Page 21 of Blindly Yours

You’d have liked me. Your dress was gorgeous. If I’d been there, it would have looked even better in a heap on my bedroom floor…

Ok. And that’s enough. I swipe that chat closed too and slide the phone away from me as I slump back in my chair. This is exactly why I haven’t dipped my toes into online dating until now. Behind a screen, you can say whatever you want. Apparently, Bloom doesn’t have the douchebag filter perfected yet.

I’ll just have to tell Junie it won’t work out for me. In-person connections are better. I want to look a man in the eye while he delivers a desperate pick-up line. That way he can look right back at me and see how pathetic he really is.

No one worth my time will see any value in dating apps anyway, right? If they’re like me, they’ll see how shallow it all is and search for a more genuine alternative.

Like an app that hides identity and appearance and all those shallow things.

I stare at my phone and chew on my lip.

There’s one person who joined Blindly for exactly that reason. It couldn’t hurt to give him a chance.

I chew harder.

But what if heisliving in his mother’s basement with a lap full of dollar-store snacks?

I sit up and close my fingers around my phone. No, he owns a business. He takes regular trips to the lake. He has his life together. And he’s been perfectly cordial so far.

I tap open the app and type a message below his from last night.

ASingleRose26

Can I ask you a few questions? I know this app is all about anonymity, and I’m not asking you to reveal your name or what you look like or anything, but I’d feel more comfortable if I knew some things about you first. When was your last relationship? What school did you go to? Do you live on your own? Are you secretly married?

I stare at his icon on the screen for twenty minutes while I finish my salad in silence. But there is no response.

Maybe I’ve been too forward? Maybe he doesn’t want to reveal too much about himself so quickly. He’s on the app to be mysterious anyway. I shouldn’t push to bend the rules he may have set for himself. I’ve scared him away already.

Or maybe he just has a nine-to-five job like the rest of the world.

I look at my watch to see that it’s almost one.

“Shoot.” I clear my salad box and toss it in the trash as I leap up from my seat. I have a client arriving in five minutes.

Junie catches me on my way down the hall. “Mr. Pearson is in the conference room waiting. I told him you’d be in soon.” She furrows her brow. “Everything alright?”

I fix my hair as I hurriedly sort the files in my arms. “Yes, just lost track of time. Thank you, I’ll go see him now.”

She nods, but as I turn away, she speaks up once more. “Oh, by the way. Miss Evangeline called. She’d like to meet with you this Saturday for her annual revisions.”

I pause and let my head fall to the side. Miss Evangeline is the tiniest, sweetest, elderly woman, and she’s a client who makes the companya lotof money each year with her extravagant investments, but she never visits our office. She always requests a personal meeting at her home two hours away in St. Cloud. And we always indulge her request because she’s literally our biggest client. And this year it’s my turn to make the trek to her offensively gigantic mansion to pet her three lazy corgis while she sips tea and tells me about her great-grandchildren’s latest cello recital.

There are worse ways to spend my time, but it’s still a perfectly good Saturday I’ll never get back.

***

Later that night, as I slide Daisy’s food bowl in front of her, my phone chimes, indicating a new message on Blindly.

I scramble to pick it up while Daisy scarfs down her dinner like she’s never eaten in her life.

BigSpoon92

Hey. Of course you can ask me those things. How could we get to know each other without asking any questions? I’m not trying to hide anything. I’m just avoiding the superficial, and pictures tend to really cloud a person’s judgment.

So, if it’s the pictures he’s worried about, maybe he isn’t the best looking. I take a deep breath. I can deal with that. Physical appearance isn’t everything.

Another message comes in.

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