No Match for Her Chapter 2 Read Online for Free

Chapter 1

herry

resent Day

cast a side glance at Tatum to make sure I’ve heard her correctly.

After acting coy and refusing to give me any details for the past week, she’s just introduced my blind date without a shred of irony or indication that we’re in on the same joke.

Only…this has to be a joke.

Right?

Standing in the lobby of her modern metal and glass apartment building, my younger sister gestures to a hunched, rumpled-looking man approaching us and beams at us both.

“Cherry, meet Charlie.” Three simple words with the power to change my life. As with every first date, I hope it’s for the better.

Based on the vibe of this sheepish stranger in performance fleece, I’m preparing for the worst.

The unbridled joy that squeaks through Tatum’s voice makes me take a quick glance around to see if she’s referring to someone else—someone who looks like fitness model eye candy with a brain to match. That’s the level of fabulous I’m expecting from her breathless squeal.

But, no.

The man coming our way moves slowly—not fashion model on a runway slowly, more like head in the clouds slowly. Like he might forget where he’s going before he gets there. Or walk right past us because something shiny catches his eye.

Which is exactly what happens.

Charlie momentarily bypasses us to root around in the candy dish at the building’s front desk until he finds what he’s searching for. Then he returns to us and presents me with one of the two purple lollypops he’s just scored and a bouquet of sunflowers he had tucked under one arm.

“Thank you.” I clutch the candy and the long stems and consider running them upstairs to put in water so they don’t wilt during dinner.

Then Charlie holds up his newly acquired purple lollypop, turns it so it reflects the light, and slips it into his pocket. “My favorite flavor. And the color brings back memories of building models with crystal tiles in science class. I like how a color can instantly return us to a time and place. Enjoy yours.” He gestures to me with a tilt of his head, most of which is covered by the hood of his sweatshirt.

As I gape at him and his non sequiturs, I rescind my impression that he’s plain-looking. I really don’t know what he looks like at all. Under a shock of hair falling over half his face, a pair of thick dark-rimmed glasses, several days’ worth of scruff, and excessively baggy clothes, he’s practically in disguise.

As a wandering minstrel.

And because this is Silicon Valley, home of startup companies with ridiculous valuations and stock options that multiply like spring bunnies, a man dressed like him could easily be a career-delayed, forever college student…or a wealthy serial entrepreneur.

“Cherry, meet Charlie.” My sister’s words echo in my head, urging me to connect the dots.

As the hamster cranks its rusty little wheels, I realize what my sister has finagled, and a feeling of annoyance settles in. Then dread.

The man standing in front of us, quietly studying me, is Charles Walgrove—the billionaire tech company owner and an investor in the San Francisco Strikers soccer team, where Tatum’s boyfriend Donovan Taylor just signed a rich three-year deal.

He’s also Tatum’s boss. Yes, my sister is setting me up with the man who signs her paycheck at a job she wants to keep.

That can’t possibly be disastrous. Especially when I’m the one sister prone to making oblivious observations about fashion faux pas. Like his yellow socks.

“I can’t decide if those are more lemon or banana, but either way, they’d make for a nice dessert,” I say gesturing at the one bright ray of hope amid the monochromatic, dismal array of clothes.

“Thanks?” He squints at my observation, and I bite my tongue to avoid tanking this date before it even gets started.

Staring down at my ankle-length red skirt, the black spike-heeled booties, and the short black boucle sweater I’m wearing over a white T-shirt and several strings of gold necklaces and leather wrap bracelets, I sense the blush unfurling along the back of my neck.

I’m way overdressed.

As the only redhead in the family, I already look like the outcast. Bright, loud, red, artsy—hard to miss. Tempted to say the inappropriate thing that flutters into my brain before vetting it. The one who leaps when the rest of my family plods sensibly along.

And now that my youngest sister has fallen hard for her gorgeous soccer star boyfriend, I’m also the last single sister out of five.

Unlucky in love, party of one.

