The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren
ELEVEN
MOM, DID YOU know the first roller coaster was built to keep people away from brothels?”
Jess dragged her eyes away from Google to focus on her pajama-clad seven-year-old, hanging upside down over the back of the couch. Her hair was nearly to her waist, and Pigeon had made herself a nice little nest where it pooled on the cushion. “Hello, small human. How do you know what a brothel is?”
Juno peeked at her from behind her book. “I heard it.”
She lifted her chin to what Juno was reading. “Your library book about lizards mentions brothels?”
“No, it was in a movie I watched with Pops.”
Jess leaned an elbow on the dining table next to her abandoned bowl of oatmeal and slid her gaze over to Pops sitting innocently in the lounger. He scanned his crossword puzzle, saying casually, “It was on some history channel.” He flipped a page. “Practically a documentary.”
“A documentary about brothels, Pops? It can’t wait until she’s, I don’t know, ten?”
Upside-down Juno grinned at her victoriously. “I looked it up in the dictionary you got me.”
Dammit.
Pigeon darted off the couch barely a second before Juno slid the rest of the way to the floor, landing in a giggling, crumpled pile. Sitting right-side-up again, she flipped her head back, leaving her hair a tangled mess around her head. “It was a movie about Billy the Kid.”
Jess looked at Pops again. “Young Guns?” she said incredulously. “My seven-year-old watched Young Guns.”
“In my defense,” he said, still not bothering to glance up, “we were watching Frozen again and I fell asleep. When I woke up, she’d changed the channel and got invested. You want me to keep her from learning history?”
Juno skipped to Jess’s side and peered down at her laptop. Clearly Jess was grasping at straws; she’d actually typed Second Grade Art Projects into the search bar.
“I already know what I want to do for my project,” Juno said. “I want to do an art tape amusement park with a roller coaster, a carousel, tiny screaming people, and a Tilt-A-Whirl.”
“Honey, while I appreciate your ambition, that is a lot of work.” Jess paused. And giant, and messy, with five thousand sticky tiny pieces that would end up on Juno, Jess, the furniture, and the cat. “Also, I’m worried you’d tell Mrs. Klein how you arrived at roller coasters for art inspiration.”
“I wouldn’t tell her that I know what brothels are.”
“Maybe we could start by not repeating the word brothel.” Jess tucked a strand of hair behind Juno’s ear. “What about a hot air balloon collage? We can cut pictures out of magazines and glue them to a poster board.”
Her daughter was clearly not tempted.
Jess turned back to the screen and clicked on a list of projects. “These pinwheels are pretty. Or a Popsicle stick bridge?”
Juno shook her head, furrowed brow pinned firmly in place. Hello again, Alec. She grabbed a book from a pile on the table and turned it to a page listing the Top Ten Amusement Parks Across the World.
“I want to do something cool and enter it in the North Park Festival of Arts.” Juno pointed a sparkly painted fingernail at an old photo. “This is Switchback Gravity Railroad. It’s the one the guy built so people would go here instead of the”—she leaned in, whispering—“brothels.” Straightening, she returned to normal volume. “But I don’t want to do that one because it only went six miles an hour and that’s only two miles an hour faster than Nana’s Rascal scooter when she broke her knee.”
Pops chuckled from his chair. “I thought she was going to mow someone over in that thing.”
Juno turned the page to a brightly colored coaster, one with a loop so huge Jess’s stomach lurched just imagining it. “I think I want to do Full Throttle at Magic Mountain,” she said. “Since you don’t have to work at Twiggs anymore, maybe we could go there tomorrow for Try Something New Sunday?”
Jess had called Daniel on her way home from GeneticAlly last night. He’d sounded mildly relived when Jess gave notice; she’d shown no promise as a barista. “That’s a long drive,” Jess told her.
“We could take the train,” Juno singsonged.
“I don’t know if the train goes that far north,” Jess sang back.
Her daughter leaned in close, pressing the tip of her nose to Jess’s. “It does. Pops checked.”
Jess glared at Pops again, but guilt still hadn’t induced him to look up from his crossword.
“Are you even tall enough to ride that?” she asked.
