Page 9 of Love’s a Script (Hearts Collide #1)
Chapter Nine
RUBEN BYERS: How true is the adage about opposites attracting?
CLANCY WASHINGTON: It sounds true and is reinforced by fairy tales about beauties and beasts and our insistence on visualizing human attraction with magnets.
But when it comes to forming lasting romantic relationships, the research does not support that.
In actuality, it shows that we like people we recognize, people who are similar to ourselves.
RB: So how similar? Is it enough for the big-level stuff—ethics, politics, religion—to align, or is it better to go more granular? Like if someone enjoys binging prestige TV shows and cracking crude jokes, do they need to find someone who enjoys the same?
CW: [Laughter] You don’t have to go out there and find a clone. But how you view the world and how you show up in it has to align. If not, it’s unlikely to work out.
* * *
In the corner of a popular sports bar, Ruben’s first date with Aliya—an industrial project manager and dog foster mom—unfolded amid the cheers and chants of patrons watching the rugby championship on flat screens affixed high on walls.
The conversation had come in waves with Ruben and Aliya.
He prided himself in being able to talk with anybody, but things were not flowing.
When they simultaneously reached for their drinks, they made eye contact.
Aliya raised a brow—a challenge—then brought her stein to her lips and sharply tipped her head back, chugging the amber liquid.
Having learned his lesson earlier, Ruben didn’t attempt to join in and let his date compete against herself.
Before arriving at the bar, Ruben and Aliya had played indoor miniature golf on a course designed to look like the grounds of a circus.
Undeterred by this, Aliya approached the activity with a seriousness reserved for the PGA final, asking for complete silence during and between swings.
When they’d left the site to head over to the sports bar, she’d stopped bragging about her victory long enough to challenge him to a footrace.
“Bet I can make it to the end of the parking lot before you!” she’d said, breaking into a sprint before Ruben could process the call to action. His acceleration had been clumsy, and his foot landed on a patch of ice that took him to the ground, flailing for purchase.
A group of teens hanging around nearby had seen him go down. They burst out into laughter, and one of them shouted, “You good, mister? Don’t walk into the light!” It bruised him more than any fall could have.
“I win!” Aliya declared presently, slamming her drained glass onto the table.
“Impressive,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound sarcastic.
The waiter delivered their food, and for a couple of minutes they silently ate, and Ruben used the intermission to remind himself there was a reason they were matched.
They were 54 percent compatible—or was it 53?
Nevertheless, he shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss their chances over a small personality incongruence.
“You mentioned something about wood-burning art earlier,” Aliya said after a while.
“Yeah, I picked it up in the last few years,” he said, pulling out his phone to show her pictures of his creations, images of space, marine animals, plants, and birds captured in pieces of wood.
“These are awesome. What do you do with them afterward?”
“Lots of gifts to friends and family. The rest hang out in different areas of my apartment.”
“You know what you should do? Sell them.”
“It’s just something I do to relax, and the logistics involved in selling seem like a nightmare to deal with.”
“It wouldn’t be that hard to set up an Etsy store or—oh, I see people selling crafty stuff at the farmer’s market all the time.”
“I don’t have any interest in doing all that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a hobby.”
She frowned. “But you’re leaving money on the table. You should take the revenue and put it into a high-yield savings account.” She proceeded to go on about her investments and how much she’d already saved for retirement, while Ruben continued to eat, trying to care.
At the end of her spiel, he told her, “Like I’ve said, I’m not interested in making income from my hobby.” His tone was firm and brought the topic to a close but also shifted the mood of the date, and he suspected they both knew it would be the first and last meal they’d share.
* * *
For weeks, whenever all the matchmakers were in the same room with their boss, as they were today for a staff meeting, there was hope that cruise lead would be announced.
Mary had thought about everyone’s odds: Francine had the best chance of getting the role because she’d been a matchmaker at Hearts Collide since the much-mythologized “rose gold stationery years.” Francine herself played into her assumed victory, regularly talking about how she planned to use the cruise lead stipend to buy a purse she supposedly had on hold at Hermès.
In contrast, Sienna was the agency’s most junior matchmaker, and she’d been compensating for that through brownnosing.
Mary, meanwhile, saw her own chances interchangeable with Catelin and Kaitlyn’s.
And Eden was uninterested in the role, so of no challenge.
“Last thing before I let you go,” Cassidy said from the head of the long table as Mary held her breath. “We need to do better at sorting out the regular garbage from the recyclables. It’s getting ridiculous, ladies.”
Shoulders in the room sagged like days-old party balloons as Cassidy, unaware of the shift, continued with her final remarks, but before she could officially dismiss them for the day, Eden interrupted. “Do you have an update on who will be cruise lead?” she asked.
The other matchmakers’ heads swiveled from Eden to their boss.
“No, I’m still deciding,” Cassidy replied.
“Then is there a date you can give us when to expect an announcement?” Eden asked shamelessly.
Cassidy looked around at all of them. “I see,” she said, removing her thick-framed glasses. “I’ll tell you what, during next month’s meeting, I’ll have an answer for you.”
A round of excited chatter swept the conference room, and Mary leaned over to Eden and said, “Thank you.”
“It had to be done,” her colleague replied. “I can’t work under a perpetual drumroll anymore.”
The matchmakers got up to leave the room and start their workday, but Cassidy called Mary to hang back.
“How’s it going with Ruben Byers?” Cassidy asked, her attention split between Mary and the phone in her hand. “What’s the status of the radio documentary?”
“Oh, we don’t discuss his work,” Mary said.
Cassidy looked up with a frown. “Do you have any sense of whether he’s appreciating the process?”
“I think so. He had a first date with his second match over the weekend. It wasn’t a success, but he still seems optimistic.”
Mary had paired Ruben and Aliya together because of their outlooks on life.
They were go-getters, principled, the types of people who would rewrite an instruction manual they thought inadequate.
However, according to them both, a second date was not in the cards.
Despite their similarities, they’d rubbed each other the wrong way.
Aliya called him low energy in her post-date evaluation, and in Ruben’s verbose write-up that inexplicably included a review of the sports bar they’d patroned and the history of the first miniature golf course in the country, he said Aliya was overly competitive.
“Have you set him up with his next match?” Cassidy asked.
“I’ll be working on that this week.”
“Okay, great work. Keep it up,” Cassidy said.
“Thank you!” Mary held her smile in place until her boss turned to leave.
She’d sounded confident, but truthfully she wasn’t sure how she’d proceed.
The time constraint, the effect of each failed date on Ruben’s attitude toward matchmaking, and her boss’s investment in the outcome were weighing on Mary, making her second-guess the instincts that she’d used to match couples long before she’d ever known the name Ruben Byers.