The Soulmate Equation (12 page)

River laughed and lifted his glass again. Just then, Rama returned. “You guys ready?”

“Saved by Rama,” she said.

River's eyes held hers. “Saved.” He lifted his hand, palm up, gesturing for her to order.

Jess sighed and turned her face up. “You know what I'm getting.”

“Yup.” Rama turned to River. “And you?”

“Wait, what is she getting?”

“Tom ka soup,” Rama recited. “And the duck green curry.”

River frowned. “Oh.” He opened his menu again. “What… um, else would you recommend?”

Jess gaped at him. “Do not tell me you were going to get the same thing.”

River nodded down at his menu. “Drunken noodles?”

“They're great,” she confirmed. “Let's do soup for two and the two entrées.” She looked at River. “Want a beer or anything?”

He seemed genuinely tickled by the way she took charge. “Water's good.”

They handed their menus to Rama, and Jess stared at her date across the table. “But really: you were
not
going to get the duck.”

“I was.”

She didn't know where the urge to laugh-scream came from, but she swallowed it down with a cold gulp of ice water.

“Did you work today?” he asked stiffly, clearly hoping she'd forgotten what she'd asked before they were interrupted. Frankly, if he didn't want to answer, Jess probably didn't want to hear the truth anyway.

“Nana's always been a stickler that if I don't have to work, Saturday is a family day.”

“You live with your grandmother?” he asked.

“Yes and no. Nana Jo and Pops own the apartment complex. They live in the bungalow, and I live in the apartment across the courtyard.”

“With your daughter?” he confirmed, and she nodded. “What's her name?”

After a second's pause, Jess shook her head. Unease twisted through her.

“I know she's off-limits as far as the experiment,” he said. “That was just me asking about family. Sharing.” He paused, smiling playfully. “For example, I have two meddling sisters.”

“Oh, you're lucky then. Meddling women keep the world running.”

“They'd love that.” He laughed, warm and clear. “Both older: Natalia and Pilar. Both overbearing.”

“The youngest. Huh.” Jess sipped her water. “I would have lost that bet.”

Amusement lifted the corner of his mouth. “Why's that?”

Rama materialized again with a large steaming bowl of soup. He placed it between them and they shared a few moments of easy silence as they dished up their portions, passing the chili sauce and condiments across the table.

Jess bent to smell the contents of her bowl—the tangy, pungent broth was one of her favorite comfort foods—and registered that River had just mirrored her movement precisely.

He noticed at almost the same time and straightened in his chair. “Why are you surprised I'm the youngest?” he asked, moving on.

“Youngest children are usually less ‘intense,' ” she said with a smile, using his own description against him. “You uptight perfectionists tend to be oldest children.”

“I see.” His laugh rolled through her, and he bent, taking a bite of soup. The deeply sexual groan he let escape when he tasted was destined to haunt Jess's best and worst dreams.

“What about you?” he asked. “Any siblings?”

She shook her head. “Only child.”

He took another bite. “I guess we'd have both lost a bet, then. I would have said oldest, with at least one sibling.”

“Why?”

“You seem responsible, smart, conscientious. Bossy. I imagine you emulating your parents and—”

Jess snort-laughed and reached up to cover her mouth with her napkin. The very idea of emulating Jamie was absurd. “Sorry, that was just—” She smoothed her napkin over her lap again. “No, I'm an only child.”

He nodded in understanding and, to his credit, changed the subject.

“So, we've talked about how I got here,” he said. “But how'd you end up a statistician? I'll admit it suits you.”

She lifted a brow.

“You seem very competent,” he added. “It's reassuring. Attractive.”

Jess watched him pointedly avoid her eyes. He had no way of knowing, but calling her “competent” was easily the best compliment he could have paid her.

He set the glass down again. “But to my question…”

Jess hummed, thinking. “I find it soothing that numbers don't lie.”

“But they
can
be misleading.”