If the fashion mismatch isn’t enough, my date is one of an elite few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who earned their billions before age thirty. And Charles Walgrove did it with computers and algorithms.

I could not be less interested in computers and algorithms.

Although I work for a high-tech company where some people bother themselves with numbers and computer code, I spend my days working with color, design, graphics, and art. I pull swatches of fabric and create color boards. And if I can’t find the textile I have in mind, I design it myself.

Even that isn’t creative enough for me. I paint abstract canvases as often as I can with latent dreams of one day quitting my day job.

So forgive me if my first instinct is to appraise the sheepish-looking man in front of me and decide Tatum is playing some kind of a joke.

I wait for the punch line.

Then I wait some more.

I also check the near vicinity for a tasty dessert of a man like Donovan Taylor. Tatum knows my type, and if ever a man fit the bill, it would be any of Donovan’s teammates on the Strikers team.

Any. Of. Them.

Where are you, flawless man lurking nearby with an athlete’s physique, a whip-smart sense of humor, and a sinfully beautiful face? Anyone?

Not finding an impish grin on Tatum’s face or any other sign she’s testing my sense of humor, I inhale a cleansing breath, shoot a subtle glare in her direction, and extend my hand to the man waiting patiently in front of me.

“Hi. I’m Cherry. The best sister.” I’ve probably made that joke to half the people my siblings have introduced me to, and nearly one hundred percent of the time, it merits a smile or a laugh.

Not with Charles Walgrove.

He blinks at me a few times and presses his lips together, appraising me. He looks taken aback by my very existence, not to mention that his baggy jeans and navy hoodie make him look like some sort of stalker gnome. Or the Unabomber.

After looking me up and down and up again, Charlie seems content with the visual survey of me. He gingerly slides his hood off and reaches for my hand. “Cherry. I’m delighted to meet you.” He gives my hand a firm pump, lets it go, and looks up at Donovan who’s several inches taller than him. “Donno, nice to see you off the pitch. That last game was a heartbreaker, not that you need me to say it.”

Donovan blinks hard and runs a hand through his hair, no doubt reliving every disappointing moment of the recent game. “I know. We still don’t have our rhythm.”

Charlie claps him on the back. “That’s what it looked like.” Charlie taps a finger against his lips and looks off into the distance.

I feel bad for Donovan. It’s one thing to lose a game, but it’s another to stand in front of one of the team’s investors and have to answer for it. Yet another reason why I can’t, for the life of me, understand why Tatum would choose to set me up with Charlie. She and I will be having a conversation later.

“Coach has some ideas for where we’ve been going wrong, I’m sure you’re in the loop,” Donovan sighs.

Charlie waves a hand. “I’m not here to give you a hard time. But I love the game, and I’m curious about the new strategy.”

“No worries, Charlie. Ask me whenever.” Donovan plasters on a smile, and I see his arm tighten ever so slightly around my sister’s shoulder as he joins me in the this-is-so-awkward camp.

Tatum’s eyes question me with a subtle raised eyebrow to ask if I want them to come to dinner with us. We talked earlier about how she and Donovan might just introduce me to my blind date and head off on their own. She thought it made the most sense, so we could get to know each other without the pressure of sitting under the watchful eye of our matchmaker.

“Yeah, no watchful eyes,” I told her at the time, assuming I’d want her to leave me to work my dating magic with her hottie office friend. But now that I know her friend is really her boss, I don’t feel so brave. Having a buffer might be nice.

So, I return her look with a subtle shake of my head—“don’t leave”—and she immediately nods in understanding. Picking up Donovan’s hand, she pipes in, “Actually, you two can talk shop over dinner. Cherry and I thought we’d make it a foursome, just for fun.”

Tatum runs the sunflowers upstairs to save them from drought, and my eyes go to Charlie’s—or what I can see of them—to ascertain whether he agrees with our definition of fun. His expression is blank, save for an acquiescent rise in the corner of his mouth, and he nods. “Foursome it is.”