“We’ll put lifts in her shoes,” Pops offered, to which Juno responded with an ear-splitting screech as she ran over to tackle him.
Jess rubbed her temples, looking up when her phone vibrated on the table with an unknown number. Who would be calling at 8:15 a.m. on a Saturday?
The foggy window of her mind wiped clean. River.
She should answer. She should. He probably had the test results. But she couldn’t make her thumb swipe over the screen. She just let it vibrate in her hand before it went over to voicemail.
It wasn’t panic over the possibility that the results were confirmed late last night. It was the opposite: She’d lain awake until after two a.m. thinking of what she would do with the money. College savings. A better hearing aid for Pops. A little cushion in the bank. Now that she’d taken the leap and signed the contract, Jess didn’t want it snatched away.
Her phone screen went dark. She waited … and waited. No voicemail. Great. Now she would have to call him.
Jess returned to her laptop, finger hovering absently over the keyboard. She’d resisted doing this so far, but the urge was too tempting. Jess typed Dr. River Peña into the search bar and pressed Enter. The results populated the page: medical articles, UCSD alumni posts, awards. LinkedIn, ResearchGate. She clicked on the image tab, and low-resolution thumbnails filled the screen. The first photo was a faculty shot taken, according to the caption, while he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Medical Genetics at UCSD. There were more recent ones, too: pictures with investors at various fundraising events. In each, he looked easy in his skin. In each, he was smiling. Jess was so unprepared for the sight of his crinkly eyes and uneven, perfect grin that she felt that weird hot flush of defensive anger. She’d caught hints of his smile in passing, but usually only as smug amusement or flashes of embarrassed laughter. Jess had never seen it like this: bright and sincere. And pointed right at her.
“Ooh, who’s that?”
“Nobody.” She slammed her laptop shut and picked up her coffee with all the subtlety of a cartoon criminal. “I was just …” With renewed focus, she flipped open Juno’s book again. “So, roller coasters, then?”
Daughter slyly appraised mother. Suspicion slid across Juno’s features, but was quickly replaced by the realization that she’d just gotten her way. “Yes!”
Closing the book, she scooped it up with the others and raced toward her room. “I’m gonna look at the train schedule on your iPad!”
Jess began to argue, but her phone vibrated on the table. It was a text from the same unknown number.
Would you like to have dinner?
(It’s River.)
Her lungs filled with helium.
Does that mean you reproduced the finding?
David just emailed the graph. I called to share the results.
But it’s a yes on the finding?
98, confirmed.
Jess stared at her phone while her heart decided to absolutely freak the hell out inside her body. Flipping, flopping, punching. It was real.
It was real.
She knew it was her turn to say something, but her hands had gone vaguely numb. Stalling, she clicked on the phone number and entered it under Americano Phlebotomist in her contacts.
Finally, the three dots appeared, indicating that he was typing.
Are you free tonight?
Slowly, one letter carefully tapped at a time, she managed to reply.
Bahn Thai. Park & Adams. 7:30
Park in the alley in the back
“Four letters down,” Pops said across the room. “First letter is L—‘hurdle.’”
Pushing her phone aside, Jess bent to rest her head on her folded arms.
“Leap,” she said.
“HONESTLY, JESSICA, Ihaven’t seen outfit panic like this since I wrote Nicoline in His Accidental Bride.” Fizzy stepped back to judge what had to be outfit change number 142. “And you’re not even pretending to be a virgin picking out what to wear on your Victorian-era wedding night. Take it down a notch.”
Jess took in her reflection, styled and polished and hilariously unfamiliar in a padded push-up bra and V-neck sweater with a neckline so plunging it nearly reached hell. “Fizzy, I cannot wear this.”
“Why not?”
“For starters?” she said, motioning to the mirror. “I can almost see my belly button.”
Fizzy blinked. “And?”
Jess yanked the sweater over her head, tossed it onto the bed, and reached for a distressed chambray shirt she’d picked up at a boutique in LA last summer. It didn’t fit quite the same with the benefit of Fizzy’s padded bra, but even Jess had to admit she (they) looked pretty good.
She added a layered necklace, tucked the shirt into the front of dark jeans, and turned to face Fizzy. “Well?”
