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Marsie looked up to see if Beck was following her. Beck’s lips were pursed, so she was paying attention, but that was also a sign that she thought Marsie was being ridiculous. Which Marsie ignored. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what she wanted out of a partner and creating an equation to match. Plus, the math was the interesting part. Filling out the profile, going on the dates...drudgery.
“I created this equation here,” she said, moving the mouse to another cell, “to give me a better understanding of how someone scores, assuming they are high in the desirables that really matter to me, like education, and low in the desirables that don’t, like where they’ve traveled to in the past. If someone scores 70 or higher in either the total score or 7 or higher in the weighted average, I’ll wink at them or respond to an email. If they score 80 or 8, I’ll message them. Before I’ll agree to a date, their total score through all forms of interaction has to have reached 90 or 9.”
“Your total scores are either 100 or 10? How’d you make that work?”
Marsie felt the sheepish look that crossed her face. “I massaged the equations a little. I like the round numbers.” Then she shook off her embarrassment as if it were a light dusting of snow. She’d had fun creating the equations. Sitting at her desk in her favorite chair, her lamp making a spotlight on the pages spread out over the wood, and a cup of tea that had already cooled because she’d been too diverted by the math to stop to drink it. Flow, that feeling of being so involved in something that the rest of the world fell away.
At the time, she hadn’t cared about how massaging the equation to force the round numbers would affect the validity of her system. It was her system, and she was going to be applying the equations equally to all of the men. Plus, she wasn’t handing her system into a professor to be graded. Beck was the only person who would see it. Sure, Beck made faces at Marsie’s silliness, but that’s what her friend called it: silliness. Like Marsie was just one of the girls.
When the flow had stopped and Marsie had looked up from her scribbles, what she had wanted was someone to share her equations with.
More silliness. Because if she’d had someone with whom to share her fun with spreadsheets, she wouldn’t need them in the first place.
But she’d kept the pages because the man she fell in the love would want to see them. He’d be amused by them, maybe even offer suggestions on how to improve them. Comment on the way she’d labeled the charts. Laugh about how much she liked round numbers. It would be a romantic moment they would share over a bottle of Chianti and spaghetti with a spicy marinara sauce.
No, maybe a grapefruity sauvignon blanc with fish tacos.
Beck pointed her glass of wine at the laptop, bringing Marsie back to the task at hand. “So, if you’ve got all this math to figure out who to talk to, why and how, what do you need me for?”
“The math will help me find the man, but you’re going to help me talk to him. I need help writing emails.” Not that Marsie couldn’t write. She could write persuasive articles full of graphs and charts and numbers, but writing a chatty, easygoing, get-to-know-you email would take her an hour a sentence.
She didn’t have that kind of time.
Beck laughed and pulled the computer toward her. “Okay, what’ve we got?”
“Well, I figure we can look at the first ten men on the site and see what we get. That will be enough for the night.” Maybe enough for the week. Online dating was, in theory, fine. Everyone was doing it, and it’s not like Marsie was meeting people at work or at bars or at the gym. Though, to be fair, she ended the bar experiment a while ago, and she was at the gym to work out not to talk, and she was at work to work. But she’d rather continue trying online dating than change her routine.
But fine in theory didn’t remove the squicky feeling that she would be looking at pictures of real people, reading what they had written about themselves, and then she was going to grade them. As if they were objects, not human beings.
She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another big glass. The spreadsheet helped with her uneasiness. It made the judgments of who to interact with and why less personal. What she didn’t know was if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Maybe it was just a thing, she thought, taking a long sip out of her glass. “Who’s first?” she chirped, picking up her pen and readying herself over her printouts.
Judging by the expression on Beck’s face, she wasn’t fooled by Marsie’s fake cheer, but she clicked on the first picture anyway. “He’s cute,” she said, turning the computer so that Marsie could see the screen.
“I’ll give him one point for attractiveness,” Marsie said, scratching a one into the appropriate cell. She’d always liked doing the work on paper before entering anything into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t always possible, but writing things out by hand helped her think.
