Dating By Numbers. Jennifer Lohmann

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       CHAPTER TWO

      IF A DATE was going well, Jason usually ordered another drink. Not enough to get him light-headed, but something to hold on to while he and the lovely lady across the table talked and laughed. If a date was going south, he had, on occasion, ordered enough to drink that he had to Uber his way home after seeing the woman to her car.

      Tonight was one of those other nights. Those nights when he was two hours and one drink in, and Allison hadn’t caught any of his polite overtures about the night being over. The waitress had disappeared into a black hole on the other side of the restaurant.

      Not a black hole. The customer whose table she’d attached herself to was very cute. Even Jason could see that and men weren’t his type. However, he wasn’t the only non-cute-dude customer who wanted her attention and wasn’t getting it. Someone was going to complain to the manager soon. It might be Jason, if he could figure out how to get Allison to stop telling a story about her childhood cat and get out of this chair.

      “My mom had said I shouldn’t name him Muffin, but it went with our breakfast animals. My brother had his dog Bacon and my dad had Pancake and...” She paused to drink from her water glass.

      Good enough. “Allison, please excuse me. I’ve really got to use the bathroom.”

      Her water glass was resting on her bottom lip as she looked up at him. “Okay. Sure. The best part of the story will be here for you when you get back.”

      “I can’t wait,” he said, then kicked himself. He liked his job because he liked people. He got to work with his hands, improve the way the world worked one small repair at a time, and chat with all the interesting people who worked at the research firm. He also knew how to flatter people and make them feel good. Most of the time, he was sincere about it. But then there were nights like tonight when habit kicked in and Allison was smiling up at him, pleased that he was going to listen to some boring story about Muffin, and he wished he could be a dick, toss money on the table and leave.

      As soon as he rounded the corner of the bathroom, he pulled a random waiter aside and asked him to get their waitress and their check. He needed to be done with this date. He and Allison had met for coffee earlier in the week and that had gone well. But the more she drank, the more she talked, and the more she talked, the less well everything went.

      In the safety of the bathroom, he pulled out his phone and thought, for a moment, of texting Marsie to tell her that not all dates were fun. He’d run into a wall of chatter, he’d say. She’d be amused by that. Smile that superior smile of hers where the corners of her mouth lifted a hair and her cheekbones looked extra sharp. When she smiled like that, he knew she was trying not to laugh at him or his story because she thought it wasn’t fitting, but secretly—or maybe with people she felt comfortable with—she would burst out in a full gut laugh.

      Or that’s what he liked to imagine with her starched button-down shirts and pressed slacks. Depending on his mood, he imagined her laughs to include her leaning over and him getting a nice peek down the front of her shirt to what was probably a sensible skin-colored bra, but which he always imagined to be red lace.

      But he and Marsie worked together. They weren’t friends. Hell, Marsie didn’t even consider him a colleague. She’d said he was a good worker, not a good coworker. He may not have a PhD, but he was smart enough to know the difference between the two.

      Plus, he had never seen her relax enough to laugh like he imagined. Maybe she didn’t know how.

      Plus, he didn’t have her phone number. The message lost its fun if sent through work email. Too many strikes against the idea to count, he put his phone away, did his business, washed his hands and headed back out to his table, Allison and the check.

      At the table, Jason made some excuse about getting a call about a broken pipe at work, slipped his credit card into the holder and looked at his date.

      “This has been fun,” he said. It was better to be direct with these things than to leave a person hanging. He’d been ghosted enough times while dating, and he didn’t do it himself. Well, not anymore. One of many things he’d learned dating so much was that you either became a more understanding, more considerate person, or you became the other. Some of his friends had become the other. Drinks with them were a never-ending litany of complaints. They didn’t understand that you got back from the world what you put out into it.

      He wondered if he should talk about this with Marsie. She was starting to date, and he didn’t want her to fall into that negative black hole. Then he blinked Marsie out of his head. Even if he was ending any chance of a third date with Allison, he shouldn’t be thinking of Marsie.

      Bringing himself back to the present, he realized Allison had apparently been dating long enough to know what was coming. She looked at him, her brows raised. She thankfully looked more expectant than hurt.

      “I don’t think this is going anywhere. You’re nice,” he said, meaning it. “But there’s no spark.”

      The waitress picked that moment to grab the check. She gave him a dirty look, then passed Allison a sympathetic one.

      To his surprise, his date laughed, and he liked her better for it. “Yeah. I didn’t think so, either.”

      Huh?