Be My Bride and Have My Baby Read online

  After waiting a moment for the app to load, Melissa found a curated list of Rodger’s interests and experiences staring her in the face. As she focused enough to read them, she found that she couldn’t help but laugh. Cliff diving? Sky diving? Drag racing? The man, it appeared, was some kind of adrenaline junkie. A rich one, too, it seemed—who else could afford what seemed like extensive, expensive hobbies? Notably, too, it didn’t seem like there was any sort of job listed. Family money, likely.

  Melissa’s brow became more and more furrowed the longer she read. It was only a preliminary notion, and quite the definition of judging a book by its cover (something she, as a librarian, counted as one of her professional skills; but only with actual books)— but she couldn't fathom how she and Rodger Wyatt had matched. It didn't appear that they had anything whatever in common.

  She looked back at the invite in her messages box. Apparently Rodger had been sent a notification as well when Melissa had received hers, said the note from the LoveMatches team. It was up to Rodger and Melissa, if they decided to move forward with their matchup, to coordinate with each other to set up a first date. The LoveMatches team wished them well—and then ducked out of the fray.

  Melissa thought for a moment about sending some sort of feedback to the LoveMatches team, but then decided against it. Complaining wasn’t something she wanted held against her if she ever wanted to experiment with LoveMatches ever again.

  Her mind was already on the next thing; in her brain, there was no way that Rodger was reaching out to her, and clearly she wasn’t going to reach out to him—so their relationship, as touted by the algorithm and the team at LoveMatches as it was, was over before it began.

  If Melissa had cared more, she might have been a little sad and a little cheered by the romance of that thought; but she was already looking over her Netflix queue, thinking of which dramedy would pair best with the Malbec she'd just opened on her kitchen counter.

  But then her phone beeped again. Completely caught up in what she was doing elsewhere, Melissa turned to her phone and looked at the notification out of the corner of her eye.

  It was the LoveMatches app.

  She'd received a direct message from one Rodger Wyatt.

  Again autopilot took over. She opened the message.

  Hi, it said. Are you free on Saturday?

  She closed her eyes and stared at the wall in front of her.

  Her mind was swirling.

  What?

  Chapter 2

  Rodger Wyatt was not having a very good day.

  As Melissa was getting her books put away and preparing to head home and relax, he was out with his friends; which, normally, would have meant that he was having fun—was in a good place. As it happened, he was in a very good place. Rodger was currently standing in the basketball court of the Hyde Park Country Club, an extremely exclusive location. The floors had been hand-buffed just that morning. A butler stood to the side of the court with hot towels, cold towels, cold water and hot coffee. He would stand there all afternoon. That was his job:to stand.

  Even though standing was what Rodger was currently doing as well, that was not his job. His was to throw the ball he was currently holding through the hoop which seemed to waver excruciatingly far above his head. The problem was that Rodger, though he’d paid for private basketball lessons, though he’d had two basketball hoops in his backyard growing up, though he’d had no lack of the sort of resources necessary for honing latent talent into full-blown marketable talent, had never had the initial spark of skill which would have made any of that possible.

  In short, he was very clumsy.

  He told his friends and colleagues and anyone who would listen, in a desperate tone often associated with overcompensation, that he merely had no eye-hand coordination. Sometimes that explanation (or excuse, depending upon how you looked at it) would morph into the fact that he had no depth perception. How Rodger knew either of these claims down pat was beyond the pale of real research, evidence, or proof—and that was surely why he'd chosen just these excuses. They were just common enough yet serious enough that people would buy it but not become too concerned about him. And, as far as Rodger was concerned, that was truly the sweet spot.

  However, as unfortunate as Rodger was in terms of the gifts of spacial perception, he was quite gifted with friends—and money. For as is universally known, one’s friends are the ones which can be counted upon to ignore the usual tenets of propriety vis-à-vis etiquette. To put it briefly, they teased him, and they teased him mercilessly; which could be seen as a very good thing for another reason. With the depth of Rodger’s pockets and the breadth of his connections it would have been only too easy for lemmings to swim around Rodger and clamor for his attention and friendship out of a sense of utilitarianism. This was not the case.

  “Bet you dinner that you don’t make it,” grinned Mike, one of Rodger’s best friends. He was standing idly by the hoop, not looking remotely concerned.

  “You’re on,” said Rodger. “Of course, I was going to cover dinner anyway.”

  “Sure you were,” said Mike. “But now—“

  Rodger threw the ball. He missed the shot.

  “Now, I’ll have earned it,” said Mike triumphantly.

  “Right,” said Rodger. “And betting a sure bet is definitely earning something. So I’m taking you out to dinner tonight?”

  “Did you have anything else planned?”

  Rodger didn't have anything else planned and it stung a little bit. His social life was not nearly as well fleshed out as his work life. Even Mike was really a work friend who had started to hang around after hours. His work life, however, had become incredibly profitable. He'd made millions and millions—well, between his father and himself, that was, they’d made millions. Rodger had set himself up quite comfortably, but he lacked the sort of friendly charisma that would have made him into an accessible, sociable sort of millionaire. Instead he was rather far on his way towards becoming a social recluse; and he was not yet old enough for that sort of thing, on the whole. So questions like the one which Mike had just thrown at him (along with the basketball, which Rodger found himself holding again) were trigger questions for Rodger. Mike knew it, and grinned.

