The Soulmate Equation

IT PROBABLY SHOULD have occurred to Jess that her wrapped up in River’s coat would be the perfect candid, but it absolutely did not occur to her that they would end up on the front page.

Of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Fizzy dropped a copy onto the table before unloading her bag from her shoulder.

“Holy shit, Jessica Davis.”

Jess brought her mug to her lips, hiding a grimace behind it. “I know. I saw it on my iPad this morning.”

“How fucking adorable are you two?”

She set the mug back down. “Stop it.”

Fizzy cleared her throat, reading aloud. “ ‘The pair have the sparkling gleam and nervous tremble of new love. Seemingly without realizing it, Jess leans into him when she speaks. River looks at Jess like he’s waited his entire life for her. But despite the outward impression that love is in the air, neither believed the result when it first came in. “We’re both scientists,” Peña said plainly. “It wouldn’t be our natures to dive headlong into anything.” Even so, it’s hard to not believe it when you see them together.’ ”

Jess groaned. “Seriously. Stop, please.”

“No, no,” Fizzy said, holding up a hand and flipping to the second page. “The next part is my favorite. ‘When the wind picked up and Jess was visibly cold, River wrapped her up in his coat. My photographer and I went quiet, witnesses to the love story unfolding in front of us. GeneticAlly may be entering a crowded sea of seasoned dating services, but it’s clear they’re getting the important things right.’ ”

By now, Jess was leaning her head on the table, wishing for the building to collapse. “Can we stop now?”

“If we must.” She heard Fizzy fold up the paper and set it down on the table. “Was it fun?”

“No,” Jess said immediately, reflexively. She sat up, and the lie hung filmy between them. “Yes?” She took a too-hot sip of coffee and coughed. “I mean, no. It wasn’t fun in the sense you mean. It was weird and awkward… but good?” She squeezed her eyes closed. “Stop it, Fizzy.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop looking at me like that.”

Fizzy laughed at her. “Your mainframe is actually melting.”

“He’s a good-looking man, okay?” Jess conceded. “So, yes, there’s a proximity effect there.”

Pointing to Jess’s giggling smile in the picture, Fizzy said, “You look like you want him to eat you for dinner.”

“Okay, nope.” Jess sat up straighter, dragging her hair into a bun. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Melting.” Fizzy stared at her in wonder before shaking herself into action and unpacking her laptop. They got to work; Fizzy wrote, Jess crunched data. But she could feel Fizzy look up at her every once in a while, studying her like a sample in a dish. And she felt the weight of her scrutiny so physically that Fizzy might as well have been standing behind her, hands on her shoulders, pressing down. Lucky for Fizzy’s head and the external hard drive on the table between them, she looked away just before Jess reached for something to throw at her.

Jess knew Fizzy probably had a thousand questions about all of this. She did, too. What in the fresh hell were she and River actually doing? How did she feel about being so physically attracted to someone she wasn’t sure she actually liked? What should she do with all of this interest in her loins? And in all this silent questioning, it never occurred to Jess that 8:24 was coming soon.

The door opened with a jubilant ding, and her heart skipped away, double tempo.

Stride, stride, stride.

River passed through the room with the sweeping confidence of a king through a court, and Jess felt the air shift all around them, an honest-to-God change in atmospheric pressure.

Fizzy leaned to the side, spotting River, her eyes going wide. “Holy shit.”

Jess didn’t have to turn to know that everyone was watching him. And then, even with her back to the room, Jess felt them all turn to look at her.

Ignoring the feeling, she turned around. River was smiling… at people? A healthy flush to his cheeks, a tiny yet unmistakable upturn to his mouth.

Fizzy’s voice glimmered with wonder: “What did you do to him?”

“We did not—”

“He’s smil—”

“I know,” Jess snapped. “It’s weird. Shut up.”

She did not shut up: “When you two actually—”

Leaning in, Jess hissed: “Shhh!”

She pretended to be very, very engrossed in her work, but it was useless. And she knew without having to watch him that once he’d picked up his drink, he was headed their way.

He set down two cups on their table. “Hey.”

