The Science Of Love: A Billionaire BWWM Romance Read online

  David told her good-bye and walked away, almost skipping on his way back to the apartment. By the time he was unlocking the door he had been married to her for ten years in his mind. They had four beautiful children and lived in the nicest neighborhood in San Francisco with a big house where she could teach dance and play Go whenever she wanted. They would have a bedroom separate in one corner so the kids wouldn’t bother them while they were making love all night long.

  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.

  Chapter 3

  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.

  He almost fell out of his chair.

  The numbers for the website were astronomical. It had taken off in a twenty-four hour period and gone viral. Engineers and computer specialists were signing up in droves. Women without technical backgrounds were flocking to it. Somehow the right combination of factors had struck and they had a winner. David emailed the numbers to everyone who was slated to be in on the daily meeting and printed them out just to be safe. He walked into the meeting while shaking and happily delivered the good news to the board. He ended his presentation by telling them they needed to act fast to keep the momentum going or they would lose it for sure. There were plenty of other dating sites which could learn and adapt from what they were doing. The board voted unanimously to give him whatever support he needed.

  Jada resigned from her school teaching position a few months after selling the house. There was no point staying in Mississippi after her parents had passed on. She thought about what to do next and decided to go north. Not back to Ohio, where she had started college, but over to Pennsylvania where she wanted to try and be accepted into one of the prestigious scientific institutes which were located there. She had her eye on Carnegie Mellon, but didn’t know if it was the right place for her. She would travel to Pittsburgh, find a place to live and start the application process. There was nothing to be gained by staying in Mississippi. With the money from the sale of the house, she was able to pay-off what remained of the education loans. She had decided against going into debt if she would aim for a scientific degree.

  David found his company a hot item after years of struggling along. Suddenly, he was getting calls from prospective investors and media figures wanting to know how his geek dating site had become all the rage. In truth, he had no idea what had happened. Somehow the site had been picked up by one engineer, who showed it to another and then the whole IT industry knew about it. The key factor seemed to be men actually finding women to who would go out with them. Most of the other sites excluded eighty percent of the men using them and the top twenty had their pick of the women signing up. In a strange way, their site had found a way around it.

  Jada arrive in Pittsburgh when it was cold, in the depths of the winter. She found a motel room where she could stay until she had a place to rent permanently. The city was bustling and located on the banks of the river. She loved the hills around the city and the buildings inside it. But she needed income and a way to start the school application process. Becoming a teacher in Pennsylvania was not easy and involved taking a battery of expensive tests if you transferred in from another state. She lacked the time and money to do that. She spent her days searching on line for jobs she felt she could do. And at long last Jada focused in on an area she had some experience: dance.

  David decided if one dating website could do well, maybe another could do
even better. He bought a company which specialized in dating to the health care community. The focus was not totally dissimilar. He did not publicly let it be known he was buying the site until after a few weeks had passed so they could figure out whether or not the same methods would work for it. Two weeks into the transition, the site took off again and became highly successful. Lighting had struck twice in the same place and David realized he had a winning combination of programming and audience which could make him rich beyond imagination.

  Jada found a job teaching dance to suburban kids outside Pittsburgh. It took her a few weeks to locate a small dance studio where the young kids would show up in the evening, change into their dance clothes and learn the basic steps. Her gymnastic coach background helped and soon she was teaching at a small store-front dance school. It was a change from the loud and obnoxious high school students she had been dealing with. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a decent place to live in the city with a safe neighborhood. She was working to begin the application process on line, but was determined to obtain an advanced degree in a scientific field.

  The process of taking over most of the online dating market had begun slowly, but cascaded as David’s company started applying what they’d learned to other markets in the on line dating field. Within two years, they had applied everything to the new sites they had put up on the internet and we soon worth millions of dollars. The pace of growth was astronomical. David had to move the company headquarters. They moved all the way across the Midwest until settling on a building in downtown Pittsburgh. The move was covered in all the Pittsburgh media outlets and was the cause for much celebration.After the presentation was over when they moved into the new building, David decided to take his immediate staff to a small place near the center of town for dinner. They were quiet, not wanting to draw too much attention to their selves and drove individual cars to the location. David had some trouble finding place to park and put his SUV in the lot in front of a strip mall.