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She locked her car door, then followed him to his truck and let him help her into the passenger seat.
“I’m sorry,” she said as soon as he climbed into his own seat and shut the door.
He turned his head to look at her, not starting the truck. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about, Marsie. You were being you. And you turn what you are trying to figure out into numbers, so you can better understand.”
She waited to say anything else until his engine had turned over and they were driving out of the lot. “But being me hurt you. And I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I was hurt. No one likes to think that they are being measured and come up short.”
“You didn’t come up short. Not by a long shot. I was measuring you wrong.”
“Explain,” Jason said as they turned onto the main road.
“It’s even wrong to say that I was measuring you wrong. I was measuring everything wrong. And everyone.” She looked out the window for a brief second, then turned back to look at his profile, even as he was looking at the road.
If she was going to confess her stupidity, then she needed to do it the brave way, facing him. No hiding it. “The night that I spent running different algorithms and giving different weights to different measures and you never passed, there was a tingle at the back of my mind. A sense that something was wrong. Your profile was cute. I knew you and I liked you. How could those things not push the numbers over the edge, no matter how much I finessed the algorithm?”
“I’ll be honest, Marsie, this isn’t making me feel better.”
She shook her head. “But you see, I was measuring education and height and compatibility of television shows and what I thought of the last book you read. Nothing in my measurements told me that I feel stronger when you’re around. That you always have my best interest in the front of your mind. Nor that it gives me pleasure to have your needs at the front of my mind.”
In the back of her mind, she went through her decisions to create the algorithm and the characteristics that she had decided to measure. “It was fine for picking through people I didn’t know. I mean, you’ve got to have a reason to say yes to this guy and no to this guy, and my algorithm was as good as anything.
“But it was a terrible way to decide how I felt about someone I knew. Not just terrible, but cowardly. Cowardly because admitting to how I felt about you would mean I was admitting to the fact that my algorithm couldn’t find me the perfect guy. That all my plans and all my ideas and all my numbers weren’t anything other than a security blanket.
“And, God, that was scary to admit to myself.” She gave a wry chuckle. “And I feel like an idiot admitting it to you.”
He was silent for several seconds as he pulled into her driveway. Then he sighed, and it was heavy, and it was sad, and she worried that nothing she said would overcome what he had seen and how it had made him feel. “That’s a lot of information about you and about how I make you feel.”
He turned the car off, then turned in his seat to look at her. “But those papers were about me, and how you felt about me.”
Pieces clicked and clanked in her mind, the noises of hard stones, like the abacus her father had shown her how to use when she was five. Then the little stones stopped and the equation was solved. She had completely misunderstood both his question and her answer.
“All those things you do for me, I feel compelled to do them for you.”
The dark of night pressed in on them in Jason’s truck, broken only by the streetlights reflecting in the rearview mirror. An owl hooted in the distance.
“That was weak,” she said. “I can do better. You’re kind. You’re funny. You’re thoughtful. You’re the kind of guy who leaves a poker game to pick up the woman who caused him emotional pain. I want to be with that guy. When that guy is sad, I want to make him happy. And if I can’t make him happy, I want to be there to be sad with him. If his burden is too big to carry, I want to be an extra set of shoulders.”
Tears had pooled in her eyes, not sadness so much as an overflow of all possible emotions. She was sad that her actions had caused his pain and this conversation. She was grateful that she had the chance to have this conversation and to have a second chance. And she was as nervous as hell that she would screw this up.
