“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not blushing. I’m flushed. From the— from the aggressive sunshine.”
Tessa smiled the smile of a woman filing this conversation away for future blackmail. “Connection Sessions start in thirty. Julian Pierce is first. Try not to fall asleep while he lists his accomplishments.”
Julian Pierce was exactly as advertised.
He sat across from me in the sunlit conservatory they’d converted into a speed-dating arena, all sharp cheekbones and practiced polish, and told me about his career in finance, his reading habits (“mostly non-fiction, I find fiction somewhat inefficient” — about books, but honestly it applied to his entirepersonality), his hobbies (golf, wine tasting, golf again), and his ideal relationship delivered with the cadence of someone reciting a LinkedIn bio out loud. He was handsome as a luxury condo is architecturally impressive: clean lines, great lighting, zero soul. Talking to Julian was like texting with ChatGPT — responsive, eerily smooth, and utterly missing whatever makes a person worth talking to at two in the morning. He asked about my dreams. He nodded at appropriate intervals. I found myself wondering what it would be like to kiss him and registered nothing — no spark, no curiosity, no heat — which at least saved me some time.
“I believe,” Julian leaned forward with calculated intimacy as our five minutes wound down, “that the key to any successful relationship is attention to detail. I pride myself on being an excellent listener.”
“What’s my favorite color?”
He blinked — the first genuine expression I’d seen on his face, a flicker of confusion disrupting the careful composition of his features. “I’m sorry?”
“My favorite color. I mentioned it yesterday during the introductions.”
The silence stretched between us — a rubber band about to snap. His eyes went slightly blank — a browser loading a page that no longer existed. “Blue.” A beat too late. “You seem like someone who appreciates blue.”
It was purple. The purple of twilight just before the stars come out, which I’d described in embarrassing detail while Mason spilled wine on the tablecloth and Derek watched me with that unsettling intensity of his. Julian had been three seats away, nodding along like he was absorbing every word.
“Close enough.” I meant the opposite. Julian nodded like he’d passed the test — confident he’d never considered thepossibility of not having all the answers. Behind him, through the conservatory windows, the garden was visible where I’d seen Rhys stare at the sky last night. I wondered if he’d have gotten the color right. I already knew the answer.
Mason was a disaster.
He arrived six minutes late, apologizing before he’d even fully entered the room, his shirt untucked on one side and his hair staging a rebellion that suggested he’d either just woken up or survived a minor explosion. He tripped over the threshold, caught himself on a decorative column, knocked over a vase of roses someone had placed there for aesthetic purposes, and spent the first ninety seconds of our five minutes reassembling the floral arrangement while simultaneously introducing himself.
“I am so sorry” — approximately the twelfth time — cramming roses back into the vase with the frantic energy of someone defusing a bomb. “I swear I’m not usually this— I mean, I am usually this, but I’m better at hiding it? And the alarm didn’t go off, or it did but I apparently sleep through alarms now, which is a development I’m going to need to discuss with my therapist—”
“Mason.”
“—and I couldn’t find my other shoe, which — shoes don’t just walk off on their own, that’s the whole point of shoes—”
“Mason.”
He looked up from the roses, equal parts mortified and hopeful. “Yeah?”
“Breathe.”
He breathed. Shaky, a little panicked, but it was breathing, a start. “Right. Breathing. I can do breathing. It’s basically my main skill.”
I laughed — a genuine, startled sound that had nothing to do with performance. Mason was so catastrophically human it was impossible not to find him endearing. He was just trying to survive the next three and a half minutes without additional property damage.
“Tell me a real thing.” I leaned back in my chair. “Not your job or your hobbies or your relationship goals. A real thing.”
Mason’s face went through several expressions before settling into a genuine grin. “My mom calls me every Sunday at exactly 4 p.m. and asks the same three questions: have I eaten enough vegetables, have I called my grandmother, and have I met anyone nice. Every week I tell her yes, yes, and not yet. And every week she says ’Well, there’s always next Sunday.’” He paused. “I really wanted to call her this Sunday with a different answer.”
My heart performed an inconvenient maneuver. “Mason—”
“Not like that,” he added quickly, cheeks flushing. “I mean, you’re great, obviously, but I’m pretty sure you’re not— I’m not— we’re not—” He gestured vaguely between us. “I just meant a nice person. In general. As a concept.”
I reached across and squeezed his hand. “You just did.”
His smile was like sunrise breaking through clouds. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Call your mom.”
Derek Hoffman made my skin crawl.
