She accepted my offer.
Chapter Two
Tabitha
“Dr. Carter the reports you requested are on your desk.”
My assistant is a tall woman who dresses like a runway model but also has one of the sharpest minds I’ve encountered. She’salso three years older than me. An unusual circumstance since I’ve had my doctorate for five years and I just turned twenty-two.
I’m accustomed to my academic peers feeling inferior in my presence. Around Melissa, or Missy, as the other assistants address her, I find myself feeling nervous. She’s a reminder of everything I’ve never experienced. She’s confident in her body and she always has a date lined up for Friday nights.
Regardless, this is a professional workplace, and I won’t let my own internal demons affect our working relationship. I’m a consummate professional on the outside, but on the inside I’m green with envy. I haven’t been on a date in ages. I went to college when I was too young to attend parties and now my peer group works for me. All my colleagues are too old, and all the age-appropriate friends I could make work under me.
I’m in my own little work bubble. Which would be fine if I could make friends outside of work, but my rigorous schedule makes that impossible. I don’t have time for drinks or for long lunches. Not while I work at this office. And dating has never been my strong suit.
Work progresses like normal. I review reports, send out memos and I speak to the biologists who filed the reports. I did field work for a year myself, trekking through a Southeast Asian rainforest to study the rafflesia flower.Rafflesia arnoldiiis better known as the stinking corpse flower. It produces the largest flower on Earth and smells like a rotting corpse.
It was fascinating despite its unfortunate scent.
Shuffling through paperwork and lab reports I think back to that year abroad. The days were long and sweat made my clothes stick to my aching back, but I loved every minute of it.
Melissa brings my lunch before she leaves for her own break, a goofy smile on her face that prompts my curiosity.
“Oh, it’s nothing Dr. Carter.”
My raised eyebrow stops her on her way out the door.
“I mean it’s not work related. Someone brought in a flyer for a new dating app and it’s the weirdest thing. I’m doing a poor job of explaining. Let me show you.”
She goes out to her desk and comes back into my office with a flounce, her modest black dress flaring around her knees like a paid actor.
“This!” she shouts. “It’s absolutely ridiculous. I mean who would want to drop everything to move out to the middle of nowhere to marry a strange man?”
The flyer she hands me is for a mail order bride service. There is a photo of a happy bride set in front of an evergreen mountain range and the company’s logo with their ad printed in a beautiful script.
Take a chance on love. Pearl’s Mail Order Brides.Meet your match today!
“It’s so laughably bad Penny at the front desk had to pass it around,” Melissa gushes.
“Its…different,” I say when she looks at me expectantly.
She shoots me a questioning look but her phone pings with a message distracting her from my odd reply. My assistant is gone in a flash, the flyer left forgotten on my desk.
“This can’t be real,” I mutter to myself even as I bring up the website printed on the paper.
It’s real. I spend my lunch break scrolling through the site, and reading their testimonials. Then to cross check their claims I hop on social media and do a quick search. Businesses can inflate and manipulate data, but people get honest on their own profiles.
I find fourteen posts. All positive. A deeper dive through public profiles reveals that all fourteen marriages are still going strong.
Melissa’s attitude was dismissive, but I have to admit the idea does appeal to me. Friendship is hard to come by, and love is nonexistent in my life. Dealing with messy emotions isn’t myforte. The ad can make all the claims of love it wants but these couples agreed to marry before they ever met in person. They couldn’t love each other yet.
Not at first.
Something else pulled these people together. Respect and attraction, perhaps? A marriage based on shared ideals and values steeped in logic and rationality sounds like an idea worth exploring.
My lunch flies by and soon I’m reluctantly turning my focus back to work. I do my best to focus on the tasks in front of me but my mind races with possibilities. Melissa continues discussing memos, meetings, and the upcoming fundraising efforts that are occupying the board, without noticing my lack of attention. It’s the same year after year. The same office. The same reports and meetings. It’s all become rather dull.
I think back to that year of field research. The freedom. The feel of the hot sun on my skin as I conducted my own research rather than evaluating someone else’s.
