The Science Of Love: A Billionaire BWWM Romance (5 page)

He
almost fell out of his chair.

The
numbers for the website were astronomical. It had taken off in a
twenty-four hour period and gone viral. Engineers and computer
specialists were signing up in droves. Women without technical
backgrounds were flocking to it. Somehow the right combination of
factors had struck and they had a winner. David emailed the numbers
to everyone who was slated to be in on the daily meeting and printed
them out just to be safe. He walked into the meeting while shaking
and happily delivered the good news to the board. He ended his
presentation by telling them they needed to act fast to keep the
momentum going or they would lose it for sure. There were plenty of
other dating sites which could learn and adapt from what they were
doing. The board voted unanimously to give him whatever support he
needed.

Jada
resigned from her school teaching position a few months after selling
the house. There was no point staying in Mississippi after her
parents had passed on. She thought about what to do next and decided
to go north. Not back to Ohio, where she had started college, but
over to Pennsylvania where she wanted to try and be accepted into one
of the prestigious scientific institutes which were located there.
She had her eye on Carnegie Mellon, but didn’t know if it was
the right place for her. She would travel to Pittsburgh, find a place
to live and start the application process. There was nothing to be
gained by staying in Mississippi. With the money from the sale of the
house, she was able to pay-off what remained of the education loans.
She had decided against going into debt if she would aim for a
scientific degree.

David
found his company a hot item after years of struggling along.
Suddenly, he was getting calls from prospective investors and media
figures wanting to know how his geek dating site had become all the
rage. In truth, he had no idea what had happened. Somehow the site
had been picked up by one engineer, who showed it to another and then
the whole IT industry knew about it. The key factor seemed to be men
actually finding women to who would go out with them. Most of the
other sites excluded eighty percent of the men using them and the top
twenty had their pick of the women signing up. In a strange way,
their site had found a way around it.

Jada
arrive in Pittsburgh when it was cold, in the depths of the winter.
She found a motel room where she could stay until she had a place to
rent permanently. The city was bustling and located on the banks of
the river. She loved the hills around the city and the buildings
inside it. But she needed income and a way to start the school
application process. Becoming a teacher in Pennsylvania was not easy
and involved taking a battery of expensive tests if you transferred
in from another state. She lacked the time and money to do that. She
spent her days searching on line for jobs she felt she could do. And
at long last Jada focused in on an area she had some experience:
dance.

David
decided if one dating website could do well, maybe another could do
even better. He bought a company which specialized in dating to the
health care community. The focus was not totally dissimilar. He did
not publicly let it be known he was buying the site until after a few
weeks had passed so they could figure out whether or not the same
methods would work for it. Two weeks into the transition, the site
took off again and became highly successful. Lighting had struck
twice in the same place and David realized he had a winning
combination of programming and audience which could make him rich
beyond imagination.

Jada
found a job teaching dance to suburban kids outside Pittsburgh. It
took her a few weeks to locate a small dance studio where the young
kids would show up in the evening, change into their dance clothes
and learn the basic steps. Her gymnastic coach background helped and
soon she was teaching at a small store-front dance school. It was a
change from the loud and obnoxious high school students she had been
dealing with. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a decent place to live
in the city with a safe neighborhood. She was working to begin the
application process on line, but was determined to obtain an advanced
degree in a scientific field.

The
process of taking over most of the online dating market had begun
slowly, but cascaded as David’s company started applying what
they’d learned to other markets in the on line dating field.
Within two years, they had applied everything to the new sites they
had put up on the internet and we soon worth millions of dollars. The
pace of growth was astronomical. David had to move the company
headquarters. They moved all the way across the Midwest until
settling on a building in downtown Pittsburgh. The move was covered
in all the Pittsburgh media outlets and was the cause for much
celebration.After the presentation was over when they moved into the
new building, David decided to take his immediate staff to a small
place near the center of town for dinner. They were quiet, not
wanting to draw too much attention to their selves and drove
individual cars to the location. David had some trouble finding place
to park and put his SUV in the lot in front of a strip mall.

As he
got out of the vehicle he looked across the lot and saw a small dance
academy in session. He stopped to watch the young girls twirl around
in the window, finding it amusing to see them guided by the motions
of the older women. He turned to walk to the restaurant when one of
the instructors caught his eye.

It was
Jada. It had to be. After all these years, he’d found her
again. He walked up to the lobby of the school and went in, drawing
deadly glares from all the mothers who had their daughters in
session. A few of them moved in front of him.

“
Is
there someone I could speak to about the school?” he asked one
lady near him.

“
Why?”
she demanded. “What do you want?”

“
I
had wanted to ask someone about instruction for my daughter,”
he lied. “Is there someone I can talk with?”

The next
moment the door opened and Jada came out with her class, dismissing
the little girls to their mothers. She made sure each one had gone to
a guardian and looked up to see David in the lobby.

“
David?”
she said to him.

“
Jada?”
he said to her.

The
entire room vanished leaving them the only occupants. It was as if a
gate had been opened in the sky and a light had poured out which
enveloped them and only them. They continued to look at each other
until David reached into his pocket and handed her a card.

“
Please
call me,” he said to her. “I need to go. I’ve
missed you.”

Then he
turned and left.

