Nerd Girl

by Lee, Sue

“I want to go out and celebrate! For the first time in months, I’m really happy about something!” I leaned back in my chair, resting my heels on my desk. “Do you want to grab dinner and drinks at Betty’s tonight?”

  “Of course!” Anna exclaimed enthusiastically.

  “Okay, how about we meet there at 6:30? I’ve got some things to finish up here and I just don’t think I can get there any earlier because of traffic.” That’s one thing that sucked about working at MS and living in or near downtown Seattle. You were a slave to the Hwy 520 floating bridge, where traffic sucked more often than not. MS employees heading home were mostly to blame for it.

  “Okay, sounds great.”

  “I’ll call to set up reservations.”

  “Okay, bye. See you in a few hours.”

  “Ciao.”

  I started going through my email inbox, handling the more urgent ones first. I looked at my meetings for tomorrow and thankfully none of them required much planning or prep. Good. I didn’t feel much like working later tonight, especially after a couple of cocktails in me.

  I looked out my office window and thought about my new job. I was moving out of the world of Marketing IT; I was now a Digital Relationship Marketing Manager. My mission in life, for the unforeseeable future, would be to drive online integrated marketing programs for the next big launch of our world famous operating system. It sounded seriously frightening and a part of me wondered what the hell I was thinking.

  At the age of twenty-nine, working at MS on the global launch of Portals 8, was exactly where I wanted to be in my career. It was a dream opportunity. Even though I’ve been here for seven years, my experience has primarily been in IT program management, not marketing. I was content in my previous role, but I needed a change of scenery. Marketing was more dynamic, more fun, and let’s face it, Marketing’s where all the action is. Besides, it would help take my mind off of Andrew.

  I liked to think that I made it as far as I have due to hard work and people recognizing all that I have to offer. In reality, I think some of it’s also luck. I’ve always had my professional career mapped out in my brain; I always tried to think two jobs ahead and consciously worked on making appropriate career choices along the way. Fortunately, things usually worked out in my favor. I never had much difficulty in my professional life. When it came to my career, things always fell into place somehow. My career was something I could control; it was something that I had always felt confident about.

  The duct tape on my laptop, which was keeping my battery attached, was picking up more lint. Time to change the baby’s bandage. I found my thoughts drifting back to my unexpected encounter with the beautiful, blue-eyed stranger. Over the last several days, I’d thought about him often. His soulful and penetrating eyes were difficult to forget. Since I ran off so quickly, I never got his name. I was resigned to the fact that I’d likely never see him again and for some reason that made me a little sad. I inhaled a deep breath and sighed loudly.

  Unlike my career, my love life was all about failed relationships and missed opportunities. I was so focused on getting to my interview I couldn’t even remember to ask a hot guy for his name after he hit me with his car—how was I ever going to find a husband?!

  I couldn’t seem to get anything right relationship-wise. Like everything in my life, I wanted to put love and relationships into a predictable project plan. I’d feel so much more in control if I could do that, but love and work are two very different things, and relationships didn’t behave how I intended.

  I always saw myself becoming that woman in her mid-to-late thirties with two kids and a career she loved, sharing everything with the man of her dreams. We would go on vacations twice a year, and, if we could afford it, we would send our kids to private school. I would become a soccer mom and consider quitting my job and starting my own consulting company. Eventually, I’d have enough people on staff that I would be able to dictate my own schedule and still have time to volunteer for the school auction.

  For the vision to become a reality, I needed to have my first child no later than thirty-five. That annoying biological clock really started ticking loudly this year. Soon I’ll be saying goodbye to my twenties and the idea of turning thirty with no man or even any potential prospects was freaking me out. It would take nine months to carry a baby. Even before that, everyone knew it took six to twelve months to allow your body’s hormones to regulate after getting off the pill so you could get pregnant. Of course, you also wanted a year, minimum, to be just you and your husband as newlyweds before adding the stress of a new baby. Now this assumed you had someone, preferably your husband, to get pregnant with. This meant that I would need to get married before I was thirty-three. If a wedding were going to be everything I dreamed it would be, it required at least a one year engagement. And, if fate should have it and I found the right man, the average dating period prior to engagement was usually a couple of years. That meant if I had any hope of keeping to my schedule, I needed to meet someone before I turned thirty and that someone needed to be “the one.”

