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“No, no, no.” He set his coffee cup on her desk and waved his hands in the air. “Nothing about it was bad. And maybe I’m biased, because I know you. So I know all the stuff about you that’s not in your profile. And that’s all stuff that the right guy will spend the time to get to know. But to me, your profile represented a fake you.”
“It’s online. Isn’t everything online a fake version of reality?” Except that his profile description wasn’t. She learned things about him that she hadn’t known, and it had caught every last charming part of him.
“Yeah. Probably. The mysterious they say that social media is messing with us, because people only post the dramas and highs of life, but not the mundanity and hard work that all of us experience. I guess that’s a fake version of reality.” He was shaking his head as he grabbed his coffee cup back. “I don’t like all that stuff.”
He laughed. “My friends were surprised that I did online dating, but it was efficient in a way that social media has never seemed to be. Even if you’re right and it probably is fake.”
“Jason, what should I do about my profile?” He was just one guy commenting on her profile. An n of one, in statistics talk, but her sample size wasn’t big to begin with.
“Nothing. Don’t listen to me. What do I know?”
“Me,” she said, her four fingers pressing on her sternum. “You know me.”
Her words seemed to silence them both. Marsie wondered if he also felt the pressure of the truth of what she said. But when he smiled, the tension between them dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. “I should give some lucky guy a chance to get to know you.”
Will they know me like you do?
Friends. They were just friends. Devastating smile aside, Jason had failed her algorithm. Hell, she couldn’t even force him to pass. He just didn’t have what she wanted in a life partner.
Except himself, that same stupid, know-it-all voice in the back of her head said. She dismissed it, like you do with know-it-alls and had been done to her all through her childhood, even when she had been right.
He slapped a hand on the armrest. “Speaking of getting to know you, you should come with me tonight to a poker game.”
“What?” That came out of left field. And made her nervous. It had been years since she’d played poker on a regular basis.
“Yeah. I was thinking about it when I was looking at your profile and wondering what was missing. Mostly I noticed that it was missing the poker thing—which I, at least, think is really interesting. And I have a monthly poker game that I play with friends. I think you’d like them.”
“I haven’t played poker in…in years. And even then I played online. It’s different online.”
He leaned forward, an elbow on his knee and a mischievous glint in his eyes that made her heart flutter, even though he wasn’t the man for her. “Here’s what I’m thinking. I play with a group of men. I’ll bring you in, say you work in my office. You wear that.”
He nodded at her, and she looked down at her outfit to see what that was. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” She was wearing a black silk tee—fitted, because she knew she had a nice figure—and a plain black-and-gray-check pencil skirt with nice black detail. Black heels. No that.
“Nothing is wrong with what you’re wearing. You always look amazing. You look like a woman at the front of a boardroom who commands the attention of people with money. Which you are. But you don’t look like a woman who will beat the pants off the men playing poker.”
You always look amazing. Her mind hooked on those words, and it took her a moment to comprehend the rest of what Jason had said. “Are you saying that you want me to hustle your friends?”
“Hustle, no,” he said, but the glint in his eyes gave away that that’s exactly what he was thinking. She didn’t notice that he moved, but he seemed closer to her.
Then she realized that she’d leaned closer in to him.
“My friends will take one look at you and underestimate you. It will be awesome when you take all their money. We don’t play for high stakes, but you’ll make money. And then you can take me out to dinner with it.”
