The Soulmate Equation (27 page)

He stared at her in confusion for a few long moments before bending and putting his head in his hands. “I know it doesn't
change anything,” he said quietly, “but I felt shattered.” He didn't move for several long moments. “I was totally humiliated, Jess. Yes, it's just data, but it was the cruelest thing they could have done. People I've known and trusted for nearly fifteen years took advantage of my genuine belief in this technology. They manipulated me personally and the project I've spent my entire adult life on—because they knew that if I got that score, I would do everything in my power to explore the personal implication of it.” River looked up at her, and Jess saw that his eyes were red-rimmed. “I got crushed as a scientist and duped as a man. I felt like the entire world was”—he coughed—“laughing at me.”

“I wasn't laughing at you,” Jess reminded him. “We were already so much more than a number on a piece of paper. And if you'd come to me, you would have had someone in your corner, ready to fight anyone who hurt you. Ready to fight for you.”

“I didn't even know how to understand it in my own mind. I—I—” He struggled to find the words, sitting up and looking at her in earnest. “I didn't leave my office for days. I pored through every line of data from every Gold or higher pairing we've had. Sanjeev and I reran samples twenty-four hours a day to make sure the company wasn't going to have to fold.”

“You still could have called.”

He opened his mouth to defend himself and then exhaled, tilting his face to the ceiling before meeting her eyes. “I could have. I should have. I'm sorry, Jess. Time just flies for me when I'm like this. But I've only been home to shower and change.”

She couldn't help but let her gaze rise, studying his new haircut.

He shook his head, understanding immediately. “I got a haircut just before coming to see you.”

“So you could look handsome for our breakup?”

Abruptly, River stood. “Is that what you think this is?”

Jess let out a sharp breath. “I'm sorry, what?”

“We're breaking up?” he asked, voice tight.

“What are the other options?” She pretended to check her watch. “I mean, it's a little late for our standing sex date, and it's been a weird week, but why not, for old times'—”

“Jess,” he rasped, “stop it.”

She crossed the room and got right up in his face. “
You
stop it. Why are you even here? I get that you needed space. But I fell in love with you. Juno fell in love with you.” He reacted like he'd taken a shove to the stomach, and Jess pushed on. “Do you know what that means?” She pressed her fingertips to her chest, mortified when her throat started to burn. “I opened my life to you. I gave you the power to gut me if you disappeared, and you knew that, and you did it anyway. I understand that you were struggling, too. But just a word—a
text
—and I would have waited.”

He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I wish I'd handled it differently. I fucked up.”

“You did.”

“I'm sorry.” He bowed his head. “I didn't know how you'd feel once you weren't obligated to be with me.”

That pulled her up short. “River, I never felt
obligated
to be with you. Not the way that we were together by the end.”

He took a step closer, growling, “Stop calling it the end.”

“I don't understand what you think is happening here! You don't get to drop off the face of the earth for a week and then act confused.”

“Do you remember what you said to me the last time we saw each other?” he asked, closing the distance between them. “You said, ‘Statistics can't tell us what will happen, they can only tell us what
might
happen.' And you were right. A Diamond Match is so rare that two random people are ten thousand times more likely to find their soulmate with a Base Match than they are to ever score above a ninety with someone else.”

“I could have told you that,” Jess said quietly, adding with a reluctant smile, “And I bet you didn't even use the right analysis to calculate it.”

He laughed dryly. “I guess I needed to see it for myself.”

Jess couldn't help but give him an exasperated look.

Tentatively, he smiled. But it ebbed away in the face of her stony silence. “Do you really want to break up?”

Jess had no idea what to say to that. She hadn't expected to be given the option. She'd thought it was a done deal. “I
didn't
, but, I mean—”

“It's a yes or no,” he said, but gently, reaching forward to take her hand. “And for me the answer is a no. I love you. I love Juno. I needed to get my head on straight, but once I did, the first person I wanted to talk to was you.”

