Once Upon A Coffee

Part 4: Busted

What on earth possessed her to say that?  

As she looked down into her mug again, she caught a flash of Ross’s smile.  Oh, yeah.  That was why.  He had a great smile—an inviting curve of lips that made you feel like you were sharing some kind of juicy secret.  

He made so much better an impression in person than he did online.  

“Why didn’t you have a picture up on your Perfect Chemistry profile?”  She couldn’t resist asking and hoped it wasn’t a sensitive subject.  

The oddest expression crossed his features.  “It wouldn’t have been me.”

Huh.  He hadn’t struck her as much of a philosopher in their previous conversations.  “Well, I guess we do tend to place too much importance on physical appearance.”

“Why are you on one of those sites?  You can’t tell me you have trouble finding dates.”

“Wishful is a little bitty pond, in case you haven’t noticed.  Of the guys here in my relative age bracket, I already dated half of them in high school.  The other half are either married, dated friends of mine long enough that it would be weird, or they just don’t ring my bell.  We don’t get a whole lot of new blood, as it were.  I’m sure your hometown is the same.”  

“True,” he agreed.  “In a town that size, we had to revoke the whole no dating your friends’ exes rule, otherwise nobody would’ve had anybody to date.  Most folks either married their high school sweetheart or hoped to meet somebody in college.”

“Exactly.  And since I didn’t do that while I was at Ole Miss, online dating helps…cast a slightly wider net.  And it’s nice to theoretically have a system to match you up on some kind of criteria that suggests compatibility.”

“You think an algorithm or whatever can actually do that?”

“Don’t you?” she asked.  He was on the same dating site, after all.  

“I don’t think it’s a substitute for real, in person conversation.  It might be able to match you with somebody based on—I don’t know—similar values or movie tastes or political views.  And, sure, maybe you end up hitting it off.  But I don’t think there’s any true substitute for a chance meeting where you feel that indefinable spark with a complete stranger—and you know they won’t stay a stranger for long.”

The moment stretched between them, pulling taut with awareness and unspoken things.  Avery felt her skin prickle and thought if she reached over to touch his hand right now, she’d feel a snap of electricity.

The thump of footsteps on the stairs broke the spell.  Avery glanced over to see an unfamiliar guy step into the room.  Tall and exceptionally thin, he had a mug in one hand and what appeared to be a sketchpad in the other.  She gave him a polite smile as he paused to survey the room, then moved to take a seat in a booth by the other window. 

“Well, there’s definitely something to be said for serendipity,” Avery admitted.  “Whether it’s facilitated by outside sources or not.”  She thought about the wish she’d made in the fountain and smiled.  Maybe the old fountain still worked after all.

Ross lifted his mug in a toast.  “To serendipity.”

Avery clinked her mug to his.  

Conversation shifted back to books.  They both had diverse tastes—she liked urban fantasy and romance, he liked sci-fi and more traditional fantasy—but there was sufficient crossover that they had plenty to discuss.  Avery had to appreciate a man who could as readily debate George R. R. Martin’s no character is safe policy as whether The Hunger Games was a reasonably accurate political forecast for the distant future.  But she really knew she’d found someone special when he confessed to being one of the original backers of The Veronica Mars Movie and said he owned the entire series on DVD.

“Season one is as close to a perfect series of television as I’ve ever seen,” he declared.

New guy checked his watch and fidgeted, tapping a pencil lightly against his sketchpad.  The sound wasn’t quite loud enough to be truly annoying.  He looked nervous.  Waiting for somebody, she guessed.  Knowing very well how that felt, Avery silently wished him as much luck on his date as she was having on hers.

“Hey,” said Ross, “I saw an ice cream parlor a bit down the street.  How do you feel about banana splits?”

“They are one of the singular joys in life,” said Avery.  “Extra peanut butter?” 

“Naturally.”

“Then why don’t we relocate,” he said.  

“I support this plan,” she said.  Ice cream was always a good idea.

Ross shut the laptop he’d shoved aside sometime during their conversation and began to gather up the notes scattered across the table.  As he started to stuff his bag, Avery’s attention strayed to the books he’d brought.  A compulsive reader, she angled her head to get a better view of the titles. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations.  The Return of Depression Economics.  

How odd, thought Avery.  “Economics?” she asked.  “Are you taking business classes on top of the requirements for your architecture degree?  Doesn’t that make you a glutton for punishment?

Ross stopped stuffing his bag and gave her a sheepish look.  “Ah, about that.”.

“Excuse me.”  The newcomer stood by their table.  “But are you Avery?”

Avery had a very bad feeling as she cautiously answered, “Yes.”

“I’m Ross,” he said, with a look that clearly said Party Foul to her companion.  “Your actual date.”