anything. I hadn’t told anyone. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to anyone, because if I told anyone, then it might be true.”
He shook his head. “That’s off topic. What she told me is that I should be grateful for the algorithms. You’re smart, and you’re dedicated, and when you decide on a path, you stick to it. She said the algorithms didn’t show me doubts about me, but that they were showing you doubts about your path. And that you needed to explore them in the way that you learned best.”
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