“About a week ago,” Jess said, “my mom called. She was drunk at a friend's house in Vista. I had to drive up to get her on a school night, walk into a house full of fucked-up people with my seven-year-old,
and give my mother ten thousand dollars so she could avoid being arrested for stealing a huge amount of merchandise.”

River paled. “What?”

“I told her that if I gave her the money, she was never to contact me or Juno again. When
I
came home to get my head on straight, the first person I wanted to talk to was you. But I didn't have that option.”

To his credit, River didn't wince or frown or tense his jaw defensively. He just swallowed, nodded once, and absorbed it. “I should have been here. I hate that I wasn't.”

“How do I know you'll be here the next time?” she asked. “I get that this was terrible for you. I can absolutely imagine how you don't even look up when you're in a work panic. But I really, truly wanted to be the person you turned to during all of this. And you said it yourself to me once: Bad things happen all the time. That's life. So, if something huge happens at work, and you don't know how to process it, do I have to worry that you're going to retreat into yourself and not speak to me for eight days?”

“No. I'm going to work on that. I promise.”

Jess stared up at him. Dark eyes, thick lashes, full mouth. That smooth neck she fantasized about licking and biting her way down to the world's most perfectly muscled collarbones. Inside that cranium was a genius-level brain, and—when he let himself out of the lab for a breath—River Peña had the emotional depth of a man who'd already lived an entire lifetime. He talked stats with her, and the little heart that watched stories with his abuela still beat in his chest.
He loves me, and he loves my kid
.

“I don't want to break up, either,” Jess admitted.

He bowed his head, exhaling slowly. “Oh my God. I really wasn't sure which way that was going to go.” Reaching forward, he cupped the back of her neck and gently guided her forward, into his arms. “Holy shit, about your mom. I… this is a bigger conversation, I know.”

“Later,” Jess said, pulling back and resting her hand on his chest. “Is the company going under?”

He shook his head. “In the end, they only fabricated our score. Everything else reproduced within the standard margin of error.”

The next question Jess had rose shakily to the surface. “Did you ever run our samples together?”

“I did.” Reaching into his blazer pocket, he pulled out a small sealed envelope. “For you.”

A potent mixture of dread and excitement streaked through her. “Do you know what the answer is?”

He shrugged, smiling.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Nodding once, River admitted, “I do. I didn't trust anyone else to run it, but I worried someone would, eventually, out of curiosity.”

Chewing on her lip, she fought the internal battle. Should she look? Should she not? Voice tight, Jess told him, “I don't care what our score is. I never have.”

He laughed. “So don't look.”

“Do
you
care what our score is?”

River slowly shook his head. “No.”

“It's easy for you to say that because you've seen it.” She paused. “Does that mean it's bad?”

Again he shook his head. “No.”

“Is it something wild? Like the ninety-eight was actually right?” He paused, chewed his lip, and then slowly shook his head a third time. Jess blew out a frustrated breath. “Do you feel better about it now?”

“Jess,” he said gently, “all you have to do is open the envelope to know.”

She squeezed her eyes closed. “I don't
want
to. I understand that you needed to see the data, but I hate that you needed to see it to choose me.”

He quickly reacted, shooting an arm around her waist. “I don't. I'm telling you; this score doesn't matter to me. I love you because I love you, whether or not I'm supposed to.”

Jess squinted up at him, picking these words apart. “Okay, I'm going to assume that we're a Base Match.”

He nodded, satisfied, and put the envelope away. “Sounds good.”

“Are we?”

River grinned, saying, “No,” and she growled.

His expression softened, and he glanced at her mouth and then back up to her eyes. “Do you want me to tell you or not?”

“
Not
. You know what we statisticians say: all models are wrong, but some are useful.” He laughed. “I don't want to know the score, River.”

“I won't ever offer again.” He stepped forward and wrapped his other arm around her waist. “Can I do this?”