Fizzy looked her up and down, a smile parting her cherry-red lips. “You look hot. How’re you feeling?”
“Like I might throw up.”
She laughed. “It’s dinner,” Fizzy said. “Next door. You’ll have some tom ka, some duck green curry, and if at any point you think you’ve made a mistake, leave him with the check and come home. Listen to your gut. We’ll be right here.”
NO EXAGGERATION: THEYwere right there. The restaurant Jess had chosen was on the other side of their fence, which meant she was already seated at a table outside when River showed up. He was five minutes early, but going by his expression of surprise, Jess could only assume she’d derailed his plan to get there first, get comfortable, and be seated with ease by the time she arrived.
He stopped when he saw her, midstep, uncharacteristically caught off guard. “Oh.” He looked around the sidewalk. “I— Sorry, I thought you said seven thirty.”
Jess indulged in a quick scan. Even though it was Saturday, she assumed he’d just come from work—he was wearing dark navy trousers, a white button-down shirt with the collar open—but his clothes looked crisp, and his hair was freshly washed and finger-raked.
“I did. I live right there.” She pointed to her left and his eyes tracked to the apartment building.
“Oh.” Pulling out the chair, he sat across the small table from her and did his own inspection—his eyes skirting the length of her body and quickly back up. A trail of heat followed the path. He cleared his throat. “That’s handy.”
Rama, a muscular twentysomething waiter who was Jess’s hero because he frequently booted people from Mr. Brooks’s stoop, stopped at their table. He grinned down at her, and then meaningfully slid his gaze to River. “Hey, Jess, who’s your friend?”
Way to make it abundantly clear that she’d never brought a date here before. “Knock it off, Rama. His name’s River.”
The two men shook hands, and River sized up Rama while he was pouring water into their glasses. “Need a minute?”
“Sure, that’d be great.”
When Rama left them to peruse, Jess lifted her chin. “Did you come from work?”
He brought his water to his lips, and Jess definitely did not watch them part and make contact with the glass. She also did not watch his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “I stopped at home to change.” He answered her smirk with one of his own. “I don’t have a partner, kids, or pets. Work is pretty much all I have.”
“Is that by design?”
His brows pulled in, and Jess could tell he was giving the question real consideration. “Maybe? I mean, once we got some early results in the attraction study, my curiosity sort of … took over. It’s been hard to think about anything else.”
“Which is funny,” she pointed out, “since you’re thinking about dating and relationships all day long, but not ever for yourself.”
“I see it from a bit of a distance,” he said. “I was so far down in the weeds, looking at specific alleles and genetic variants, that until maybe the last year or two, the larger picture was easy to ignore.”
Jess wasn’t sure if there was a better way to phrase her next question, so she just came out with it: “Is there a part of you that feels sort of inconvenienced by this result?”
River laughed and lifted his glass again. Just then, Rama returned. “You guys ready?”
“Saved by Rama,” she said.
River’s eyes held hers. “Saved.” He lifted his hand, palm up, gesturing for her to order.
Jess sighed and turned her face up. “You know what I’m getting.”
“Yup.” Rama turned to River. “And you?”
“Wait, what is she getting?”
“Tom ka soup,” Rama recited. “And the duck green curry.”
River frowned. “Oh.” He opened his menu again. “What … um, else would you recommend?”
Jess gaped at him. “Do not tell me you were going to get the same thing.”
River nodded down at his menu. “Drunken noodles?”
“They’re great,” she confirmed. “Let’s do soup for two and the two entrées.” She looked at River. “Want a beer or anything?”
He seemed genuinely tickled by the way she took charge. “Water’s good.”
They handed their menus to Rama, and Jess stared at her date across the table. “But really: you were not going to get the duck.”
“I was.”
She didn’t know where the urge to laugh-scream came from, but she swallowed it down with a cold gulp of ice water.
“Did you work today?” he asked stiffly, clearly hoping she’d forgotten what she’d asked before they were interrupted. Frankly, if he didn’t want to answer, Jess probably didn’t want to hear the truth anyway.
“Nana’s always been a stickler that if I don’t have to work, Saturday is a family day.”