Jess and Fizzy stared dumbly up at him. He was so gorgeous and commanding that all Jess could manage in response was a flat “What.”

He nodded to the drinks he set down. A flat white. A vanilla latte. “I thought you might want a fresh one soon,” he said.

“Thank you,” Fizzy and Jess said in monotonal sexbot unison.

The left corner of his mouth tucked in. “You’re welcome.” He held Jess’s gaze, and the dark weight of it lit the fuse leading to the bomb in her libido. “Did you see the Trib?”

Her neck and cheeks flushed as she remembered how it felt to have him behind her. “Uh, I did, yeah.”

River smiled knowingly, waiting for more, but she was unable to mentally undress him and make words at the same time. Finally, he offered, “I thought Michelle did a good piece.”

Why was she out of breath? “It was really good. She was… nice. Even though she mentioned my clammy hands.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “You were great.”

“Thanks.” Imaginary River was naked and beneath her on the floor, which explained why it took her a few seconds to add, “So were you.”

He looked to his watch. “All right, well… catch you later.” With a final amused pursed-lips smile, he turned to leave Twiggs with his Americano in hand. Stride, stride, stride. The bell over the door cried when he left.

Fizzy stared after him. “What just happened?”

“He bought us coffee.” Jess was extremely casual. Not at all unsettled. “Calm down, Fizz.”

Meanwhile, her brain was shouting in all caps.

“My vagina just unfurled like a flower,” Fizzy said, still staring at the door.

“No.”

“A fucking flower, Jess.”

Jess cupped her forehead in her hands. It was going to be a long day.

HOURS LATER, FIZZY’S attention was back on the newspaper. “Look at this goddamn chemistry.” They’d left for lunch but, both being on deadline, had returned to crank out a bit more work before calling it a day. “It drips from these goddamn pages. Tell me you don’t believe this shit.”

“Stop.”

“You’re going to set the town on fire. Everyone’s humping tonight.”

“Oh my God, would you—” Jess stopped abruptly, realization falling like an anvil. “Oh shit.”

“Can you just bang him and then describe—”

“Fizz. Seriously, wait.” Jess looked up at her. The effect of River’s thoughtfulness this morning had worn off, and the chill of dread washed over her, head to toe. “Today is Monday.”

“So?”

“Juno and Pops go to the library on Monday.”

“So?”

Jess jabbed her index finger down at her copy of the paper. “Fizzy, there are about seventy copies of this picture in the library! My kid is going to see me on the cover of the U-T wrapped like a horny cat in River’s coat! Do you know how many questions she has about giraffe vertebrae? Do you know how many she’ll have about this?”

Fizzy bolted upright, turning left, turning right, before hastily shoving her laptop into her bag. Jess followed suit, packing up like Twiggs was on fire.

IT WAS NORMALLY a ten-minute walk from Twiggs to the University Heights library. They made it in six.

Fizzy stopped on the sidewalk just outside, hands on her knees. “Holy shit. Why did I pick such a sedentary job? When the zombies come, I am screwed.”

Jess leaned against the bus stop and panted, “Same.”

“If the point was to get here fast, we could have, I don’t know, taken a car?”

Jess straightened, glaring at her. “I panicked, okay? It feels a lot easier when I walk it.”

She took a deep breath, marveling over how deeply winded she was. Add to the to-do list: More cardio. She checked her watch. “Juno’s school got out four minutes ago. They’ll be here in about ten. We need to bust ass.”

Fizzy brushed the blunt ends of her dark hair behind her shoulder. “What could possibly go wrong?”

They headed up the ramp that led to the main entrance, smiling nonchalantly at an older woman as they passed. Nothing to see here. Just your average trip to the library to hide every copy of your daily newspaper. Emily, Juno’s favorite librarian, was on the computer at the main desk, and Jess slowed to a stop.

“What are we waiting for?” Fizzy said over Jess’s shoulder as she collided with her back.

“Emily is up there,” she whispered. Emily was Juno’s favorite partly because she was a sweetheart and knew where everything was, and partly because her hair was pink and she rode a sparkly blue Vespa to work every day. “If she sees me come in, she’ll want to say hi. Juno will see us, and we’re toast.”