I have mixed feelings about chickening out on a solo blind date. On the one hand, my sister and Donovan know Charlie, so if conversation between the two of us lags, they can pick up the slack. But if Charlie’s busy quizzing Donovan about game strategy, and he and Tatum start talking about work, I might feel like a fourth wheel on my own date.

These are the thoughts bouncing in my head as I survey our tidy group, thinking that we look like a motley crew at best.

I’m accessorized to the nines with jewelry I made in a new class I’m taking, Donovan is wearing a baseball cap to keep from getting recognized, Tatum has on dark jeans and a tight black sweater I forced her to buy, and then there’s Charlie, who looks like he borrowed “I’ve given up” attire from a three-hundred-pound linebacker.

It’s my own fault, sort of, that I’ve found myself in need of a blind date rescue operation. Our brother Finn—the oldest of our family of six siblings and the only male—has finally picked a wedding date, and it’s fast approaching. Every one of my sisters has seemingly found her soulmate and therefore has a date to the wedding. Each of them will gaze into the eyes of someone important on the dance floor when the bridesmaids join the wedded couple.

And unless I can find a human body to serve as my date, I will be dancing alone, and not in a Gloria Gaynor-fueled anthem about surviving on my own.

Back when Finn and his fiancée Annie announced their wedding date a few months ago, I figured I had loads of time to turn one of the first-date men in my life into a sixth date wedding partner. But none of them made it past date three—not the dog whisperer, the aspiring standup comedian, or the mechanic/poet.

So here I am.

I don’t need true love. I barely need true like. I just want someone I can tolerate. Preferably someone who likes to dance.

“How do you feel about dancing, Charlie?” The bigger question is whether he’s willing to put on a tux. One time, for one night.

His shoulders creep up, and he cracks his neck like he’s relieving tension. “Dancing? You want to do that instead of dinner?”

“Oh, I don’t mean right now. Just in general. Dancing, are you a fan?”

He doesn’t answer for so long I think he may not have heard the question. Then he nods. “I’m going to say yes. Provided the music is good, and no one is looking at me.”

“You dance like no one’s watching?” I cock my head and quirk an eyebrow so he’ll know I’m playing with him.

I get a closed-lipped grin. “In my office, sometimes I do, if you must know.”

“Oh, I must.” I grin, loving this nugget of information from this quiet enigma of a man. Maybe this blind date will turn out okay, even if we have nothing in common.

Maybe it could lead to a wedding date, where I’ll rope him in for one slow dance and a lot of wedding wine. I just need a body. And even though I can barely discern his through the baggy clothes, I have to imagine some assortment of bones and flesh is keeping him upright underneath it all.

If we can get through this dinner, odds are good we can get through a wedding.

“Okay, who’s in the mood for the dim sum place near campus?” Tatum asks, looping her arm around Donovan’s waist and starting to walk in the direction of the parking garage. She looks tiny next to him, and my sister is not small. He still has his arm over her shoulder, and he leans to kiss her temple. They’re so adorable it almost hurts.

I glance at Charlie and confirm how

not

adorable we are, walking six feet apart and avoiding eye contact.

In a concession to a tiny bit of independence, I agree we should take two cars in case one pair of us wants to stay at the restaurant longer than the other. Already sensing which couple that might be, I duck into the passenger seat of Charlie’s Tesla, noticing the organized accessory tray between our seats.

One square section contains his keys, beside a rectangular section holding a small notepad and pen, next to a compartment for his small leather wallet and another for his phone. “Did you design this contraption to fit all your stuff?” I ask, fascinated by the place for everything and everything in its place.

He chuckles, and my ears delight at the evidence of humor. Under his Cousin It exterior, there might be a person lurking.

“No, I can’t take credit for it. I think whoever configured it took a basic guess at the sizes and types of items most people have.” He looks down at the console and tips his head as if weighing possibilities. “Though I’ll probably admit I looked at the spaces available and came up with appropriately-sized things to put in them. I didn’t want to leave any of them empty.”

“So, like, you might not ordinarily have a notepad and pen in your car?”

