It's a Match

by Ana Tejano

  “Are you okay, Cams?” he had asked.

  He had heard her take a shaky breath and expected her to speak. But instead, she had burst into tears.

  The tears had caught him by surprise, and it had taken him a while to give her something to wipe her tears (his box of tissues was usually in his car). Finally, he’d pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her tentatively.

  Then Cams had started talking, and he learned that she had just come fresh from a breakup. The cupcakes she had been carrying were supposed to be for her ex-boyfriend, but she’d found out from the office grapevine that her ex was now with his best friend, who also happened to be his true love and the reason why he broke up with her. It hadn’t taken long for Cams to tell the story, and by the time she was done, she had stopped crying. She’d apologized, he’d offered her a drink, and they’d kept each other company until it was closing time.

  “There, you’re smiling,” he said, pulling her back to the present. “That’s a prettier sight.”

  Cams’s smile grew wider. “Thanks, Gabriel. I really appreciate you being here now.”

  “I assume this is a case of a terrible date,” he said. “I mean, that’s the only reason I could think of, so if you don’t tell me what happened, I’m just going to assume that until you tell me it’s not.”

  “It wasn’t really so bad,” she said. She glanced at him warily. “I’m sure you’ll think I’m such a freak. I panicked when he invited me to his place when we weren’t even halfway through dinner.”

  “He invited you to his place?” Gabriel frowned, taking another sip of his drink.

  Cams nodded, then she sighed. “Maybe I freaked out. I mean, it could have been a harmless invitation—”

  “You did the right thing, don’t worry,” he interrupted, his voice hard. Anger coursed through his veins—but he wasn’t quite sure if he was mad at the guy or at himself. “He was just after a hookup. You were right to call for help. Who knows what could have happened.”

  Cams gave him a long look. Then she scowled, pressed a finger against his chest, pushing him slightly. “This is your fault.”

  “How is it my fault?” he retorted, ignoring the burning feeling that her finger seemed to have left through the layers of his clothing. “Did I make you say yes to that guy? Did I choose your date for you?”

  “You got me into this online dating thing,” she complained. “If you didn’t talk so much about it, then . . .”

  “Did I install the app on your phone? You did it all yourself.”

  “But you made it sound so exciting,” Cams argued. “And you’re always out with someone new. I just wanted to feel that again, you know?”

  A bit of gloom descended once again as she sighed. Gabriel took another sip from his drink, watching her carefully.

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t,” she replied, forlorn. “It’s easier for you because you’ve been doing this for a long time. You’re always out with someone new.”

  Didn’t she realize that always being out with someone new was tiring? Gabriel was weary of the dating game. Didn’t she know that all he wanted now was to be with her?

  Of course she didn’t. Because he wasn’t telling her anything.

  “It shouldn’t be so hard,” she continued, obviously not waiting for Gabriel to weigh on her rant. “Why is it so hard to find someone?”

  She fell silent, and he watched her for a few seconds. Then he took another drink, longer this time, while trying to decide what to do next.

  “Gabriel, I’m sorry,” she said, after a beat. “I’m just . . . It’s . . .”

  “Maybe you’re looking too hard,” Gabriel blurted out. Cams gave a little start before looking at him, and somehow this gave him the burst of courage he needed. “What if the person you’re looking for is right in front of you?”

  05. Three weeks ago.

  Cams couldn’t remember when she started crushing on Gabriel. Was it during their long business meetings to map out their schedule? Or was it when he accompanied her to do a supply run? Was it that time she taught him how to bake, or those nights when she would stay with him at the bar and waited with him until closing time? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that one day, she looked at him and realized that this guy, her friend and business partner, was someone very special and she couldn’t imagine her life without him.

  But she never said anything, for several reasons. First, they did business together. She didn’t want to break their working relationship, especially now that he was planning to open another bar and she was about to launch her own cupcake shop.

  Second, she had just gotten over her ex-boyfriend. For real this time. It had been so liberating when she realized that she was finally okay, and she cherished the freedom that came with it. This meant she could date again, but as much as she wanted it to be Gabriel, she was still cautious around him because he knew her entire sordid story. After all, he had witnessed one of her breakdowns.

  And the third biggest reason she couldn’t tell him anything was because Gabriel was dating. Nothing exclusive, but she knew he was going out with different girls regularly. She’d known this even before they had become friends because he’d reschedule their pickup days whenever he had to meet someone or someone else would receive the supplies from her when she delivered them. She confirmed it when she accidentally saw a notification on his phone from Sparked Match, a new dating app that Charlie told her about. Cams wasn’t ready to indulge in her feelings for someone who was obviously busy with other people.

  “Isn’t online dating hard?” Cams asked when they talked about it over dinner after a business meeting one time. “How are you sure that they’re real people?”

  “You meet them in person,” Gabriel answered with a shrug.

  “But how do you know if the person is worth meeting?”