“A friendly librarian,” Fizzy said sarcastically, narrowing her eyes. “The worst kind.”

Jess glared at Fizzy over her shoulder. “Hush.”

“You hush. I feel like I’m committing a crime even being in here,” Fizzy whispered behind her. “I’m late renewing my library card!”

“It’s not like an alarm’s gonna go off,” Jess said. “They don’t scan them as you walk through the door.” A patron stepped up to the counter, and she watched as Emily listened, smiled, and then nodded, motioning for the person to follow her. Jess reached for Fizzy’s hand. “Come on.”

They slipped through the door and headed straight for the back near Adult Services, darting behind a bookcase when they saw an older man standing right in front of the giant rack of newspapers. Fizzy looked around nervously.

“Would you stop it?” Jess whisper-hissed. “You wrote an entire romantic suspense series about a female assassin. We’re hiding newspapers. Why does this look harder for you than the time you realized halfway through a game of pool that you’d bet a bunch of Hells Angels that we could kick their asses?”

“I’m not good with peer pressure, okay? Usually I’m the one talking you into doing something stupid. This is all backwards.”

Jess looked around the corner, groaning when she saw the man still standing there. “I can see six copies of the front page right there. We just need to grab them all.”

An older woman walked down the aisle, and they both tried to look casual. Fizzy leaned against the bookcase; Jess picked up an escargot cookbook off the shelf and attempted to appear engrossed. The woman eyed them warily as she passed.

Fizzy took the book from her and shoved it back into place. “Do we really have to do this?” She looked around. “This feels oddly naughty.”

Jess honestly never expected Fizzy to have a pearl-clutching side. “Do you remember when you were writing My Alter Ego and you asked me to hoist my leg behind my head to”—Jess made air quotes—“ ‘see if a normal person could do it’?”

Fizzy frowned, thinking. “Vaguely.”

“I pulled my hamstring and could barely walk for a week. For you and your book. But you still told Daniel I’d pulled a vaginal muscle in a sex accident. You owe me.”

“I’m going to kill you off in the next Crimson Lace book.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d threatened it, definitely wouldn’t be the last. “Sure.”

They both peered around the bookcase again, relieved when they saw that the coast was finally clear. Jess could already see herself seated across from the bad cop down at the police station, given sludgy coffee in a Styrofoam cup and shown surveillance footage of her skulking over to the Adult Media section, unspooling an armful of Union-Tribunes from the rack, and jogging away. She made a silent promise to Juno and San Diego County that she would volunteer and read at story time until her kid was eighteen if she could just keep Juno from seeing these papers… or her.

They walked through the library as if they had every right to be carrying two armloads of newspapers, and then arranged them carefully behind a long row of Mary Higgins Clark paperbacks.

“Is that all of them?” Fizzy asked, face flushed as she checked over her shoulder.

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

They walked down the aisle and stopped short just as the entrance came into view. Jess pulled Fizzy back, ducking her head out just long enough to see Juno and Pops walk through the door.

“Oh my God,” Fizzy said. “That was close.”

“Yeah.” Jess looked again, heart racing as she watched them walk straight to the newspapers. “Let’s go. She’ll leave Pops at the papers and head straight for kids’ nonfiction. We have about thirty seconds.”

Fizzy nodded, and with Juno’s and Pops’s backs turned, they ran straight for the doors.

FIZZY STAYED LONG enough to finish a glass of Nana’s iced tea and jot down the details of their adventure before heading home to do some social media stuff and get ready for a night out with Rob. Jess had a few texts from River mentioning the possibility of a party, and that Brandon would be emailing them both… definitely nothing to warrant the flash of heat that moved up her neck. She was tempted to launch into a brilliant retelling of her and Fizzy’s little crime spree but stopped herself for fear of beginning a conversation she didn’t really want to have. Jess wasn’t upset that River had met Juno, but she wasn’t sure she wanted it to happen again, either. Future Jess would definitely have to deal with it, but after the day she’d had, this Jess just wanted to have a glass of wine and make spaghetti.

