Page 11 of Love’s a Script (Hearts Collide #1)
Chapter Eleven
MONICA REED: There’s a belief that many of my clients have before working with me that finding love should be effortless and spontaneous. That it should find them wherever they are even if that’s locked up in a princess tower. But that’s hogwash, okay?
CHESA SALVADOR: How so?
MR: Intentionally and repeatedly putting yourself out there will yield better results than simply thinking about the love you want in your life. I’m not saying love can’t be whimsical and surprise you, but it’s more true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
* * *
“The nature of this process doesn’t allow me to dwell on a failed date for too long,” Ruben said into his recording device.
It was early in the morning at the radio station, long before any of the staff were set to show up, and Ruben was at his cubicle dictating a reflection he’d use when it was time to draft the script for the feature.
“Matchmaking encourages optimism,” he continued.
“A hope that The One is around the corner as long as you keep going. It almost sounds like the mindset of a gambler, but where slot machines are all luck, matchmaking feels dynamic, responsive. Winnable.” He leaned back onto the hind legs of his chair, pausing to think.
“I’ll need to see if there’s data to support this impression.
Maybe the hope is an illusion but required if you’re going to engage in a Sisyphean sport like dating. ”
Some movement to Ruben’s left yanked him from his focused musings. Chesa had quietly arrived and was watching him over the partition that separated their workspaces. He startled, jerking forward to avoid falling backward in his chair, but in the process, he tipped over his mason jar of water.
“Sorry! I didn’t want to interrupt you,” Chesa said as they both rushed to clean up the spill with tissue and scrap paper.
“I’d have preferred the interruption over the nefarious ghost approach.”
“I didn’t think you’d be here this early,” she said once the desk was dry. “Didn’t you have a date last night?”
Ruben sighed, retaking his seat. “Yeah.”
“Bad?” she asked, finding a spot against the wall of his cubicle to prop her shoulder against. The workday hadn’t officially begun, but a pencil had managed to find its way behind her ear already.
“No, the date was fine. She was nice. But we mostly talked work.”
“Fun, a networking event.”
The observation wasn’t far off. Minutes after Ruben had met his date, Felicia, at an indoor ice-skating rink, she’d said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
It was the worst thing someone like Ruben could hear.
He met new people at an unimaginable rate, but he had all sorts of tricks to remember them.
He’d tried running through the possible contexts he could’ve known Felicia from, and it turned out that they’d taken several English courses together as undergraduates.
“It’s okay,” she’d said. “It’s been, like, over a decade. I didn’t really expect you to remember me. I only do because you were always one of the smartest ones in class, and I thought you were cute.”
For the rest of their time together, they put their mediocre skating skills to work and detailed their academic and professional pursuits.
“So what is this?” Chesa asked. “Zero for three?”
“Yeah, I suppose it is.” He pushed against the impulse that wanted to take her words as an indictment. “What about your end?” he asked. “Any updates?”
“I scheduled an interview with that queer speed dating organizer I told you about, so I’m looking forward to that. Also, Hugh is asking about the sex robots again.”
“He’s obsessed, and it’s getting uncomfortable,” Ruben said.
“Do you want me to relay that verbatim?”
“Sure, if you think it would stop the badgering.”
* * *
In a nice downtown restaurant with table-side service and dressed-up patrons, Mary and Hattie dined with their father.
Anticipation and nerves had turned what should’ve been a delicious dinner into one Mary wanted to end.
As her dad perused the dessert menu with the flashlight on his phone, Mary looked at her sister pointedly.
“Not yet,” Hattie mouthed, but once their server had topped off the water glasses and taken their orders, Hattie took a deep breath and told their father that they needed to talk. “Mary and I are concerned,” she said.
“Concerned? What about?” he asked.
“Aurora. She’s a stranger, and we want to make sure you’re being careful,” Mary said. The sisters laid out their suspicions and doubts, trying not to insinuate he was especially vulnerable.
Their father listened, then sat back in his seat, smiling. “I appreciate you, my girls, but it’s all right.”
“No, it’s not all right, Dad,” Hattie said. “That’s why we’re here. Have you seen a picture of her taken in the last five years? Have you video called?”
“No, we want the first time we see each other to be in person.”
“So you’re meeting soon?” Mary asked, hopeful.
“In the spring. We’re attending the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.”
Hattie stilled. “Copenhagen. As in Denmark.”
“I understand it’s a bit of a mad adventure, but I’m old. What’s there to lose?” He shrugged. “I’ve already sent her the money for the tickets, and?—”
“You didn’t buy the tickets yourself?” Mary asked carefully.
“No,” he said and explained the reward points Aurora supposedly had and an early bird discount only she could access.
Mary didn’t need to look at her sister to know they felt the same sudden dread.
This wild and impulsive man was not the father Mary had known all her life.
That man was sensible and normal. He lived according to the schedule set in his Day-Timer.
“Never let the gas tank go below the halfway mark,” he used to tell them as teenagers.
“Why don’t we set up a call where we can all talk to her and get to know her?” Mary said, panic rising and thickening her throat.
Their dad shook his head. “That’s an ambush. She’ll assume I don’t trust her.”