  “You talk to them first, of course,” he said. “Ask about stuff. Things on their profile. Their hobbies, where their photos were taken. Then you decide if you want to meet them, and you ask.”

  Cams wrinkled her nose. “What if you don’t like the person and they ask you?”

  “That’s why you only talk to your matches,” he said with a laugh. “It’s just like offline dating, only you get rid of that obstacle of going to places where you could meet these people because they’re here already.” Gabriel tapped at the screen of his phone.

  He then proceeded to do a demo of the app for her, and she felt both fascinated and slightly apprehensive. Online dating had never been her thing. She met her ex and all the other guys she’d dated through friends and acquaintances in real life. Going online to talk to total strangers seemed a little weird, not to mention unsafe.

  “Of course, you exercise caution when you talk to them,” Gabriel added. “I’ve met really nice people here, so it’s not all bad or scary.”

  “But did you move past the first date with anyone?”

  “Do you mean second date or physically?” He had a wolfish grin on his face that made him look so handsome, Cams lost her breath momentarily.

  “I meant second date!” she exclaimed when she recovered. Her face felt warm. Then she gave him a challenging look and added, “Unless this online dating thing is just a façade for hookups for you too.”

  He blinked, and Cams felt a momentary surge of victory when she realized that she had him. But that went away quickly when Gabriel tilted his head to one side as he looked at her, and she suddenly felt self-conscious. Why was he looking at her like that?

  “As Kelly Clarkson once sang,” he said slowly. “I do not hook up. I also do not kiss and tell.”

  “I’m not asking you to kiss and tell,” Cams snapped, but there was an awful twist in her stomach when she imagined Gabriel locking lips with someone else. She rolled her eyes instead to cover for the sick feeling.

  “You know what, let’s not talk about that anymore,” she said, shaking her head. “I hope you find true love there.”

  Ga
briel’s expression turned serious. He asked, “Why don’t you try it out?”

  “What? I—”

  “It’s not going to kill you,” he continued. “If anything, it’s practice. And there are interesting people there anyway. I mean, I’m there and you find me interesting, right?” he teased.

  Cams rolled her eyes again, even if he was actually quite close to the truth. “Is my single status so alarming that you have to push me to do this?”

  “Just try it out. You said so yourself yesterday that you’re ready to date. There’s nothing to lose.”

  He had a point. Cams looked at her phone on the table and then at Gabriel, who gave her an encouraging nod.

  “Look, I’ll even help you with your profile,” he offered. “And I’ll help you figure out who to avoid. It’s all about marketing.”

  “You really believe in all of this, huh,” she said, slowly reaching for her phone, trying to ignore the tiny pinch in her heart. It felt just a little sad that he was pushing her to do this, but she also knew carrying a torch for him wasn’t going anywhere. She had to squash this little crush because it would probably just hurt her later on and maybe even ruin this good friendship. She would rather have him as a friend than lose him over any unrequited feelings.

  After their online dating tutorial had finished, Gabriel walked Cams to her car, as usual. She looked at him, her friend.

  “Can we agree that we won’t like each other’s profiles if we see them on Sparked Match?” she told him. It had occurred to her while he was explaining the app that this could happen. Gabriel stopped walking to look at her, making her self-conscious all over.

  But she pressed on. “Because we’re friends. And it’s going to be weird if we saw each other there and we get matched with each other, right?”

  Gabriel’s expression was still unreadable. Cams wondered if she had said the wrong thing—should she take it back? But she only said that to protect her heart.

  It felt like ages before he nodded. “Okay.”

  06. One week ago.

  Gabriel hadn’t meant to do it.

  It wasn’t exactly wrong, but it was against the word he had given to Cams. He’d been casually browsing through Sparked Match, but he was barely looking at profiles or reacting when he received match notifications. It had been a while since he’d been on a date, not because he didn’t get matches, but he just didn’t feel like asking anyone out. He figured he was pretty much done with the online thing, but he couldn’t stop it because there seemed to be something else that kept nagging at him. He just couldn’t quite put a finger on it.

  Lately, his fingers would automatically press the X button without even looking at the profile. So he almost didn’t see Cams’s smiling face look back at him from his screen, if not for his phone vibrating from a message.

  The message remained unread as he stared at her photo.

  They had been spending a lot of time together recently. After their business meetings, they would hang out for a while, talking about their own lives, and he liked that the best. Gabriel found out that she actually enjoyed her IT job, even if the workload stressed her out often. To combat that, she would go for a jog almost everyday, and he wondered how she could find the time to do that. He found it baffling how Cams could be friends with her ex’s girlfriend, but it was also just so her, being one of the nicest people he knew. There had been times when she had ranted about it, how awkward it felt being friends with her ex and his girlfriend, but she still did it in a very nice way that it was almost endearing. They had become good friends in the past months, that it was already hard to imagine his life without her.