Jess nodded, looking up at him through her lashes. It felt so good to have him this close. When she closed her eyes, she was able to focus on the desire thrumming through her blood like a drug. They had hours before Juno came home.

She reached forward and ran her hand up his chest, along his neck, and traced his lower lip with her thumb. “I can't believe you're here.”

“I missed you.”

“I've been here the whole time.” She gently pinched his chin.

“I'm feeling incredibly clingy.” River bent and rested his lips over hers. “I love you.”

Emotion welled up in her throat, and Jess wrapped her arms around his neck. “I love you, too.”

“FYI,” a disembodied voice said from the iPad, “if you think I haven't written down every word of this, you're both high.”

WITH A SMIRK,
River turned and walked over to the iPad, ending the Zoom meeting with a quick tap of a finger. When he looked back at Jess, his smile immediately took on a ravenous edge. “Guess I wasn't the only one who forgot she was there.”

Jess's “Sorry” dissolved between them as River stalked over to her, gaze darkening; adrenaline poured warm and insistent into her bloodstream. Sliding his arms around her waist, he leaned in to kiss her neck. “What is it with us and audiences?”

“I don't know, but I sure am glad we don't have one now.” She closed her eyes, focused on the sweet, tiny kisses he dropped on her skin, from her collarbone up to her jaw.

Bending and reaching around to the back of her thighs, River lifted her, wrapping her legs around his waist to carry her down the hall. “This okay?”

“If by ‘this' you mean makeup sex with no child in the house, then yes. It is very okay.”

As he walked, their kisses took on the kind of aching, bruised-lip intensity that told Jess, even more than his words had, how much he missed her. But when he set her down on the bed, and braced over her in that hungry way of his, he lifted a gentle hand to coax a few strands of her hair out of her face and said, “We never really talked about it—it was so unimportant at the time—but I haven't really been in a relationship since we founded GeneticAlly.”

Jess pushed back into the pillow, staring up at him. “Seriously?”

River nodded. “Work was everything,” he said carefully. “I just wasn't emotionally engaged anywhere else. Until you. So, I know it isn't an excuse, but now I know to be aware of it if we have another work crisis.” He paused, reconsidering. “
When
we have another work crisis. I slipped back into that mode so fast, everything else fell away. Until this morning, I thought it had only been two or three days since we spoke.”

Jess had to take a beat to absorb this. “Why didn't you tell me that the second you walked in the door?”

“I wanted your forgiveness before I defended myself.”

She reached up, bringing a hand around his neck and drawing him down to her. His kiss started slow, his lips absorbing her relieved exhale, but then he opened to taste her.

The flirtatious tease reminded Jess so much of what it had felt like to make love to him, how he could be commanding and sweet in an almost impossible balance. Her hands turned greedy, moving
up under his clothes, pushing them off. She wanted his skin right up against hers, smooth and warm with friction. They got there quickly, bare together in a stretch of afternoon sunlight streaking across her bed. River reached with a long arm for her bedside table, and then kneeled in front of her, tearing the condom wrapper with his teeth.

Jess trailed her fingers up over her own stomach, biting her lip as she looked. “I really enjoy watching you do that.”

He grinned down at his hands. “Yeah?” And then he shifted, bracing a palm near her head, and bent, kissing her. “I think I prefer watching you do it.”

His smile lingered—playful and seductive—and that familiar, charged pulse echoed in her like a second heartbeat. With enduring focus, River moved, teasing at first, staring transfixed at the look of bliss on her face. He watched her fall and then, exhaling a breath of disbelief, turned his face to the ceiling and followed her into pleasure.

He stayed over her for a long time, arms caging her protectively, his face pressed to her neck. Once they'd both caught their breath, he dealt with the condom and then returned exactly where he'd been. Jess had never had this before: someone who was, without question, hers. She held him with her arms banded around his waist and legs draped lazily around his thighs, wordlessly falling back in love.