“Only if you don't know what to look for.” She took a sip of soup. “I've always been a numbers geek. When I was a kid, I'd count my steps everywhere I went. I would count how many floors were in a building, how many windows per floor. I'd try to estimate how tall a building was, and then look it up when I got home. And when I took my first stats class, I was done for. I love working with numbers that are meaningful more broadly. Predicting earthquakes or natural disasters, political campaigns, customer service survey results or—”

“Genetics,” he said quietly.

Ahh. The elephant in the room. She felt the tops of her cheeks warm and looked down, surprised again that her boobs were so much closer to her face in this bra than they usually were. Freaking Fizzy. Jess cleared her throat. “Exactly. As long as you have enough data, you can figure out anything.”

“I get it,” he said in that same quiet voice. “There's something satisfying about solving little puzzles every day.” They ate in silence for a moment, and Jess wondered if she was imagining the
way his gaze seemed to linger on her neck, and lower, down her arms…

“Are those…” he asked, narrowing his eyes and motioning to her right forearm, where she'd pushed her sleeve up a bit, “Fleetwood Mac lyrics?”

“Oh.” Her left hand moved to cover the ink. “Yes.” She turned her arm over, but he leaned in, wrapping his thumb and forefinger around her wrist, turning it so he could see the soft skin of her inner arm.

“ ‘Thunner only happens,' ” he read, eyes moving away from the misspelled word and up to her face. “ ‘Thunner'?”

Jess rolled her eyes. “Felicity.” Hopefully he'd gathered that simply saying her name should explain everything.

He must've, because he laughed and lightly swept his thumb across the letters. Nothing like the clinical way he'd touched her last night, this was leisurely, exploring. And she was melting. “And another piece of the puzzle falls into place.”

“She—Fizzy—has the other half of the line. ‘When it's raining' except there's no
h
in
when
.” With him looking at her and touching her like that, it took great concentration to form thoughts and make those thoughts into words. “On my twenty-fifth birthday, she took me out to celebrate. It was a really perfect night and I emailed her when I got home to say thank you. I was absolutely hammered, and Pops thought it was so funny he wouldn't let me use the backspace key to correct my typos.” She shrugged. “Apparently I emailed her the full lyrics to the song we'd sung at karaoke to prove how sober I was.”

His eyes shone when he glanced up at her face. With a look that might be regret, he released her arm. “That's a good story.”

Jess laughed down at the last couple bites of her soup. “Pops is basically a monster.”

“A monster with a sense of humor.”

“I'm surrounded by jokers,” she admitted.

“You're lucky.”

There was something in his tone that caught her, hooked her eyes back up to his. It wasn't that he sounded lonely, exactly, but there was a vulnerability there that threw her a little off balance. “I feel lucky.” She scratched around inside her head for something to say. “Tell me about everyone at GeneticAlly. Have you known all of them very long?”

“Most of them since we started. David, of course. And Brandon was Dave's friend from college.” He stirred his soup and moved out of the way when Rama returned with their main courses. “It's a really tight-knit team.”

“Have any of them been matched?” Jess asked, digging into the platters.

“Brandon, yeah,” he said. “He met his wife in the…” River looked up, thinking, and Jess marveled over his dark-lashed whiskey eyes all over again. “I guess it would be the third phase of beta testing. Maybe four years ago now. They were a Gold Match.”

“Wow.”

He nodded, dishing some food onto his own plate. “I know. He was the first, and it was a really big deal.”
Nothing like this, though
hung unsaid between them. “Then Tiffany—you met her at the
Results Reveal Disaster,” he said with a wink, and Jess burst out laughing. “She's our head data analyst—she met her wife, Yuna, when they matched. I believe they were an eighty-four, and Yuna moved here from Singapore to be with Tiff.”

“How many countries have you pulled samples from?”

