Page 90 of The Business of Love Box Set 1: Books 1 - 4

JACKSON

T he stage was lit with dozens of bright lights shining directly at me and the talk show host, Sunny Addish. The gleam of the lights on her nearly white blonde hair made it look like it was made of plastic from where I sat in the low-sunken white leather chair beside hers.

Between us was a short table where two glasses of water sat upon coasters with Sunny’s face printed on them, and before us, stretching upward upon movie-theatre-esque chairs, was the audience. They hummed with conversation about the show.

The crowd was about eighty percent women. Of those women, I assumed almost all were single—otherwise, they’d have bought tickets for a different Addish Show guest—and it appeared that most were in their mid-twenties to late thirties.

Sunny sifted through a stack of cue cards in her perfectly manicured hands.

She’d been flipping through them for the last five minutes and had apologized for making me sit there silently with her.

I understood perfectly that she was memorizing the questions she was going to ask me for the live TV interview, which would begin in less than a minute once the commercial break ended.

I’d done my fair share of talk show interviews, but up until that moment, they’d all been daytime programs. That wasn’t good or bad, but having some exposure on a station at night would expose me to a whole new can of worms in terms of clients.

And now that I was in New York and the ball was really rolling, I was ready to meet more people and help them find their soul mates.

Sunny put her cue cards under her right thigh when the cameraman called a twenty-second warning.

A makeup artist hurried out onto the stage and patted Sunny’s face with powder and then fixed a couple of hairs that were sticking up from static and catching the light. Once she was done, she scurried off.

“Ten seconds, people!” a loud voice called through the studio.

My stomach rolled over with nerves.

“Five!”

Sunny gave me a charming smile. “Ready?”

I straightened out my suit jacket. “Ready.”

She turned toward camera one. The lights off stage went out. A red light appeared over the camera she was facing and the cameraman pointed to her at her cue.

“Welcome to The Sunny Addish Show,” Sunny said in her upbeat tone.

“I’m your host, Sunny Addish, but you already knew that.

I have a surprise for you. Today, I’m sitting down to talk with New York City’s new and dare I say very good-looking professional matchmaker, Jackson Smithe.

” She turned in her chair, her knees pressed together, and fixed me with her well-rehearsed closed-lip smile.

“Thank you for joining me today, Jackson. I’ve been looking forward to this interview since my producers called you up last month.

I’m just dying to talk to you about finding love in today’s day and age. ”

I didn’t love the fakeness that came with TV shows but it was the nature of the beast.

I grinned back. “Thanks for having me, Sunny. I’ve been looking forward to it too. Who wouldn’t want to get a chance to sit down with you in front of a crowd like this?” I gestured out at the in-studio crowd.

They cheered.TV show audiences were always pretty trigger happy with their applause. People wanted to be engaged. They wanted to be invited to participate and respond, and Sunny’s crowd didn’t seem any different than all the others I’d sat down in front of.

Sunny waited for the applause to die down. “Tell me, Jackson, did you have a hand in any public figure relationships this past year?”

My mind immediately went to Kimberly and how I’d set her up with Rick Garrett right when it looked like their relationship was going to fall off the deep end.

They’d broken up after being exposed to the public eye and I realized that Kim would be making the biggest mistake of her life if she didn’t at least try to make things work with Rick.

Now they were head over heels and enjoying being together while simultaneously not caring about the press.

I didn’t want to drop Rick’s name on this stage and bring any further attention to one of my best friends, so I just shrugged. “I’ve worked with a couple of big names.”

Sunny giggled. “Not going to name drop for us, Jackson?”

“Not tonight.”

She waved me off with a playful smile. “Oh, that’s just fine. We appreciate a man with boundaries. Don’t we, ladies?”

The crowd rippled with applause once more. Someone shouted over the noise and asked if I was single.

Sunny clasped her hands over her knee and pumped her eyebrows a couple of times. “Good question, audience. I think there are a lot of women out there in my audience or at home who would like to know the answer to that. Are you single, Jackson?”

“The only girlfriend I have is my work,” I said. “It’s hard to find time to date when you’re busy arranging things for clients.”

“So in other words,” Sunny said with a knowing smile that she turned toward the audience, “you’re single? There’s no special girl out in the world who secretly has your heart?”

I licked my lips.

Sunny caught my hesitation. She leaned in close. “Or is there?”

The crowd hung on her words and seemed to lean forward as well.

I rested an elbow on the armrest of my chair and ran my finger along my jaw. “Perhaps there could be,” I admitted. “But sometimes people don’t want the same things. And that’s okay. Moving on is part of the process of finding your forever person.”

“Your forever person.” Sunny sighed and pressed a hand over her heart. “How poetic.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t spend much time thinking about my personal love life.

Right now, I’m enjoying every minute of helping strangers find each other.

