Page 2 of Love or Leave

Real life men.

Not the catalogue of creeps she'd found on the dating apps since her breakup.

She'd googled “how to meet men” and read a suggestion that she join some kind of sport. Seeing as the only two local sports that were still open for registration were volleyball and golf, she decided it would be safer to choose the sport where the ball wasn't being spiked at her face.

"Because it has to be easier to hit a ball that's not in motion."

Dr. Tanaka pulled her glasses off and squeezed the bridge of her nose. "This is because of that degenerate you broke up with, isn't it?"

Cara winced, but didn't deny it.

"Golf won't fix your life, Cara."

Cara stuck her chin in the air, as if the insult didn't bother her, even though she was fooling no one.

"Maybe not," she said. "But I've gathered endless data that says what I'm currently doing isn't working, either."

Dr. Tanaka searched Cara’s eyes for a moment before shaking her head. "Golf is dreadfully boring. The outcome is always the same. The ball goes into the hole, sometimes with slightly more efficiency."

Cara nodded as she slung her computer bag over her shoulder. "Still better than volleyball. And who knows, maybe my husband is there waiting for me."

"But he'd be a golfer," Dr. Tanaka said, her nose turning up.

Cara rolled her eyes. "I have to go where the men are to find a man. It's a matter of matching trajectories, like…" She paused a moment to develop a metaphor that Dr. Tanaka would understand, and a second later a lightbulb went off.

"Like traveling to Mars," Cara finished. "You can't just hop on a shuttle and take off. You need to wait for the planets to align and aim for where Mars will be when you get there."

"And the men you want are on Mars?"

Cara lifted a shoulder. "Mars is overflowing with men. I'm bound to be compatible with one of them."

Hopefully.

She didn't need perfect compatibility. Just someone who wanted the same things as her, and who she liked to hang out with. But she had to admit it would be helpful if she knewwhatshe was looking for. How do you find something if you don't even know what it looks like?

Most people her age at least knew who they were and what they wanted out of a partner. All Cara knew was that she was lonely and wanted her person. Someone to hang out with and talk to and laugh with and have fun. Someone to have kids with, to have the family she always wanted.

But first, she needed to gather more data. Test more waters. Find out what she could tolerate, and what she couldn't. And golf lessons were the perfect start.

"I always thought terraforming Mars was a fool's errand," Dr. Tanaka said, picking up her Dr. Who Tardis mug and warming her hands around it. "If you have the technology to turn Mars into Earth, why not just fix Earth?"

Cara narrowed her eyes and tossed her professor's opinion around her brain, wondering how that fit into her analogy. "Are we still talking about golf?"

"No, my brain stopped making sense of what you said a while ago."

Cara nodded. "Well, then, I better get going. My shuttle lands in thirty minutes and I don't want to walk in late and have all the Martians stare at me."

Dr. Tanaka gave a dismissive wave and turned back to her computer. "Try not to injure yourself."

"You can't injure yourself at golf."

"That's the consensus, but then again, golf hasn't met the likes of you."

Welp, her worst fears came true.

Cara walked into the golf center three minutes late. The instructor in the center of the tiny room stopped whatever speech he'd been giving and looked at her, causing the mass of heavily cologned Martians, all wearing slightly different versions of the same polo shirt, to turn and stare at her.

She swallowed the dread and awkwardly lifted the corner of her mouth as she shuffled toward the group, pressing between two guys and trying to blend in.

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