Page 29 of Mr. Wicked

“A lot more,” Holden said. “There’s also this.” Still holding the paper, he pushed it toward me. “The day after your little bachelorhood toast aired, this article was published in the Boston College newspaper. A paper that’s distributed to students and faculty and available on their website. We’ll continue after you’ve finished reading it.”

It didn’t matter whether I wanted to read it; he wasn’t giving me a choice.

Hooked for Life or Marketing Ploy?

If you’ve been online in the last twenty-four hours, then there’s a very good chance you saw the toast Grayson Tanner, Boston’s Biggest Bachelor and cofounder of Hooked, gave aboard the megayacht he’s currently on. One can assume Tanner, 30, rented the yacht for the week, which comes—to my estimate—at a whopping price tag of $100,000 minimum. In the video, he’s holding a tumbler, filled with an amber-colored liquid—if I had to guess, it’s the Macallan 1962, which sold for $1.9 million at auction—along with a cigar—possibly a King of Denmark that goes for over $4,000 apiece. Why am I listing the possible price tags? Because given the timeline of events, I can assume this was the way Tanner chose to celebrate the international launch of Hooked, the company he started with Easton Jones and Holden Hayes while in their last year of graduate school at Harvard.

If you’re not in the dating scene or you don’t use technology to help aid you in that department, then let me tell you a little about Hooked. Within the last month, since its international launch, Hooked is now considered the top dating app in the world. When a user signs on to the app, there are three divisions to choose from: one that’s just for people looking to hook up, another for marriage, and a third that’s solely dedicated to single parents. According to Hooked’s website, Grayson was the inventor of the marriage division. Isn’t that ironic. For a man who, according to multiple sources, has never been in a relationship and, by the looks of it, isn’t even interested in settling down.

So that brings me to the title of this article.

Tanner represents a brand, specifically the branch of the company that he founded, that promotes relationships, marriage, and monogamy. But any person who has access to the internet can clearly see that Tanner’s promoting a brand he doesn’t use. That Boston’s Biggest Bachelor invented a software that’s intended to match you with your soon-to-be significant other, someone you’re, according to Hooked, statistically compatible to marry, yet he doesn’t utilize it. Dare I say, Tanner doesn’t even believe in it? Instead of practicing what he preaches, he would rather reap the benefits of his false advertising and spend the millions he’s raked in from us—his members—to cruise the waters of France with a plethora of women. Half a dozen, to be exact.

So here lies the ultimate question: If the cofounder of Hooked doesn’t believe in the service he’s selling, is Hooked really a viable option for dating? Can this app fulfill what they’re promising in their branding and messaging? And is it worth the monthly subscription fee Hooked charges, a fee that’s affording one of the owners a vacation that most of us could only dream of? Or is Hooked nothing more than a marketing ploy to make the Hooked owners even richer than they already are?

Hooked users, if you’ve had your membership to the marriage division for more than, say, six months, I think it’s safe to admit you already know the answer to that question. I know what I’ll be doing the moment I submit this article to my editor. Bye-bye, Hooked.

It infuriated me that someone had the balls to write an article off the Celebrity Alert, sharing information that was only partially true, and omitting details that would change the whole direction of their story. Rather than track down the facts, the student, probably a senior, was looking for some notoriety and a job with a local news outlet that might see the story, like the Boston Globe.

Still, the anger pulsed through me.

I ground my teeth together before I said, “It’s a school newspaper. Who gives a fuck about what they print. I’m sure only a handful of people even read it—”

“Seven million people care, apparently,” Easton said. “That’s how many times it’s been shared as of this morning. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of TikToks that have been made in your honor and how Boston’s Biggest Bachelor is now a trending hashtag.”

Seven fucking million?

Goddamn it.

“Who wrote it?” I asked.

“Who wrote it?” Holden mirrored, like the question was ludicrous.

“Yes. Who the hell wrote it.” I hissed. “I want to know the name of the journalist, so when I call the paper and threaten libel—”

“One, you’re not going to do that,” Laura stated. “Whomever the journalist was, we’ll never know since they published the article anonymously. After a little digging and pursuing some contacts, I learned that the name will never be disclosed. It was either a student or a faculty member, but it doesn’t really matter. They have every right to voice their opinion. It’s freedom of speech.”

It did matter because I wanted to rip their fucking face off.

They had every right to share their opinion, if their opinion was only of me, but to bring Hooked into the equation and challenge the integrity of our business, that was where they crossed the line.

I mashed my lips together. “Tell me the ramifications of this, Laura.”

She glanced at her tablet. “The marriage division is down over twenty percent.” She looked up. “And it’s dropping more and more every hour.”

I shoved my hands under the table and squeezed them, my fingers bound like individual padlocks. “What about the other two arms?”

“Single parent is steady, but we suspect a decline to start immediately—today, tomorrow at the latest,” Holden said, the tension obvious in his voice.

Easton pushed back from the table to cross his legs. “The hook-up division has decreased a bit, too, among our longtime US-based users. Those numbers are offset by the new international memberships that are rapidly coming in, but still, the cancellations are happening just as fast.” He blew out a mouthful of air. “And there are a lot of them.”

This business meant everything to the three of us.

It was our dream. Our livelihood. Our future.

When we started this company, we worked out of our apartment, which then led to the top floor of this building, and we’d recently bought the entire high-rise. We employed more than two hundred people. We had plans to keep growing.

The Celebrity Alert, the article in the school newspaper—they didn’t have the power to ruin us.

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