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Chapter 3
HUGO
I’m a nerd, okay?
And not in a sexy-nerd, Ben-Whishaw-as-Q kind of way. Nope, in a butt-of-jokes and perpetually-single kind of way.
I get it. Girls didn’t find it appealing back in high school. I’d been tall and gangly back then, and the glasses didn’t help.
They didn’t find me appealing in college, either, although I managed to hook up with a few girls at parties, in drunken encounters that I don’t remember really well.
I got better looking, I’m told. But by the time I’d made it into my graduate degree program, I’d been shot down and friend-zoned and downright mocked often enough by the female sex that I gave up asking women out.
At that point, I was deeply involved in my research. It turned into my life. So now I’m a confirmed bachelor who spends his free time in the lab and gets around to my laundry whenever I remember, which is why I don’t always wear clothes that match.
In fact, yesterday was the third time I’ve turned up to the lab in mismatched socks, and my assistants—good kids, all of them, Dani and Sara and Luis—decided that I needed a good course in speed dating. I protested, of course.
To no avail. They all told me they’d quit and find other mentors if I didn’t “take charge of my personal life,” as Dani put it.
It’s all bullshit. They can’t spare the time to find other research mentors. And anyway, we all get along fine.
But at the same time…I’m lonely.
I don’t need someone to do my laundry. I don’t fucking care if my socks match, even if other people do.
But I need a companion. Somebody who’s happy to see me at the end of the day. Somebody who’ll get my doofy jokes and eat Thai food with me and watch old “Firefly” episodes with me.
And share my bed. Enthusiastically.
I argued with my assistants until I was almost late for the stupid speed-dating thing, and I had no time to look around the room at all the women in it who are surely, surely out of my league. I barely had time to read the rules, much less the suggested questions, so when it comes to talking to women, I’m tongue-tied and dull and awkward, and it’s fucking high school all over again. I don’t hit it off with anybody. And to be honest, I can’t see my soulmate in any of them, either.
Until Round 2, when I sit down across from a goddess with dark hair and blue eyes in a dark pink dress. She’s too beautiful to be real, certainly too beautiful to be smart. She looks vaguely familiar. I ask her one of the questions from the suggestion sheet, and her answer is noncommittal.
Yet again, a failure to connect. I sigh. I confess my lateness and my confusion, which is totally not the thing to do, I know it’s not, and I am hereby officially giving up so it doesn’t fucking matter what I even say.
But oddly enough, this seems to engage her in the conversation. She asks about my lab, so I tell her about it, and she asks a smart question about the research we’re doing, and suddenly I see: she’s not dumb. On the contrary, her intelligence shines out of those blue eyes.
Under the table, I go hard inside my suit pants. While I’m talking about chemistry. Holy shit.
And then when I look into her eyes again, she is looking back at me. Really looking. Something happens between us.
It’s silent and wordless and inexplicable, but something definitely happens—some magical person-to-person chemistry that I could probably explain in terms of hormones and enzymes and stuff, if I had a better biochemistry background.
Which I don’t, so yeah, it’s just magic.
This one, my brain whispers to me. Oh fuck yeah, my body shouts in echo. This one.
Then the buzzer goes off, and it’s time to move to the next woman, and it occurs to me that I never asked her anything about herself. I found out nothing about her. I monopolized the whole five minutes, and I fucked it up.
Again.
I definitely want to see her again, but it’s too much to hope for that she’d match with me. I check YES anyway, and move on to the next lady, a pretty, tall blonde who works at a bank. I ask her lots of questions, and she answers them with interest, and we get on just fine.
And I don’t care. It’s Dara I want.
When Round 2 is over and I look around for her, she’s gone.
Fuck my life.