I’ve hooked up old lovers who lost each other after moving away from the small towns they grew up in.

I’ve matched seniors who got married in the gardens at their grandchildren’s homes.

I’ve matched billionaires with women who love them for who they are and not because of the size of their bank account. ”

Sunny flipped her blonde hair over one shoulder. “How dashing. You’re like a knight in shining armor, fighting for love.”

I laughed. “I don’t know if I’d romanticize it that much.”

“Why not? It’s true. In today’s day and age, it’s difficult to fall in love. If it was easy, I doubt this show would have sold out so quickly. Am I right?” She turned to her audience.

Yet again, the studio thundered with applause.

“I’m flattered,” I said. “Thank you.”

Sunny clasped her hands together. “So how do you do it, Jackson? How do you go about matching a person with their perfect someone?”

“That’s a loaded question, Sunny.” I hated how I was assuming the role of a talk show guest by saying stupid shit like that.

I gave my head a little shake and told myself to be normal, not rehearsed.

Otherwise, I’d have people like Kim calling me to tell me I’d made an ass of myself on live television.

“There isn’t one right recipe or approach that applies to all of my clients.

Each experience is uniquely tailored to them based on their needs.

For example, I have a client right now who is a young but very successful man looking for someone who could be his wife someday.

He’s accomplished when it comes to business.

He’s a homeowner. He has a dog and a balanced social life, and from the outside looking in, one might think he has it all.

But he’s lonely. It’s my job to provide a cure to that loneliness by finding the woman he will hopefully spend the rest of his life with. But it’s never as easy as just that.”

“Tell me more, Jackson.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the unabashed leading line she used to inject herself into the dialogue.

“Well, it’s not just about that one client.

It’s also about the woman I’m going to match him with.

What is she looking for? What’s her lifestyle like?

If I find a woman who checks all of his boxes on paper in terms of what he’s looking for personality wise but she’s living it up with a big nightlife and shift work and what not, they won’t be a good match.

The big picture stuff for both of them won’t line up.

That’s where I have to be very careful. I run a big risk of matching people who might fall in love but won’t be able to make it work because of lifestyle preferences.

That’s where things get really tricky in my line of work. ”

“How do you avoid something like that?” Sunny asked. This time, she seemed genuinely curious, and I doubted that was a note on one of her cue cards tucked under her thigh.

“Well,” I said slowly, “I have to be patient. Just because someone is my client doesn’t mean I’m going to match them immediately. Sometimes, it takes months. Hell, I’ve had a client I didn’t match until eleven months after we’d had our first consultation.”

“Did that bother your client to have to wait so long? I’d be way too impatient. I’m the sort of person who needs instant payoff.”

I chuckled. “You’re not alone, Sunny. A lot of us are like that. This client definitely gave me an earful a couple of times. He didn’t want to wait around kicking rocks. But I told him to keep dating. To keep looking. He did. Lucky for me, I was still the one who found the right woman, not him.”

Sunny laughed and so did her audience. “How did his story end?”

“He got married to her two years ago,” I said. “They’re expecting their first baby this Christmas.”

The crowd swooned in unison.

“Do all of your love stories have happy endings, Jackson?” Sunny asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Everyone’s life has its own timeline.

Some people fall in love when they’re teenagers.

Some fall in love when they’re older. Some think they’re in love but realize they aren’t and never were and they’ve already had children of their own who are grown and moved out of the house.

The point is, it’s never too late to find the right person and rewrite the story.

My job is to make the task easier and to sift through those who might be fun to spend time with but wouldn’t work in the long term.

I save people from investing in the wrong partners and I help them put their energy in the right ones. ”

“Sounds like you love what you do,” Sunny said.

“I do. I always have. There’s nothing more rewarding than finding someone’s happily ever after for them.”

The crowd sighed as one again.

Sunny flashed me a charming smile. “I suspect there are going to be a lot of fans waiting to meet you after this. I hope you’re ready to sign some autographs and shake some hands.”

“Absolutely.”

“Maybe you’ll meet a girl.” Sunny winked.

I laughed. “Crazier things have happened, right?”

The crowd cheered. Women called out my name. Their cries sounded far away in my mind as Sunny turned back to the cameras and addressed the audience before we cut to commercial.

Soon, I’d be off the stage. As I sat there, I thought about Hailey. We hadn’t spoken since I left Nashville. Since we shared that night.

You should call her, I thought.

But I realized if she wanted to talk to me, she’d have already reached out. And two weeks had passed since then. Maybe the sex had made things too weird. Maybe she didn’t know where she stood anymore.

Maybe she wished it had never happened.

I thought of the way she’d trembled in my hands and how she’d looked at me.

I hadn’t regretted it for a second. Not until she started pulling away, of course.

Now I felt like there was more than just physical distance between us and I worried that we wouldn’t be able to repair it with me living all the way in New York now.