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Maybe they were both screwed. Wasn’t that a depressing thought?
The bartender pushed two beers across the wood. Jason wrapped his hands around them and navigated his way back to his table.
“Your beer,” he said, setting his date’s drink in front of her. “Snacks will be up shortly.”
“Thanks.” Her voice was a little high-pitched. Nothing he couldn’t learn to live with. Right. That was part of not judging a date immediately. Deciding what he could learn to live with.
“So how’s online dating going for you?” After an uncountable number of dates, he’d realized that people either talked about all the cool places they’d traveled to, tried to make their work sound as interesting as possible, or compared online-dating horror stories.
Talking about dating was often the most interesting choice. Jason liked dating. He liked people. But no doubt about it—people were crazy and dating meant you met some crazy ones.
“Oh, good,” she said with several energetic nods. “Good. There are lots of nice men in the area.”
“No horror stories?”
“Oh, not yet. And I’m sure I won’t really have horror stories. I mean, people are generally as nice as you give them credit for. If you’re nice first, people will generally be nice in return.”
She’d said “nice” four times in the past thirty seconds. The optimism was, well, nice, but was turning bland quickly. Like the fat ringlets surrounding her face, Felicity might be all roundness and no interesting sharp corners.
“That’s…nice.” He couldn’t help himself. And he wasn’t even trying to make fun of her.
“Any horror stories for you?” she asked, her voice starting high and getting higher at the end of her question.
“No.” He’d had unpleasant dates and dates he’d laughed about with his friends, but with this round-eyed, round-cheeked and ringleted woman staring at him from across the table, he couldn’t say anything other than, “The women were all nice.”
There was no way Felicity would find any of the stories funny.
They stared at each other, silence rising from the table like black smoke.
“I brought you some water,” the waitress said, setting two glasses in front of them. “I’ll be right back out with your food.”
“That’s nice,” his date said in response, and Jason nearly choked on his beer.
“So do you like to travel?” he asked, setting his glass down. If she said travel was nice, he was likely to spew beer through his nose. Better not to risk it.
“Oh, I do.” More nodding. “I don’t get to do it very often, but when I do, it’s nice.”
His dad had told him to pick a nice girl and settle down. With Felicity finding everything in the world nice, he wondered if his dad had given him the worst advice in the world—and if God was trolling him. Marsie would probably have some statistical explanation—a percentage of the people in the world who say nice and how often they say it correlated to their eating habits or something. Maybe how often they went to the doctor. She studied health care, after all.
The waitress picked that moment to bring their snacks by. He’d either ordered a lot of snacks or this bar was more generous than most. Unless he was rude and got up and left right now, they would be here for a while. It would take them two hours at least to get through the pile of tater tots, not to mention the spring rolls and stuffed mushrooms.
God, he had been hungry. He should have just committed to dinner.
At least Felicity could report to her friends that the date had been nice. Jason reached for a fry and settled his mind to a boring hour. “So tell me about all the nice places you’ve been to.”
He was never going to listen to his father’s advice again.
He couldn’t wait to tell Marsie.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MARSIE SIGHED AS she sat at her dining-room table and signed into the dating site. Poking around at pictures and descriptions of men hadn’t been fun when she’d started—and it hadn’t gotten more fun with time. The fun part had been creating the algorithm to find the perfect match. Applying the perfect match was a chore, especially because the more she looked and scored the men according to what she was looking for, the fewer men seemed to be available.
