The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren Read Free Book Online Page A

breaking into a sprint.
    â€œHold it, please!”
    Turning, he glanced over his shoulder and then disappeared into the elevator.
    â€œMotherfucker!” Jess mumbled.
    Jennings Grocery headquarters was only three floors up, so instead of waiting, she took the stairs. Two at a time. Visibly out of breath when she jogged from the stairwell into the hallway, Jess immediately collided with a brick wall of a man. For the record, he smelled amazing. It was infuriating.
    â€œCareful,” he murmured, eyes on his phone as he stepped around her, continuing down the hall.
    But Jess had reached the boiling point: “Americano!”
    Hesitating only briefly, he turned. His dark hair fell over one eye and he brushed it aside. “I’m sorry?”
    â€œApology not accepted. You took my parking spot.”
    â€œI took your—?”
    â€œAnd you didn’t hold the elevator,” she said. “I’m running late, you saw me, and you didn’t bother to hold the door.”
    â€œI didn’t see you.” He let out a short, incredulous laugh. “Maybe you should leave a little earlier next time.”
    â€œWow. You really are an asshole.”
    He frowned, studying her. “Do we know each other?”
    â€œAre you kidding?” She pointed to her chest. “Twiggs? Spit in a vial? Entirely average? Any of that ring a bell?”
    Comprehension was a weather front that moved across his face. Surprise, recognition, embarrassment.
    â€œI…” His eyes flickered over her and then down the hall as if there might be reinforcements coming at any moment. “You were… completely unrecognizable. I didn’t know it was you.”
    For the life of her, Jess couldn’t figure out if that was a sick burn or a backhanded compliment.
    â€œI’m sorry, I don’t recall your name, Ms.…?” he asked evenly.
    â€œYou’ve never known it.”
    And there was the look that delighted her—the one that said he was barely tolerating the conversation. Breaking eye contact, he finally glanced down at his watch. “You said something about running late?”
    Shit!
    Jess pushed past him, jogging ten feet down the hall to Suite 303, the offices of Jennings Grocery.
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    THIRTY-ONE PERCENT OF California households are run by single parents, but Jess would never have guessed that from the people streaming into the Alice Birney Elementary Science-Art Fair meeting. Being a solo parent at a school event was like being a single person at a couples’ party. Minus the wine. If Nana or Pops wasn’t with her, Jess was made intensely aware that the other parents had no idea how to interact with a single mom. The longest conversation she’d had with someone there had been at the first-grade holiday recital when a mom had asked if Jess’s husband was going to be sitting in the empty seat next to her. When she’d said, “No husband, free chair,” the other woman smiled awkwardly for a few beats before rolling on breathlessly for five minutes about how sorry she was that she didn’t know any nice single men.
    But for the first time at one of these events, she realized as she walked into the hall, Jess was relieved to be alone; she wouldn’t have to small-talk. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that tonight; every meeting she’d had today had been a dead end. Well, except the Jennings Grocery meeting. That was a complete disaster.
    One of the biggest sins in statistics is cherry-picking—choosing which data sets to include in analysis after the study is finished. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to drop outliers: the data isn’t collected correctly, etc. But if a data point affects both results and assumptions, it must be included. And just as Jess suspected, Jennings Grocery didn’t just want to exclude a few data points in the set they sent her; they wanted to eliminate enormous territoriesentirely in