Page 1 of Matched

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“I’ve done it! I’ve finally done it! I’m a genius!”

“Huh?” I glanced over at Jonas, who was bouncing on his feet in the kitchen doorway of our student house, waving his phone around with a wide grin on his face.

“The app.Matched LSU. You know, the one I’ve been working on for the past three months? The one that’s worth twenty percent of my final grade?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry.” Rubbing my hand over my brow, I sighed. “Late night.Verylate night. My brain hasn’t woken up yet.”

My housemate smirked at me as he stepped inside the room. “Lucy?”

“Yep. It’s not like you’re thinking, though.” Gritting my teeth, I steeled myself for Jonas’ inevitable reaction. “We had the talk.”

He gasped dramatically. “Notthe talk.Let me guess how it went… She said you were incapable of commitment, and?—”

“No. It was me.”

“That was gonna be my next guess, but I thought maybe… She seemed like she was a bit, uh, over it, the last time I saw her.”

“Yeah…fair point. It was mutual, though. What’s the point in us trying to get more serious when we’re just gonna move in different directions in another few months? She’ll be up in Sheffield, and I’ll be starting my master’s degree in Plymouth in September.”

He shot me a knowing look. “You don’t seem sad about it.”

“I’m not crying into my Cheerios, if that’s what you mean.”

“You’re not even eating Cheerios.”

I glanced down at my bowl. I hadn’t even registered what I’d been shovelling into my mouth, and now I realised I’d managed to eat my way through almost an entire bowl of Weetabix. Fucking hell, I must’ve been more out of it than I thought. I didn’t even like Weetabix that much.

Shaking my head, I pushed the bowl away from me and turned back to Jonas. “I’m not sad…no. She was…she was great. We had fun together. But we want different things. It makes no sense for us to waste our time dating when, like I said, we’re going to go in different directions in a few months.”

He shot me an unimpressed look. “Mate. You always do this. I don’t know how you can give it up, just like that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You date a girl for what, two or three months max, and then you dump her. Usually for the reason you just gave me.We want different things,” he mimicked.

“Fuck off.”

“Just saying it how it is. If you found someone you actually cared about, you’d try harder to make it work.”

“I have cared about all of them. Almost all my break-ups have been on good terms, and I’m still friends with most of my exes.”

“Okay.” Raising his hand, he pointed at himself. “Look at me and Jada. If she told me she was moving to, I dunno, Australia or somewhere, and I’d planned on living here, I’d do everything I could to make it work. I’d do that long-distance shit if I had to, but you know what? I’d get on a plane in a fucking heartbeat and move my whole life to be with her. I don’t care where I live. I can get a job doing programming anywhere, but Jada’s only in one place.”

“You’d need a visa.”

“Not the point.” He cuffed me around the back of my head, and I gave him the finger. “That’s all hypothetical, anyway. She’s not moving to Australia. The point is, if you love someone, you don’t let them go.”

“I thought the saying was, ‘If you love someone, let them go.’”

“You’re fucking hopeless,” he muttered. “Look. If you’d been in love with Lucy, or any of your exes, you’d be crying into your Weetabix right now.”

“Okay. Yeah, I get your point.”

“Fucking finally.” Spreading his arms wide, he tipped his head back to face the ceiling. “Nate has seen the light! It’s a genuine miracle!”

“With all due respect, fuck off. Now, are you gonna tell me what you were shouting about earlier? Your app?”

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