  “Stop smiling,” said Rodger irritably. “What if I’d had a date or something?”

  “Well, first off, you wouldn’t,” said Mike baldly. “And, secondly, if you did, I’m pretty sure you would have shouted it from the rooftops. You’d be wearing a t-shirt right now which proclaimed the fact that you had a date tonight, and you’d have inserted that salient fact into every conversation we’ve had since we got off work. But—see—none of that happened. So I’m pretty sure tonight was just going to be about video games and pizza, anyway.”

  “Whereas now it can be about video games and Chinese.”

  “Precisely. Want to try again?”

  “Not really. Here, you shoot some.” Rodger tossed the ball back to Mike and loped off toward the side of the room. He gave his butler a high-five (tips being wholly unnecessary, as Rodger already paid him extremely generous wages) and accepted a hot towel and a cold cup of water before turning around to watch his friend successfully sink ball after ball through the hoop.

  To Rodger’s left, a small beeping noise resounded. His phone; he had an alert. Mindlessly he stooped to pick it up. He furrowed his brow. It was a message from the app he’d signed up for last night – Mike had a friend who had gotten married via it, he’d said–LoveMatches. Rodger was a bit skeptical of the idea, but he threw some money at it to make Mike shut up and had consequently forgotten about the entire thing. But here it was, there was a notification on his screen claiming that the team at LoveMatches and some algorithm had found him the perfect woman.

  An algorithm? For love? Rodger snorted and almost threw his phone down on the bench before a thought occurred to him. He swiped his phone open and scanned the message in full.

  The contents of that message were sur
prising enough that Rodger had to sit down on his bench.

  The girl—the woman—with whom the app was proposing to set him up was beautiful. The darkness of her skin made her eyes seem luminous and awake; her long, braided hair was black as ebony. Melissa, he thought. Interesting. He scanned her bio. He liked the fact that she was in an active pose—it looked like she'd been hiking when her picture had been taken. He set his phone on the bench beside him and thought for a moment; and then he picked his phone back up and thought some more.

  What if, he wondered. He spent a moment typing busily on his phone, and then he sent the missive, and then looked up with a grin. He ambled back over to the court, where Mike was throwing an ostentatious number of free throws.

  “You know, Mike,” said Rodger, “I wouldn’t count so much on that free dinner tonight. A rain check, perhaps. I might actually have a date tonight.”

  ***

  Melissa was reeling.

  As if the “Are you free on Saturday” thing wasn’t enough—the man had sent a follow-up message.

  “Is there any chance you’re free tonight,” he was saying. “We could go out to dinner.”

  Melissa sat back in her chair. Well, things were certainly escalating quite quickly. She hadn’t even decided if she wanted to date this man, and here he was, asking for an expedited first date…

  She looked at his picture again. He really was quite handsome. Her eyes softened as she looked over his listed interests—he must be crazy, she found herself thinking again. Sky diving? Cliff diving? What on earth would they even do on dates?

  But she was getting ahead of herself. She forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths. But then she looked back at the message, still blinking on the front of her phone.

  Well, tonight plainly wasn’t going to work.

  Melissa wanted to think that she was the sort of spontaneous person who could upend an entire evening of personal, comfortable plans when something which was by definition more exciting came along. And sometimes she was, she thought defensively. Tonight was just not that night. And—her cheeks flushed—the message that she was available at a moment’s notice wasn’t particularly one which she wanted to send to any man with whom she’d be spending any sort of time in the future. She resolved that she would turn him down for that evening, but act very, very excited about the prospect of Saturday.

  ***

  Rodger’s phone bleeped again. He fell over himself sprinting to the bench to collect it, and then remembered at the last minute that this was not a very suave appearance to put on in front of his friend.

  Right on cue, he heard another snort from Mike in the background.

  Rodger flushed and hoped against hope that whatever Melissa had had to say would be in the positive. His heart sank when he saw her message. I’d love to, she’d told him. On Saturday, that is, I’m busy tonight. But I’m really looking forward to meeting you then!

  After a moment he decided that it was probably a good thing. He was texting a girl he didn’t know late on a Friday night, essentially. The connotations there were less than great.

  But that meant that he’d have to admit to Mike that he didn’t have a date tonight.

  “Got a date tomorrow,” he said gruffly, as he returned to greet his friend. He grabbed the ball back and glared at Mike, as if daring him to take any sort of umbrage against what had just been said.

  “Right. Tomorrow,” said Mike, giving Rodger a sidelong glance. “Sure.”

  “It’s true, idiot,” said Rodger, throwing the basketball at Mike’s head.

  “So, who is this girl?”

  “I’ll tell you all about her at dinner tonight.”

  “Deal. I’m feeling like Italian food, actually.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yeah, I think I am,” said Mike, his grin carving a slow curve between his cheeks. “Wanna head out?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Rodger, tossing the ball back to Mike and signaling to the ever-waiting butler that he and Mike were ready to depart.

