3. Finn
CHAPTER THREE
finn
My weeks from hell were kicked off with Bennet’s questionnaire.
It was a comprehensive quiz that was designed to determine my personality type and the matching types I would find romantically appealing.
With three huge parts of in-depth questions, it had probably cost the poor guy an entire weekend to design.
And that was where the relatively good things ended.
Jason became very busy compiling a list of contacts who were single and somewhat matched the types Bennet had determined I’d have chemistry with.
And when Jason contacted someone who was taken or simply not interested in having a date—ouch!
—he asked them to recommend two friends.
It was all very quickly turning into a pyramid scheme, but Jason had a wide circle of friends, and Taylor was relentless about motivating everyone to do their best.
Behind the curtains, Harrison decided that I needed a Hallmark marathon, and we sat through several holiday romances.
When I asked what a Tarkovsky fan like himself was doing watching Hallmark’s holiday flicks, he seemed completely confused by the question.
“Film’s my medium,” he said. “And it comes in all sorts of flavors.”
By the fifth day of this silly exercise, I longed for the more practical medieval torture methods. I would have given anything for an iron maiden. In fact, even the ancient Chinese torture technique involving a slow drip of water on top of my head sounded more exciting at this point.
By the second week, I was sure it was fizzling out.
Coursework was beginning to pile up, and the futile efforts to set me up with someone, anyone, were killing the morale around the BEL house.
Harrison had an important essay to deliver, so he no longer had the time for Hallmark flicks.
Bennet took on several new students in need of tutoring.
Jason had exhausted his wider circles of friends, acquaintances, and everyone’s third cousins.
Which left Taylor utterly free of any kind of responsibilities other than getting me the perfect date.
He and I sat down in our usual booth while the rest of the gang worked through their commitments on Tuesday evening. Taylor had a tall beer in front of him, and I had a glass of dry red.
“If you had one shot at it, what would your ideal date look like?” Taylor asked.
I snorted at the question. “Can’t we talk about anything else?”
“Not until you’re settled down,” Taylor said.
I held his gaze for a while. The trouble was, I didn’t know. Somewhere in the depths of my mind, there was an image of a happy time, but it was so full of sunshine that I could hardly see a thing. Laughter in that moment was so thunderous that I heard nothing else.
It was warm there. It was a summer scene, somewhere in the grass, in the shade of an old tree.
“What was your first date with Harrison like?” I asked.
Taylor’s eyebrows curved expressively, and he exhaled.
“Difficult to say. Our first was just a cup of coffee and a lengthy discussion about doing each other a favor. But that was a fake one. So was the trip to the market where he bought me a stork figurine. I usually think of that as the first, even if I needed many more weeks to realize just how badly I wanted to kiss him.”
Yeah, Taylor wasn’t exactly the prototype of your typical romance. Or maybe he was, according to Harrison and Bennet’s trope list.
“I don’t have a problem scoring dates,” I told him. “It’s the second and third dates that are the issue.”
“That’s just a question of who you’re going out with,” Taylor said. “Did you delete them all?” His gaze went to my phone.
“Yep,” I said. The first task had been deleting dating apps. It felt strange to go through a day without looking at who was around and interested for the entire first day, especially given the group effort to score me dates.
“Good,” Taylor said. “Because you’re not looking to get laid. You’re looking to fall in love. We need to design the romance.”
I wasn’t sure he understood just how contradictory those sentences were.
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have ever needed the apps for anything. It would have happened in a bar or a café. I would have looked up and seen the person so brilliant and perfect that all others would seem blurry in comparison.
But nothing was ideal about the world, and everyone stayed in their dorm rooms, browsing the selection on the dating apps, ordering a one-night stand like it was a meal delivery, then turning over to sleep with little more than a goodbye hug.
I sighed. “Tell me about the tropes again.”
Taylor rubbed his hands together eagerly and grinned.
“They’re the best, man. It’s like a secret sauce you add to a perfect meal.
The meal’s good, no question about it, but the secret sauce makes you think about the meal for days after you’ve finished it.
” He leaned back in his chair and looked up dreamily.
