Page 8 of The Dating Charade

“Fine, man.” Sunny propped his feet on the dash. “But good luck trying to meet someone in our neck of the woods. You’re not exactly in Atlanta anymore.”

“I haven’t got a lot of time on my hands anyway right now.”

Sunny laughed and raised one brow. “You do realize we share an apartment. And a job. I know exactly how much time you have on your hands. Enough time to wear out that pull-up bar for no good reason.” He rubbed his belly, now rolling like jelly beneath his shirt. “Me, on the other hand, I don’t waste my time. Slim pickings in this town work in my favor. Which is why, if you just tried out the app—”

“No,” Jett replied, his firm tone stating this conversation was over.

Sunny turned his gaze out the window, mumbling several more points to the glass during the rest of the ride.

Jett ignored him. But as much as he pretended not to care, there were moments it bothered him. Unlike many of his buddies, he wasn’t coming up on a decade-long anniversary and struggling to find something decent for his wife. He didn’t get to complain about having to stop by the grocery store on the way home because the wife was in the middle of making chili and had forgotten the diced tomatoes. He never had the opportunity to warrant a wife’s wrath by suggesting she just “do without.”

Now, to be fair, that also meant he didn’t clean up dried macaroni glued to the carpet of the minivan on Saturdays or dress up in matching family outfits for spring photos. When the married guys crawled into work because they’d stayed up all night holding kids who’d thrown up from 2:00 to 6:00 a.m., his act of benevolence was offering a cup of coffee.

No, he had neither interest nor the need to fill his life with those things—those small human beings. Never had. But as for the other, the chance to find the woman whom, as Dr. Donna so aptly put, he could “warm his toes with”—well, that was another matter. And sometimes, more and more of late, he’d felt the nudge to do something about it.

Dr. Donna was better at this than he realized.

Jett thought about it as he wiped down the kitchen after dinner and made his way toward his small, private room. He twisted the combination dial on the locker closest to the wall.

Missy Jenkins. Her name drifted like a song note across the forefront of his mind as the locker popped open. Had it really been that long, that long, since he’d been out to dinner with a woman?

Sure, there was Sarah, his neighbor across the hall. She fed him a casual meal every now and again. But that usually began with them running into each other in the shared hall and her mentioning the idea with as much expectancy and desire as she would have in asking Sunny or any one of their neighbors. They usually sat on her sofa with plates of spaghetti and chatted in between plays of the UT game. He always left with no hint beyond having strengthened their neighborly bond. And frankly, that was just fine with him.

But Missy, the woman who’d moved off to Seattle and taken his heart with her . . . Could it really be coming up on two years?

He caught his face in the small mirror hanging in the back of the locker and immediately frowned. Touching his temple, he tried to decipher if the hair poking out was white or simply his imagination.

He swung the locker closed. He needed to get it together.

In the stillness of his room he lay on his back, picked up his phone. It glowed in the otherwise dark space. Even as he typed the words in the app store and hit the download button, he felt the heat on his neck, the shame in even considering the terribly desperate option. He twisted his neck to double-check the lock on his room door. The mere act of looking into one of these sites depleted the level of his manhood.

This was just testing the waters, he reminded himself as he swiftly created a username and logged in, scrolling down the page as dozens of faces popped up. He would just take a look around, see if this was a real possibility for expanding his connections . . .

The alarm sounded, but this time it was both outside and in. Because there, illuminated in the red light flashing above his bed, was the profile picture of Cassie Everson. Fifteen years had changed the cut of her hair, had altered her muscular frame of high school years to something softer, more feminine. But that unmistakable smile was still all hers, thin lips tilted up as if she was on the cusp of laughter. Hazel eyes twinkled with that same down-to-earth confidence he’d seen on the court all those years before but had never managed to turn his way. She’d been a senior, after all, while he’d been but a lowly freshman.

And yet here they were, single, fifteen years later. His boyhood dreams come true.

“Well, I’ll be,” he murmured as he jumped out of bed, siren wailing.

Cassie Everson.

The one and only.

3

Cassie

“Jeeves, I’m home.”

Cassie’s keys clanked inside the tidy, porcelain bowl beside the front door as she proceeded to slip off her coat. Jeeves took his time greeting her—the selfish thing—determined to watch a cardinal bouncing lightly across her front yard instead. Only at the sound of his food clattering into the ornate and entirely-too-expensive-to-be-a-cat-bowl dish did he drop off the window ledge. He gave an appreciative rub against the side of her leg and dug in.

Her phone dinged as she picked up his water bowl.

The notifications from her dating app always gave a lighthearted ping whenever she received a message from an interested hunter. When she’d started the dating app a year ago, she’d optimistically called them suitors. As time went on and she got more and more acquainted with their characters, they’d dropped down to men and then humans, shortly after scum bags, and finally rested comfortably at hunters. Still, that ding was addicting and so chipper nobody could resist its siren call. Surely whoever’d invented that ding was a billionaire.

Unconsciously she fell into the familiar habit of checking the app, no less certain of her plans to terminate the profile tonight, while setting the fountain bowl in the sink and turning on the water. As it began to fill, she read the message.

Dear Cassie.