  It was all so exhausting to think about.

  Being the nerd that I am sometimes, I outlined this chart yesterday to remind me that I was soon going to fall behind schedule. I posted it temporarily on my refrigerator.

  I turn thirty in ten months and it’s not looking too good on the husband front. And even if I were to meet someone, the odds that he would be the man of my dreams have got to be less than one percent. One percent! What a depressing thought. No wonder I focused so much on my career. If I was being tracked on my relationship performance, I would never be rehired for new opportunities.

  All things considered, I thought of myself as a healthy, well-adjusted person. I’m still in my twenties, I own my own condo, and I’m moving up the corporate ladder at a satisfactory pace. I had a great career, working for one of the most sought after companies in the world, and I was earning a six-figure salary. I didn’t think I was bad looking and some people might think I was even pretty. I’m 5’5” and petite, I kept fit by running and not eating junk food, I had long, thick, dark brown hair that fell just past by shoulders and brown eyes, I had good skin, and I had a good personality … I considered myself an attractive, smart, fun, mentally stable, successful woman.

  So why couldn’t I find the right guy?

  Or in my case, why couldn’t I keep the guy interested? I was afraid of becoming that woman you meet at parties or family gatherings where everyone says, “Why is a pretty and smart girl like you still single and not settled down?”

  Why did people ask that, anyway? It’s not like single women chose to be in this position. Did they think that asking us that pointless question would somehow make us feel better? Didn’t they realize that I was wondering the same thing about myself already? People always had a little bit of pity reflected in their eyes and just a hint of sympathy in their voices when they asked about my love life—it always made me feel so good about myself that I wanted to eat another piece of cake before heading home. Alone. Regardless of how smart and pretty I was.

  If everything I observed about myself was true, the only reasonable conclusion to my constant singledom was that there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was one of those women who just didn’t see the obvious in themselves. I didn’t know what that was, though. Time and time again, I was unlucky in love, and I don’t think it was because I alphabetized my cereal boxes or because I snored sometimes when my allergies were bad. Success in matters of the heart was my Achilles heel. For someone who was always in control of her life on so many other levels, I couldn’t seem to control the one thing that I really wanted.

  Love.

  Anna and I were fraternal twins. Even though we looked different, growing up, people tended to lump us into a single identity, “the twins,” and often forgot which name belonged to whom. Since twins occurred in only three percent of natural births, and especially less when we were young, being a twin gave us some minor local notoriety. Because of this,
Anna and I learned at a very early age that our relationship was different than the sibling relationships our friends had.

  As a twin, there was always a natural tendency to compete with one another and to stand out as an individual. From preschool and onward, Anna and I always made an effort to be different from the other. If Anna liked purple, I liked pink. If I liked Cinderella, she liked Belle. If Anna wanted a pink bike, then I wanted a blue one.

  As we reached our teenage years and onto adulthood, our differences became even more pronounced. Anna always got in trouble growing up, I always followed the rules. The only time I really got in trouble was when Anna had something to do with it.

  Anna was the cheerleader and the pretty one. That, of course, made me the smart one. The paradox of being twins was that even though people tried to lump you together, they also always compared you to your twin, even when they weren’t conscious of the fact.

  We each had our strengths and we never held it against the other for our own weaknesses. If Anna got more attention and more dates in high school because she was prettier, that was okay with me. I took pride in my 3.9 GPA and had passed three AP exams for college credit. Besides, saying that I was less attractive than Anna was putting it mildly. It’s not like I was on the other end of the beauty spectrum or anything; I didn’t turn heads when I walked into a bar, but I like to think that I’m a relatively attractive person. It’s just when compared to Anna, she’s the “prettier” one.

