User Unknown

Chapter 8: Choices

"Yep, all alone. How about you? What's the family look like? Siblings?" he asked.

I knew it: career, home, family. He'd be asking about my favourite sexual position in no time at all. Maybe I should save us both the time and just ask him instead.

"I live alone, I have a younger sibling who I bicker with constantly, and my parents are still married but hate each other. You?" I replied, much more snidely than I'd planned. If there had been an award for worst chat on a date ever, I'd have won it. I even berated myself as he stood up and scraped his chair noisily across the grubby tiled floor: Why aren't you being kinder to this man? You're better than this. You've got better chat than this!

"Do you want another glass of wine? You've finished yours already," he offered, waving his hands towards the direction of my now-empty glass, the contents of which I'd gulped down in almost record time. "And no, no siblings for me. My mother lives in a residential home, my father died a couple of years ago. That's the problem with geriatric parents: they die when their kids are still relatively young. Are you planning on starting a family soon? Is that in your future? You'll be in the geriatric category soon."

As he gabbled on, I wondered if I could muster up enough brain-power to telekinetically pick up the discarded bottle of wine from the next table over and smash it right over his head. I was now starting to detest him. I wasn't exactly date of the century, granted, but the man in front of me had just called me a geriatric, and asked about my plans to have children, on our first date.

On our first fucking date.

"Yes, I'll have another glass of wine, please. You can hold the spunk. I'm not planning on geriatrically starting a family today!" I delivered the biggest fake smile I could muster along with my sarcastic line, and I could tell I'd probably overstepped the mark. I watched him nod, speechless, and then walk over to the bar, grabbing his phone from the pocket of his jeans and no doubt requesting his own escape plan be put into motion.

So, I reached for my phone too.

anon~girl: Sorry about being quiet. Very busy day. I'll give you a shout when I get back home.

As much as I tried, I couldn't stop thinking about the prospect of James being married. Visions of the faceless-but-not man playing with his children on a lush green lawn surrounded by a white picket fence played like a movie trailer in my mind, tormenting me every time I thought about sharing some funny anecdote of my day with him. I wanted things to go back to how they were before he dropped 'dad' into our conversation, but I couldn't. I just couldn't get past it. It was like a ghost that kept hovering around in the back of my mind, haunting me with dirty thoughts of infidelity every time I let myself dare to think of him.

unknown*user: OK. I hope you're having a good time whatever you're doing.

I jammed my phone back into my bag as Andrew came back to our table with new drinks.

"Hey, listen, something's come up and I'm going to have to go." He avoided eye contact as he spoke to me, busying his hands and eyes by placing the drinks on the table and gathering up his wallet, keys and phone. "I've paid for these drinks already so you can have them if you want? I've got an Uber on the way, terribly sorry."

"No worries at all. I hope all is well!" My response was far more chipper than it should have been, but I couldn't mask the relief I felt over no longer having to sit across from the table and pretend to be interested in him. It was my own fault. I knew the date would be a bad idea before I'd even text my agreement to it, but I needed to do something to get James out of my mind, if only for a little while.

And I still did.

Grabbing my phone and the full glass of wine, I texted and drank. Not James this time, though. I had an itch that only one person could scratch. And that person would require a pint of snakebite-and-black ...

**** This is the [relatively] clean version of User Unknown. The rest of this chapter is explicit and will be featured in the full book, available on Amazon, coming soon! ****

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