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To her surprise, he laughed. “You’re great. You know that, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“I love how you don’t let up. How you push and push and push. Such commitment, it’s just great. I’ll bet your friends think it’s incredibly irritating when they’re down and you sweep them up in your intensity to propel them forward. But I’ll also bet they know they wouldn’t be able to live without it.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You’re relentless. Spending time with you is great. When I’m on your floor and I want coffee, I always check to see if you’re in your office. Because coffee with you is better than coffee without you.”
The restaurant was a little overwarm. The heat seemed to have been sealed into the fried appetizers, which she still had to blow before she took a bite. But neither of those accounted for the warmth flooding her at Jason’s words, a warmth that a sip of her ice water couldn’t dampen.
“It’s too bad there’s no spark between us,” he said, moving his hand—fried croquette pinched in his fingers—between them. “I could spend days talking to you and never be bored. I think you’d always have the capacity to surprise me.”
Those words, though, were a bucket of ice water, and she wouldn’t recover her warmth for days. She smiled through gritted teeth. “No spark. Right. Of course.”
Her smile must not have fooled him any more than it made her feel better, because his face fell out of the cheer and good times brightness it had been in for the entire dinner. “Oh, Marsie. I’m sorry. Did I…? I didn’t think…” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t think you were interested in me, like that.”
Neither did I.
She wasn’t. He was the building manager for her office. She didn’t know if he’d gone to college, but he didn’t have a profession to match hers, so his education didn’t really matter. He would fail her algorithm on profession alone. And he was too short.
He was cute, though, with a nice smile and a butt she checked out regularly. She felt comfortable around him. He was the only person in the office that she got coffee with on a whim. She never did anything on a whim.
Still, his words shouldn’t have hurt. She put a little more force into her smile. Her cheeks were warm from the effort, at least, even if the rest of her body was still chilled. “No, no. You’re right. I’m not interested in you, like that. We’re friends.”
There. That sounded right. Friends. Buddies. Pals. People who got coffee together and talked about their dates with other people.
“Besides,” she said breezily, pretending she couldn’t still feel his words in her heart, “I have a strict algorithm. You wouldn’t pass. Most men don’t.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes me feel much better,” he replied; the hurt that had punctured her was darkening his eyes now.
“But I thought… You just said… Does it matter if you wouldn’t pass?” It didn’t matter that he didn’t think they had any of that mysterious and poorly defined “spark.”
Did it?
He shook his head. “Of course not. We have no spark. We’re friends.” She recognized the fake smile as quickly as she’d recognized the hurt.
They finished their dinner in tense conversation, never once going back to the dating and the very reason they were having this dinner in the first place. He talked about the progress on the renovation at the other end of the building, and she talked about the grant she was applying for.
Neither asked to see the dessert menu or wanted coffee.
Marsie didn’t want to go home, but she didn’t want to be a part of this conversation anymore, either.
She needed to think.
CHAPTER TEN
JASON SLAMMED HIS truck door hard, then sat in the driver’s seat and watched Marsie back out of her parking spot. He watched her practical and boring little Prius pull up the street and her blinker come on. Then she seemed to wait for a space large enough for a bus, and she turned left.
Only after he couldn’t see her taillights any longer did he jam his key into the ignition and back out. Turning left would get him home faster. He turned right.