“Only one? From what you said about your rating system, I would think a two.”
“His smile in the picture looks fake. But I’ll bet it’s nice in person,” she allowed.
“Whoever you award a two will have to be a paragon of attractive masculinity,” Beck replied. “And I can’t imagine that man will be any fun to be around.”
“That’s why attractiveness of the photo doesn’t have much weight in my equation,” Marsie replied tartly. “Ultimately, it’s just not that important to me.”
“By why... Never mind. I’m sure you have a reason for being picky about the scores you assign even when it’s not an important factor to you, but I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“Because accuracy is important,” Marsie said, even though Beck had specifically said she didn’t care.
“Accuracy and yet you massaged the numbers to get grades of 100 and 10,” Beck pointed out with raised brows.
The wine in her glass sloshed as she waved her hand over the papers and laptop. “This is an art, not a science.” They both laughed at the ridiculousness of that statement.
The pot on the stove burbled as it started to boil, and Beck slid out of her seat. “You rate the next one while I get the pasta in. But don’t move from the profile. I want a chance to see all of them.”
“You’re happily married,” Marsie said, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard over the cascade of pasta into the pot.
“Window-shopping,” her friend called over her shoulder.
Marsie laughed as she jotted down her notes on Waterski25. He was fine, she guessed. Got a 75, so she winked at him.
They kept going through the men as they poured more wine and slurped pasta. The more they sipped, the longer each evaluation took and the more they laughed, about the men, about dating, about the ridiculousness of rating people on a spreadsheet. And, as Marsie moved on to the last man, the splotches of tomato on the printouts had gotten extra funny.
She wobbled as she stood and had to brace herself on the counter.
“You didn’t plan on driving home tonight?” Beck asked.
“Not any longer.” The ground moved a lot more while she was standing than it had when she’d been sitting down. “Can I sleep here?”
“Sure. The sheets on the guest bed are clean. Do you need me to get out the aspirin?”
“No, I know where it is by now.” She didn’t indulge in this much alcohol often, but when she did it happened at Beck’s house. Though not often was still often enough to have a routine. She shook her head, regretting that action immediately.
“Thanks, Beck. For doing this with me. I’m not sure I could have done this on my own.”
“I don’t know what took you so long. It seems like everyone is doing online dating these days. Hell, my younger sister has three apps on her phone for it.”
“I liked the idea that I could do it on my own. Meet someone like they do in the movies.”
“You know, signing up for online dating doesn’t mean you can’t still meet someone while in line at the grocery store. Though that would probably be easier if you didn’t have your groceries delivered.”
“Only when I have a deadline at work,” she said defensively.
“Oh, get upstairs,” Beck said with a wave. “This won’t be so bad, you’ll see. You might meet some nice people.”
“That’s what Jason said.”
“Who’s Jason?”
“He does maintenance around the office. Caught me working on my profile. I think he’s one of those people with three dating apps on their phone.” Her lips had slurred over the word “think,” so she muttered the word under her breath several times until she felt like it came out correctly.
“Oh, well, I don’t know this Jason fellow, but it sounds like he has the right idea. Have fun.”
“I—” she paused, giving herself extra time to concentrate on the next word “—think my spreadsheets are fun.”
“They’re fun for you,” Beck said, placing a heavy hand on Marsie’s shoulder. “Just don’t let them get in your way. Math and statistics can’t solve all the world’s problems.”
“The hell you say,” Marsie said with a laugh as she grabbed her purse and stumbled down the hall to crawl up the stairs. “I’ll clean up in the morning.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and Neil will beat us both to it.”
“Ha!” Marsie looked up the long set of stairs that seemed steeper than usual. Which was probably the alcohol. Then she sighed, lifted her foot and began her climb. Like dating and finding a mate, one step at a time.
