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“It’s called Stir. It’s thin and black, with a wooden spoon on the cover, if I remember correctly,” she called back. “I think all I need to get from the store is the chicken.”
They had a plan for their day. She was going to make “the world’s best roast chicken,” while he was responsible for sides. Since the chicken apparently took hours to cook, the rest of their day would be spent lounging. After their hike yesterday, Marsie had suggested a bath in her big tub. Jason had seconded that suggestion.
He headed over to the bookshelf holding the cookbooks and looked for a thin, black book. “What’s the author’s last name?” As he could have predicted, her books were organized by author’s last the name. And, as he looked more closely, the cookbooks were first organized by cuisine, then by author’s last name. “And what kind of food is this roast chicken?”
There was a little banging around in the kitchen before she answered. “It’s delicious kind of food,” she said, the impish smile she was wearing carrying through the doorway. “Delicious Italian food. The author’s last name is Lynch.”
His fingers bumped as he ran them over the bindings of the books. No Lynch, though there was a small space where a thin book could fit. It was even in the right spot. “Could it be somewhere else? It’s not here.”
“Hmm…” Her voice was louder, and he turned to find she’d popped her head through the doorway. “My desk maybe? I’ve been looking at the recipe for weeks, trying to decide if I could justify making so much food for just me.”
Then, as quickly as she’d appeared, she evaporated back into her kitchen. He chuckled as he headed over to her desk. She’d said he was responsible for the side dishes, but he was pretty certain she was rifling through her refrigerator looking for what she wanted to make.
Marsie was not good at giving up control. They might end up with a comprise—more side dishes than two people could reasonably eat, even considering leftovers. The trick to being with a woman like Marsie was giving her the space to be the amazing person she was. If that meant sacrifices like eating too much, he was willing to make them.
He didn’t see the book when he first glanced at her desk, though he was too amused by how messy her home desk was compared to her work desk to look closely. She had papers everywhere on her home desk, and none were in the neat piles she kept at work. It was more evidence of the layers to her personality that made her so interesting.
One of the piles was higher than the other. He picked up those papers and, as she had thought, the cookbook was lying underneath. He was setting the papers back on her desk when he noticed a name along the side.
Jason.
He looked away, determined to leave Marsie’s private notes alone when the other words on the page snapped through his head and it dawned on him what he might be looking at.
Waterski25. BigPappi82. They weren’t names, so much as they were handles, probably for online dating and far more clever than the one he’d used for himself, JSN0562.
This is Marsie’s algorithm. That realization was quickly followed by the next: and she scored me. Running along the top of the page were attributes a man might have: height, education, compatibility of television programs, attractiveness of profile picture, prestige of job… He picked up the paper. She’d had to print it on legal-size paper because she had so many requirements she was judging the men against.
He was looking closer now, all thoughts against snooping gone under a sense of indignation. He knew that she was ranking and scoring men. They’d talked about it. They’d joked about it. He’d teased her about it.
But he hadn’t known she’d ranked and judged him. And if his scores in comparison to the water skier’s were any indication, he hadn’t done very well. There wasn’t a total at the end of the sheet. Knowing Marsie as well as he did, she probably marked her scores on the paper, then transferred them to a spreadsheet on her computer where the algorithm she’d created could crunch the numbers for her.
No reason for her to decide the fate of an interested dude. No, Marsie would coldly mark a score and let the computer do the dirty work of saying if it was a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
