Love by the Numbers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Other Bella Books by Karin Kallmaker

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Copyright © 2013 by Karin Kallmaker

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published 2013

  eBook released 2013

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designer: Judith Fellows

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59493-318-9

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Bella Books by Karin Kallmaker

  Romance:

  Roller Coaster

  Above Temptation

  Stepping Stone

  Warming Trend

  The Kiss that Counted

  Night Vision / The Dawning

  Christabel

  Finders Keepers

  Just Like That

  Sugar

  One Degree of Separation

  Maybe Next Time

  Substitute for Love

  Frosting on the Cake I & II

  Unforgettable

  Watermark

  Making Up for Lost Time

  Embrace in Motion

  Wild Things

  Painted Moon

  Car Pool

  Paperback Romance

  Touchwood

  In Every Port

  Erotica:

  In Deep Waters: Cruising the Seas

  18th & Castro

  All the Wrong Places

  Tall in the Saddle: New Exploits of Western Lesbians

  Stake through the Heart: New Exploits of Twilight Lesbians

  Bell, Book and Dyke: New Exploits of Magical Lesbians

  Once Upon a Dyke: New Exploits of Fairy Tale Lesbians

  Acknowledgment

  Twenty-Six, by the numbers, might be the gallons of Diet Coke drunk during this book’s creation, or the number of late arrivals for school pick up because I was lost in Russia, or even the number of times I cursed the book’s very existence. Twenty-Six is probably the number of times I’ve read it already, start to finish and found one more typo. Twenty-Six, or thereabouts, is the number of times my patient publisher asked how the book was coming along, and a mere fraction of the number of times she wanted to ask—her forbearance is much appreciated.

  To my family and friends who have found me too often distracted, and apt to launch into non sequiturs about women who turn out to be fictional, and who have finally accepted this state of mind is what passes for my normal I say thank you.

  To those family and friends who have not noticed these proclivities I say bless you.

  Many thanks go out to Facebookers Georgi, Beth, Jackie, Jacky, Jane, Kerstin, Eileen, Minna and Karen for suggestions of places Lily and Nicole should visit.

  Far more than Twenty-Six is the number of readers who have expressed their support and encouragement over the year it took for me to write this book. While I know that I will stop writing only when they pry the keyboard out of my cold, dead hands, nevertheless, it is the support of readers that makes me know that any day is a day that I can write and what I write will be read. Every note and every kind word led to sentences, paragraphs and chapters in this book and I hope that the respect and love I have for my readers shows in every page.

  Twenty-Six and all the candles have no Wicks.

  About the Author

  Karin Kallmaker’s nearly thirty romances and fantasy-science fiction novels include the award-winning The Kiss That Counted, Just Like That and Above Temptation along with the bestselling Substitute for Love and the perennial classic Painted Moon. Short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and collections. She began her writing career with the venerable Naiad Press and continues with Bella. She was recently honored with a Golden Crown Trailblazer Award, recognizing her more than twenty years of writing for lesbian readers.

  She and her partner are the mothers of two and live in the San Francisco Bay area. She is descended from Lady Godiva, a fact which she’ll share with anyone who will listen, though she admits you’d have to pay her a lot to get on a horse, naked or otherwise.

  All of Karin’s work can be found at Bella Books. Details and background about her work can be found at www.kallmaker.com.

  Chapter One

  “I have worked for some first-class asses in my time, but you are the queen of them all!” Firecracker finger snaps punctuated the last three words. “I told Damon to shove this job and I only came back today for my stuff. I am out of here!”

  Nicole Hathaway watched Eric snatch up a notebook and the satchel that he had left on her office side chair after his precipitous departure yesterday afternoon. There was little point in saying anything. She would be glad to see him go. Given his heightened respiration and exaggerated physical gestures, he would slam the door on his way out.

  “If they found you murdered in your bed they’d have to question the entire state of New Hampshire and parts of Vermont! If I were you I wouldn’t walk across the Quad, honey, because someone is surely going to drop a house on you!”

  The door was slammed so hard the transom above it popped open, allowing her to hear the thick wooden echo resounding the length of the deserted hallway. She also heard the tinkling of his aggravating ringtone. He’d be fine—all the sympathy he could want at his fingertips, and in seconds, from his four or five hundred nearest and dearest friends.

  She glanced at the time on her phone display: 9:07. No doubt she would hear from her publisher by the end of the day. She turned her attention to final edits of the Human Cognition course syllabus for the semester that began in less than two weeks. It would be needed when the powers-that-be of the University of Central New Hampshire got around to appointing someone to fill in for her sabbatical. Classes began next week, but the lack of an instructor for them wasn’t her problem.

