CHAPTER 1
Three years later
“Wait wait wait wait…” Sloane, my roommate, started. She was in her pajamas, bonnet on her head protecting her curls, and sipping a glass of white wine. She’d come out of her room when I got home and perched herself on the couch, ready for me to summarize the date. For as long as we’d been roommates (more than two years now) this had been our ritual. “You’re telling me you gave him your leftovers?”
“Yes,” I groaned, pouring myself a glass of wine from the bottle on the counter.
“The guy who cuts his meat into tiny pieces?”
“My dad nearly choked on a piece of steak once,” I said, carrying my wine to the couch. “Had to get the Heimlich from a fellow restaurantgoer and everything. Maybe Lance has too.”
Sloane curled her lip. “Did he still hold his fork in his entire fist while he ate?”
“It’s unique,” I insisted.
She rolled her eyes. “A free meal is a free meal no matter who you have to eat it with, I guess.”
I cringed. “I paid.”
“You paid last time!”
“I know. I panicked. He started talking about flat-earth theory. And he was on the wrong side of that argument! I practically threw my credit card at the waiter.” I don’t know why. I didn’t have extra funds just lying around to pay for all dates. At twenty-seven, my job was still the same one I’d had for the last four years—assistant to a literary agent. And even though in the last couple years I’d gotten to take on a few of my own small clients, in every other way it was the same: same responsibilities, same office, same boss, same barely livable salary. We should’ve split the check. I usually split the bill on dates, but Lance was into the I pay this time, you pay next time idea. As if there were going to be an infinite string of next time s.
“Thank god he brought up his thoughts on the Earth’s shape,” she said. “Or you would’ve been in love with him by next week.”
“I would not have,” I said, but only half-heartedly. We’d met in a yoga class three weeks earlier when I’d stumbled and knocked him over while attempting the Warrior 2 pose. We’d exchanged numbers before the class was even over through whispers and giggles under the annoyed glare of the instructor. Lance was cute and asked me questions about myself, a low bar, yet one many men couldn’t make it over. He’d made it to date three. I thought we were on our way. Then he brought up his conspiracy theories and the perfect future I had envisioned came crashing down.
“I’m just saying…” she sang.
“You have no room to talk,” I said to Sloane. “You’re happily in a relationship now. You’ve forgotten about the discovery phase. The discovery phase is the absolute worst part of a relationship. I hate having to start from zero with someone, to answer the same questions over and over again and ask the same questions over and over again. Decide if we’re compatible over and over again.”
“So you were willing to live with fist fork for the rest of your life so you could avoid having to explain what a slush pile is again?” Sloane twisted her smartwatch on her wrist.
“Among other things,” I said. We both knew I wasn’t going to marry Lance, despite how much I tried to convince myself his habits were charming.
“You know what this means?” Sloane said.
I took a sip of wine. “No, it doesn’t.”
“It does.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t need them. I’m meeting people the real way.”
“In yoga class? That’s the real way?”
“Yes! It was romantic.” I was a romantic at heart. It was why I wanted to be a literary agent. I wanted to put love stories in the hands of the hopeless romantics of the world. Plus, I was really good at seeing what did and didn’t work in a story. At seeing how to shape a book into the perfect combination of conflict and romance. And through years and years of reading love stories, I wanted my own. Not one that involved swiping right. I’d seen it happen not just in stories but in real life, time and again. Why couldn’t it happen for me?
“It really wasn’t,” she insisted. “Your meet-cute obsession is narrowing your field of potentials. How many new people can possibly cross your path when you go to the same four places every day?”
“Rude.”
“True.”
“Dating apps are no better. They are all a big, unromantic scam, wasting our time and money. A software engineer once told me that they can’t re-create real interaction anyway, so they’re a pointless way to meet—”
“I don’t need another rant about how you wish you lived before social media and apps and how true romance only happens organically through shared experiences, history, and in-person chemistry. This attitude is why you’re still screwing Rob.”
I gasped and heat crawled its way up my neck and clung to my cheeks.
She pointed, her wine sloshing over the edge of the glass in her opposite hand. “I knew it! Dammit, Margot, you should have to put five bucks in the Bad Decisions jar for that.” She gestured toward the jar on the bookcase that had started as a joke and was now an even bigger joke because it was half-full of money.
