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Besides, Jason wasn’t shy. If he noticed that she’d looked at his profile, there was no way he would remain silent. He’d come in her office and sit in the chair, put his elbows on her desk...and she would want to lean right back into him.
Silly. He wasn’t what she was looking for. Too short for one. Maybe an inch taller than her five-ten, and she wanted kisses that gave her a kink in her neck.
“Worker, huh.” Disappointment came and went over his face, too quickly for Marsie to register why what she’d said was insulting. Then he smiled at her and the back of her neck tingled. “You’re right,” he said. “Coming from you, that is a high compliment. And I’m flattered. Thank you.”
She cocked her head, examining his face for the teasing she was used to seeing in his eyes. When she didn’t find any, she reached up and rubbed the spot on her hairline where she could feel him, even though he was sitting on the other side of her desk. “You’re welcome.”
“So, do I get to see your profile?” There was the teasing sparkle that she was used to.
“No.”
“But I could help you with it. I’m a guy, and I know what guys want. Plus, I’m great at getting things from people.”
“I don’t want to get something from someone. I want to be liked and respected for who I am. And my profile reflects that.” She hoped.
“What if I look you up or come across it on my own?”
“Umm... Then I guess you see it.” The online algorithm was supposed to be spot-on. That’s what the creator had said in his book on datasets. In theory, based just on what she knew of Jason, his profile wouldn’t come through her matches. He wasn’t what she was looking for. Too...
She snuck another peek at his arms. Too much bicep and not enough sleek suit.
Her brain reminded her with a wag of her finger that just because he didn’t fill her requirements didn’t mean that she didn’t fit what he was looking for in a match.
No, of course she wasn’t. Men like Jason weren’t looking for a woman with a PhD who played the daily bridge question in the paper. He was friendly and outgoing and charming. He liked to talk and laugh and socialize. He wouldn’t be interested in quiet evenings at home. Plus, there were thousands of women in the area using online dating. She’d be lost in the masses.
“If I see it, and I think it can be improved, do you want me to let you know?”
She leveled her sternest look at him. The one that had gotten her through being the only woman in her graduate school cohort. Only once had the men made jokes about Barbie not being able to do math.
“With the condition that I get to give you feedback on your profile.”
“That’s a deal.” His smile flattened out into a seriousness that she didn’t expect from him. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d seen him be serious when arguing with contractors about the new office space. He just never let his seriousness get in the way of the rest of his life. It was one of the things she liked about him.
Though she was still surprised when the next words that came out of his mouth were, “We should be each other’s online dating support”—said with a straight face, even.
“Hmm,” she said, pretending to think about it. “No. I already have someone helping me with my profile, and you know what they say.”
“Never look a gift horse in a mouth?” he said with a raised brow.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”
He shrugged. For a moment she thought she saw hurt flicker across his face, but she dismissed that as improbable as winning the lottery. “Well, it was worth an ask. Let me know if you change your mind.”
“Sure,” she said, not meaning it. And judging by his raised eyebrow as he lifted himself out of her chair, he believed it as much as she did. Though he still said “Later” with a smile as he walked through her door.
He has a nice butt, Marsie thought as she spun her chair back to face her computer. She opened the document she and Beck had worked on for hours. The short profile put a lighter spin on her personality, as did the carefully crafted answers to the shorter questions like, “Favorite movies.” For example, they decided not to include Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the last book she’d read, even though it was. And a reread at that. Beck had told her to pick a novel, so she’d included the latest Jonathan Franzen, even though she’d hated it.
* * *
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Beck’s hand holding a glass of red wine was the first thing Marsie saw when her friend opened her front door. Marsie shifted her purse higher onto her shoulder, grabbed the glass and had taken a sip before Beck had the door fully open.
“Hey, that was my glass,” her best friend said once the door was fully open.
“No, it wasn’t,” Marsie said as she stepped inside and slipped off her shoes. “You’re still wearing lipstick. If this had been your glass, there would be lipstick on the rim.” She set her bag on the console table by Beck’s front door and dug out her laptop. It was a Lenovo laptop, because they came in orange and she liked orange. Maybe she should have a reason for this preference, like that it represented processing power or battery life. But she allowed herself one bit of silliness in her life, and her laptop color was it. Once her laptop was safely tucked under her arm, she took a long sip of the wine, then stopped to take a deep breath and let the alcohol warm her throat on the way down.
When she looked up, her friend raised an eyebrow and nodded to the glass, which had a near perfect kiss of Beck’s pink lipstick staining the crystal. “You must have a lot on your mind,” Beck said.
“I do.” Marsie took another drink. She needed the wine more than Beck did. “Do you need help with dinner?”
Beck laughed softly and shook her head. “No. But you can pour me another glass of wine.”
“In charge of booze. I can handle that tonight,” Marsie replied, taking another sip before following her friend into the kitchen.
The kitchen smelled like a dream of garlic and tomatoes and pork as a pot burbled away on the stove. “You make the best food,” she said, sliding onto a bar stool. She minded her responsibilities though, pouring a glass of wine for her friend before adding more to the purloined glass. She was the checklist queen and knew that checklists worked best when you took care of the important stuff first.