Jada
hadn’t followed the rise of David’s company, Top Floor
Intersections. She had been too busy the past two years trying to
find her place in Pittsburgh. She had managed to locate a decent
apartment on the west side of the town in an area which was on the
rise. This managed to help her in her attempts to get into a graduate
program at Karski College, a small school located in the city. She
had decided on the field of physics, since this had always interested
her. But the college kept putting her on the “waiting list”
which irritated Jada to no end. She would come home every evening
from teaching young girls the basic positions and sit down with a
text book on physics to try and beef up her knowledge of the field.
When she had some free time she’d find a Go game to play on
line.

It was
two days before she pulled out David’s business card and looked
at it. She seemed to recall hearing something about his company in
the news and brought it up on the tablet. The company was doing very
well, according to the financial reports. David had found a way to
unleash a dating site that men with poor social skills, nerds, would
flock to. He’d expanded what he did to other dating systems and
was providing the framework for a whole new way for people to meet
each other.

But, as
she soon discovered, David didn’t have much going on in his own
life. He was unmarried and approaching thirty. He was often seen in
the company of fashion models and never lacked for a date to some
important media event. There were speculations he might be gay. Most
of the commentators made interesting connections between his social
awkwardness and a dating service for computer techies and engineers.
Which was interesting as David couldn’t find any steady action
on his own.

So as
Jada picked up her phone and was prepared to call him, she had some
idea what he had been doing all these years. The nervous little
computer nerd whose eyes had lit up when she kissed him had gone on
to do great things. And what had she done? She was teaching at a
dance academy and watching her money dwindle while hoping to be
accepted into a graduate program in physics. She hadn’t had
time for men, but perhaps she could renew things with the young man
who had been eager to learn Go just to impress her.

His
phone only rang twice when he picked it up.

“
Jada?”
he said again. “I’m so glad you called.”

Jada had
been his obscure object of desire for the last decade. In his heart
of hearts, David could only love one woman and it was her. She was
the unobtainable, the one who had got away, and the loss from which
he had never recovered. Jada was the woman he saw in his dreams every
night and the face which faded from him in the morning. He still had
the Go set he’d bought after meeting her, but couldn’t
pick it up as it reminded him of Jada. He’d been told by
several business colleges that the local ballet was a good place to
make contacts, but David couldn’t bring himself to go no matter
what city he was in. All he could think of was Jada whenever he saw
ballet dancers.

He
hadn’t been able to find out where she’d gone. If he had,
David would have been unable to get in touch with her. His shyness
was too strong to allow him to communicate with her. He knew Jada was
out there someplace, but he couldn’t even bring himself to seek
her out. So the day he saw her in the storefront dance studio was the
day David felt his life was finally moving in the right direction.
He’d been strangely aloof that evening at dinner and his
associates kept asking him why he wasn’t talking much, but he
couldn’t tell them. How could he tell a room full of tech gurus
that he’d found the true love of his life once again and feared
it was a cruel illusion?

But his
illusion had called him. She was real and in Pittsburgh. He had to
make contact with her and when she called, he’d been at home
going over the numbers for the day. David had stopped everything and
focused on talking to her. They played catch-up and David was
secretly thrilled to learn she was still single. He proudly told her
he’d avoided marriage or any kind of relationship, but he
didn’t tell her why. How could he tell her that he had her
picture in a special place in his heart? If there had been a secret
room in his soul, he would have placed an idol of her to worship
every day. He would have burned incense and prayed to her image if
he’d had the ability to do so. But he lacked the words to
express him to her and merely suggested they get together over the
weekend. He recommended a nice restaurant he could take her to. She
paused and claimed to check her calendar, which in truth was empty,
and told him the date was open. He offered to pick her up personally,
but she told him they c
ould
simply meet at the restaurant.

“
Do
you still play Go?” David asked her.

“
All
the time,” she responded. “But now I do it mostly on
line. I don’t like to play that was so much because you can’t
read your opponent’s facial expressions.”

“
You
started me playing,” David told her. “I wouldn’t
know a thing about it unless I had you teach me. It’s been a
big part of how I think-out business strategy. I credit you for
helping me out.”

“
There
is a club here in town,” he heard her say. “We should go
there some evening.”

David
ended the call and nearly fell off the chair in joy. She wanted to
see him again! All these years of waiting had paid off! All he had to
do was meet her at the restaurant Saturday night and not mess it up.
How would that look if it came out Mr. Internet Dating had blown a
meeting with a potential girlfriend? The embarrassment alone would be
horrendous. He had to do what he could to make this date work.

Jada
hung up the phone and wondered what he would be like after all these
years. She tried to remember him. So much had happened since they
were together so briefly all those years ago. Had he changed much?
She didn’t think he had. David still seemed like the anxious
computer science major she had known years ago. There had been that
brief moment at the entrance to the dorm when before she’d
learned of her father passing away where she thought it might have
turned into something more. Over the years she had thought about
David and how her life could have been different. It wasn’t
unusual to see mixed race couples these days. She remembered her
mother talking with disgust about a local man who had taken up with a
white woman, so the old prejudices still remained, but they seemed to
be fading.

It had
been a long day for her with several classes she had in the city
being rescheduled due to some bad weather. The storms had come into
Pittsburgh early and swept across the hills, sending huge torrents of
rain through the streets. Some of the intersections flooded and cars
had to be re-routed. The lightning was fading as she looked out the
window of her apartment and thought about David.