As she straightened the apartment and began dinner, she fell back on a new and still unfamiliar comfort: reminding herself that she didn’t have to worry about money, at least for a few months. She’d never had the luxury of a cushion before, and it was almost indulgent to imagine paying a year of insurance premiums in advance or splurging on real Tylenol instead of the generic. Wild times.

Pigeon wound around her feet and Jess was just adding pasta to the boiling water when the door burst open and Juno rushed inside.

“Mom! How to Build the World’s Best Roller Coaster in Ten Easy Steps! I got it!” She kicked off her shoes and opened her bag in the middle of the living room, spilling the contents across Jess’s freshly vacuumed floor.

Setting the wooden spoon on the trivet, Jess turned away from the stove and leaned against the island. Did she look guilty?

“I was number two on the waitlist, but somebody didn’t pick it up, and so when I was there, Emily said I could check it out.” Juno slapped the book on the counter and finally came up for air. “I gotta start my project.”

“Hello to you, too.” Jess stopped the whirling dervish with an arm around her shoulders and reeled her daughter in to press a kiss to the top of her head. “Where’s Pops?” She looked out into the courtyard but didn’t see him.

Juno disappeared into the living room, returning with a blue folder, at least a dozen pieces of paper trying to escape it. “He’s taking Nana for Ethiopian food.” She toppled a neat stack of mail as she spread the papers out on the counter in front of her. Jess picked them up again. “The instructions say to use a nine-by-twelve piece of cardboard but I can also use a thirty-six-by-forty-eight.” She paused. “Do we have that?”

“You’re asking if I have a four-foot piece of cardboard lying around? Sorry. Fresh out.” Jess stirred the pasta and turned off the stove. “Baby, let’s try and keep it manageable? Where would we even put something that big?”

Juno looked around the apartment and motioned to the dining room table.

“And where would we eat?”

“At Nana and Pops’s.”

Jess looked at her daughter over her shoulder as she drained the noodles. “What else do you need to start this project?”

“Art tape, the big kind. Lots of it. Did you know that in Philadelphia somebody made a one-hundred-twenty-eight-foot cocoon out of translucent tape? Twenty-one miles of it! You can climb in it and everything.”

“Wow.” Jess pulled down plates and brought them to the counter.

“I also need glue and regular tape and construction paper to make the people.” She pointed to Jess’s iPad on the table. “Can I look it up?”

“May I,” Jess said reflexively, and dished noodles onto the plate, topping them with sauce.

Juno picked up Pigeon from the chair, lifted the iPad to wake it up.

“How was school today?” Jess asked, turning just as an image loaded on the screen.

A picture of her and River.

The cover of the Union-Tribune she’d been looking at this morning. Fuuuu—

“Mom!” Juno yelled. “That’s you and River Nicolas!”

Was it possible to lose all the blood in one’s body without actually bleeding?

“Is he your boyfriend?”

How was Jess supposed to answer that? That she was only pretending with River because they were paying her? That they were friends who just happened to be photographed wrapped up in each other’s clothes? How was it that she tried so hard to protect Juno, but consistently screwed everything up?

She set down their dinner with shaking hands. “That’s…” Jess searched for words, panicked, sweating, spiraling. “We were—”

I am not my mom. I am not putting Juno last. I can explain.

Before Jess could speak, though, Juno tilted her head. “You look pretty with your hair like that.” And then, just as quickly, her attention was drawn to her plate. “Ooh, spaghetti!” She took a humongous bite, eyes closed as she chewed.

Stunned, Jess could only stare as Juno tilted her glass to her face and set it down, leaving a bright moon of milk over her top lip. She grinned winningly at her mother. “Can I order tape after dinner?”

“Yes, as much tape as you want,” Jess said.

“Okay!” Juno swirled more noodles onto her fork. “Can I get different colors? Like blue and orange and green and red?” She took another giant bite, and Jess moved back to the kitchen.

She opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Sure,” she told her, and poured herself a drink. Pink? Purple? Polka dot? Knock yourself out, kid. Jess had never had the luxury of being frivolous before; it felt strange but also wonderful. She watched Juno finish her dinner and pull out the iPad again, humming as she added art supplies to her cart.

Whoever said money couldn’t buy happiness had never seen this.