Beck filled up a big pot of water, put it on the stove and turned on the gas. She chuckled when she turned around to grab her wineglass. “You don’t want to wait until after dinner?” she asked, nodding toward Marsie’s open laptop and the printouts of her Excel spreadsheet on the counter.
“As of five tonight, thirty men have looked at my profile, five have winked at me—whatever that means—and two have said, ‘Hey.’ Action is required.”
“You could have written something in return.” Beck’s fingers trailed along her granite countertop as she came around the island and looked over Marsie’s shoulder. “You’re smart. You don’t need me every step of the way.”
“Ha. You weren’t at the bar for the disastrous date I had the last time I tried this all by myself. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.”
“That’s an n of one,” Beck said, mimicking one of Marsie’s favorite phrases, the thing she said whenever anyone tried to generalize to the entire population based on a small sample size.
“Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to waste any more time kissing frogs. There has to be a prince for me out there somewhere.”
“What’s this?” Beck pressed a finger on the printouts and glided the papers across the counter.
“It’s my rubric,” Marsie replied, not glancing up from her laptop as she signed into her profile. “So I can score profiles and know who to reply to.”
“Height, possible five points,” Beck read. “Education, possible ten points. Compatibility of television shows, possible two points. Attractiveness of profile picture—I like how you spelled out picture instead of writing ‘pic’—two points. Only two points?”
Marsie looked up. “I either think the profile picture is attractive, has the possibility to be attractive, or isn’t at all attractive. So three options, zero, one and two.”
“But isn’t attractiveness at least as important as height, which has five possible points.”
“Oh—” Marsie waved her hand in the air, then went back to her computer “—the final grade is basically a weighted average. Height and attractiveness of profile picture equal out in the equation, though education stays more important.”
“Right. How silly of me,” Beck said in that tone of voice she had when she thought Marsie had taken something too seriously.
“Here.” Marsie turned her computer around with the spreadsheet pulled up. “I put desired traits across the top and names along the side. I was just going to total the scores, which is this cell,” she said, pointing the mouse at the correct spot on the screen. “I was planning on basing all my decisions on that total score, but I’m worried that someone could skew their results by getting full points in all the minor desirables and zero points on the major ones. Like all cute and good taste in television, but not the kind of education I want my life partner to have.”
Marsie looked up to see if Beck was following her. Beck’s lips were pursed, so she was paying attention, but that was also a sign that she thought Marsie was being ridiculous. Which Marsie ignored. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what she wanted out of a partner and creating an equation to match. Plus, the math was the interesting part. Filling out the profile, going on the dates...drudgery.
“I created this equation here,” she said, moving the mouse to another cell, “to give me a better understanding of how someone scores, assuming they are high in the desirables that really matter to me, like education, and low in the desirables that don’t, like where they’ve traveled to in the past. If someone scores 70 or higher in either the total score or 7 or higher in the weighted average, I’ll wink at them or respond to an email. If they score 80 or 8, I’ll message them. Before I’ll agree to a date, their total score through all forms of interaction has to have reached 90 or 9.”
“Your total scores are either 100 or 10? How’d you make that work?”
Marsie felt the sheepish look that crossed her face. “I massaged the equations a little. I like the round numbers.” Then she shook off her embarrassment as if it were a light dusting of snow. She’d had fun creating the equations. Sitting at her desk in her favorite chair, her lamp making a spotlight on the pages spread out over the wood, and a cup of tea that had already cooled because she’d been too diverted by the math to stop to drink it. Flow, that feeling of being so involved in something that the rest of the world fell away.
At the time, she hadn’t cared about how massaging the equation to force the round numbers would affect the validity of her system. It was her system, and she was going to be applying the equations equally to all of the men. Plus, she wasn’t handing her system into a professor to be graded. Beck was the only person who would see it. Sure, Beck made faces at Marsie’s silliness, but that’s what her friend called it: silliness. Like Marsie was just one of the girls.
When the flow had stopped and Marsie had looked up from her scribbles, what she had wanted was someone to share her equations with.
More silliness. Because if she’d had someone with whom to share her fun with spreadsheets, she wouldn’t need them in the first place.
But she’d kept the pages because the man she fell in the love would want to see them. He’d be amused by them, maybe even offer suggestions on how to improve them. Comment on the way she’d labeled the charts. Laugh about how much she liked round numbers. It would be a romantic moment they would share over a bottle of Chianti and spaghetti with a spicy marinara sauce.
No, maybe a grapefruity sauvignon blanc with fish tacos.
Beck pointed her glass of wine at the laptop, bringing Marsie back to the task at hand. “So, if you’ve got all this math to figure out who to talk to, why and how, what do you need me for?”
“The math will help me find the man, but you’re going to help me talk to him. I need help writing emails.” Not that Marsie couldn’t write. She could write persuasive articles full of graphs and charts and numbers, but writing a chatty, easygoing, get-to-know-you email would take her an hour a sentence.
She didn’t have that kind of time.
Beck laughed and pulled the computer toward her. “Okay, what’ve we got?”