“I am not screwing Rob!” Which was true. I just still occasionally, against my better judgment, wanted to screw Rob, which was why my cheeks were cherry red at the moment. Rob was my boss and the last real relationship I’d had. Real being a relative word. Our timing had been off from the very beginning. He was going through a divorce, he was emotionally unavailable, he was … my boss. It had been a relationship full of shared looks, bathroom makeouts, and weekend rendezvous. It was filled with high highs and really low lows. It was wrong. God, I knew it was wrong. But in the midst of all the boring dates I’d been going on for the last several years, sometimes it felt like the only exciting thing in my life. Sloane was the only person in my life who even knew about that so-called relationship.
She stood. “Sit down. I’m going to make you your special slushie and you are going to download the dating apps again.”
“Nooooo!” I whined.
She headed for the kitchen. “You prematurely deleted them.”
“I didn’t. I was on the edge of something with Lance.”
“The edge of the Earth?”
“Ha, ha.” I reached for the book I’d left on the coffee table earlier and sank deeper into the couch. I opened it to where a piece of dental floss was acting as a bookmark. “Maybe I’ll just stick to my book men from now on,” I said. “Celebrate a Me Era where I read more and work on a promotion and, you know, be more consistent than once every six months with yoga. I don’t need a man.”
“Is it possible to read more than you do?”
“It is,” I assured her.
“You’re right, you don’t need a man. And I agree with that promotion thing, make that happen, it’s long overdue. But”—she pushed a button on the blender and the sound of ice being pulverized filled the room for sixty seconds—“everyone needs a little fun.”
I knew why she really wanted me back on the apps. She thought without them I’d become preoccupied with Rob. It was hard not to when I saw him day in and day out.
My book was plucked from my hands and she held out my drink.
“Don’t lose my spot!” I called as she shut it and deposited it on the table.
“Spot is safe,” she said as I accepted the drink.
Then my cell phone was placed in my free hand.
I sighed, resigned, took a sip of slushie for courage, and cringed. She’d made it strong tonight. I scrolled to the app store and pushed the get button on my go-to dating apps. I watched the little cloud and arrow symbols as the icons were brought to life on my screen. The more colorful they became, the more my heart sank. This should’ve felt like I was taking charge of my life. So why did it always feel like I was giving up?
CHAPTER 2
I knocked on the frame outside the open door to Rob’s office and then leaned my upper body just over the threshold. “Hi, good morning, I finished reading Janet’s rom-com yesterday and I had a few suggestions. Do you want me to email them to you or do you want to discuss them face-to-face?”
Sloane would make me put five dollars in the Bad Decisions jar if she saw me right now, too many buttons undone on my shirt, my dark hair curled into beachy waves, my plum-colored lipstick on, leaning into my boss’s office at just the right angle for a cleavage view.
After my terrible date last night and the walk of shame back into the dating apps, I needed some excitement, but Rob was too preoccupied with his computer to give me much of anything. “An email is fine. I’m doing lunch today with Kathy Green, so—”
“The editor?” I asked, taking a step forward and straightening my shoulders. Los Angeles was not New York. It was rare that he met face-to-face with editors here. Like me, he usually pitched over emails or phone calls or, unlike me, on his quarterly New York trips.
“Yes, I’m pitching her Sarah’s book. She’d be a good fit, yes?”
“She’d be a great fit.” I’d worked hard on Sarah’s book. I was the one who’d found it in the slush pile of emails that came into Rob’s inbox from authors hoping he’d represent them. It was my job to comb through those emails, pick out the promising ones, and sometimes … most of the time … pass them on to Rob. But not before giving him my notes for story improvements.
Occasionally, Rob let me junior-agent on authors I personally found. Share most of the responsibilities in exchange for a small cut of the commissions. But Sarah was not one of those cases. He thought she was going to be big. He handled clients he saw the most potential in.
For the last three years, Rob had promised me that soon, very soon, I could be a full-fledged agent. It was beyond frustrating that I hadn’t been promoted yet, because my clients did decently well, they earned royalties, they made best-of lists.
“What time is the meeting?” I asked. My eyes went to the clock on the wall in his office. It was ten. “Should we walk over together?” He had promised me the last time he had a local meeting that I could come next time so I could meet more editors in person. Face-to-face was so important to build rapport.
He finally looked over at me from where he’d been typing who-knows-what on his keyboard. His eyes lingered on my blouse, then jumped to my lips. “Just me this time. I’ll take you along next time. It would be good for you to see the master at work.” With those words he gave me a flirty wink.
