The Science Of Love: A Billionaire BWWM Romance (4 page)

The next
day, David woke early and went to his classes with a smile on his
face. His classmates remarked on his chipper attitude and asked him
if something good had recently happened to him. He told them it had,
but couldn’t tell them just what. He kept checking the time all
day. At eight he was going to call her and ask if they could meet at
the student union. They had Go sets available to check out.

He
called her at eight and waited for her to pick up the phone. But he
received a recorded message. It was Jada and she was informing every
one that her father had just passed away from a heart attack and she
would have to go back to Mississippi for the next few weeks.

It would
be ten years before David would ever see her again.

David
graduated two years later with his degree in computer engineering
from Olentangy University in central Ohio. He had continued to
impress his professors and contributed more than was mentioned to the
development of computers with flash drives. David had written much of
the code used to control some of the basic mechanisms on the
computers although he failed to receive any patent credit for his
work. His professors thanked him and mentioned him in some of
publications as a contributor, although in private they would admit
many of their pet projects never would have reached fulfillment
unless David had been involved. He kept this in mind years later when
people would ask him to forgo credit in place of funds.

Jada was
forced to withdraw from college and return home. Her mother was
heart-broken by the loss of her father and all the children made
their way back to the little town in Mississippi where they had grown
up. The church where he had pastored for so many years turned up in
mass for the funeral. It lasted several days and he was eventually
laid to rest in his family cemetery where generations of the Young
family had been interred. Jada had remembered the small cemetery from
going to visit it with her parents as a child. It scared her. The
tombstones were old and showed the aged glory they had obtained over
years of marking the final resting places. And now her father was
there too.

It
rained the day they buried him. The cemetery workers were forced to
pump water out of the freshly-dug grave just so they could lower the
vault into it. Jada would always remember standing around with her
family as the lighting crashed in the sky and her mother cried. She
felt the lighting was her father preaching a sermon on Sunday
morning.

David
took a job with a financial company soon after graduation. They
wanted to place him originally in a division which monitored programs
that allowed people to access their retirement accounts, but soon
realized he was capable of so much more. David put in the minimal
work he could during the day while trying to find some field he could
make decent money in during the evening. The life of a corporate man
who trudged to work every day and was glad to receive his annual
bonus check and be idled every five years was not for him. David
wanted more. He wanted to start a company which would generate enough
cash to allow him to buy whatever he wanted. And date super models.

Jada
realized she still was going to be on the hook for the student loans
she had taken out in a few years if she didn’t get her degree.
Instead of earning a teaching degree at a prestigious Midwestern
university, she opted for one of the state teacher colleges which was
close to where she lived with her mother. Her brothers were well on
their way to careers of their own. She needed to get the degree
finished so she could pay off the loans and take care of her mother.
Her mother had worked at a grocery store all her life and needed
help. Although her father had not made a big income as a church
pastor, he had been able to support his children and see they got a
good education.

Some
days David would look up from his computer and think about the
gorgeous black woman he had seen in college. She had to leave because
of a death in the family. Would he ever see her again? He’d
tried to find out where she had returned so as to send her a letter
or email, but the college was forbidden to divulge personal
information. Even the people at her Go club didn’t know where
she had gone back to. After a few weeks of trying, he gave up and
moved on to his studies. Women would come later, grades and school
first.

Jada
would think about the clumsy white boy with the computer science
background at times. She was too involved with caring for her mother
and trying to finish her teaching degree to think of much else. He
had been charming and his degree could have made him marriage
material. She didn’t know what her mother and father would’ve
thought, but interracial couples were becoming more prominent. How
her father would have handled her bring home a white boy was never
answered as her father had passed on before it ever became an issue.

It was
during the first year after college that David hit on an idea which
would make him some money for the first time. He’d noted the
inability of the food vendors at the place he worked to calculate how
much food was needed for the vending machines. Since spoilage was
always a concern, it would have been nice to compute the daily uses
of the machines. At a huge financial institute such as where he
worked, the amount of food the machines could consume daily was
enormous. David made a casual inquiry to the owner of the company in
the evening and found out how the machines recorded what was being
sold on which day. It was a simple thing to make changes to the
machines’ basic software and have a real time data-dump which
told the company every hour what was being sold. He made enough off
the software to quit his boring job at the financial company and
start his own software company. The financial company was not pleased
to learn David had used them as a spring board to his success, but
there was nothing they could do about it.

Jada
finished school about a year after David due to some problems she had
transferring credits. She was forced to sit out for one term while
trying to straighten out her father’s estate. Her mother was in
no condition to talk to a lawyer, leaving the job to Jada. I took her
two months working with the courts and church to get everything
situated and when it was over her mother owned the house she had
lived in with her husband and raised three children. Jada could feel
a bit of ease now that it was done. Her mother was able to get some
retirement money from her father’s church, but it wasn’t
much. The church had to find a new pastor and couldn’t be too
concerned with taking care of the wife of the former.