CHAPTER TWO
IF A DATE was going well, Jason usually ordered another drink. Not enough to get him light-headed, but something to hold on to while he and the lovely lady across the table talked and laughed. If a date was going south, he had, on occasion, ordered enough to drink that he had to Uber his way home after seeing the woman to her car.
Tonight was one of those other nights. Those nights when he was two hours and one drink in, and Allison hadn’t caught any of his polite overtures about the night being over. The waitress had disappeared into a black hole on the other side of the restaurant.
Not a black hole. The customer whose table she’d attached herself to was very cute. Even Jason could see that and men weren’t his type. However, he wasn’t the only non-cute-dude customer who wanted her attention and wasn’t getting it. Someone was going to complain to the manager soon. It might be Jason, if he could figure out how to get Allison to stop telling a story about her childhood cat and get out of this chair.
“My mom had said I shouldn’t name him Muffin, but it went with our breakfast animals. My brother had his dog Bacon and my dad had Pancake and...” She paused to drink from her water glass.
Good enough. “Allison, please excuse me. I’ve really got to use the bathroom.”
Her water glass was resting on her bottom lip as she looked up at him. “Okay. Sure. The best part of the story will be here for you when you get back.”
“I can’t wait,” he said, then kicked himself. He liked his job because he liked people. He got to work with his hands, improve the way the world worked one small repair at a time, and chat with all the interesting people who worked at the research firm. He also knew how to flatter people and make them feel good. Most of the time, he was sincere about it. But then there were nights like tonight when habit kicked in and Allison was smiling up at him, pleased that he was going to listen to some boring story about Muffin, and he wished he could be a dick, toss money on the table and leave.
As soon as he rounded the corner of the bathroom, he pulled a random waiter aside and asked him to get their waitress and their check. He needed to be done with this date. He and Allison had met for coffee earlier in the week and that had gone well. But the more she drank, the more she talked, and the more she talked, the less well everything went.
In the safety of the bathroom, he pulled out his phone and thought, for a moment, of texting Marsie to tell her that not all dates were fun. He’d run into a wall of chatter, he’d say. She’d be amused by that. Smile that superior smile of hers where the corners of her mouth lifted a hair and her cheekbones looked extra sharp. When she smiled like that, he knew she was trying not to laugh at him or his story because she thought it wasn’t fitting, but secretly—or maybe with people she felt comfortable with—she would burst out in a full gut laugh.
Or that’s what he liked to imagine with her starched button-down shirts and pressed slacks. Depending on his mood, he imagined her laughs to include her leaning over and him getting a nice peek down the front of her shirt to what was probably a sensible skin-colored bra, but which he always imagined to be red lace.
But he and Marsie worked together. They weren’t friends. Hell, Marsie didn’t even consider him a colleague. She’d said he was a good worker, not a good coworker. He may not have a PhD, but he was smart enough to know the difference between the two.
Plus, he had never seen her relax enough to laugh like he imagined. Maybe she didn’t know how.
Plus, he didn’t have her phone number. The message lost its fun if sent through work email. Too many strikes against the idea to count, he put his phone away, did his business, washed his hands and headed back out to his table, Allison and the check.
At the table, Jason made some excuse about getting a call about a broken pipe at work, slipped his credit card into the holder and looked at his date.
“This has been fun,” he said. It was better to be direct with these things than to leave a person hanging. He’d been ghosted enough times while dating, and he didn’t do it himself. Well, not anymore. One of many things he’d learned dating so much was that you either became a more understanding, more considerate person, or you became the other. Some of his friends had become the other. Drinks with them were a never-ending litany of complaints. They didn’t understand that you got back from the world what you put out into it.
He wondered if he should talk about this with Marsie. She was starting to date, and he didn’t want her to fall into that negative black hole. Then he blinked Marsie out of his head. Even if he was ending any chance of a third date with Allison, he shouldn’t be thinking of Marsie.
Bringing himself back to the present, he realized Allison had apparently been dating long enough to know what was coming. She looked at him, her brows raised. She thankfully looked more expectant than hurt.
“I don’t think this is going anywhere. You’re nice,” he said, meaning it. “But there’s no spark.”