He was handsome, really handsome, with dark hair, piercing blue eyes, and a strong nose. Plus, he was charming, always saying just the right things at just the right time. That was how I’d gotten into trouble before. But today I wasn’t going to let him charm his way out of a promise. I crossed my arms over my chest, suddenly wishing I’d buttoned my shirt all the way up to my chin. “That’s what you said last time.” I sounded like a petulant child. I kind of felt like one.
“Did I?” he asked. “Well, this meeting is more just old friends catching up with a pitch thrown in the mix. I wouldn’t want you to feel like a third wheel.”
I mentally pulled up the list my sister, Audrey, had given me years ago about the art of negotiation. She was the most successful person I knew in real life, so she often became my internal compass.
Common interests. That was one of the C’s. “I’d be a great second opinion on Sarah’s book. Two people excited about a project is better than one.”
“I have this one.” He picked up a stack of papers from his desk and held them out. “Will you file these with the rest of the contracts?”
Rob wasn’t about compromise (one of the other C’s) because he had all the power. He was dismissing me now. Redirecting me. And I was letting him—walking forward, taking those papers, and leaving his office. I pulled his office door shut behind me even though it had been open when I arrived. It was my passive-aggressive form of rebellion. I quickly filed his contract in the agency file room and went back to my desk in the lobby, where I’d been stationed for the last six months. Ever since the office’s receptionist had taken a better job across town. Rob had promised they were still looking for a replacement. That it would happen soon, very soon.
I seethed while answering phones, responding to emails and receiving packages, because it was better to be angry than hurt. I hated that Rob still had the power to hurt me.
As he was leaving the office at eleven forty-five, Rob said, “While I’m gone, will you reach out to Kari and see if you can schedule a phone appointment for later this week?” as if he hadn’t rejected me that morning.
I clenched my jaw and nodded. Kari was his top client and I enjoyed talking to her, hearing about her latest projects or ideas or her struggles and blocks. But not even the thought of talking to Kari could loosen my jaw.
“Great,” he said. On his way out the door he turned back. “Oh, and I probably won’t be back in today. Why don’t you treat yourself and leave at four instead of five.” He took two steps backward and the door swung shut between us. He stood for a moment, staring at me through the glass like I should mouth a thank you or blow a kiss. He was obviously expecting something. When I did nothing, he looked down at his phone and walked away.
I let out a frustrated grunt, sent an email to Kari, then did what I often did when I was dissatisfied with my job: typed in the address for my dream agency in New York—Mesner & Lloyd Lit. Getting a job there as an agent was a pipe dream without more stats on my résumé and as long as the word junior was still in my title.
I took my phone out of my purse that was tucked under my desk and shot off a text to Sloane: I thought sleeping with your boss was supposed to get you ahead in your career.
I stared at my phone, waiting for her to chime in with some empathetic frustration that would make me feel better, but she was obviously actually working today.
She was a film agent. It was how we met four years ago. One of Rob’s clients was working with her to sell their film rights. Sloane and I were on the phone weekly trying to iron out the details. She had thought I was the lit agent, because of how little she had talked to Rob. Eventually, she and I were having weekly lunches. Then, when we found out our leases were ending at the same time, we decided to become roommates. One of the best decisions I’d made in the last several years. The only good decision? No. I shook my head. There were others, even though I couldn’t think of any at the moment.
I was starting to put my phone away when I saw a little red notification next to one of my dating apps. Ugh. I’d matched with a couple guys the night before, under Sloane’s watchful direction. But I’d avoided looking at the apps ever since.
The message waiting now read: Should we just start by exchanging full body pics, save ourselves some time.
I rolled my eyes.
Phase one of dating-app swiping consisted of collecting a wide array of potentials. I tried to match with as many people as possible to give myself a fighting chance. This was my least favorite phase because I’d end up chatting with a handful of guys, most of whom didn’t want to have conversations at all. Even the conversations that had promise still felt forced, and I loathed that with all my romance-loving soul.
It was the opposite of a meet-cute. The opposite of a chance encounter or eyes meeting across a crowded room or hands accidentally touching on a handrail. I wanted a mixed-up coffee order or a fighting over the same taxi or reserving the same book at the library and both getting called to come pick it up and then both realizing we had the exact same taste in books. I wanted a knocking someone over in Warrior 2 pose and him not turning out to be a conspiracy theorist … Stupid Lance.