  The Cams he knew now was way happier than the one he first met. And she should be, now that she was finally over her ex and now that she was back in the dating pool again. She deserved to be happy.

  Gabriel’s thumb moved from the X button and clicked on her photo to open her profile. He noted the tiny changes from the first time they set it up, such as that cute little line in her bio about making the perfect cheesecake, which he knew she hadn’t really worked on yet because the cream cheese she wanted was too expensive. She added new photos too, and he really liked that one where she was smiling at the camera while holding a piping bag poised over her famous red velvet cupcakes, oblivious to the flour on her face. Charlie must have taken this photo because he couldn’t remember ever seeing it.

  She looked beautiful.

  She always did.

  Gabriel had thought about romantically pursuing Cams several times, because why not? They were both single and available. He had always liked her, and they got along well. But he liked what they had, and he didn’t want to ruin it. It was, for all intents and purposes, a business decision.

  But now that she was actually dating—or at least, getting there—did that change anything for him?

  His finger went back to click the X and hesitated again. It made perfect sense when Cams asked him to do this, for their friendship’s sake. It had given him a strange feeling when he agreed to it, as if there were an opportunity he was refusing. He had that same feeling now.

  Gabriel glanced at her photo again. His heart skipped a beat.

  Without thinking, he clicked on the heart, and Cams’s smiling face slid to the right of the screen.

  It wasn’t like she’d find out anyway.

  Cams had been staring at Gabriel for a while now, and he was staring back. Of course he was, because that was his profile picture. It was a solo photo taken somewhere, the background a little blurred because his face was the focus. His eyes looked straight at you, as if he could really see you and only you. A tiny smirk was on his lips, making him look a little mischievous, like he was up to something and it was about you. The other photos had just the right amount of mystery for ladies to want to like him: a shot of him posing at the counter of the bar (taken during an interview he gave for a food zine), one of him laughing as his dog Thor, a Siberian husky, licked his face, and one of him at the beach, holding a surfboard. Gabriel always told her to avoid shirtless guys on Sparked Match at all costs, unless the show of skin was in an appropriate place. Cams spent more time looking at this particular picture, admiring how drops of saltwater glistened on his toned upper body, strengthened by all his runs and weekend surfing trips. His smile was bright against his tan skin, and Cams thought this was the most natural photo of all. Perhaps because she took this photo, that summer she joined Gabriel and his staff on a beach trip.

  She totally understood now why this would be an attractive profile. This was a showcase of the best things about Gabriel: his charm, his professionalism, his adventurous nature, his compassion. But it also didn’t show a lot about him, the things that Cams knew—like how he would always sleep in on Saturdays, or how he liked his coffee with two sugars, or how he would always eat a bite of dessert after every meal no matter how big of a meal it was. It didn’t talk about how he was into animal rights, or how he was a wide reader, or that he had this childhood dream of being a teacher. She wondered how long before he told the girls he dated about these little things—did they talk about it the first time, or did it take many dates before he opened up?

  A message popped up at the top of her screen. It was Kevin, one match that she actually enjoyed talking to. She liked him well enough, despite his little tendency to overshare, but that wasn’t really a deal breaker.

  She let the message slide back up on her screen, the red notification badge on the corner reminding her about it. Cams glanced at Gabriel’s face again and sighed.

  Quit it, Camilla.

  Her finger hovered over the X. She asked for this, right?

  Then she pulled her finger back, looking at Gabriel’s dark eyes and bright smile again. It’s not like he’d know if she decided not to do what she asked him to do. At least, she could be completely honest about what she felt for him here, since she couldn’t do that in real life.

  Cams pressed the heart.

  07. Present time.

  “Right i
n front of me,” Cams repeated slowly. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  Gabriel picked up his glass and downed the rest of his whiskey, the brown liquid burning a fiery line down his throat despite the ice that had diluted it. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and when he opened them, Cams was still watching him.

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone that time?” Gabriel asked. She blinked and sat back, her cheeks turning even redder, matching her dress. It reminded him of the first time they met and that bowl of red batter that had started their relationship, as red as the heart button on the app that led them here.

  Gabriel could still remember how he’d stared at Sparked Match after he had tapped the heart button, unsure of what he was waiting for. He hadn’t been waiting for a confirmation of the match because of course Cams would have followed their agreement. He’d stared at the next face on his screen for a moment, not really seeing. Then he’d sighed and navigated to the app settings, finally deciding on deleting his profile.

  He had just been about to tap “Delete Account” when his screen faded to black, telling him he had a match. He had almost ignored it but stopped short when he saw the face.

  Gabriel’s fingers had never moved faster as he’d called Cams, his heart racing while he had waited for her to answer.

  She didn’t answer the first call. Or the second.

  He was sure she had seen it. Their match had remained on his list, so he didn’t imagine it, either. Gabriel had thought of sending a message through the app, but it didn’t seem like an appropriate way to talk about it, since they knew each other anyway.