  We’re a quarter Korean, from our maternal grandmother, and shared the same light olive complexion. Our hair was dark brown, but Anna’s a shade lighter. Anna was more ethereal looking than me; her eyes were a unique shade of gray mixed with green and light brown. I just had plain brown. Anna had the classic, thin runway model body, whereas mine was more athletic. She always wore the latest fashion trends and I went for the more classic, girl next door look. I was preppy and Anna was a specialty shop, cool vintage clothes sort of girl. I loved reading for pleasure; Anna only read if school required it or if a book was being made into a movie. Of course, our tastes in men were different, too. She had always preferred the more artistic type and I went for the cleaner-cut professional type.

  Our Venn diagram would look something like this:

  Even in our effort to be our own people, we had deep empathy and loyalty to one another; we had that “special twin relationship” people always referred to. I recalled times as a child when one of us would get hurt, the other would cry alongside. If I got a lollipop from my eye doctor, I would insist on getting one for my sister as well. I preferred the pizza crust over the toppings, so she would always save her crust for me and I’d trade her a neatly stacked pile of pepperoni.

  Things hadn’t changed much. If one of us had a broken heart, we would hold the other all night, as Anna did two weeks ago when I learned of Andrew’s recent engagement. I realized that Andrew actually did want to get married, he just didn’t want to marry me.

  Anna was my best friend, my sister, and my other half. She was my twin and we had shared not only our mother’s womb, but nearly every single life experience together, literally, since birth.

  I took a seat at the bar and looked down at my watch. It was 6:20. To offset my perpetual timeliness, Anna was always late. While she wasn’t late yet, I had every confidence that she would be. Our habit had always been to arrive thirty minutes before Happy Hour ended, which ensured we could get the cheaper drinks before we were moved into the dining area. I was starting to get worried she would be stuck with full-price cocktails. Come on, girl. I heard my phone ring and looking down at the lit screen. Anna.

  I heard her voice before I could even say hello. “Jules, you’re going to kill me.”

  “You’re going to cancel on me, aren’t you?” I didn’t even sound that surprised; only mildly irritated. Last minute cancelations were nothing new for us.

  “But I have a really good excuse,” she countered.

  Of course she did. I sighed, resigned to a celebratory evening alone. The bartender had just placed my wine in front of me, which at least softened the blow.

  Anna continued arguing her case. “The Edgewater Hotel called me just now and said that they could do a tasting tonight after all. Since the wedding is in less than a month, I really want to get this out of the way.” Anna was getting married at the end of August. I was tired of hearing about it.

  “Couldn’t you have called me earlier? I just waited twenty minutes for you and already ordered my drink,” I said, trying not to whine. This was so Anna.

  “I’ll totally make this up to you. How about we go for brunch on Sunday somewhere?”

  “Fine, that will work. I’m making you buy, though.”

  “How about we do Macrina’s around ten?”

  “Okay, sounds good. See you then.”

  “Love ya, sis. Bye!” she chimed.

  “Love you too,” I said begrudgingly, taking a sip of my wine to ease the blow. Sisters. As I swallowed my first sip of the Oregon pinot noir, I noticed a gentleman sitting a couple of seats to the right of me. He was staring at me and he wasn’t being very subtle about it, either.

  I looked over. Son of a gun. It was my blue-eyed stranger.

  “Hey, it’s you,” he said accusingly, narrowing his eyes at me. “Do you remember me?”

  I just stared at him, utterly surprised that the man I’d been daydreaming about like a teenager for the last four days was sitting two seats down from me. What were the odds? I quickly recovered and found my voice. “Now that’s a pickup line I haven’t heard before,” I replied, proud of my witty response.

  His face froze and then looked crestfallen.