  When her cell phone rang forty minutes later, she closed her document and answered. She only needed to give peripheral attention to her publisher’s first two sentences. They would be almost word for word identical to the last time he’d called about the same matter.

  When Damon paused for breath, she said, “He believed himself to be a standup comedian. Upon learning I don’t watch much television, he felt it necessary to deliver a daily update of his most recent viewing. I don’t know anything about real or pretend housewives. I don’t intend to visit the Jersey shores. I don’t wish to dance with any stars. He was upset when I asked him to stop his audible punctuation and unhappy when I informed him that I was not a studio audience and did not applaud on demand.”

  Damon’s normally cultured tone was flat. “That was the third a
ssistant I’ve hired—”

  “May I remind you that Twitter, Facebook and blogging case histories were not my idea? That social media isn’t my definition of social? Going on a speaking tour was not my idea either.” She also hadn’t asked for the voluminous correspondence but that at least could be handled remotely and usually with form letter answers from Damon’s publicist staff. There was no need for someone to babysit her for public appearances.

  “As you remind me every time we talk. So I will remind you that your involvement in social media and publicity travel is in your contract as long as we pay for the expenses. We are, so you must.”

  “You told me it was a formality and there would never be money allocated for a publicist and travel. We never discussed that I would have to deal with an assistant.” Let alone someone who would disrupt her blissfully quiet office every day by demanding banal social interactions, and who would accompany her the first time the possibility of extensive travel on her own presented itself. She wasn’t interested in details about hotel A versus hotel B, and which rooms had which views. If she was going to travel she wanted to be visible for her required engagements and utterly invisible the rest of the time.

  “Neither of us anticipated that Love by the Numbers would be an Oprah 2.0 book.”

  She drew in a deep belly breath and slowly let it out. Oprah book clubs in major US cities were on the itinerary for most of October. “No, I never thought anyone would call the book ‘the I’m Okay, You’re Okay for the new millennium.’ ”

  “Some authors would see it as success, not punishment. You leave for London the day after tomorrow. You’ve succeeded in driving every assistant away.”

  “Two quit and one never made it here. Lack of map skills is a problem with the educational system, not me.”

  “You drive them away,” he repeated. From the background noises, she thought he might be in a taxi. “Nicole, enough games.”

  “I don’t play—”

  “Officially, I consider your persistent ruination of all my attempts to make this tour go smoothly to be courting breach of contract. If you don’t go, we keep a lot of your money. Another assistant is on the way. She will arrive tomorrow morning. Her name is Lily Smith. You can huff and puff all you want, but you will not drive her away.”

  She held back a childish retort. He truly had no idea how much she wanted to travel by herself. She would hope, like assistant number two, that this Lily Smith creature never materialized.

  After a chilly leave-taking on both sides, she set her phone on her desk. The phenomenon known as Love by the Numbers was temporary—it was a fad. Her academic research, meant for other researchers, had gone inexplicably viral. It was “Chicken Soup for the Romantic,” the review in O Magazine had gushed. She accepted this. Her own prediction was that the furor would only last another eleven to twelve weeks before being replaced by some other fascination of the moment, just in time for the holidays. Or it would be supplanted by the cottage industries people were establishing based on her book. The woman in Michigan who claimed to be able to implement a relationship-scoring formula based on fingerprints instead of DNA would probably do very well for several years, especially when the digital fingerprinting was a fraction of the cost of DNA screening. In the meantime, the travel required by those regrettable clauses in her publishing contract lasted from late August to the first week of November.

  She planned to make the absolute most of the disruption. Her private agenda was of no concern to anyone else. That was what private meant.

  She went back to her syllabus and then turned her attention to a study that she’d been asked to peer review on meta-awareness and the effect of observation on frequency of social media use. At lunch she made her usual trip to the student union for the salmon salad and a short stint in the sun to boost her vitamin D and support the flow of oxytocin. She estimated the temperature as seventy-one or seventy-two—average for a summer day in New Hampshire. By the time she walked back to her office, however, she could feel the damp of impending afternoon rain in the air.

  The rain had made good by the time she shut down her computer and a light steady sprinkle misted her office window. She picked up her helmet and pack and wheeled her bike slowly out of her office. The cleats on the bottoms of her biking shoes clacked on the cold marble floor.

  The empty hallways of summer were always welcome. When students were present they resented that she brought her bicycle inside the building when they couldn’t, but students were naturally resentful due to both their age and the strictures of academic rules. Six years as a student in these hallowed halls, two years obtaining her doctorate at MIT and another six-plus years spent teaching, conducting studies and publishing the results meant she was allowed to bring her bicycle indoors. That was how the academic life worked. It had also provided her an adequate office where she could enjoy solitude every day from eight thirty to five.