Copyright © 2025 by Kasie West We Met Like This by Kasie West (Excerpt)
CHAPTER 1
Three years later
“Wait wait wait wait…” Sloane, my roommate, started. She was in her pajamas, bonnet on her head protecting her curls, and sipping a glass of white wine. She’d come out of her room when I got home and perched herself on the couch, ready for me to summarize the date. For as long as we’d been roommates (more than two years now) this had been our ritual. “You’re telling me you gave him your leftovers?”
“Yes,” I groaned, pouring myself a glass of wine from the bottle on the counter.
“The guy who cuts his meat into tiny pieces?”
“My dad nearly choked on a piece of steak once,” I said, carrying my wine to the couch. “Had to get the Heimlich from a fellow restaurantgoer and everything. Maybe Lance has too.”
Sloane curled her lip. “Did he still hold his fork in his entire fist while he ate?”
“It’s unique,” I insisted.
She rolled her eyes. “A free meal is a free meal no matter who you have to eat it with, I guess.”
I cringed. “I paid.”
“You paid last time!”
“I know. I panicked. He started talking about flat-earth theory. And he was on the wrong side of that argument! I practically threw my credit card at the waiter.” I don’t know why. I didn’t have extra funds just lying around to pay for all dates. At twenty-seven, my job was still the same one I’d had for the last four years—assistant to a literary agent. And even though in the last couple years I’d gotten to take on a few of my own small clients, in every other way it was the same: same responsibilities, same office, same boss, same barely livable salary. We should’ve split the check. I usually split the bill on dates, but Lance was into the I pay this time, you pay next time idea. As if there were going to be an infinite string of next time s.
“Thank god he brought up his thoughts on the Earth’s shape,” she said. “Or you would’ve been in love with him by next week.”
“I would not have,” I said, but only half-heartedly. We’d met in a yoga class three weeks earlier when I’d stumbled and knocked him over while attempting the Warrior 2 pose. We’d exchanged numbers before the class was even over through whispers and giggles under the annoyed glare of the instructor. Lance was cute and asked me questions about myself, a low bar, yet one many men couldn’t make it over. He’d made it to date three. I thought we were on our way. Then he brought up his conspiracy theories and the perfect future I had envisioned came crashing down.
“I’m just saying…” she sang.
“You have no room to talk,” I said to Sloane. “You’re happily in a relationship now. You’ve forgotten about the discovery phase. The discovery phase is the absolute worst part of a relationship. I hate having to start from zero with someone, to answer the same questions over and over again and ask the same questions over and over again. Decide if we’re compatible over and over again.”
“So you were willing to live with fist fork for the rest of your life so you could avoid having to explain what a slush pile is again?” Sloane twisted her smartwatch on her wrist.
“Among other things,” I said. We both knew I wasn’t going to marry Lance, despite how much I tried to convince myself his habits were charming.
“You know what this means?” Sloane said.
I took a sip of wine. “No, it doesn’t.”
“It does.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t need them. I’m meeting people the real way.”
“In yoga class? That’s the real way?”
“Yes! It was romantic.” I was a romantic at heart. It was why I wanted to be a literary agent. I wanted to put love stories in the hands of the hopeless romantics of the world. Plus, I was really good at seeing what did and didn’t work in a story. At seeing how to shape a book into the perfect combination of conflict and romance. And through years and years of reading love stories, I wanted my own. Not one that involved swiping right. I’d seen it happen not just in stories but in real life, time and again. Why couldn’t it happen for me?
“It really wasn’t,” she insisted. “Your meet-cute obsession is narrowing your field of potentials. How many new people can possibly cross your path when you go to the same four places every day?”
“Rude.”
“True.”
“Dating apps are no better. They are all a big, unromantic scam, wasting our time and money. A software engineer once told me that they can’t re-create real interaction anyway, so they’re a pointless way to meet—”
“I don’t need another rant about how you wish you lived before social media and apps and how true romance only happens organically through shared experiences, history, and in-person chemistry. This attitude is why you’re still screwing Rob.”
I gasped and heat crawled its way up my neck and clung to my cheeks.
She pointed, her wine sloshing over the edge of the glass in her opposite hand. “I knew it! Dammit, Margot, you should have to put five bucks in the Bad Decisions jar for that.” She gestured toward the jar on the bookcase that had started as a joke and was now an even bigger joke because it was half-full of money.