The waitress picked that moment to grab the check. She gave him a dirty look, then passed Allison a sympathetic one.
To his surprise, his date laughed, and he liked her better for it. “Yeah. I didn’t think so, either.”
Huh?
His skepticism must have been clear on his face because she laughed again. “Don’t look so surprised. You tried very hard. But I don’t want to be with any man who needs to try so hard to be with me.”
This Allison was more interesting. Still no spark—he hadn’t lied about that—but he’d hang out with an Allison who shot him down before he’d hang out with an Allison who talked about her cat Pancake or Bacon or whatever breakfast item it had been named after. “You deserve better. That’s true. Good luck finding him.”
She shrugged. “I have a date tomorrow with a guy. It’ll be our fourth date. I have hopes for him.”
It was Jason’s turn to laugh. “So I’m the confirmation date.”
“Confirmation date?”
“You know, you’re really into someone, but you go on a date with a guy to see if you spend the entire date thinking about the person you’re really into or if your eyes roam. I’m that guy for you.”
“Yeah, I guess you are.” All pretense of this date going anywhere was over. Allison reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. “I’d feel bad, but I think he’s on a date right now, too. Normally we text several times a night. Nothing from him tonight.”
“Such is the way of modern dating.”
“Oh, Jason, how long have you been dating?” She must have heard the weariness in his voice. A weariness he tried to pretend wasn’t there, because the sympathy in her voice cut a little.
He shrugged off her pity. “A while. Not that I haven’t had serious girlfriends, but none of them ever seem to stick.”
“No spark,” one of those girlfriends had said, when he’d asked why. That was the only reason she’d been able to give for why she was breaking up with him. Though, if he were being honest with himself, that particular relationship had been faltering ever since she’d started sending him links to different college programs for older students.
Allison’s face looked less sympathetic when she pursed her lips. “Sure you haven’t had trouble sticking to them?”
For a server who hadn’t paid them any attention practically the entire time they’d been in the restaurant, their waitress now picked the most inopportune times to pass by their table. Apparently, she’d heard Allison’s question which, following the other bits of conversation she’d overheard, made him look like the bad guy. The server’s book landed on the table with a smack, jolting his card and the pen onto the table.
“I don’t think you can come back to this restaurant,” Allison said, her eyes twinkling.
“At least not when she’s working,” he said with a gesture of his head to their retreating waitress. Which was okay. He didn’t like this place much anyway. The restaurant thought too highly of itself for his taste.
He collected the pen and his credit card off the table, added a tip to the bill and signed his name.
“Want me to pay half? I have cash.”
“Nah. If this guy is the one, your confirmation date might as well have all the trappings of a real date. It might be your last.”
She smiled, but his hopes that she’d forgotten her previous question were dashed when she opened her mouth and said, “Well, have you been the one giving up too early?”
“Is this a date or therapy?”
“Come on,” she said, giving him a gimme gesture with her fingers. “Look, we’ll probably never see each other again, and we’ve both been doing this dating thing a long time. You might as well be honest. What have you got to lose?”
She had a point. Maybe even one about him giving up on the women too soon. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so.” He shook his head, shoving the book and the signed receipt to the middle of the table. “I don’t want to think so.”
“It’s the risk everyone talks about with online dating and dating apps. The pool of prospects seems to be so vast that the girl who is close enough, and might actually be better than you deserve, can’t compete with the possibilities of your imagination.” Allison said those words with no trace of bitterness in her voice. Flat, like those were the rules of the game and she’d played them, too.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He looked at dating as fun, which led credence to her statement. “But isn’t that what modern romance is? We all date and date and date until we decide we don’t want to date anymore, then we settle down with the person we happen to be with at the time?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I think you take each person at face value and not think about how they compare to competition. Only the people able to do that get off the hamster wheel with someone. The others are either running forever or get spun off alone.”
