4. Four
Four
A t three a.m. Leslie said good night though she didn’t want to. Ryker promised to see her at five tomorrow evening, but it seemed too far away. She drove home in the trusty old van, left her exhibits in the back, and waltzed up the walk to her little bungalow. Inside, she dug her phone from her purse. Much too late to call Hannah. Instead she dialed Mom—her other best friend, the one who was definitely awake, who tended to sleep only on Tuesday nights.
“Les? Haven’t you been awake for nine days?”
“Yeah, but it’s fine. Listen, the most unbelievable thing happened at the fair.”
“Ooh, I’m all ears.”
“Remember when Hannah took that anthropology elective and needed more participants for her enormous semester-long group project?”
“Sure, the matchmaker test. Wasn’t it some kind of dare?”
Leslie couldn’t help laughing, picturing Ryker’s face if he could hear her mom’s response. “Not to everyone, as it turns out.”
She launched into an account of the last ten hours. She didn’t need to be in person with Mom to experience her full reaction, reserved though she always was. Hums and encouraging commentary fueled Leslie’s story the whole way through. A surprised breath close to a hiss came over the line when Leslie mentioned Ryker’s father.
“The man’s a decent politician,” Mom said after a moment. “I don’t agree with him on every issue, but he’s respectful and honest. And I remember Senna Maddox now too; I’ve seen her interviewed after winning a big case. That woman is whip-smart and struck me as really compassionate too, in the work she does with crime victims. If they’re the same in private as they are in public, I’d be fine with them as your in-laws.”
“Mom!” Leslie fell back onto her bed and covered her eyes with her free hand. “I’ve been on one date.”
“Maybe there’s something behind that test though, Les. I’m trying to remember—did you ever meet him in person back then? For some reason I don’t think you did.”
“Nope. I took the test to appease Hannah, and then I went on with my life.”
“Well, that’s all water under the bridge anyway. He’s in town and wants to take you out. The only question is, do you want to disrupt your singleness long enough to give him a chance?”
One of the great things about Mom was how she never second-guessed Leslie’s relationship status. If she wanted to date, Mom would be in favor—but no more in favor than if she maintained happy singleness for the next couple centuries.
“You know,” Leslie said, “there’s something about him that makes me curious.”
“Well then, disrupt away.”
She let out a low laugh. “I love you, Mom.”
“Love you too. Now why don’t you go to bed?”
“I think I will.”
They hung up, and Leslie let her phone fall beside her while she stared up at the ceiling. She was pretty tired now. Ought to change out of her dusty fair clothes, put on some pajamas, crawl under the covers. But first…
She got up, knelt beside the bed, and reached under it to pull out her memory box. It was a glossy cardboard hatbox, pasted all over with cutout pictures of rabbits that ten-year-old Leslie had printed from internet sites. The round lid was held on with a woven blue cord and stiff with disuse as she removed it. Inside the box nestled the most important memorabilia of her second decade of life. These were the things that had survived multiple purges when the need for space required it. She had always pledged not to become a packrat like Dad. To that end she’d restricted herself to three hatboxes total. Everything she cared about but no longer used had to fit beneath her bed.
Ten-year-old Leslie had filled the hatbox before she turned eleven. Then she had parted with and added things over the years. She had pressed a rose, preserved her own fingerprint in plaster as the hand of an artist still growing, rolled her eyes at concert T-shirts and friendship bracelets that had seemed so significant a few summers before. She lifted the tassel from her graduation cap and set it aside. She slid a silver ring with a garnet stone onto her little finger.
Here was the plaster fingerprint. Her right pointer finger no longer fit the mold, of course. What a sentimental little artist she’d been.
Suppose she was remembering wrong and hadn’t kept the matchmaker test results? She’d certainly felt less than sentimental toward them.
A sheaf of papers, folded in half, peaked up from the bottom of the box. Leslie slid it from under a few other items and unfolded it. In the top left corner her alma mater’s logo burst off the page —a purple horizon line, orange and yellow sunbeams of promise. And centered beneath that…
Your True Match! Congratulations!
Her heart gave a solid extra thump. She drew a deep, deep breath the way humans sometimes did. It seemed to fill her body with more than oxygen. She continued reading, unable to devour the words fast enough.
Leslie Meredith Snow your match is Laurence Ryker Gould Maddox
Well, look at that. No wonder the name Ryker hadn’t pinged her memory. She gnawed her bottom lip. To be fair, if he’d called himself Laurence, she might not have recognized that name either. Of course, as a vampire he hadn’t changed much from his undergrad picture, only grown into his good looks.
Now here it was. The test itself. The answers—hers and his.