  ***

  Having gotten the texting over with, Melissa was now staring at her phone waiting for a reply while trying her very best not to act as if she was staring at her phone. It was not going very well. She wasn’t fooling anyone—not that there was anyone in the room with her to fool; and if she was trying to fool herself, well, then she was trying to win a losing battle in the first place.

  She turned on some reality television and poured herself a glass of wine and found some chips which were languishing in the back of her cabinet. She half-watched her show and half-watched the television set for a while before she found her eyelids drooping…

  But then she sat up. Her phone had beeped. She picked it up and looked at it—

  “Sounds good to me,” Rodger had said. He'd closed out the LoveMatches DM with a phone number—his, presumably. Melissa allowed herself to pause for just a moment to contemplate just how odd it would be if he'd typed someone else’s number in this context. He’d also noted that he’d pick her up around 7pm on Saturday, that was, the very next day—Melissa’s stomach dropped, suddenly realizing just how close that was—if only she’d let him know her address.

  Melissa typed out the address of her apartment building before she could change her mind and pressed send.

  And then she sat back down on the couch.

  There she was, half-tipsy, having an enjoyable evening alone; a very typical one. But now—suddenly—she had a date that Saturday. Melissa laughed. It seemed like such an odd thing, but at the same time, such a casual thing. She had a date on Saturday. She imagined telling her colleagues at the library all about it on Monday morning.

  But then her stomach dropped again. Before she could be that girl, casually laughing about how a date had gone, whether it be disastrous or fantastic, she had to get there. And that meant talking to a man. A strange man. One she’d never met. For a very long time – potentially for hours.

  And she’d have to wear something!

  Her cheeks flushed again. Of course she’d have to wear something, she thought. What a dumb thing to think.

  Instead of floating back over to sit down on the couch, to pick up her glass of wine, to finish eating the bag of chips, she ran over to her bedroom and pulled open her closet. First she’d figure out what she was going to wear, she thought. And then she’d eat the chips.

  After a moment, she doubled back. She’d bring the chips with her. She’d eat the chips now.

  Melissa stood in front of her closet. It suddenly struck her that she had absolutely nothing to wear. She knew that that was a rather clichéd expression, but for her it felt sadly true: She had plenty of old-looking things featuring plenty of crochet and pastels and beads—but not in a bohemian sort of way—which she wore at the library. She had plenty of very comfortable things which she wore around the house after work. She had a pair of good jeans that she wore with one of three striped tees whenever she felt the urge to look a tiny bit better prepared, when she was going into the city, for example, or meeting with a friend. Beyond that—nothing.

  Well, there was one dress. She put down the chips and reached into the very back of her closet. It was a lace black number; but not in a sexy sort of way, she thought morosely. It was drab and funereal. In fact, that was it, she thought, realizing suddenly that the last time she had worn it was at her grandmother’s funeral.

  She couldn’t wear that.

  Melissa looked down. The chips were gone. She tiptoed back out into her living room, grabbed her cup of wine, and came back into her bedroom.

  So that was it, she thought, looking at her closet. She was going shopping the next morning.

  Elated at that prospect of a plan, she looked at her watch. It was all of 10pm, but she felt extremely exhausted. She decided to finish the episode of TV she was watching before lounging in bed for a while with her latest book. Thoughts of perhaps spending some time writing her own book flitted through her head, and she fel
t a tiny bit guilty. She was never going to be an author if she prioritized men over books.

  But then, she had a date, she thought smugly, and sat happily on the couch to watch her show.

  It was a sitcom she knew every single word to, but that only increased her comfort. She fell asleep an hour later.

  ***

  The next morning she cursed herself for what she'd done. Falling asleep on the couch like that? With her wineglass still in her hand and crumbs all down her shirt? What a rookie move!

  And she had a date that evening. She had a long way to go before she looked and felt good enough to go out, she knew that much for sure. She got up and ate something and made sure that her makeup looked decent enough to go out, and then she walked over to the nearest thrift shop and started to see what she could get done.

  The nearest thrift shop was a simple Goodwill. Melissa thumbed through the racks of dresses for a very long time before she realized that she should figure out what she wanted before she just jumped into the gigantic fray of the thousands of dresses which were hanging in the store.

  She knew she wanted a dress. One-stop shop. But, beyond that, she really didn’t have much of an idea. And it wasn’t as if this Rodger had really given her any idea of what she should be wearing. And it was so much harder to be ready for everything if you were a woman! All that a man needed to wear in order to look good was a pair of nice-casual sneakers, a button-down with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and a pair of dark straight-leg jeans. That was it! And yet men dressed so horribly so much of the time…

  She was digressing.

  She closed her eyes and thought.

  If the nice-casual uniform for men could be described like that, what was the women’s equivalent?

  And then it hit her. It was obvious. The little black dress. She couldn’t believe she didn’t have one; it was ostensibly a staple in capsule wardrobes for women of all ages! Of course, now she doubly didn’t have to feel bad about any money she spent today, as long as she kept it within reason. She was just rounding out her wardrobe; adding in an essential piece.