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She winced. “That’s not how I meant it.”
“Tell me this, did you score me or did you score my online profile?”
“Will it matter?” she asked hopefully.
“I don’t actually know. But right now you have nothing to lose.”
The harshness of his voice made her suck in her breath. She had known it was bad, but she hadn’t realized it was that bad. “Um. Okay. I scored your online profile. I liked your online profile. And we were friends. I wanted to know if, you know, something else maybe could happen.”
He cocked his head, a brow raised. “So what? If I passed, you would make a move on me and if I didn’t, then nothing. We’d stay friends.”
She shook her head. “Honestly, I didn’t put that much thought into it. Your profile showed up in my matches and, well, it seemed so you. It was charming and light and interesting and I just…kinda… I didn’t think about what would happen if you passed. I just wanted to see if you could.”
“You expect me to believe you didn’t have a plan?”
“You’re nothing I could have planned for. I didn’t expect you. I didn’t want you.”
The instant those words left her mouth, Jason stepped back like she’d hit him. “You didn’t want me.” His face had fallen, and he no longer looked angry. He looked crushed.
God, she’d done that to him. Tears welled in her eyes, and she felt smaller than an ant, and worth less, too.
“No. I mean, yes. God,” she said, her head falling back so she could look at the ceiling and find something stable when it felt like the floor was sliding out from under her.
She brought her face down so that she was looking at him when she said what she needed to say, what she hoped he needed to hear. “I didn’t want to want you. I had this idea of what I wanted. Of what would matter to me in a relationship, and it was all stupid shit. Like what television shows you watched and the last book you read. I wasn’t thinking of things like kindness and reliability and making me laugh and finding someone who softened all my rough edges.”
Tears slid down her face, pooling around the edges of her mouth and around her nostrils. She wiped at her face with the heel of her hand. “I was looking for all the wrong things. You, you, are the right things. You’re everything I should have been looking for in a man and everything I was too blinded by my algorithm and my desire to hack online dating to see. I was so determined to win, that I almost lost.”
“Almost?” God, he was back to sounding as hard as steel, cutting and cold.
“You dismissed me as a partner, too. You were looking for spark, and we didn’t have it.” She sniffed, scrubbed at her face and sniffed again. “That’s not too different.”
“In this case, I think it is. I never laid out your positives and negatives on a piece of paper and scored them. I just knew that you were Marsie and that I liked hanging out with you. And then I realized I wanted more.”
He sighed. “I’m not saying that I wasn’t stupid, too. I was. My idea of spark didn’t account for the joys of getting to know someone and falling in love slowly.”
Love? She opened her mouth to ask, but he raised his hand to stall her. “But I never scored you and found you wanting. That’s the difference.”
“I’m sorry. Really, really sorry.”
“I’m sure you are. But I’d bet if we went back in time, you would do it again. I’m not sure you know how to make decisions without laying out the numbers. How will I know that you’re not still laying out my faults and taking off points?”
“How will I know that you won’t regret that we didn’t have immediate spark?”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked as sad as she felt. “That’s the best you can do?”
“I can’t change how I am and how I think. But I can change my score sheet. I did change my score sheet. You just can’t see it, because I didn’t write it down. I just acted on the results.”
“Well, then I guess we’ll never have to worry about it, will we. You’ll never have to wonder if I missed the spark, and I’ll never have to wonder if you’re tallying my faults.”