“You live with your grandmother?” he asked.
“Yes and no. Nana Jo and Pops own the apartment complex. They live in the bungalow, and I live in the apartment across the courtyard.”
“With your daughter?” he confirmed, and she nodded. “What’s her name?”
After a second’s pause, Jess shook her head. Unease twisted through her.
“I know she’s off-limits as far as the experiment,” he said. “That was just me asking about family. Sharing.” He paused, smiling playfully. “For example, I have two meddling sisters.”
“Oh, you’re lucky then. Meddling women keep the world running.”
“They’d love that.” He laughed, warm and clear. “Both older: Natalia and Pilar. Both overbearing.”
“The youngest. Huh.” Jess sipped her water. “I would have lost that bet.”
Amusement lifted the corner of his mouth. “Why’s that?”
Rama materialized again with a large steaming bowl of soup. He placed it between them and they shared a few moments of easy silence as they dished up their portions, passing the chili sauce and condiments across the table.
Jess bent to smell the contents of her bowl—the tangy, pungent broth was one of her favorite comfort foods—and registered that River had just mirrored her movement precisely.
He noticed at almost the same time and straightened in his chair. “Why are you surprised I’m the youngest?” he asked, moving on.
“Youngest children are usually less ‘intense,’” she said with a smile, using his own description against him. “You uptight perfectionists tend to be oldest children.”
“I see.” His laugh rolled through her, and he bent, taking a bite of soup. The deeply sexual groan he let escape when he tasted was destined to haunt Jess’s best and worst dreams.
“What about you?” he asked. “Any siblings?”
She shook her head. “Only child.”
He took another bite. “I guess we’d have both lost a bet, then. I would have said oldest, with at least one sibling.”
“Why?”
“You seem responsible, smart, conscientious. Bossy. I imagine you emulating your parents and—”
Jess snort-laughed and reached up to cover her mouth with her napkin. The very idea of emulating Jamie was absurd. “Sorry, that was just—” She smoothed her napkin over her lap again. “No, I’m an only child.”
He nodded in understanding and, to his credit, changed the subject.
“So, we’ve talked about how I got here,” he said. “But how’d you end up a statistician? I’ll admit it suits you.”
She lifted a brow.
“You seem very competent,” he added. “It’s reassuring. Attractive.”
Jess watched him pointedly avoid her eyes. He had no way of knowing, but calling her “competent” was easily the best compliment he could have paid her.
He set the glass down again. “But to my question …”
Jess hummed, thinking. “I find it soothing that numbers don’t lie.”
“But they can be misleading.”
“Only if you don’t know what to look for.” She took a sip of soup. “I’ve always been a numbers geek. When I was a kid, I’d count my steps everywhere I went. I would count how many floors were in a building, how many windows per floor. I’d try to estimate how tall a building was, and then look it up when I got home. And when I took my first stats class, I was done for. I love working with numbers that are meaningful more broadly. Predicting earthquakes or natural disasters, political campaigns, customer service survey results or—”
“Genetics,” he said quietly.
Ahh. The elephant in the room. She felt the tops of her cheeks warm and looked down, surprised again that her boobs were so much closer to her face in this bra than they usually were. Freaking Fizzy. Jess cleared her throat. “Exactly. As long as you have enough data, you can figure out anything.”
“I get it,” he said in that same quiet voice. “There’s something satisfying about solving little puzzles every day.” They ate in silence for a moment, and Jess wondered if she was imagining the way his gaze seemed to linger on her neck, and lower, down her arms …
“Are those …” he asked, narrowing his eyes and motioning to her right forearm, where she’d pushed her sleeve up a bit, “Fleetwood Mac lyrics?”
“Oh.” Her left hand moved to cover the ink. “Yes.” She turned her arm over, but he leaned in, wrapping his thumb and forefinger around her wrist, turning it so he could see the soft skin of her inner arm.
“‘Thunner only happens,’” he read, eyes moving away from the misspelled word and up to her face. “‘Thunner’?”
Jess rolled her eyes. “Felicity.” Hopefully he’d gathered that simply saying her name should explain everything.
