Dating-ish (Knitting in the City #6)
Penny Reid
To my fellow Asimov readers, who know that the first law of robotics should be the first law of humanity.
1
DeepMind
A neural network that learns in a fashion similar to that of humans and may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain.
–Source: Google’s Artificial Intelligence Program
I was sweating.
“Is this seat taken?”
My head whipped up from the book I wasn’t actually reading to look at the café employee. Her hands rested on the only other chair at my table and she gazed at me with an affable, expectant smile.
“It’s taken,” I shrieked. Like a lunatic.
But, man, I need that chair!
She lifted her hands, recoiling as though the metal singed her skin, and gave me a wide-eyed stare. My attention moved behind her and I spotted the nearby table of university students, obviously hunting for an extra seat.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I shook my head, gathering a deep breath and telling myself to calm down. “I’m meeting someone and he’ll be here soon. I’m a little early.”
“Okay, no problem.” She affixed a polite smile and moved to another table, making the same enquiry.
Longingly, I gazed at the booth by the window. Every café or coffee shop has that one coveted table, where two to four friends can gather and spend an afternoon not being overheard while sharing ideas and stories. Or where a person can go to work—impervious to the room and its distractions—headphones on, laptop open, losing count of how many lattes and croissants were consumed over an eight-hour day.
I did not have that table. I had a mediocre table, set in the center of the coffee shop, surrounded by other mediocre tables.
But I would not let my mediocre table get me down.
My attention flickered to the door of the café, then to the clock above it. He wasn’t late. Yet.
Squirming, wishing I’d worn anything other than this sweater dress, my eyes returned to the book on my lap.
Pay no attention to me, nothing to see here. I’m just perspiring, wearing a sweater dress in May, and not reading while waiting for my perfect match.
Derek Simmons. Six foot three with a well-maintained beard, great smile, gray eyes, tan complexion, and short hair. He didn’t work out regularly—which was great, because that meant he didn’t expect me to work out either—but enjoyed some outdoorsy activities. Engineer. Thirty-nine. Divorced, two kids.
Derek and I were a perfect match. That’s what FindUrPartner.com indicated last Thursday.
You have a perfect match. The notification alerted me as soon as I signed in. The irony was, I’d been logging in to suspend my account. After almost two years of Internet dating debacles and equally disappointing men, I was ready for a break. But then I’d received the perfect match message. Therefore, I did what any normal person would do.
I Internet stalked him.
Loves: cooking, hiking, camping, eighties music, film noir. Reads: GQ Magazine, The Economist, Politico. TV shows: The Walking Dead, Daredevil, and Project Runway.
. . . cooking, film noir, The Economist, and Project Runway?
YES! A man unicorn.
Compelled by his uni-horn, I emailed him.
Hi Derek,
I hope you are well. According to this website, we’re a perfect match. This has never happened to me before, so I thought I’d reach out and say hi. Let me know if you’d like to meet up for coffee sometime. I work downtown near the Loop and am free next Monday afternoon.
Best, Marie
The next morning, I was alerted that he’d looked at my profile, and I read his response with bated breath.
Hi Marie,
Thanks so much for your note.
Next Monday works for me. I’m near the university. You name the place and I’ll be there.
-Derek
I loved his response.
Direct. To the point. Polite. No detour into unnecessary topics. No typos.
To say my hopes were high would be a gross understatement. My hopes had reached astronomical. Since our exchange of emails, I’d tried to curtail those blasted hopes to no avail. I couldn’t help my hopes.
Don’t run away from me, hopes! I can’t move that fast in these heels and we’re in this together.
But they did run away, hopping onto a spaceship—likely one of those SpaceX crafts that keeps infuriating Elon Musk by blowing up—leaving me on the ground, waving frantically, which was probably compounding my sweating problem.
Arm waving at one’s high hopes while wearing a sweater dress in May is a workout.
But he’s perfect!
This squealing nugget of optimism originated from some dark corner in my brain. Once I found the owner of this voice inside my head, I was going to . . . I didn’t honestly know. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be bitter and jaded, trading optimism for pessimism.
Or worse, nihilism. Nihilism was the worst. And the perpetuators of it had no imagination when it came to accessorizing. All black, all the time? No, thank you.
I checked the clock over the entrance for maybe the hundredth time just as a man walked through the door. My heart did an odd prickling thing, but then the sensation eased. He wasn’t Derek. The man was too short and had no beard. And he was clearly younger than thirty-nine, more like late twenties.
With another sigh, I returned my attention to the book in my lap. I didn’t even know the title, having grabbed it from the bookstore across the street in a fit of pre-date-overthinking-induced insanity. I didn’t want to wait for him by scrolling through messages on my phone. I felt like phone-scrolling was too prosaic. And I didn’t want to be one of those people who just stared forward or people-watched while waiting, even though I loved to people watch. And I didn’t—
“You’re Marie.”
I glanced up, blinking at the man standing in front of my table, the man who I’d just dismissed as being not-Derek. He wasn’t looking at me. Rather, his gaze was on the open pages of my book.
“Yes?”
His eyes quickly darted to mine and then away as he removed his coat. “I’m your date.”
I frowned because I was surprised. And because I was surprised, it took me a solid five seconds to respond. By then he’d already placed his jacket on the back of his chair.
“Oh! Hi. Hi. Please sit down.” I gestured to the seat across from mine and belatedly stood, trying not to feel weird about my smile. I never knew how big to smile during these things. I missed the days when I could just smile naturally and not have to think about it.
Reassessing my date, my eyes flicked over him. He was definitely not six foot three. More like six foot even, or a little shorter.
No big deal. A lot of guys embellish their height on dating sites, except . . .
He shaved his beard.