Swiped: The brand new rivals-to-lovers, slow burn, STEM rom-com by Paula Rogers

Author:Paula Rogers [Rogers, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Choc Lit Contemporary Romance: A Joffe Books Company
Published: 2025-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The next morning, Nat watched as Tracy Goodwin-King and the BuzzFill crew set up lights, mics, and an unbelievable amount of cables as they readied the BeTwo office rooftop for the interview. Whither, Weather didn’t have an office, and apparently, Rami had felt that being outdoors was an adequate gesture toward neutral territory. At least the BeTwo billboard wasn’t in view, even if part of Nat wished that it were.

Justin and Jo rushed around making notes on the instructions and taking pictures for the BeTwo socials. They seemed to be avoiding her on some instinctive, animal level, and Nat had noticed that they were leaving her out of any of the shots. She could guess why they weren’t speaking to her, and as for making sure she wasn’t in the pics — that was probably because she couldn’t stop pacing and because she was wearing every hour of her sleepless night under her eyes.

Tracy and V, the green-haired producer from Tech-Talk, approached Nat with a clip-on microphone.

“So glad we’re doing this outside,” said V, squinting into the bright sunlight. “A lot of these tech offices have glass walls everywhere, which, hello? San Andreas Fault?”

Nat’s stomach gurgled loudly. Had she eaten since the pizza with Rami? She didn’t think so. V eyed her with what looked to Nat like fear.

Tracy struck a confident pose and hit Nat with a glowing smile. “So, this is just a natural, friendly chat today, OK? Our audience wants to know how you’re doing, how the dates are going, and if you’ve met anyone promising.” She nudged Nat with a playful elbow. “Have you?”

Nat stayed quiet, staring at the microphone clipped to her shirt.

“Have you met anyone promising?” Tracy repeated, her smile starting to crack into a more aggressive, manic energy.

Nat’s eyes searched Tracy’s flawless skin as she wondered how to even answer that question. Yes, she had met men who had seemed promising. But then, pretty much the moment she’d met them, all of the promise had gone down in flames faster than someone posting a nuanced opinion on the internet.

So, where did the problem lie? Her profile had been specifically engineered to get the most matches from the top users on the app. She had basically fed her app’s data back to itself — it should have been a perfect closed loop of victory. Yet her dates had been disasters and almost all of her messaging had gone nowhere. Rami’s words rose in her mind in spite of her best efforts to push them away. Either her user pool was really just that bad, or there was something wrong with the approach, aka her app. Now she stared down the barrel of two options for an existential crisis — A) an entire segment of the human population, namely cis-het men, were irrevocably inept, or B) her entire career was.

But of course, there was a third option for what the problem could be — the problem could be her. Even a city full of

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