“Friends to lovers, for example. How cool is that? You’re around someone your whole life, they know you inside and out, and you wake up one morning with a sudden and terrifying realization that you’re in love with them. ”
“Can’t be that easy,” I said. “You just…realize it?”
Taylor laughed. “No, I guess not. There would usually be an accident when booking a hotel room.”
I sucked my teeth. “Well, I don’t like any of my friends.”
“Even as friends?” Taylor asked, pretending to be heartbroken.
I shrugged. “You’re all on thin ice here.”
We left a short while later, a breeze sweeping past us in the dark street with a full promise of colder days ahead.
Other students were everywhere around, like a swirling maelstrom of lives and possibilities and hopes and dreams and secrets.
They moved seemingly in random directions, like some mathematical experiment, never colliding, always missing each other in the chaos.
Here, a blond girl with dark roots and a baggy sweater that looked like it belonged to a big, hunky athlete.
There, a tall, nicely built guy with a low-taper fade that seemed like he’d just walked out of a barbershop.
Over there, a twink in a crop top and tight abs bare to the cool air, unbothered and proud of his body to the point of flaunting.
And just passing by, a jock with short, dark hair, his head turned away, the collar of his jacket lifted, and the scent trailing him so fresh and exciting that I nearly stumbled and looked back.
Cedar, pine needles, sea salt-heavy breeze that inexplicably took me to a sandy beach I’d never visited in my life, somewhere sunny and peaceful.
I gave in, turning my head over my shoulder to look at the guy whose scent was so distinct from all the other scents around me. But by the time I looked, I couldn’t make him out in the shadows between the streetlights.
When the weekend came around, the BEL house was quiet with most of the guys out partying.
The notorious Kappa Gama Beta was throwing a party of reconciliation, but since I had no fights with them, I didn’t feel like going.
Besides, the one person who’d wronged them the most and stolen their garden gnome was Taylor, and he wasn’t “setting a foot in that hellhole,” he said.
The Meet Cute Committee gathered in the living room of our frat house, with the exception of Greg, who crossed the lines and entered the keg competition at the KGB house.
Bennet had his binder, and Jason had his arm around Bennet.
Taylor had his feverish excitement, and Harrison had his cool and steady determination.
“We voted,” Taylor announced. “As the list of tropes narrowed down, we unanimously agreed we weren’t letting you date any of our brothers or sisters, even if we had any single ones. ”
“Ouch,” I said.
“That was a private vote,” Jason clarified.
“Doesn’t make it better,” I said.
Bennet cleared his throat and leafed through the color-coded pages of his binder.
“Ah, so, we think that the best strategy is to set up a string of blind dates with the likeliest candidates we agreed on. If my math is right, it shouldn’t take more than seven-point-four dates, round it down to seven, before you meet your soulmate. ”
“And it just so happens that a week is seven days long,” Jason said, a proud grin on his face as if he’d just figured this out.
“You’re going in for seven out of seven,” Taylor said, kicking back in an armchair with his hands folded behind his head.
“I’m doing what?” I asked.
Harrison offered a softer look, like he understood this was a lot.
“Seven dates in seven nights. Of course, if Bennet’s math is wrong and your soulmate happens to be the first one, then you can see if you want to do any of the other dates.
We sorted them at random, based on availability, so don’t get discouraged if you get to Thursday and there’s no clear winner. ”
“We won’t tell you which ones scored the highest,” Taylor said. “That would be cheating.”
“The response to the ad was spectacular,” Harrison said.
“Wait, what?” I asked, my eyes bulging out of my head.
“No time for talking. In case you need to shower, you better do that now because you have a date at La Famiglia Tavola in forty-five minutes,” Jason said.
It began without ceremony. The disastrous string of dates that my so-called friends put me through kicked off at a small Italian tavern three blocks away from campus, where the tables were made of real wood and draped with checkered cloths, the chairs creaked when you sat on them, but you got to sigh with relief because they held your weight, and the interior was lit by discreet lamps in the corner and many candles on the tables.
The wine came in decanters, and the food was authentically Italian, according to Harrison, who liked the place a great deal.