David
used the money he made from the software for the vending machine
company to invest in some good equipment for his new company. He was
able to reconnect with some of his coding buddies from college and
get them to find jobs. It wasn’t easy starting a new company
and one of the problems was finding people who needed their services.
But the companies were out there and with all the changes brought on
by the Internet, they needed to upgrade their systems to be
competitive. David was able to find enough work with the help of one
guy he’d known in college who was gregarious enough to go
around and talk to potential customers. The rest of the team would
stay up all night coding for whatever they needed and tried to have
it ready error-free by the next day. With their dedication, they were
able to beat many other companies with large staffs and more
resources.

Jada
started teaching high school science in a rural high school near the
town she grew up while she lived at home with her mother. She was
able to plan her lessons at home in the evening and make sure her
mother had the medication she needed. Then she would commute in her
parents’ old car to school and begin her teaching. She was
liked by the students and enjoyed what she did. As part of her
contract she was able to help with the gymnastics team and tried to
keep the kids motivated. She would rather have taught ballet, but she
couldn’t get the school board interested in it. Ditto for her
attempts at starting a Go club, the kids just weren’t motivated
to join. She kept her interest in the game by playing people on line.

It was
six years after college that David hit on the idea that would
catapult him into the money stratosphere: Internet dating. David had
always been awkward around women and having a computer screen between
them and he didn’t seem to help matters much. One day it hit
him, if he was having these problems, so might other men. If he could
find a way to create a system which would make it easier for men to
meet women, imagine how popular it might become! He called several of
his programmers and marketing people into the small conference room
the company used in the industrial court where it was located and
they began to work out a strategy to find the best way to match men
up to available women. They deliberately aimed their marketing plan
and programming to awkward men such as most of the men who worked at
the company. One team was focused on getting women to sign-up, as the
men they wanted to attract for the dating service tended not to be
the most photogenic. Another group worked on finding a way to improve
the social skills of those men who would join the new service. A
final group worked on the marketing strategies.

Jada
tried to maintain her interest in science. She subscribed to several
scientific journals and kept her membership in many science education
journals. She helped sponsor the annual science fair at the high
school where she taught and was always pushing to get more money for
the school laboratories. She became very instrumental in obtaining
funds from the local oil and chemical companies in the state. But,
outside of dance, it was something she wondered if she could ever
pursue. Obtaining an advanced scientific degree would be necessary to
do any significant scientific work and make a contribution. With her
mother’s failing health, it didn’t seem to be a
possibility. The nearest college offering an advanced degree was
hours away.

When
David launched the new dating service for computer and engineering
professionals, nothing like it existed. He had found a demographic
which was not being served by the Internet, but which had a large
income. In other words, he had the perfect market. Why no one had
thought of it before would always mystify him. The dating service was
launched without a lot of advertising because the company wanted to
see how their algorithms performed before publicizing it too much. So
the existence of the service was an open secret for the first few
months.

Jada’s
mother passed away eight years after her father. She died peacefully
in her sleep. Jada had woken early one morning to go teach school and
went in to check on her before she left. She found her mother
lifeless and still in bed with her eyes closed. The funeral home and
coroner was quickly summoned. The funeral was less intense than when
her father had passed on since her mother’s health had been
failing for a long time. She had named Jada the executor of the
estate, which only made sense as she had taken care of her father’s
legal affairs after he had passed away. Her brothers came down again
this time for the funeral, but didn’t stay long. The new pastor
at her father’s old church presided over the funeral.

“
What
do you think you’ll do now?” one of her brothers asked
her after the funeral. “The house passed on to you, I don’t
think there’s any problem with you staying there.”

“
I
need to move on,” she told him at the restaurant where they had
gathered afterwards. “The house represents the past and my
childhood. It’s time to grow-up. I’m going to apply to
some of the colleges up north for graduate work in a scientific
field. If you remember, I always did want to become a scientist when
I was a little girl.”

“
When
you weren’t talking about becoming a ballerina,” her
brother laughed.

*****

David’s
idea for a dating site lingered on for a few weeks before it caught
fire. He didn’t think it was going to take off and had made
plans to quietly take the site down and refund the money of everyone
who had signed up. It seemed like it would be impossible to teach
engineers and computer coders how to interact with women. In spite of
the money they made, it was not easy to attract women who were not in
the computer and scientific fields to the men who were. David was on
the verge of considering the project a total loss when something very
strange happened.

After
Jada had buried her mother, she went home and tried to decide what to
do. The house represented her past life, all the aspirations her
parents had for her and how she had lived growing up. Singing in
choir on Sunday, studying hard through the week. It was time for a
change. She knew she would have to sell the house and most of what
was in it. Her father had bought it back in the sixties and she no
longer wanted anything to do with it. Her brothers agreed with her on
selling it, they already had the things they wanted out of it. She
contacted a realtor and put the house up on the market. Three months
later she sold the house and split the money with her siblings. The
market had been very good for sellers that year.

One day,
David came in early on a Monday morning, trying to decide how he was
going to tell the board of directors of his company that the “geek
dating” website, as he called it, was a flop and should be
scuttled. It wouldn’t make him look good in front of the
investors, but it was something that needed to be done. He booted up
his computer, sighed and called up the numbers for the weekend.