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His finger hovered over her picture for several seconds. Marsie was very private about her dating profile. She didn’t want him to see or comment on it, so he’d never tried to find it.
But she found me first. It was a poor excuse, but enough for him to tap her picture and see more.
He skimmed her description of herself. She read like a stilted version of Marsie. Trying too hard, kind of like her photo. There was even an exclamation point, which he didn’t think she ever used in real life, either when she wrote or texted, but also in her daily tone of voice. In this profile, she was all softness and no interesting sharp edges. Like her photo, she was trying to be fun, but she was also trying not to be the type of person who’d get excited when talking about math.
She was hiding herself. There was no math excitement in her description, no hint that she was a big, fat nerd, but also no depth. She didn’t even include that she’d played online poker to put herself through grad school. And, given what he knew about Marsie from their regular coffee dates, she probably had a thousand other little surprises. None of which were in her profile. Not that he had any in his profile, but he hadn’t lived the same seemingly straightforward, but actually full of curves life that Marsie had.
He hoped his profile reflected the fact that he was a good guy. Marsie’s profile made her seem like she was just another cute girl, when she was far more interesting than that.
* * *
“HEY.” MARSIE LOOKED UP. Jason was standing in her doorway, two cups of coffee in hand. “I was fixing the plumbing in the kitchen and thought you might like a coffee.”
“Oh, God, yes. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Oh?” He slipped into her office. The short distance didn’t give her enough time to enjoy his rolling stride, but he was bringing her coffee and his T-shirt was tight around his chest. She’d enjoy watching him walk the next time they went together to get coffee.
He sat and slid a cup across her desk. “Hot date last night? It’s not one of your regular date nights.”
Was she imagining the edge to his voice? “No date last night. No dates for the past several nights, actually. I’m taking a short break.”
“Really?” His surprise was clear. “What about our bet?”
She wrapped her hands around the warm paper cup and leaned forward to smell the coffee. The aroma was enough to wake her up a bit. “Even with our bet, I canceled a third date with a guy. We didn’t have…”
“Spark?” he finished for her, a pleased smile lighting up his face. “So you believe in spark, now, do ya?”
“No. Not exactly.” She sipped her coffee. “But I recognize that my algorithm wasn’t perfect. So I’ve been spending the past couple of nights running tests on it.”
And she’d been doing so with Jason’s profile as the standard. But she wasn’t going to tell him that part. He didn’t need to know. After all, he didn’t think they had spark, and she knew he didn’t have the basics of what she wanted in a man. She was certain of it. She’d manipulated the numbers and the weighting several times to see if he would pass. He hadn’t. Not once.
That had been last night. When she’d finally realized that he wouldn’t ever pass and that she was disappointed about it, she went to bed.
And then she hadn’t slept.
“Test, huh?” Amusement flickered in his eyes. “I’d be curious to see that.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’d find it boring.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I never find you boring.”
“I find the algorithms boring.” She wrinkled her nose. “No, not boring. Right now, it’s frustrating me. Measuring people with numbers is tricky business. Even the Census people would like to do it differently than they are allowed.”
“So…” She could feel what he was going to ask in his pause and raised eyebrow, and she braced herself against it. “You were looking at my dating profile.”
Despite practicing what she would say when he asked, despite fortifying herself against the question, despite all her preparation, she still blushed. And given the burn up along her hairline, she’d turned a bright red. No cute flush for her.