“Exactly. If I have an idea, I’m probably not scribbling it down while I’m driving, especially when I have a hands-free phone to take dictation.” He gestures at the car’s touch screen which is bigger than my laptop and loaded with maps, data, and music playlists.

“But you didn’t want to leave an empty rectangle.”

“No one wants an empty rectangle,” he deadpans, then points to one of the trays. “Would you like a mint?”

“Sounds like a guiding principle for life. May your rectangles be full, and your breath be fresh.” I shake one of the mints from its container and he does the same.

I try to decide how I’d feel about an empty rectangle if I had one in my car. As it is, my center console is a jumble of pens, receipts, hand sanitizer, baseball hats, and hair ties in no particular arrangement. I shudder at what Charlie would make of it.

He nods, keeping his eyes on the road.

Glancing at the notebook, I’m suddenly curious. “Is there anything written in the notebook at all? Or is it just a placeholder until you find a better rectangular object to put in its slot.”

Another gentle laugh. I have no idea why the sound soothes me. I guess I’m more nervous than I realized. “I have some notes in it. Sometimes it’s nice to connect my hand to the pen and the page. It’s a neurological exercise I employ when I want to commit something to memory.” I eye him from the side and see him chewing his bottom lip. “I’m probably telling you something you already know.”

“I appreciate that you appreciate it. I’m an artist, so I use a lot of hand-eye connection.”

He takes his eyes from the road to glance at me, and from the way he looks me over, I feel like he sees me in a different way than he did earlier. “What kind of art? Fine art? Painting?”

“Only on my own time. For work, I pick colors and textiles and design interior spaces.” Okay, this isn’t so bad. We’re conversing. It feels normal, even if I’m not attracted to Charlie whatsoever.

“Like houses?”

“Smaller spaces than that, but same idea.” That’s when I notice my skirt is caught in the door. Maybe a swift tug will free it. I pull, but it’s good and stuck.

“Condos?” The corner of his lips twist into a grin as though he’s playing along with a game. Then he notices my struggle. I let go of my skirt and pretend nothing’s amiss.

“Airplanes. Jets. Custom ones.”

His face creases with concern. “Everything okay there? Need me to stop?” He pulls the car over to the side of the road before I can answer. I swing the door open and free my skirt, which now has a slippery line of car wax imprinted in the fabric. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, no. Not your fault. It’s all good. I have a book that tells me how to get every kind of stain out.”

I have no such book. He just seems so…devastated by the stain.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Totally. Thanks for stopping. We can talk more about jets if you want.” He’s a billionaire, after all. He probably enjoys jets.

Through the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyes dart around surveying me. Then he exhales and pulls the car back onto the road. “I imagine some of my colleagues own some of said custom jets,” he mutters.

“No doubt, they do.” For all I know, the hateful project I’ve had to revise twenty times and currently has royal blue velvet couches is his. The owner has sent a representative to every meeting and given notes through him—too busy to attend to plans for his airplane in person, evidently.

I’m not about to ask Charlie. That feels personal, akin to asking if I can peek at his stock portfolio. We’re already on awkward footing. I won’t ask.

“You a fan of royal blue?” I can’t help it. I need to know.

He casts a side-eye my way. “No. Why?”

“Just curious.”

I do a silent perusal of the man my youngest sister has been talking up for the past week, noting how sneaky she’s been in never telling me she was setting me up with her boss. Or maybe I didn’t ask. I’d been swept along by her enthusiasm for a friend she’d never mentioned before.

“Charlie’s probably the smartest person I’ve ever met… Charlie has a giant heart… Charlie’s really hot,” she told me. That last one has me wondering if my sister has been staring at the 1s and 0s on her computer for too long.

Granted, I can barely get a solid look at his face and his body is shrouded in fabric, but I don’t sense the heat of flames. More like an old Bic lighter where the butane has evaporated.

And for my purposes, I don’t need flames. Better that the man has a giant heart. I haven’t come across enough of those lately.