“Yeah?” Jason wished he had another drink. Some excuse to sit here and keep talking to Allison. The removal of hope and expectation made their conversation interesting. “Sounds decidedly unromantic. Is that how you did it?”
“I like to think that I fell in love the old-fashioned way. I met a guy, liked him and the more I got to know him, the more I liked him. Nothing unromantic about that. The computer helped some and hindered some, but no more and no less than relatives would have one hundred years ago. Only the skills I used to navigate it were different.” Her smile was soft, without a trace of irony, and her focus had drifted away from him, probably to the man in her life.
No denying it. He was jealous.
“Fell in love? But you’re out here with me.”
“Yeah. Stupid. I just realized, as the words slipped out of my mouth, that I’m really falling in love.” She nodded to the check still lying between them on the table. “I’m going to head out. Sure you don’t want to split that?”
“Leaving from here to see your guy?”
She rolled her eyes. “From a date with one guy into the bed of the man I love? No. Custody switch is tomorrow. I might as well get a head start on my cleaning. Got to keep up a good example for the kids,” she added with a wry smile.
Her chair squeaked against the floor as she backed it up. “Thanks for the evening. I enjoyed my dinner. And the conversation, especially the last part.”
He pushed his own chair back and stood. “Yeah, me too. Thanks for the advice.”
“You look like you need it. But hell, probably all of us do.”
They walked out to the sidewalk and Jason walked her to her car. When they got there, she leaned in and he gave her a hug. She was warm and smelled good. Postpressure, she’d proven to be interesting and funny. But it was like hugging a cousin for as much interest he had in her beyond tonight.
The truth of modern dating had to lie somewhere between her starry-eyed old-fashioned romance with new technology and his wondering if you got out of the game with the person you were with when you decided you didn’t want to play any longer. As nice as she was, Jason would still take his toys and go home rather than end the game now, with Allison.
Lucky man who had her, both being with a great woman and for finding that spark in the first place. Jason didn’t think he’d met any woman who could lure him to stop playing yet, and he’d been looking. He wasn’t lying to himself about that.
“Good luck with your guy,” he said as she got into her car.
“Good luck to you, too. It’s hard out there.” With that, Allison slammed the car door and she was out of his life.
Jason turned to walk to his car. He spent his career making and maintaining contacts, and he’d never quite gotten used to dating, where trying to keep in touch with everyone you shared a cup of coffee with was creepy. Watching someone like Allison, who was smart and interesting, drive out of his life would never be fun.
He shoved his hands into the pocket of his jacket. He’d be on Marsie’s floor on Monday to fix some guy’s desk and bring her a cup of coffee before asking her if she’d had any luck with her profile. He’d also like to hear her opinion on the flyby nature of dating. She was sure to have something unexpected and insightful to say. It was one of the reasons he liked working with her so much, beyond his hopes that she would lean over and he’d catch a glimpse of her cleavage.
He wasn’t a total dog.
CHAPTER THREE
WELL, I’M NOT sick to my stomach.
Rolling over in bed made Marsie reconsider her hopeful sentiment.
Yet.
Once her head had found its place on her shoulders, she swung her feet over the side of the bed and steadied herself with the help of the nightstand as she stood, her toes sinking into the plush rug. All things considered, she wasn’t that bad off. She didn’t vomit as she reached down for her clothes and the throbbing in her head hadn’t hit a level she would call pounding. She was too old to go through one, two—please, God, say it wasn’t three—bottles of wine with Beck in one sitting.
The mattress sank as her butt hit, helping to steady her when she put on her socks. Everything about Beck’s guest room was cushiony. Her feet sank into the rug. The mattress had practically swallowed her whole. The curtains had enough fabric to be properly called draperies. The only nonsoft things in this room were the tchotchkes covering every flat surface and the wood of the four-poster. The guest room made up for the rest of the house with its hard edges and modern furniture. Whenever Marsie stayed over, she wondered if this was what the rest of the house would be like if Beck lived alone, or if she put all her girly decorating energy into this one room and the effect would be diluted if she had the entire house to play with.