Page 15 of Her Football Star Ex

He unlocked the screen and showed it to me. “It’s a dating app.”

I pulled my head back, surprised. “You signed up for online dating?”

He shrugged, his cheeks coloring. “Arianna was giving me a hard time last week about never going out with girls even though I’m thisbig starreceiver.” He did air quotes when he said the last three words. “So I decided to sign up for this to prove a point.”

“Arianna got you to sign up for this?” I asked. Arianna was my baby sister who was also Cole's best friend.

“Yeah.”

“But aren’t you worried women will just fill up your inbox because you’re the wide receiver for the Dragons?” That was enough to keep me off online dating.

He shook his head. “Not yet. I’m using my middle name Tyler instead of Cole, and I haven’t posted any photos of my face.”

I furrowed my brow. “You can do that?”

He shrugged. “No one stopped me.”

Then to demonstrate, he tapped his screen a few times to bring up what I guessed was his dating profile.

There was a photo of him with a hat on taken from behind, sitting on his fishing boat. And another of him holding the bonnethead shark that he’d caught on his big fishing trip to Florida last spring—his face blocked out enough by the huge fish that you’d only know it was him if someone told you.

He scrolled down the page so I could see what he’d said about his interests and hobbies and what he was looking for in a woman.

“Everything in my profile is all the real me,” he said. “I just didn’t talk about my job or show my face.”

“And it’s working?” Because if I was ever going to try dating again, itwouldbe nice to find someone interested in me as a human and not just me as the famous football player.

He lifted a shoulder. “It’s going all right. I haven’t been trying too hard to set up actual dates or anything since the season is still busy and I want to focus on that,” he said. “But I’ve matched with a few women.”

“So how does it work?” I asked.

It was probably ridiculous that I was a thirty-one-year-old man with no idea how online dating even worked these days, but I hadn’t had to know about it before since I’d found Emerson so long ago.

“Well,” Cole said, tapping on his screen a few more times. “On this particular app, you have to match with someone before you can message them. And to do that, the app presents you with a photo of the person, their name, and age.”

I watched as he brought up a photo of a girl with black hair named Ashanti who was twenty-three and lived in the Denver area.

“So you decide whether to match with them based only on the photo, name, and age?”

“No, if you want to see more before swiping, you can check out their profile.”

He tapped the screen a couple of times and brought up Ashanti’s profile so we could see that she was into snowboarding and football.

“And if you like what you see, you swipe right?” I asked, remembering some of what I’d heard the single guys on the teams talk about.

“Yeah, and if you aren’t interested, you swipe left,” Cole said.

He must have liked what he’d seen in that girl’s profile because he swiped right.

“That’s efficient,” I said when a photo of another woman with blonde hair and blue eyes showed up on his screen.

“When I first heard about this app, I thought it was shallow.” He shrugged and swiped left. “But most people go off looks in the first place so it’s pretty realistic, I guess.”

“So can you message that girl you swiped right on a moment ago?” I asked.

“Only if she matches with me,” he said, swiping left on another girl. “Meaning that she will have to swipe right on my photo as well.”

“I see,” I said.

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