He must’ve, because he laughed and lightly swept his thumb across the letters. Nothing like the clinical way he’d touched her last night, this was leisurely, exploring. And she was melting. “And another piece of the puzzle falls into place.”
“She—Fizzy—has the other half of the line. ‘When it’s raining’ except there’s no h in when.” With him looking at her and touching her like that, it took great concentration to form thoughts and make those thoughts into words. “On my twenty-fifth birthday, she took me out to celebrate. It was a really perfect night and I emailed her when I got home to say thank you. I was absolutely hammered, and Pops thought it was so funny he wouldn’t let me use the backspace key to correct my typos.” She shrugged. “Apparently I emailed her the full lyrics to the song we’d sung at karaoke to prove how sober I was.”
His eyes shone when he glanced up at her face. With a look that might be regret, he released her arm. “That’s a good story.”
Jess laughed down at the last couple bites of her soup. “Pops is basically a monster.”
“A monster with a sense of humor.”
“I’m surrounded by jokers,” she admitted.
“You’re lucky.”
There was something in his tone that caught her, hooked her eyes back up to his. It wasn’t that he sounded lonely, exactly, but there was a vulnerability there that threw her a little off balance. “I feel lucky.” She scratched around inside her head for something to say. “Tell me about everyone at GeneticAlly. Have you known all of them very long?”
“Most of them since we started. David, of course. And Brandon was Dave’s friend from college.” He stirred his soup and moved out of the way when Rama returned with their main courses. “It’s a really tight-knit team.”
“Have any of them been matched?” Jess asked, digging into the platters.
“Brandon, yeah,” he said. “He met his wife in the …” River looked up, thinking, and Jess marveled over his dark-lashed whiskey eyes all over again. “I guess it would be the third phase of beta testing. Maybe four years ago now. They were a Gold Match.”
“Wow.”
He nodded, dishing some food onto his own plate. “I know. He was the first, and it was a really big deal.” Nothing like this, though hung unsaid between them. “Then Tiffany—you met her at the Results Reveal Disaster,” he said with a wink, and Jess burst out laughing. “She’s our head data analyst—she met her wife, Yuna, when they matched. I believe they were an eighty-four, and Yuna moved here from Singapore to be with Tiff.”
“How many countries have you pulled samples from?”
He didn’t even have to think. “Fifty-seven.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” Wiping his mouth with his napkin, River was a portrait of manners and class across the table from her. Did it make her a terrible person that she was surprised this date wasn’t awful? The conversation flowed, the silences were easy. She hadn’t spilled anything down her shirt, and he’d called her competent. It was the best date she’d had in seven years. “And everyone else has dated pretty broadly, if they’re single and interested.”
“Do you think it’s a bummer for any of them who haven’t had a Gold or higher match? Like, do you worry within the company it will become a competitive or—I guess, like, a status thing?”
He stared at her, and then blinked. “You ask really probing questions.”
Immediately, Jess was mortified. “I’m sorry. I’m just—” Ugh. “Sorry.”
“No, no, it’s okay, it’s very … thoughtful.”
Warmth spread in a prickly rush along her skin. “I want to know about it,” she admitted. “I want to know about you, and this, and what you think about all of it. I mean, we’re here right now. I said I would enter into this agreement genuinely.”
“I know,” he said, and seemed to be quietly appraising her with new eyes. “I appreciate it.”
“Will you?” she asked, feeling her heart hit her from the inside like a gloved fist.
“I don’t really know any other way to be.” He reached for his water and took a sip. “You asked me before whether this result was an inconvenience. It isn’t. It isn’t an inconvenience, but I admit I’m not sure what to think about it. If I take it seriously, it rearranges my entire life. If I don’t take it seriously, I’m discarding everything I’ve worked for.”
“Which, incidentally, also rearranges your life,” Jess said, laughing.
He laughed, too. “Exactly.”
“Well, in that case,” she said, “I can be on board for Project Be Genuine but Cautious.”
He wiped his hand on his napkin and reached across the table for a handshake. With her heartbeat in her ears, she took his hand, and hers felt weirdly small in his grasp.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“I guess we get together when we’re free,” he said, and her brain took off spinning about how that would work, where this could even go.