Besides, he’s pretty much wearing the uniform of Silicon Valley startup culture, which I see at work every day. So, I prepare myself for an evening of algorithm jokes.

Are there algorithm jokes?

I make myself laugh thinking about it.

Anything to avoid thinking about how I ended up here, hard up for a date, at age thirty-two.

pparently, there

are

algorithm jokes.

“A machine-learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What would you like to drink?’” Tatum tells the three of us. I look at her blankly, Donovan grins at her adorkable enthusiasm, and Charlie beams like a flashlight on steroids, probably because he knows the answer, but he’s too nice to spoil it for Tatum.

After a loaded moment of waiting, she blurts, “The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’” She can’t help giggling at her own joke, which makes me giggle at her. Charlie’s almost-smile indicates he’s close to experiencing legitimate joy.

From an objective bystander’s point of view, I appreciate that he’s amused. At least one of us is enjoying the evening. As his date, I don’t have anything remotely resembling an algorithm joke to entertain him, if that’s what’s required to get him engaged.

I’m tempted to ask him some more questions about the configuration of his car console divider. At least that felt like a conversation.

Since I returned from my first trip to the restroom—oh yes, there will be more to save me from abject boredom—mostly Tatum has talked to me, and Charlie and Donovan have been off on a sports tear. “Ever since I read

Moneyball

, I’ve wondered if there’s a way to take that approach in other sports,” Charlie says, glancing my way.

“What’s

Moneyball

? Tatum asks, always eager for information.

“An A-plus read. It’s an account of how the general manager for the Oakland As used numbers to recruit a winning team about twenty years ago. Team was at the bottom of the league, and he used computational models to find undervalued talent that the team could afford to put on its roster. Turned the team around.”

“It was a movie, right? With Brad Pitt,” I offer. It’s the only thing I can contribute because honestly, I don’t even remember the movie, and I was probably annoyed at the time that a Brad Pitt movie contained so much baseball.

Donovan nods. “Good movie. Yeah, I think that kind of analysis works in baseball because it’s such a numbers game anyway. Not sure you could apply it to soccer.”

“True, true, but I’m game to try,” Charlie counters, eager to continue down this particular rabbit hole. The conversation continues as white noise without me as I look into my cup of green tea and wonder if the green leaves at the bottom actually spell the words

hell

or if it’s just my imagination.

Looking around the restaurant, I try to eyeball other tables I could join instead. The three sporty numbers nerds at my table probably wouldn’t even notice, and maybe I could score an extra pork bun for my trouble.

Alas, I don’t see an empty seat, so I sip my tea and fiddle with my jewelry, thinking about new ways I could hammer the metal to produce different results.

Then I shoot Tatum a death glance, but since she’s staring into her boyfriend’s bottomless eyes, my light saber misses.

I love my sister, and I can understand why she’d think Charlie is a good match—for her.

But she knows me.

My list of past boyfriends includes musicians in touring bands, artists who sleep most of the day and do their best work drunk at three in the morning, and an arborist who rode a motorcycle and bailed on me to live in a tree to protest deforestation.

In other words, I date artists and free spirits and flakes.

The relationships rarely make it past the two-month mark and I’m fine with that. I’m a free spirit and a flake too, at least compared with my family full of STEM achievers and academics—the lone artist trying so hard to be like them that I ended up working for a tech company. I’m in the art department, but still.

Maybe setting me up with Charlie is her unsubtle way of passing judgement on my past boyfriends and my life rule of spending my money on fashion instead of investing in municipal bonds. “Get on the straight and narrow, Cherry!”

Or maybe guys like Charlie are the only ones she knows because she spends most of her time at work.

There’s always the third and most depressing answer, which is that Tatum has already become one of those people in a relationship who think that two single people are a perfect match even if the only thing they have in common is being single.

I stifle my urge to strangle her. I haven’t done that since I was nine.

Fine, thirteen.

I know she means well. And I just need a wedding date, so my aunts and my mom’s friends don’t fuss over me and worry for my future. It will be bad enough that I’ll have to join the sad, hopeful single ladies if Annie decides to do the bouquet toss thing.