“Well, I figure we can look at the first ten men on the site and see what we get. That will be enough for the night.” Maybe enough for the week. Online dating was, in theory, fine. Everyone was doing it, and it’s not like Marsie was meeting people at work or at bars or at the gym. Though, to be fair, she ended the bar experiment a while ago, and she was at the gym to work out not to talk, and she was at work to work. But she’d rather continue trying online dating than change her routine.
But fine in theory didn’t remove the squicky feeling that she would be looking at pictures of real people, reading what they had written about themselves, and then she was going to grade them. As if they were objects, not human beings.
She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another big glass. The spreadsheet helped with her uneasiness. It made the judgments of who to interact with and why less personal. What she didn’t know was if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Maybe it was just a thing, she thought, taking a long sip out of her glass. “Who’s first?” she chirped, picking up her pen and readying herself over her printouts.
Judging by the expression on Beck’s face, she wasn’t fooled by Marsie’s fake cheer, but she clicked on the first picture anyway. “He’s cute,” she said, turning the computer so that Marsie could see the screen.
“I’ll give him one point for attractiveness,” Marsie said, scratching a one into the appropriate cell. She’d always liked doing the work on paper before entering anything into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t always possible, but writing things out by hand helped her think.
“Only one? From what you said about your rating system, I would think a two.”
“His smile in the picture looks fake. But I’ll bet it’s nice in person,” she allowed.
“Whoever you award a two will have to be a paragon of attractive masculinity,” Beck replied. “And I can’t imagine that man will be any fun to be around.”
“That’s why attractiveness of the photo doesn’t have much weight in my equation,” Marsie replied tartly. “Ultimately, it’s just not that important to me.”
“By why... Never mind. I’m sure you have a reason for being picky about the scores you assign even when it’s not an important factor to you, but I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“Because accuracy is important,” Marsie said, even though Beck had specifically said she didn’t care.
“Accuracy and yet you massaged the numbers to get grades of 100 and 10,” Beck pointed out with raised brows.
The wine in her glass sloshed as she waved her hand over the papers and laptop. “This is an art, not a science.” They both laughed at the ridiculousness of that statement.
The pot on the stove burbled as it started to boil, and Beck slid out of her seat. “You rate the next one while I get the pasta in. But don’t move from the profile. I want a chance to see all of them.”
“You’re happily married,” Marsie said, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard over the cascade of pasta into the pot.
“Window-shopping,” her friend called over her shoulder.
Marsie laughed as she jotted down her notes on Waterski25. He was fine, she guessed. Got a 75, so she winked at him.
They kept going through the men as they poured more wine and slurped pasta. The more they sipped, the longer each evaluation took and the more they laughed, about the men, about dating, about the ridiculousness of rating people on a spreadsheet. And, as Marsie moved on to the last man, the splotches of tomato on the printouts had gotten extra funny.
She wobbled as she stood and had to brace herself on the counter.
“You didn’t plan on driving home tonight?” Beck asked.
“Not any longer.” The ground moved a lot more while she was standing than it had when she’d been sitting down. “Can I sleep here?”
“Sure. The sheets on the guest bed are clean. Do you need me to get out the aspirin?”
“No, I know where it is by now.” She didn’t indulge in this much alcohol often, but when she did it happened at Beck’s house. Though not often was still often enough to have a routine. She shook her head, regretting that action immediately.
“Thanks, Beck. For doing this with me. I’m not sure I could have done this on my own.”
“I don’t know what took you so long. It seems like everyone is doing online dating these days. Hell, my younger sister has three apps on her phone for it.”
“I liked the idea that I could do it on my own. Meet someone like they do in the movies.”
“You know, signing up for online dating doesn’t mean you can’t still meet someone while in line at the grocery store. Though that would probably be easier if you didn’t have your groceries delivered.”
“Only when I have a deadline at work,” she said defensively.
“Oh, get upstairs,” Beck said with a wave. “This won’t be so bad, you’ll see. You might meet some nice people.”
“That’s what Jason said.”
“Who’s Jason?”
“He does maintenance around the office. Caught me working on my profile. I think he’s one of those people with three dating apps on their phone.” Her lips had slurred over the word “think,” so she muttered the word under her breath several times until she felt like it came out correctly.
“Oh, well, I don’t know this Jason fellow, but it sounds like he has the right idea. Have fun.”
“I—” she paused, giving herself extra time to concentrate on the next word “—think my spreadsheets are fun.”
“They’re fun for you,” Beck said, placing a heavy hand on Marsie’s shoulder. “Just don’t let them get in your way. Math and statistics can’t solve all the world’s problems.”
“The hell you say,” Marsie said with a laugh as she grabbed her purse and stumbled down the hall to crawl up the stairs. “I’ll clean up in the morning.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and Neil will beat us both to it.”
“Ha!” Marsie looked up the long set of stairs that seemed steeper than usual. Which was probably the alcohol. Then she sighed, lifted her foot and began her climb. Like dating and finding a mate, one step at a time.
CHAPTER TWO (#u372e9ba1-3f20-5292-8dd1-9a0adc97e0bc)