“I am not screwing Rob!” Which was true. I just still occasionally, against my better judgment, wanted to screw Rob, which was why my cheeks were cherry red at the moment. Rob was my boss and the last real relationship I’d had. Real being a relative word. Our timing had been off from the very beginning. He was going through a divorce, he was emotionally unavailable, he was … my boss. It had been a relationship full of shared looks, bathroom makeouts, and weekend rendezvous. It was filled with high highs and really low lows. It was wrong. God, I knew it was wrong. But in the midst of all the boring dates I’d been going on for the last several years, sometimes it felt like the only exciting thing in my life. Sloane was the only person in my life who even knew about that so-called relationship.
She stood. “Sit down. I’m going to make you your special slushie and you are going to download the dating apps again.”
“Nooooo!” I whined.
She headed for the kitchen. “You prematurely deleted them.”
“I didn’t. I was on the edge of something with Lance.”
“The edge of the Earth?”
“Ha, ha.” I reached for the book I’d left on the coffee table earlier and sank deeper into the couch. I opened it to where a piece of dental floss was acting as a bookmark. “Maybe I’ll just stick to my book men from now on,” I said. “Celebrate a Me Era where I read more and work on a promotion and, you know, be more consistent than once every six months with yoga. I don’t need a man.”
“Is it possible to read more than you do?”
“It is,” I assured her.
“You’re right, you don’t need a man. And I agree with that promotion thing, make that happen, it’s long overdue. But”—she pushed a button on the blender and the sound of ice being pulverized filled the room for sixty seconds—“everyone needs a little fun.”
I knew why she really wanted me back on the apps. She thought without them I’d become preoccupied with Rob. It was hard not to when I saw him day in and day out.
My book was plucked from my hands and she held out my drink.
“Don’t lose my spot!” I called as she shut it and deposited it on the table.
“Spot is safe,” she said as I accepted the drink.
Then my cell phone was placed in my free hand.
I sighed, resigned, took a sip of slushie for courage, and cringed. She’d made it strong tonight. I scrolled to the app store and pushed the get button on my go-to dating apps. I watched the little cloud and arrow symbols as the icons were brought to life on my screen. The more colorful they became, the more my heart sank. This should’ve felt like I was taking charge of my life. So why did it always feel like I was giving up?
CHAPTER 2
I knocked on the frame outside the open door to Rob’s office and then leaned my upper body just over the threshold. “Hi, good morning, I finished reading Janet’s rom-com yesterday and I had a few suggestions. Do you want me to email them to you or do you want to discuss them face-to-face?”
Sloane would make me put five dollars in the Bad Decisions jar if she saw me right now, too many buttons undone on my shirt, my dark hair curled into beachy waves, my plum-colored lipstick on, leaning into my boss’s office at just the right angle for a cleavage view.
After my terrible date last night and the walk of shame back into the dating apps, I needed some excitement, but Rob was too preoccupied with his computer to give me much of anything. “An email is fine. I’m doing lunch today with Kathy Green, so—”
“The editor?” I asked, taking a step forward and straightening my shoulders. Los Angeles was not New York. It was rare that he met face-to-face with editors here. Like me, he usually pitched over emails or phone calls or, unlike me, on his quarterly New York trips.
“Yes, I’m pitching her Sarah’s book. She’d be a good fit, yes?”
“She’d be a great fit.” I’d worked hard on Sarah’s book. I was the one who’d found it in the slush pile of emails that came into Rob’s inbox from authors hoping he’d represent them. It was my job to comb through those emails, pick out the promising ones, and sometimes … most of the time … pass them on to Rob. But not before giving him my notes for story improvements.
Occasionally, Rob let me junior-agent on authors I personally found. Share most of the responsibilities in exchange for a small cut of the commissions. But Sarah was not one of those cases. He thought she was going to be big. He handled clients he saw the most potential in.
For the last three years, Rob had promised me that soon, very soon, I could be a full-fledged agent. It was beyond frustrating that I hadn’t been promoted yet, because my clients did decently well, they earned royalties, they made best-of lists.
“What time is the meeting?” I asked. My eyes went to the clock on the wall in his office. It was ten. “Should we walk over together?” He had promised me the last time he had a local meeting that I could come next time so I could meet more editors in person. Face-to-face was so important to build rapport.
He finally looked over at me from where he’d been typing who-knows-what on his keyboard. His eyes lingered on my blouse, then jumped to my lips. “Just me this time. I’ll take you along next time. It would be good for you to see the master at work.” With those words he gave me a flirty wink.
