Page 4 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

Time snaps back, an elastic band whiplash of memory and pain, of guilt.

“Yes,” I hear myself say to Jasmine, my voice pitched high and reedy.

Dean’s eyes find mine. And it’s fitting that it’s like this, him on a stage and me frozen in shock.

He looks the same. Exactly the same, and yet there’s nothing recognizable about him. Not the tension in his jaw or the rigid set of his shoulders. Especially not the cold hatred in his stare.

“Yes,” I say again. “I know him.”

That’s Dean Westlake. And fifteen years ago, I ruined his life.

My legs are wooden as I begin my walk of shame toward the stage.

I haven’t given much thought to how I would approach Dean in the last few years.

Not after I spent most of my first year of university trying and failing to get him to pick up his phone or answer my texts before he changed his number outright.

Then using the then fledgling social media apps to find him, only to be blocked.

Once it became clear that Dean well and truly wanted nothing to do with me, I stopped. I gave him space. I respected the boundary. It’s not like I was trying to forget about him. It seemed like that was what he wanted me to do.

So I did.

But now, I’m about to see him again. I’m going to have my photos taken by him. And I am so woefully unprepared, because I’m sorry doesn’t feel like enough. How could it?

My “friends” destroyed his life. It doesn’t matter whether I had any part in it. I hurt him, simply by association.

I try to smile in his direction. It’s so good to see you again is what I’ll say. It’s genuine and true. But before the crowd ahead of me even has time to part, Dean leans toward Nick and whispers something in his ear, all without taking his eyes off me— his glare off me.

And then he hops off the stage and stalks for the door, staying practically plastered to the far wall. As far as physically possible from me. Before I can utter a single word, apology or otherwise, Dean Westlake is gone from my life again. This time as quickly as he re-entered it.

A group of runners blows past me on the wide path, throwing customary waves and smiles my way.

I’ve attempted to join running groups in the past but found the social aspect to be a bit much.

I run because it requires little equipment and even fewer participants.

Ideally, I should be running in zone two, and the easiest way to measure that is the talk test, but I’m willing to sacrifice that data if it means I can avoid having another conversation about hockey with a Toronto Finance Guy.

I get my most productive reading done while running anyway. The thirty-to-sixty-minute loops along the Martin Goodman Trail I make three to five times a week while listening to an audiobook make up most of the singular focus time I have that isn’t devoted to coding.

“You have a notification from…” The robotic voice from my phone’s virtual assistant app interrupts my book about the Donner Party to tell me about two new emails. I pause the narration and break stride to walk the rest of the way; I’m almost finished anyway.

Another group of runners wave their hellos, and I smile in response. While I’m not a fan of running in groups, I like the camaraderie between runners. How most go out of their way to acknowledge another runner. How I can still be part of a community even if it’s a completely solitary activity.

After losing clients and then coming face to face with Dean, I didn’t feel right again until I pulled my runners on the next day and took the route down the Leslie Spit.

Then, like now, I’m not a business failure or a horrible person.

I am simply another runner, part superiority complex, part slowest person on earth.

“Read it,” I prompt, and the VA begins reading the first email.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: You’re Voted Most Likely to Reunite!

Hey Don Head Class of ’09!

You’re invited to an evening of memories and merriment with old classmates, because you’ve been voted most likely to reunite.

The Don Head Alumni Organization hopes to see you this summer to celebrate how far we’ve come in the last fifteen years!

“Fuck,” I say, as two women push strollers past me and glare. “Sorry.” I grimace.

The robotic voice continues reading the details of the reunion scheduled for a month and a half from now.

The “Don Head Alumni Organization” hasn’t even bothered to book the event on neutral territory; we’ll be going back to the scene of multiple crimes and traumas, including the worst thing I ever did: our high school’s combined cafeteria and auditorium .

This whole thing reeks of the LKs.

Lauren S., and Lauren G., and Kaylie, Kayleigh, and Kali. My former friends and the girls who orchestrated Dean’s public humiliation. The one I didn’t actively participate in but didn’t do much to stop once I realized what was happening. The one in which I failed to defend him in the aftermath.

Because I’m a coward. As undeserving of his forgiveness now as I was then.

Our school was large, with a few hundred students in each graduating class.

We grew up in the suburbs and lived our lives divided into all the traditional groups: jocks, geeks, music nerds, art nerds, theater nerds, stoners.

There were student council try-hards, the ones who always volunteered to help the teachers and handed out hall passes, and, of course, the popular kids.

I was never actually that popular. With a C name, I couldn’t officially join the LKs, a group named for the first letters of their names. Once Lauren G. suggested I change my name to Khloe.

I declined.

I wasn’t an original member of their group anyway.

They’d all been best friends since elementary school.

I’d been a girl destined for geek-hood, except I’d been blessed with genes deemed good enough to attract the attention of one of the jocks— the only group of boys the LKs would ever consider dating.

And though I never ended up dating that sweet hockey playing jock boy— Lauren S.

had longed for him for years— the LKs adopted me as one of their own.

To: [email protected]

The robotic voice continues, drawing me out of my memory spiral.

From: [email protected]

Subject: Membership Cancellatio n

“No,” I shout, stopping in the middle of the path as Torontonians and tourists mill around me. Most don’t even blink at my outburst.

Panic bubbles up inside me, and I clap my hands over my mouth to keep it inside, to keep myself under control. This can’t be happening. Not again.

