unknown*user: You've been very quiet today, is everything okay?
I felt the message from James ping up on the phone in the bottom of my bag at the exact moment I met my last-minute date — Andrew, a thirty-five-year-old mortgage broker who was about three inches shorter than he'd written on his online dating profile, but took my mind off the predicament with James for long enough to persuade me to meet him for a drink. He'd managed to make me chuckle with his messages and didn't appear too offensive-looking in his profile pictures. Not that that means anything these days, of course; those profile pictures could easily have been ten years old or more. Still, I figured I could give him a chance since I had nothing else better to do.
"Most girls don't like to meet on the first day, I was surprised when you said yes," he laughed as I introduced myself to him, and he ordered me a glass of white wine without even asking what I wanted to drink first.
"Well, I was free, you were free, this seemed like a nice pub," I offered in way of a response, cocking my head and eyeing the dated, faded interior that in absolutely no way matched the modern-looking exterior. I'd been wrong about the pub and it was becoming more and more apparent that I'd been wrong about the man, too. I was sure of that right when he said: "I don't really like red lipstick, but you wear it well, I suppose."
It's astonishing what you can learn - and dislike - about someone while you wait to be served at the bar.
"So, what do you do for work?" he rambled, waving a £20 note around in a bid to get the barmaid's attention.
Inwardly, I groaned. We were about to do the dating merry-go-round of bullshit dating questions: career, home, family life, favourite sexual position — I was sure of it.
"I'm a personal assistant. And you're a mortgage broker, right?" I replied, checking out the clock on the wood-panelled wall behind him and wondering how long you were morally obligated to stay on a first date before making up a crappy and obviously fake excuse to leave.
"Yep, mortgage broker. Do you need a mortgage?" he laughed and snorted, wrinkling his nose up as he did so. If I'd have been into him, the snort and the nose-wrinkle would've been quite cute, but I wasn't, so I just found it repulsive. I'd also noticed that his socks didn't match, and that his jeans were ever-so-slightly too short in the leg. Not that those were viable reasons not to date someone, obviously, but they were certainly added to the mounting pile of reasons why I didn't want to date him.
"Nope, but I'll give you a call if I do!" I fake-laughed back, without a snort. My mind was somewhere else. Specifically, it was wondering whether or not forty-five minutes was too short for a first date. It had taken us almost twenty minutes to introduce ourselves, grab drinks at the bar, and eventually find a table that wasn't taken/sticky/covered in an assortment of empty and abandoned glasses. I reckoned I could probably survive another twenty/twenty-five minutes if I squeezed a second large glass of wine in. Thirty minutes, at a push.
"So, do you live alone?" His voice brought me back from my escape-plan thoughts.
"Yep, all alone. You?" I knew I was giving him barely anything to work with, but I also couldn't be bothered with the small talk. He wasn't a bad-looking man: dark, short-shaved hair, and a face that was kind and warm. His eyes crinkled up at the edges when he smiled, which I quite liked. He seemed genuine. On any other day, I might've been a little interested in him. Today, however, my body longed to be lounging on my couch, trashy reality TV playing in the background; and my mind wanted to be entertained with the mysterious, anonymous new friend in my life and all of his witty conversation starters. Maybe if I was a real bore to this Andrew fellow, he'd make his excuses and leave? Just how immoral was it to deliberately tank a date you weren't at all into?
"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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