  Many of her colleagues didn’t darken their office doors for more than an hour or two a week and then only when classes were in session. From this fact she deduced that none of them lived with anyone like her mother.

  The light humidity of late summer dampened her skin as she pushed through the doors leading out of the Herman J. Hathaway Science and Industry Building. She cast a glance at her great-grandfather-by-adoption’s statue proudly guarding the courtyard. The statue had been commissioned by the estate to grace the building Hathaway had funded, and featured him holding a sextant and calipers. That he’d never finished high school was, she supposed, beside the point. Even his detractors admitted his ingenuity and community service were a credit to New England practicality and compassion. His millinery and textile fortunes had been inarguably crucial to putting the University of Central New Hampshire on the road to its small but mighty reputation in cognitive sciences research. She had earned her tenured position with hard work, but she supposed most of her colleagues assumed it had been a foregone conclusion—she had the Hathaway name. There were those who would add, only inside their reserved New England minds, that she might have the name but she didn’t have the blood, obviously.

  Pedaling as quickly as possible through campus to the main gates that would let her out onto Daniel Webster Highway, she anxiously eyed the thick, dark clouds that were pouring over the mountains and blocking the sunlight from the unsettled surface of the lake. The lightly misting clouds overhead were child’s play by comparison. She would have to increase her usual pace.

  Heavy drops were spattering on her helmet by the time she reached the long driveway to the house. She spotted Kate rocking in the porch glider, one hand on her large belly. If she went on tour she would likely miss her sister’s delivery, but her mother’s obsessive readiness rendered her own presence unnecessary.

  Though she was already tired of answering people’s questions and hearing their tedious anecdotal stories of how their own lives proved or disproved various Love by the Numbers hypotheses, the idea of being on her own for weeks and weeks would take her breath away if she thought about it more than she already did. No matter what her mother had to say about the propriety of it all, it was a business trip. There were no colleagues going to the same conference to suit Indira Hathaway’s repressive notions about safety for her elder daughter, but her mother had ceased objections when Nicole had explained that her publisher was providing a travel assistant. Now that all the plans were made and she had no assistant—if this Lily Smith creature never arrived, that is—her mother would be truly torn between her lingering notion of what a proper, unmarried, well-bred Indian daughter should do and the waste of a great many nonrefundable travel tickets. Knowing her mother, the idea of wasted money would tip the scale.

  Kate would have simply announced she was going, told her mother to expletive-off and left. But with a baby on the way, her unmarried, unemployed sister was going to need to live at home for the next several years. She might finally learn that a little finesse kept the volume level down.

  There was a bright flash o
f lightning as she mounted the last steep stretch to the garage. The humidity had increased and she had negotiated both weather and wet roads without getting soaked to the bone or falling. Why did her publisher think she needed help coping with the vagaries of travel? She was perfectly capable of navigating a timetable. She had mastered the Boston transit system while going to MIT and was certain that trains and airports all over the world could be similarly conquered. Annual academic conferences in the US and Canada had not proven difficult to reach. Her mother had taken her to visit their family in India twice, though both times she’d scarcely been allowed to breathe without permission. Being only English-speaking and raised as a Christian hadn’t helped her fit in either. Her experience with cars was limited but she could certainly drive a rental vehicle from point A to point B. After all, people spoke English everywhere and she wasn’t afraid to ask questions.

  It was as if Damon thought she couldn’t manage the social interactions by herself, even though social currency and the predictability of behavioral exchanges were her area of expertise. She could adequately introduce herself to a book club chairperson, or a bookseller, or even the radio and television hosts who were going to interview her.

  Having someone by her side every waking hour would subject her to more juvenile humor, narcissistic tantrums and behavior expectations like those of the unlamented Eric, and it would rob her of any chance for other…pursuits.

  She quickly dried her bike and helmet before hurrying across the breezeway to the house to let herself into the mudroom.

  “Your shoes will be wet.” Her mother’s clipped tone, half due to her lingering Malayalam accent and half to her quick and decisive nature, carried easily from the kitchen. “Put them near the fire.”

  She made no answer—there was no point in reminding her mother that her elder daughter was thirty-two and possessed basic common sense, just as there was no point in saying that she didn’t care for the vindaloo she could smell bubbling on the stove. She would have happily acquired her own dinner had she known the menu. She could easily afford to do so, and would have dissembled about having a dinner meeting with a colleague to avoid the lecture about wasting a perfectly good meal of wholesome food. An evening of sighs and ill-temper wasn’t worth it at this point. She’d take an antacid before they sat down.