I have an interview with a Toronto business journal in a few weeks about the definition of success. What am I supposed to tell them now?

Hi Chloe,

I signed up because my friend Beth signed up, but Beth told me that she canceled her Core Cupid membership, and when I asked why, I have to say, I was shocked at her reason.

The virtual assistant’s voice is far too detached to be narrating my vocational demise like this.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t justify paying so much to get dating advice…

Inaccurate. I don’t provide advice at all.

From someone who can’t even get a date herself. How can I trust that I’ve found my perfect match if you haven’t found yours?

The virtual assistant pauses, as if it has somehow intuited that I need this moment to breathe, to panic, to process.

Please send the contract termination paperwork as soon as possible.

Jillian Jenkins

I find myself on a bench. I’m not sure when I took this seat.

An elderly white woman sits on the other end of the bench, recognizably rich from the gold on her hands, her coiffed white hair, and her well-tailored designer walking clothes.

Though her status is most obviously highlighted by the seven-hundred-dollar dog stroller next to her and the purebred King Charles Spaniel sitting prettily inside it.

I smile at her.

She does not smile back.

I wipe my hands— suddenly sweating more than any other part of my body— on my athletic pants, thankful the sweat-wicking qualities have disappeared.

I started Core Cupid out of my U of T dorm room.

I was a lonely first year without any friends, nursing a broken heart of my own making, whose roommate constantly complained about her inability to find a “nice” guy at various frosh events.

Core Cupid started as an attempt to bridge the gap between us, strangers in a co-living space.

A quirky, glitchy little script of code that took her Facebook friends and labeled them Dateable or Not.

It was a quiet fuck-you to Zuckerberg because it used everything but profile pictures; it looked at commonalities and differences.

It resulted in my very first successful match. Safia and I never became true friends, but she did find her husband because of me. I have their wedding invitation framed in my office.

Core Cupid is more than “just a dating app.” It is not even, really, meant to disrupt the professional matchmaking industry— whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean— despite what the write-up in the Toronto Star stated.

Core Cupid is my life’s work. It takes love and humanity, two things that have always felt incomprehensible to me, and distills them down to something I can understand, something I can control. Something I love: code.

I can’t lose it. I won’t . I will do whatever it takes to keep Core Cupid going. Somehow.

A herd of teens passes by the woman and me on the bench.

All girls. Beautiful, thin, and chattering in that way teenagers have, where every topic— school, parents, boys or girls— sounds serious, life-altering.

My stomach aches at the sight of them. Not for some time long lost, but because I wish I could stop them.

I wish I could shake them and tell them in a way that they’ll hear me and tell them that there is so much life to live.

That the things that seem insurmountable today probably won’t be a few years from now.

The things that you think are important— like what the rest of these girls think of you— probably aren’t.

Behind them comes another group of teens, smaller in size and stature. Boys who haven’t quite grown into themselves yet. Most on foot, two on skateboards. All of them stare at the group of girls in front of them. Not leering, more like longing.

Dean loved to skateboard. The sound of the wheels on the sidewalk outside my house were a warning bell, reminding me that I had only minutes before my cute, sweet French tutor would knock on my door.

We used to spend hours speaking in stilted French. And then more hours doing stuff with our mouths that didn’t involve speaking.

We may never have gone public as a couple, at least not until we were outed by the LKs, but Dean was the closest thing to a best friend, and a boyfriend, I’ve ever had.

I’ll never claim that my pain was worse than his, but losing him, so publicly, so swiftly, turned into a wound that still doesn’t feel all the way closed.

All because I left my phone on the table during lunch. By the time I’d returned with a basket of French fries from the caf kitchen, they’d already hidden it away. I didn’t even notice until next period. And by then it was too late.

Sometimes, late at night, when I should be sleeping but instead uselessly review all of my most embarrassing life moments, I see his face when I finally met him on that stage. The horror, the shock. The betrayal.

The LKs laughed . Their boyfriends did, too. And then the whole cafeteria was laughing at him. The whole school.

In the aftermath, Lauren G., the ringleader and the one using my phone, had gotten in trouble, but so had Dean.

By then, it was the end of the school year and Dean never came back. He never showed up at graduation, either. The adults seemed to simply choose to forget; the students talked about it in snickered whispers.

And I relived it. Every moment. Everything I could have done but didn’t. Everything I should have done, like stopped them, like protected him, but was too cowardly to.

I was frozen, standing on that stage, watching the life of someone I cared for be ruined. And I did nothing. Sometimes I still feel trapped there. The smallest, scaredest version of myself, paralyzed by the fear of what? Speaking up? Speaking out?

Maybe if I could explain all that to the clients who are quitting, they’d understand. They’d see how absurd it would be for me to have a boyfriend, a husband, a partner. How could I ever be in a relationship when I couldn’t even do my secret friends with benefits the solid of not ruining his life?

Admitting the truth would most definitely lose me more clients, not keep them. But maybe Jasmine is right. Maybe it’s not a matter of finding a boyfriend; maybe it’s a matter of faking one.

I have Dean’s number saved in my contacts — the BIA gave it to me after he left — and he might say no. He might laugh in my face at the idea of helping me. But I’ve never had the chance to say I’m sorry, so maybe, at the very least, I could finally do that.

I unzip my phone from the back waistband pocket of my running leggings and do my best to wipe the condensation from the screen.

Then I dial.