“You don’t know her to trust her!” Hattie said too loudly at the moment their server reappeared.
“Two molten lava cakes and the poached pear,” the waiter said, his expression neutral as he placed each person’s chosen dessert in front of them.
No words were spoken, and Mary didn’t taste a thing. When only shallow pools of melted ice cream remained, their father said, “I’ve been alone a long time, so my choices don’t come from desperation. I’m clearheaded. You mustn’t worry.”
It was obvious their father was in love with this Aurora woman and would not be moved to doubt, so after they assured him they’d cover his tab, he rose to leave and bid them goodnight with kisses to the back of their hands.
“He won’t have two pennies to rub together,” Hattie said flatly, waving over a server for a glass of wine.
Mary also feared that. How many stories had she read of reasonable people getting caught up in emotions and financially ruining themselves in the process? Her father was too close to retirement to ever recover.
“You still want to go the private investigator route?” Mary asked.
“It’s our only option,” her sister said. “He’s a man of evidence, so if something’s off, we’ll present him with proof. And if all is well, then we’ll shout bon voyage as he leaves for Europe.”
Mary nodded, her frayed nerves soothed by the plan despite her qualms about prying into her dad’s private life.
“Mitch is taking the boys next weekend to visit his parents. Come over and we’ll iron out the details.”
“I can’t. I have an out-of-town wedding next weekend.”
“The week after, then.”
Mary agreed.
Later, close to midnight, the sisters left the restaurant.
“I’m so happy to not be breastfeeding anymore,” Hattie announced as they stepped out onto the sidewalk crowded with the usual Saturday nightlife crowd and hordes of concertgoers wearing identical branded merchandise. The road was filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“It’s going take forever getting out of here,” Mary said mostly to herself as Hattie had closed her eyes and started shimmying to the music pouring out of the bar next door.
Mary used her ridesharing app and booked the cheapest car, which happened to be one where they’d be commuting with other customers.
She linked her arm with her sister’s and approached the curb, craning for a view of the incoming vehicles.
Within minutes, their hired dark Hyundai Elantra pulled up ahead.
“She drunk?” the driver asked Mary when she opened the backseat door.
“No, she’s fine. A little tipsy.” Mary still took the middle spot to act as a potential vomit buffer between Hattie and the stranger in the right window seat.
Once Mary made sure her sister was buckled in, she turned to acknowledge the other passengers, but froze when she found Ruben, of all people, beside her.
He smiled and greeted her like they’d planned to meet in such warm, close quarters. Meanwhile, she was unnerved and negotiating her leg’s position to maximize the space between them.
“This is Mary,” Ruben told the woman in the front passenger seat who he introduced as his cousin.
“The matchmaker?” Junie said, whipping her head around and revealing a striking appearance of bleached brows and facial piercings. “What a cool job you have.”
“Thank you. I do enjoy it,” Mary said.
“Were you at the concert?” Ruben asked.
She looked at him but quickly turned away. With traffic at a standstill, the brake lights from the vehicles ahead tinged the interior of the cab red, making it almost feel like she was in the corner of a pulsing nightclub with a sexy stranger.
“No, dinner with family,” Mary replied, patting her dozing sister whose head had lolled against the window with a soft thud moments earlier. “You?”
“Trivia night at the Bull Trout Pub.”
She vaguely recalled something about the hobby on his admission forms. “Did you win?” she asked.
Junie groaned while Ruben explained, “We had a good average score, but a whole round on Romeo and Juliet adaptations did us in.”
“I have a question,” Junie said, turning again to address Mary. “You’re an expert on relationships. What’re your thoughts on love at first sight? Do you believe in it?”
“Sure, I believe in it.”
Ruben scoffed.
“What?” his cousin asked. “You disagree with your matchmaker?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Mary said, surprising herself.
“Okay,” he said with a laugh, “but I just think the concept of falling at first sight is something that sounds nice in stories or wedding vows so people insist it’s real.”
“Around 15 percent of our successful clients say they fell in love immediately with the person we matched them with.”
“I’m sure that’s in retrospect,” Ruben said, angling his body slightly toward Mary. “It’s easy to assign depth and significance to that initial spark once someone is actually in love when in reality it was all carnal.”
“It might not be the deep love felt by an aging couple, but it’s still a version of it.”
“There’re better words to use in that case, like ‘smitten,’ ‘infatuated,’ or ‘besotted.’ Maybe the Germans have a term we could borrow. But let’s reserve the word ‘love’ for the real thing.”
“A purist,” Mary said dryly. Their knees bumped with each groove in the road, and it added a vitalizing current to their exchange. “How do you define real love, then? What waiting period is needed to reach it? A month? Six months? A year?”
He shrugged. “It’s not about the length of time specifically?—”
“You’re rejecting the legitimacy of love at first sight, so obviously time is relevant to you,” she countered.
“If in an instant,” Ruben said, “someone can know the good, the bad, and the morning breath of someone else, then fine, I believe in love at first sight.”
“But you wouldn’t say a novice pianist isn’t making music because they’re not as good as someone performing with an orchestra, would you?”
There was silence. Ruben opened his mouth, but no words came.
“Well,” Junie said, laughing, “I think Mary won that round.”