Mismatched

Ch. 1

NO MATCHES FOUND

I stared at the large, bolded font on the page. The printer started up again, shooting out another page that slid off the paper tray and onto the floor. The printer shot out another page, and another, and another.

I grabbed the power cord and ripped it out of the wall, everything going quiet.

Five hours. I hadn't even been left alone for five hours with one incredibly simple job, and I was already at risk of burning Aunt Judy's entire matchmaking business to the ground.

The only instructions Judy had provided me were to input the personality questionnaires into the system, wait for the computer to analyze and print out the information on their match, and then plan a date that fit their interests. Which made the fact I currently had a desk covered in pages that read "NO MATCHES FOUND" very bad.

Everything had gone smoothly, until this one.

I grabbed the profile questionnaire and scanned the page. It was nothing crazy; his name was Riley Jenkins, 26 years old, owned a cat, was a writer, loved coffee, and his favorite music was 1940's big band.

There was a page attached with photos, which I'd found were usually filled with people trying to make their lives look more exciting than they actually were. Riley's weren't like that. His photos looked comfortable, homey.

He had short, dark, wavy hair that looked perfectly messy and hazel eyes behind thin rimmed glasses. In almost every photo he was wearing an oversized sweater with either a coffee or his cat next to him.

From the pictures, he read as quiet, and maybe a little odd, but nothing was jumping off the page to indicate he was any sort of un-dateable psychopath.

His gender preference was marked as men. While I was definitely not an expert as a straight man, I would go as far as to say he was conventionally attractive.

Which is how I knew that it must have just been a mistake. A computer error. There's no way that no one would find him attractive.

I decided I would just go home, get some sleep, and come back in the morning and fix it. Just as I reached to turn off the lamp on the desk, the landline phone started ringing.

Why would someone call two hours after close? What if it was Aunt Judy calling because she already knew I was messing things up? That was the only reasonable explanation for the phone ringing at this hour.

I tentatively picked up the phone, preparing for a long lecture. Yet again, Nate the family screw-up, doing what he did best.

"Hello?"

I sat up straight at the unfamiliar male voice on the other end. I scoured the desk for the script that Aunt Judy had written out for me to follow, shoving piles of paperwork to the floor.

"Is this the matchmaking service?" he continued.

I pulled the script towards me and read off it. "Hello, this is Judy's Matchmaking, Shelburne's premier dating service. How can I help you in your journey to find love today?" I vomited a little in my mouth as I said it, but I did it.

"I just got an email that my match was found, but when I logged on to the portal it says, 'an error has been encountered' and then forces me to exit," he said, the frustration clear in his voice.

"Okay, can I get the email associated with your account so I can try to look into this for you?" I asked with feigned sincerity, as if the cause of the problem wasn't sitting unplugged right over my shoulder.

"It's just my first name dot last name at Gmail dot-com. So, Riley dot Jenkins at Gmail dot-com."

"Shit." The word fell from my mouth before I could stop it and I immediately pulled the phone from my mouth, staring at it in horror.