The first several pages were marked with a header: LMS. She flipped past them without glancing. Who cared what she’d said about herself ten years ago? But here—the next page’s header was different. LRGM. Here he was. And his answers… They were fascinating. Some of the questions were set up on a numeric scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. Every scaled question also included blank space for comments, and Ryker had commented. Every time. Some were actual fill-in-the-blank, and Leslie wondered who on earth had “graded” that section; but maybe the test was graded based on the scaled questions, and the miniature essays were just another way to get to know your match.
Would you rather give up social media or eat one meal for the rest of your life? What vampire gives up culinary variety in favor of social media? Oh yeah, guess if you’re one of the vampires who thinks he’s too good to eat food. Insert eye roll here.
Rank these ideals 1-5 in order of their value within your personal belief system. Truth Justice Ambition Beauty Affability I know how this looks, ranking ambition so high. Just being honest (see ranking #1).
Name the one book you would re-read for the rest of your life, if you could read only one. The Lord of the Rings . In this scenario it’s one book. Because I said so. I don’t read a lot of fiction but I’d still pick this book over everything else I’ve ever read.
Would you be willing to relocate for the job of your dreams? Of course.
Would you be willing to seek a new job for a home in your dream location? Of course not.
Could you be in a lasting romantic relationship with someone whose politics you disagreed with? This question is too vague, because some political issues are secondary and some are primary. I don’t want a partner who agrees with me 100% of the time, but some political disagreements would be too big to ignore in a relationship.
The test did then ask a few political questions. Leslie bit her lip again as she read his answers to those, but…wow. They agreed about the most important issues.
Maybe there was more to this test than fodder for a dare. She kept reading. A few true-or-false added even more variety, and here he’d had no opportunity for commentary.
Sometimes revenge is justified. True. Sometimes a white lie is justified. False.
At a social event, I… …would rather tolerate bad food than bad music. False. …am half-hoping no one starts to dance. False. …am the one giving the toast. True.
Life is chaos. False. Life is a gift not to be taken for granted. True. I’m more than the sum of my accomplishments.
Odd. He’d left that one blank. It was the only blank on the entire test.
The final question, a return to the mini-essay, made her blink. Ryker had written a lot .
Describe your ideal date. Oh man, this one’s tough. I don’t think I have an ideal for myself. I like being active, up for just about any physical challenge. I like using my head too—escape rooms, dinner theater, stuff like that. I’d enjoy dinner and wine and talking, or dinner and a movie, or whatever. Really whatever. As long as she was enjoying it too. I can handle black tie and I can handle trail gear and I’m really happy with either or with anything in between. I hope she doesn’t read this and roll her eyes. I’m not trying to play chameleon here. I just enjoy a lot of different experiences, and besides the most important thing on the first date isn’t what I’d have fun doing but rather showing up to be worth the second date.
Where had Laurence Ryker Gould Maddox come from? Some alternate universe?
Leslie stood up, paced around her room, then flopped onto the bed again, pages still clutched in one hand. This could be real. This could be worth it. Her bones knew. Her senses thrummed with the knowledge. Everything sharpened around her—colors and angles, scents and sounds. She closed her eyes against the brightness of the ceiling light. She stilled her breathing and listened to her own heartbeat. Slow and steady, a normal thirty beats per minute. Outside her window, a stray cat darted over the grass and up a tree, its claws gripping and scratching bark. Beyond the cat, insects rasped and chirped. A pickup truck coasted down the street, some small unsecured item rolling around in the bed. Leslie smelled the feline odor, the truck’s exhaust. She focused her senses and found other aromas seeping around the seal of her bedroom window. Flower beds, mostly.
She forced herself up off the bed and changed into a pink sleep shirt covered with a shooting-stars print. She turned out the light and crossed the room in what humans called “the dark,” a pleasant monochrome that Leslie couldn’t understand as darkness. To her, darkness existed only when she closed her eyes. In her bedroom, blackout shades drawn, everything was visible. Only color was missing. She hadn’t been born with night vision; her memory could vaguely bring back the day she’d first experienced it, a few weeks before she turned twelve. But her brain had so fully adapted to her vampire senses, she was mostly incapable of remembering what the world had been like without them.
She crawled beneath her duvet and let her body sink into the comfort of her bed. Nearly ten days was a long time to stay awake, and now that she’d lain here a few minutes, muscles relaxing, pulse slowing…she was tired.
She’d done a lot today. Sold a lot of art. Chatted with a lot of humans (and one wolf). Met her backup husband.
Her heart gave an extra beat, and she pressed her palm there. Tomorrow she would sell more art, chat with more people. Tomorrow she would see Ryker again. She’d be rested this time. Ready for their second date. For possibilities that had been nowhere on her horizon this morning.