He didn't even have to think. “Fifty-seven.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” Wiping his mouth with his napkin, River was a portrait of manners and class across the table from her. Did it make her a terrible person that she was surprised this date wasn't awful? The conversation flowed, the silences were easy. She hadn't spilled anything down her shirt, and he'd called her competent. It was the best date she'd had in seven years. “And everyone else has dated pretty broadly, if they're single and interested.”

“Do you think it's a bummer for any of them who haven't had a Gold or higher match? Like, do you worry within the company it will become a competitive or—I guess, like, a status thing?”

He stared at her, and then blinked. “You ask really probing questions.”

Immediately, Jess was mortified. “I'm sorry. I'm just—”
Ugh
. “Sorry.”

“No, no, it's okay, it's very… thoughtful.”

Warmth spread in a prickly rush along her skin. “I want to know about it,” she admitted. “I want to know about you, and this, and what you think about all of it. I mean, we're here right now. I said I would enter into this agreement genuinely.”

“I know,” he said, and seemed to be quietly appraising her with new eyes. “I appreciate it.”

“Will you?” she asked, feeling her heart hit her from the inside like a gloved fist.

“I don't really know any other way to be.” He reached for his water and took a sip. “You asked me before whether this result was an inconvenience. It isn't. It isn't an inconvenience, but I admit I'm not sure what to think about it. If I take it seriously, it rearranges my entire life. If I don't take it seriously, I'm discarding everything I've worked for.”

“Which, incidentally, also rearranges your life,” Jess said, laughing.

He laughed, too. “Exactly.”

“Well, in that case,” she said, “I can be on board for Project Be Genuine but Cautious.”

He wiped his hand on his napkin and reached across the table for a handshake. With her heartbeat in her ears, she took his hand, and hers felt weirdly small in his grasp.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“I guess we get together when we're free,” he said, and her brain took off spinning about how that would work, where this could even go.

And where she wanted it to go.

“Okay.”

“Otherwise, we wait for marching orders from Brandon about any public appearances.”

“
Brandon Butkis
,” Jess whispered, partly to break the tension of imagining forging a personal relationship with River after tonight and partly because—how could she not say it? “Come on, you have to admit it's a great name.”

Rama dropped the bill off at their table and River thanked him before sliding the small leather folder into his lap. Never missing a beat, River delivered the next bit of information with an admirably straight face: “His wife's last name is Seaman.”

Jess gasped. “No.”

Finally, a smile broke across his face. “Yes.”

“Did they hyphenate?” She leaned in. “Please tell me they hyphenated.”

River laughed. “They did not.”

Small footsteps stomped along the sidewalk, and the weight and rhythm registered in Jess's brain only a split second before a pair of small arms were thrown around her neck. “Did you save me some duck?”

Jess peeked over her daughter's head to deliver an apologetic-mortified glance at River. Holding her kid at arm's length, Jess gave the most convincing Mom Face she could manage. “What are you still doing up, honey? You're not supposed to be out here.”

“I could hear your laugh in the courtyard.”

“But what were you doing in the courtyard?”

“Beating Pops at checkers.”

“Pops?” Jess called out.

“She's too fast,” Pops replied from behind the fence.

Juno giggled.

“I've got her,” Jess said back. She relented and kissed Juno's forehead before turning her around to face River. Apparently this was happening. “Sorry for the interruption.”

He shook his head and smiled warmly at Juno. “Not at all.”

“Juno, this is Dr. Peña.”

Juno reached out, and he wrapped her tiny hand in his large one. “River,” he said, shaking gently. “You can call me River.”

Settling on her mom's lap, Juno tilted her head, considering him. “You have a unique name, too.”

River nodded. “I do.”

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

“My middle name is M-E-R-R-I-A-M. I'm named after mountains. What's yours?”

“Nicolas, after my grandpa.”

She pursed her lips, less impressed. “Hmm. That's kind of normal, I guess. Did anyone ever tease you for being named River Nicolas?”

“A few times,” he admitted. “But I'd rather be teased for having a name nobody else has than one that a ton of people have. I'm willing to bet no one else is named Juno Merriam Davis. Only you.”