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He needed to think.
Instead of heading directly home from this one wrong turn, he picked the turn lane with no cars and went that way. He wasn’t in a hurry to get home, but it was too late to head out for a country drive, so he’d take the long way home and drive until he put that dinner behind him.
Marsie’s comments about him not passing her algorithm shouldn’t have hurt. He wasn’t trying to pass her algorithm. They had no spark. Their future was as friends and, if he was being honest with himself, they were friends of happenstance. If either one of them got another job, their friendship wouldn’t survive.
His shoulders dropped. That was a shitty, sad thought. He and Marsie weren’t a match, but she was funny, smart, interesting, and he still wanted to know what she looked like when she was relaxed on the couch, glass of wine in her hand, and her hair a mess like she’d just had sex on the living-room floor.
And he didn’t really want to put the dinner behind him. What he wanted was to not have said that thing about no spark, so she wouldn’t have said that thing about her algorithm and he wouldn’t be driving around randomly, trying to decide why his feelings here hurt.
Stupid. Stupid.
He reached for his phone in the center console to call her and apologize, then he pushed it away. His parents and their marriage was his goal. I knew your father was the man I was going to marry as soon as I saw him.
He liked Marsie, but he didn’t feel that way about her. Just because he’d never thought that about any woman didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. It just meant that he hadn’t met the right woman yet. She was out there, and this area of North Carolina had enough people that she lived locally.
He wasn’t stupid enough to believe that the right woman for him only lived in someplace like Michigan or Utah or, hell, Morocco. The world didn’t work like that.
He would meet a woman and he would know that she was the woman. He was as sure of that fact as Marsie was in the power of her algorithm to pick the right man for her.
Reaching a decision, he changed lanes and turned back to the path for home. He’d stop by Marsie’s office with a proposition. They’d see whose way worked best. No more avoiding talking about their dates.
He slapped his hand against the steering wheel.
Yes. This was a good idea. Brains versus emotion. They’d see who was right.
Jason turned into his driveway laughing. Despite his mom’s eye rolls, his dad repeatedly said emotions weren’t men’s business. Men were brawn. Clearly, though, Marsie was the brains.
He’d still win.
* * *
JASON PAUSED IN the doorway to Marsie’s office while she sat behind her desk. He didn’t go in, not yet. The strangeness of their dinner and their dismissal of each other—he was at least honest enough to admit that he had started it and that it wasn’t just her who’d dismissed him—had lingered. It still lingered, not quite like a bad smell, but one he wasn’t familiar with. Maybe a pleasant smell gone sour.
That was how he had felt walking out of the restaurant—like he’d soured something nice.
Sure, winning was one of his motivations for starting this competition with Marsie, but getting them back to their comfortable friendliness was the bigger one. He liked many things about her, but the easy way they’d always gotten along was the biggest.
“Hey,” he said, after a long second of standing there without her noticing. She must have been thinking hard, because she started, then smiled and turned in her chair. She was wearing black and gray today. Her sleek gray suit jacket was lined around the lapels and the sleeves with black. Her shirt was black. Her earrings were black. He would bet that her pants were gray like her jacket and that she was wearing a pair of black high heels that made her a little taller than he was.
But with her light blondish, reddish hair and sharp, intelligent face, she looked anything other than boring, even if that’s what she was trying for.
“Hey.” Her voice was warm, without the hesitation he’d been afraid of. Maybe their dinner hadn’t ended as awkwardly for her as it had for him.
Then she tilted her head and scooted back a little, and he knew she’d felt the oddness too. “I didn’t expect to see you today. I guess…”