But it would be nice to have a friendly face to return to afterward, someone who will shrug and laugh off my poor catching skills and wish me better luck next time. I’d like to know him a little bit and feel a little comfortable, and if there’s a tiny shred of dating potential, well, that’s just gravy.

I look over at Charlie, searching for the gravy factor. Not gonna lie, I’d like an

au jus

, but I’d settle for something brown and runny left over from Thanksgiving.

I almost catch myself reaching to pull away the glasses so I can see more of Charlie’s face. I feel like a mother hen wanting to pat and prod her duckling into prom date form.

Over the past few years, he’s been in the media a lot, and I could swear I’ve seen pictures of him, but I can’t recall him looking so…disheveled. Then again, I’m not someone who pays particular attention to tech news, and with Tatum blindsiding me without telling me who my date would be, I didn’t have the benefit of a pre-date google session.

I reason that if I don’t know him well enough to have an inkling what his face looks like, I probably don’t know him well enough to touch his glasses. Seems like a line I shouldn’t cross.

Right?

And now I’m starting to ask myself a different question, namely, if dinner is this boring and painful, do I really want to be responsible for him as my plus-one at my brother’s wedding?

Maybe being alone is better than being bored.

I’m not bored when I’m alone.

Not all the time.

I cough loudly, hoping to get Tatum’s attention without being obvious. Unfortunately, I’m greeted with three pairs of eyes and Charlie slides my water glass closer to my hand. He is kind, I’ll give him that.

But really, only Tatum and Donovan are on a date. Charlie and I might as well be drowsy chaperones. Speaking of which, I pour myself a full glass of beer since I’m not driving.

Charlie indicates with a tip of his head that he’d like me to top his off as well. We clink glasses. Or we try to…

When Charlie’s glass connects with mine, the unmistakable pop of shattering glass sends a crack splitting the side of his, which promptly starts leaking beer onto the table. The glass is full, so there’s no stemming the fountain of suds. Charlie tries to sip it quickly while I throw my napkin onto the table to soak up the increasing dribble.

“I’m so sorry. Did I smash your glass…?”

“No, it probably already had a tiny crack. The clink just expanded it.” He’s trying to be nice, but I notice a healthy amount soaked the front of his hoodie.

He follows my gaze and deflates. Maybe it’s a favorite hoodie, or maybe he’s coming to the same conclusion I am—this date is not going well. Charlie strips off the hoodie and hangs it on the back of his chair. I take in his Coldplay T-shirt and seize on it as a way of deflecting the conversation from the disaster that is us. “Did you see them in concert?”

Charlie looks down as his shirt and his features relax into relief at the new topic. “Oh. Yeah, I did. Chris Martin’s got talent and a good sense of humor. It was fun.”

“Cool.” I know I should have more to say, but my conversational skills seem to have left with the spilled beer. I feel drained.

Tatum and Donovan have all but disappeared into a bubble of love, staring into each other’s eyes, so they barely register our existence. He’s holding her hand under the table, and she’s scooted her chair toward the corner of our square table so she’s sitting next to him. They’ve been eye-fucking each other for the past fifteen minutes, so even if one of them occasionally contributes to the conversation, it just makes me feel like I’m in bed with them, which just makes me want to drink more.

Normally I find them cute. Right now, they just remind me how far I am from ever experiencing what they have.

That’s the problem with being the “carefree, artsy one.” I’m supposed to like my dead-end relationships. But what if I don’t anymore?

What happened? Dating used to be fun. I used to have such blind optimism each time I went out with someone new that it pulled me along for at least a date or two. But after meeting enough frogs who turned out to be plain old frogs, I guess having dinner with a billionaire gnome who isn’t a serial killer—as far as I know—qualifies as some kind of success.

I notice Tatum and Donovan watching us quietly, and Tatum has a mile-wide smile on her face. The wheels are probably turning in my sister’s head, imagining our future grandkids. That’s not what’s happening here.

Not. At. All.