Page 8 of Her Age Gap Match

What the hell was I supposed to do with this?

Damn it, Jasper…I didn’t have any course of action here. I couldn’t just call him up and say, Hey, our system says we should get married, can we have crazy sex like right now? I mean…he would probaby think I was nuts. Even worse, he might take me up on it, then my job would be on the line and I might fall in love and then I’d be in love with a guy twice my age and never able to quit because I was sure he was so, so good in bed⁠—

“Stop it, Poppy,” I muttered to myself. “You’re spiraling.”

I opened my laptop instead.

I could send an email. Emails were harmless. Emails had a subject line and felt professional, and you didn’t just come onto your clients in emails because that was crazy.

I opened a new draft.

Dear Mr. Lawson⁠—

Deleted it. We’d been on a first name basis for two years.

Hi Johnny⁠—

Better. Normal.

I wanted to reach out regarding your current pause status with Bloom. As we like to do with all paused clients⁠—

We did not do that. There was no such protocol. I was inventing protocols at three in the morning in an oversized KU t-shirt, and yes I was breaking the rules, but I wanted to break them in as un-rulebreaky a way as possible.

As part of our ongoing client care process, our data team has flagged your file for a more personalized check-in during your pause period. Jasper Ellison, our lead data scientist, has some observations about your compatibility profile that he felt warranted a follow-up conversation—and as office manager, I coordinate those discussions on his behalf.

I paused.

That was actually not bad. Jasper had flagged his file. That was true. Jasper did have observations, also true. I coordinated things on people’s behalf constantly, that was quite literally in my job description. The fact that Jaspers observation was a 99% match result between Johnny and me specifically, and that I was coordinating this particular discussion at three in the morning directly following a sex dream, was context I was choosing to omit.

I kept going

If you’d be open to it, I’d love to schedule a brief coffee meeting at your convenience to discuss next steps.

That was simple enough. It called for a reaction. If he didn’t respond, that was fine; I was just an assistant, he would probably brush it off.

My finger hovered over the trackpad.

I sucked on my lower lip.

If I wasn’t going to push it now, I was going to lose my nerve⁠—

I pushed send.

Immediately remembered it was three in the morning and I’d meant to schedule it and now I seemed like a psycho anyway, oh my god⁠—

“Poppy? Are you up? Everything okay?”

Stevie’s voice at the door, sleepy and muffled.

“Yeah,” I called back. “Sorry, couldn’t sleep. Go back to bed.”

“I wasn’t in bed.” A pause. “Can I tell you about the weird dream I just had?”

My skin was clammy with anxiety, my hands shaking, adrenaline pumping. There was no way I would be able to go back to sleep now.

I stood and trudged over to the door, opening it only to come face to face with my roommate.

Stevie was even shorter than me—just about five feet, rail thin, with short black hair and thick-framed glasses. She was a medical examiner for the Chicago PD, had studied forensic pathology at KU. We’d met four years ago when we were two Lawrence girls both looking for roommates, and we’d never looked back.