All Grown Up(5)

“I still can’t believe you get to call sitting in this place and having that Persian kitten fetch you coffee, work.”

“A person from Paris is Parisian, not Persian, dumbass. And not everything is as simple as it looks.”

He shrugged and stood. “Whatever. Drinks tonight?”

“Can’t. Picking up Bella.”

“Annabella. How is your little sister?”

“Not so little anymore. Spent a semester abroad in Madrid. She’s flying home tonight. I told her I’d pick her up at the airport.”

“She’s in college already?”

“Going to start her second year. Nineteen.”

“Damn. She was always a cute little thing. Bet she’s a hot number now that she’s legal.”

“Don’t even think about it, asshole.”

Logan chuckled and held out his hand for a shake. We clasped. “Next week, then, pretty boy?”

The intercom buzzed, and Esmée’s voice came through. “Ford, you have Mrs. Peabody on the line.”

Logan’s forehead wrinkled. “Peabody? You still talk to that nutjob?”

“She’s not a nutjob… She’s just eccentric.”

“Eccentric is just the polite way of saying nutjob.” Logan shook his head. “I worry about you sometimes. I think you might be as nuts as her.”

“Get out, jackass. And don’t harass my receptionist on the way out.”

***

It made no sense to leave the office and go all the way uptown to my place, only to head back downtown to shoot over to the airport at ten. I had enough shit to do here to keep me busy for days anyway. By the time seven o’clock rolled around, the floor was pretty empty—just me and the night cleaning crew. I’d ordered in some Thai food and decided to go sit in the seating area in front of the windows, rather than behind my desk with my back facing the city.

I sank into the leather couch, slipped off my shoes, and propped my feet up on the glass table in front of me. Still a few hours to kill, so I started to sort through my email while eating with chopsticks out of a cardboard container. My inbox was a damn disaster. At any given moment, there were always three-hundred unread and follow-up items to manage. I sorted them oldest first and opened one I’d been avoiding for nearly a week. The director of marketing wanted me to consider a half-million-dollar investment in an advertising campaign with Match.com.

I normally didn’t question his judgment—he’d been with my dad for twenty-five years. But I wasn’t so sure a dating website was the right place to market high-end Manhattan shared workspace. And that was a damn big chunk of change. Part of the problem was, I had no experience with how the online dating scene worked or the buying habits of its users.

After reading the PowerPoint proposal, I clicked on the link on the last slide, deciding to give the site a test drive. It took me about ten minutes to set up an account. When it prompted me to begin a search, I felt like I was shopping at the supermarket for the ingredients to make my favorite meal—interests, background, height, body type. I started to get into it and added shit like my favorite slogans and my happy place so the site could match me with women with similar ideals.

My search returned more than a thousand profiles. I clicked on a few, and within minutes, one face began to blur into the next. Every woman I saw at the popular bar of the month must have also had a profile on this damn site.

I clicked around a little more and noticed some ads starting to appear. Within minutes, they knew enough about me to target exactly the type of product I’d buy. I’d listed one of my hobbies as hiking and checked the box for income over two-hundred-and-fifty grand a year. An ad popped up on the left of my screen showing a Patagonia brand, top of the line, all-weather backpack for four-hundred bucks. This site knew their users—probably gathered more intimate details than anywhere else.

After I finished buying the blue Mountain Elite bag, I clicked back to my email and told the director of marketing to move forward. Sold.

With no desire to continue my email cleanup and hours before I had to leave to pick up Bella, I narrowed my Match.com search criteria and updated my profile. The age category took me about ten minutes of staring at the screen.

Eighteen to twenty-four?

Twenty-five to thirty-one?

Thirty-two to thirty-eight?

At the ripe old age of twenty-five, I was done dating the eighteen-to-twenty-four crowd. Been there, done that. I had no patience for games. I wanted a woman who knew who she was, rather than one who tried to be the woman she thought I wanted. Unclick. Later, eighteen to twenty-four.

Leaving the box on the twenty-five to thirty-one age group checked, my pointer then hovered over the next box. Why was I excluding an awesome thirty-two-year-old? That’s more experience. And likely less bullshit. Click.

After all my modifications, I now had only a dozen or so women who were my supposed ideal match. One through five seemed interesting, definitely worth a second look. Then I clicked on number six—a woman from New Jersey. Her profile writeup actually had me laughing out loud.

Intrigued, I clicked over to her pictures. There were only a few, but one in particular caught my attention. It was a photo taken from the side as she cannonballed into a pool. Her dark hair flew high above her, and the portion of her face I could see was scrunched up in a smile. And while I couldn’t get a good look at her body, since it was all folded up, I could see she had the curves to rock the bikini she wore. Even better, she looked like the type of woman who cared more about having fun than her hair and makeup getting ruined in the pool. And lately, the latter was the type of woman I seemed to attract when I went out.