He was handsome, really handsome, with dark hair, piercing blue eyes, and a strong nose. Plus, he was charming, always saying just the right things at just the right time. That was how I’d gotten into trouble before. But today I wasn’t going to let him charm his way out of a promise. I crossed my arms over my chest, suddenly wishing I’d buttoned my shirt all the way up to my chin. “That’s what you said last time.” I sounded like a petulant child. I kind of felt like one.
“Did I?” he asked. “Well, this meeting is more just old friends catching up with a pitch thrown in the mix. I wouldn’t want you to feel like a third wheel.”
I mentally pulled up the list my sister, Audrey, had given me years ago about the art of negotiation. She was the most successful person I knew in real life, so she often became my internal compass.
Common interests. That was one of the C’s. “I’d be a great second opinion on Sarah’s book. Two people excited about a project is better than one.”
“I have this one.” He picked up a stack of papers from his desk and held them out. “Will you file these with the rest of the contracts?”
Rob wasn’t about compromise (one of the other C’s) because he had all the power. He was dismissing me now. Redirecting me. And I was letting him—walking forward, taking those papers, and leaving his office. I pulled his office door shut behind me even though it had been open when I arrived. It was my passive-aggressive form of rebellion. I quickly filed his contract in the agency file room and went back to my desk in the lobby, where I’d been stationed for the last six months. Ever since the office’s receptionist had taken a better job across town. Rob had promised they were still looking for a replacement. That it would happen soon, very soon.
I seethed while answering phones, responding to emails and receiving packages, because it was better to be angry than hurt. I hated that Rob still had the power to hurt me.
As he was leaving the office at eleven forty-five, Rob said, “While I’m gone, will you reach out to Kari and see if you can schedule a phone appointment for later this week?” as if he hadn’t rejected me that morning.
I clenched my jaw and nodded. Kari was his top client and I enjoyed talking to her, hearing about her latest projects or ideas or her struggles and blocks. But not even the thought of talking to Kari could loosen my jaw.
“Great,” he said. On his way out the door he turned back. “Oh, and I probably won’t be back in today. Why don’t you treat yourself and leave at four instead of five.” He took two steps backward and the door swung shut between us. He stood for a moment, staring at me through the glass like I should mouth a thank you or blow a kiss. He was obviously expecting something. When I did nothing, he looked down at his phone and walked away.
I let out a frustrated grunt, sent an email to Kari, then did what I often did when I was dissatisfied with my job: typed in the address for my dream agency in New York—Mesner & Lloyd Lit. Getting a job there as an agent was a pipe dream without more stats on my résumé and as long as the word junior was still in my title.
I took my phone out of my purse that was tucked under my desk and shot off a text to Sloane: I thought sleeping with your boss was supposed to get you ahead in your career.
I stared at my phone, waiting for her to chime in with some empathetic frustration that would make me feel better, but she was obviously actually working today.
She was a film agent. It was how we met four years ago. One of Rob’s clients was working with her to sell their film rights. Sloane and I were on the phone weekly trying to iron out the details. She had thought I was the lit agent, because of how little she had talked to Rob. Eventually, she and I were having weekly lunches. Then, when we found out our leases were ending at the same time, we decided to become roommates. One of the best decisions I’d made in the last several years. The only good decision? No. I shook my head. There were others, even though I couldn’t think of any at the moment.
I was starting to put my phone away when I saw a little red notification next to one of my dating apps. Ugh. I’d matched with a couple guys the night before, under Sloane’s watchful direction. But I’d avoided looking at the apps ever since.
The message waiting now read: Should we just start by exchanging full body pics, save ourselves some time.
I rolled my eyes.
Phase one of dating-app swiping consisted of collecting a wide array of potentials. I tried to match with as many people as possible to give myself a fighting chance. This was my least favorite phase because I’d end up chatting with a handful of guys, most of whom didn’t want to have conversations at all. Even the conversations that had promise still felt forced, and I loathed that with all my romance-loving soul.
It was the opposite of a meet-cute. The opposite of a chance encounter or eyes meeting across a crowded room or hands accidentally touching on a handrail. I wanted a mixed-up coffee order or a fighting over the same taxi or reserving the same book at the library and both getting called to come pick it up and then both realizing we had the exact same taste in books. I wanted a knocking someone over in Warrior 2 pose and him not turning out to be a conspiracy theorist … Stupid Lance.
Copyright © 2025 by Kasie West