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Of course, the algorithm was supposed to weed men out. It was supposed to make it easier to pick from the dude on the right and the dude on the left. But she hadn’t thought it would mean almost no men would be available. And that’s what it was looking like right now.
She clicked around at some promising pictures, made a couple notes on the spreadsheet next to her and, for one particularly good-looking guy, fudged the numbers a bit so that he would get a higher score.
In the beginning the lack of options had seemed okay. She wasn’t looking for fifteen perfectly fine men; she was looking for the one perfect man. She only needed one. One wasn’t too much to ask.
Was it?
She checked the time on her laptop. She had a date with Trevor in two hours. Their third date. He would probably expect at least a kiss. Which, actually, was reasonable. If she liked him, she would want at least a kiss. But the thought of kissing him, of putting on a cute bra and digging out a matching pair of panties, had her looking right back at the long list and pictures of other men.
Oh, God. She dropped her head to her hands with a groan. That was a terrible sign. Terrible. On paper, Trevor was the perfect man. In person, he was nearly the perfect man.
And therein lay the problem.
Math, her father had always said, was an abstraction of reality. Abstraction made understanding both the problem and the solution easier and clearer. Logic led you from the problem to the solution. And the key to making sure the solution could be applied to the real-world problem you were trying to solve was in making sure the assumptions you made when abstracting from the real world and applying to math were correct.
She looked to her spreadsheet. Every last row and column was an assumption. There were assumptions about what she wanted. Assumptions about how important those wants were in relation to other wants. Assumptions about the men she was browsing online for.
Any one—or all—of those assumptions was wrong.
She sat back in her chair, looking at both the pictures of men on the screen and the spreadsheet laid out next to her laptop.
The assumptions she knew best were the ones she had made about her own wants. Those were the ones she needed to examine first.
No, what she needed to do first was call Trevor and cancel their date.
She gave the phone sitting on the table next to her laptop a long side-eye. Then she took a deep breath. Then she straightened her shoulders and grabbed the phone before she could talk herself out of the uncomfortable task. She sped through her contacts until she came to his and hit the call button as quick as possible.
It was like ripping off a bandage. Only worse, because, she was hurting someone else in the meantime. And the person didn’t get a chance to brace himself.
“Marsie, hello.” Trevor sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her, though there was a tinge of uncertainty at the periphery. “Is there anything wrong? We’re still on for our date tonight, right?”
“Well, actually, that’s what I’m calling about. I’m just not…”
She scrambled to think of how to say this nicely, even though she knew that, really, there was no way to say this nicely. This was one of those situations where you had to accept that you were going to hurt someone. The goal was not to be a jerk about it and linger. Or be dishonest.
“I don’t see us turning into anything, and I didn’t want either of us to waste our time tonight. I didn’t want you to show up at the restaurant under false pretenses. You’re a great guy. You’re everything I want in a partner, but… But there’s no spark.”
She closed her eyes against the reality that she’d just used those words. She didn’t even believe in spark. But she did believe in a connection, and she didn’t have it with Trevor.
“No spark?” He sounded confused. “I thought we got along really well.”
“We do. But I can’t imagine us being anything other than friends.”
“Why are you telling me this over the phone?”
She bit her lip. God, this was hard. Sometimes, it seemed easier to be single than deal with the messy, illogical bounces of another person’s emotions. But whenever she thought that way, she would remember how nice it had been to share a bed with Richard. And how much nicer it would be to share a bed with someone she loved deeply.
