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Instead, she peered closer at his picture. The photo had been taken straight on his face. His hair was clipped close to his head, almost as short as his scruffy short beard. One of his eyebrows was slightly raised, like he hadn’t been completely comfortable to have his picture taken. Looking straight on, his nose was a little crooked, like he’d broken it when he was a kid.
It was cute.
Even in the picture, his eyes seemed to see right through her, like they did in person, freezing her to her chair and making her want to look back, forever. And, like in person, the person he seemed to be seeing through the computer screen, sitting in her chair, was better than she thought. When he looked at her in that way, even through a picture, she felt like less the sharp, abrasive, too-smart economist who corrected people’s statistics at parties—even though she knew she shouldn’t—and more like a person a stranger would want to approach and talk to.
When he looked at her like that, she felt like she might be the person he seemed to think she was.
She ran an index finger down her spreadsheet. Her algorithm had no space for that look, whatever it was. She couldn’t even put a name to it. You couldn’t measure something you couldn’t name.
After a sip of wine for nerve, Marsie turned back to her screen. Jason described himself as good with his hands, “A bit of MacGyver without the spying. I’ll fix anything you’ve got for me.” She smiled at that description of himself, which was probably true and had a bit of his usual cheek. Apparently, he liked hockey—they never talked about sports—but couldn’t skate. If she thought about it, she should tell him that she was the opposite. She could skate, and knew nothing about hockey. He described himself as a country boy—which she did know—but that he liked living in the city and going to the museums, especially the downtown science museum.
His profile told her a lot about him that she hadn’t known, but it didn’t say anything about the things she did know about him. It didn’t say anything about how much he liked to read, about his sense of humor and his kindness.
Neither, frankly, did her algorithm. She pulled the hard copies of her notes closer to the computer and wrote “Jason” at the bottom of the page. Then, not sure why she was doing it when she knew the likely outcome already, she scored him.
His profile picture was cute. She would probably have given it a one, but she knew that his butt was also cute, so she upped it to a two. He was shorter than she preferred. His TV interests were nothing like hers, and she sure as hell wasn’t interested in watching hockey. He listed his education as “some college,” which was more than she thought he had, and made her wonder what that meant. His career, of course, was nothing like what she wanted in a partner.
She looked at the score she gave him for that. Beck was right. She was a snob. The zero score she had written for education didn’t account for the fact that he was clever, interesting and curious, something most of the men she’d been on dates with—men with an education on par with hers—couldn’t claim.
Where was she wrong?
She reread Jason’s profile from top to bottom. He probably hadn’t analyzed every word of his description as she had. Like working through any implications of the TV shows she liked. Or considering what her favorite places to hang out said about her.
He hadn’t overthought the whole damn thing, because he wasn’t the kind of person who overthought things like she did. It was one of the things that made him so relaxing to be around. When he was sitting in her office and they were drinking their coffee and chatting, all the little details that usually worried her fell away. Suddenly, she could do with her life what had always been so appealing about math—strip away the pointless bits and work with the truth.
Like his curiosity, that quality wasn’t anywhere in her spreadsheet.
But she could measure some parts of his profile, points besides the facts of what someone did and what they said they liked. She could measure how light their profile read. Was it breezy? Did it seem effortless? Not that she had any room to judge! Even if there were only a couple sentences, were those sentences she could imagine talking with?