  I instantly felt bad for teasing him. “I’m just playing with you,” I added quickly and gave him a little smile. “Of course I remember you. It’s hard to forget the guy who hit you with his car.”

  He winced at my reminder and then gave me a deprecating smile. He was about to speak when his phone rang; he held up his index finger for me to hold on. I took another sip of my wine and sneaked a peek at his profile while he spoke on the phone. It might’ve been because I hadn’t just been knocked into confusion from being hit by a vehicle, but he was more attractive than I remembered. He wore a light blue button down shirt that brought out the blue in the eyes I couldn’t forget. I could tell he took care of himself because his designer jeans hung nicely off his lean hips. His sandy brown hair was cut close but still had enough length for it to be a little messy on top. I imagined running my fingers through it. Did I just think that? Trying to shake that image from my mind, I continued to study him. He had a strong, masculine jaw with a day’s worth of stubble on it. I bit my lower lip as I watched him. He was definitely sexy …

  I could wax poetic about why shoes were an early indicator of the type of man that wore them. A man’s shoes could tell you if he was trying too hard or if he was clueless about fashion. They told you if he was conservative, trendy or artsy. In our younger days, Anna and I made judgment calls on whether or not to date someone merely by his shoe selection. Yes, I knew this was shallow and I’d like to say I’ve come a long way from that, but some old habits were hard to break. His shoes looked expensive; clean and black with a little metrosexual style going on. In translation, he was successful, confident, casual, and not completely clueless about fashion.

  Checking him out made me self-conscious about my own appearance; part of me desperately wanted to run to the bathroom and make sure I didn’t have anything in my teeth. I was glad I was wearing my best jeans, dark denim that flattered both my hips and ass, topped with a simple white V-neck t-shirt. I shrugged. It certainly wasn’t my most alluring attire, but I hadn’t planned on impressing anyone today.

  Just as I was wondering if I still had some lipstick on, he hung up his phone. He walked the few feet over to the empty seat next to me and paused. “Well, it looks like I’ve been stood up. The person I was supposed to meet is working late.” He didn’t look too disappointed.

  I gave him
a sympathizing look nonetheless. “Join the club.”

  He chuckled and looked down towards my toes. With my legs crossed, I was unconsciously swinging by foot back and forth and I had accidentally just bumped his calf. “Fancy, that,” he said with a smile. “Another coincidence.”

  “What’s the other coincidence?” I asked. I stopped kicking my leg. It was a nervous habit of mine.

  He smirked. “Well, the fact that I bumped into you here, after nearly killing you with my car the other day seems to be a rather big coincidence, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, embarrassed I didn’t clue into something so obvious, and returned his smile with my own. “Ah yes, of course, the accident.”

  “So I never got your name that day …” he trailed off curiously.

  “Sorry about that. I was in a bit of a hurry.” I extended my hand to him. “I’m Julia.”

  He took my hand. “I’m Ryan. It’s nice to meet you again.” He grinned.

  The contact of our hands sent a current through my body. His hand was soft and warm, his handshake firm. Our eyes locked for several moments longer than normal for a standard greeting. His grey-blue eyes pulled me in and wouldn’t let me go. I felt my pulse speed and my breath hitch. As the moment passed beyond what was considered appropriate, we both seemed to be recognizing that a unique connection was being made. I looked down at our clasped hands and, much to my disappointment, he suddenly released my hand. We gave each other flustered grins. The bartender had just walked up to us, interrupting my longest handshake on record. My face felt warm.

  Behind the counter, the bartender looked pointedly at Ryan. “Can I get you a drink, sir?”

  “Yes. I’ll have a gin and tonic,” he said. His voice cracked mid-way through his order and he had to clear his throat. Our moment of contact had affected him, too, it seemed. He kept his focus on the bartender. Nodding towards my glass of wine, he said, “Can you please put her wine on my tab?” He looked back at me contritely. “It’s the least I can do after I hit you with my car. I should thank you for not suing me.” He grinned and I noticed a flash of dimples.