And where she wanted it to go.
“Okay.”
“Otherwise, we wait for marching orders from Brandon about any public appearances.”
“Brandon Butkis,” Jess whispered, partly to break the tension of imagining forging a personal relationship with River after tonight and partly because—how could she not say it? “Come on, you have to admit it’s a great name.”
Rama dropped the bill off at their table and River thanked him before sliding the small leather folder into his lap. Never missing a beat, River delivered the next bit of information with an admirably straight face: “His wife’s last name is Seaman.”
Jess gasped. “No.”
Finally, a smile broke across his face. “Yes.”
“Did they hyphenate?” She leaned in. “Please tell me they hyphenated.”
River laughed. “They did not.”
Small footsteps stomped along the sidewalk, and the weight and rhythm registered in Jess’s brain only a split second before a pair of small arms were thrown around her neck. “Did you save me some duck?”
Jess peeked over her daughter’s head to deliver an apologetic-mortified glance at River. Holding her kid at arm’s length, Jess gave the most convincing Mom Face she could manage. “What are you still doing up, honey? You’re not supposed to be out here.”
“I could hear your laugh in the courtyard.”
“But what were you doing in the courtyard?”
“Beating Pops at checkers.”
“Pops?” Jess called out.
“She’s too fast,” Pops replied from behind the fence.
Juno giggled.
“I’ve got her,” Jess said back. She relented and kissed Juno’s forehead before turning her around to face River. Apparently this was happening. “Sorry for the interruption.”
He shook his head and smiled warmly at Juno. “Not at all.”
“Juno, this is Dr. Peña.”
Juno reached out, and he wrapped her tiny hand in his large one. “River,” he said, shaking gently. “You can call me River.”
Settling on her mom’s lap, Juno tilted her head, considering him. “You have a unique name, too.”
River nodded. “I do.”
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
“My middle name is M-E-R-R-I-A-M. I’m named after mountains. What’s yours?”
“Nicolas, after my grandpa.”
She pursed her lips, less impressed. “Hmm. That’s kind of normal, I guess. Did anyone ever tease you for being named River Nicolas?”
“A few times,” he admitted. “But I’d rather be teased for having a name nobody else has than one that a ton of people have. I’m willing to bet no one else is named Juno Merriam Davis. Only you.”
Jess leaned back, taking this all in, confused by the warm wiggly feeling in her stomach.
Juno shifted on her lap, and Jess heard the tiny bell of the cat on the other side of the fence separating the restaurant patio from the apartment’s side yard. “My mom is Jessica Marie Davis,” Juno said with exaggerated sympathy. “We looked it up once, and there were four hundred of them.” She paused, and with surprisingly good comedic timing added, “In California.”
“Yeah.” He caught Jess’s eye and then smiled back at Juno. “But I bet there’s really only one person like your mom anywhere in the world.”
W h a t.
“That’s true,” Juno agreed with unbridled innocence.
He immediately looked away, clearing his throat, and Jess’s heart scrabbled up a vine, swinging wildly behind her ribs.
River pulled out his wallet, smoothly sliding four twenties into the bill folder. “I should probably head out.”
Jess smiled. “Thanks for dinner.”
“Anytime.” He smiled at Juno again, and then quickly at Jess. “I mean it.”
They stood, and Jess let her pajama-clad kid climb onto her back to be carried to bed.
At the alley, River stopped and looked over Jess’s shoulder at the apartment complex behind them. The tender tips of vines could be seen bobbing along the top of the fence. “Thanks for letting me park back here.”
“We have a guest spot. Street parking is a total drag.”
“People sit on cars out front,” Juno added. “Mr. Brooks gets so mad.”
River frowned, taking this information adorably seriously. “Does he?”
“Our neighbor,” Jess explained. “It’s a cast of characters here.”
River glanced at his watch as he reached for his car door and unlocked it. “I’m seeing that.”
Jess searched for it, she really did, but there was nothing in his tone to make her think he was complaining at all.
“Good night, Jessica Marie and Juno Merriam.”
Juno squeezed Jess’s neck. “Good night, River Nicolas.”
