Page 14 of The App Trap
We arranged to meet at a famously cheap public house fondly nicknamed after a piece of dessert cutlery. It was a fleeting affair and a spontaneous last-minute date, so neither of us expectedanywhere too posh. Besides, you simply cannot sneeze at somewhere that does curry and a pint for just the right side of a fiver.
I started to feel nervous as memories of my introductory online date made me worry about what might be in store. Still, I can’t deny that I was excited. As I was about to learn, it didn't matter how painful an online date was, you’d always come back for more. And already I was not only hungry for more, but also for some aforementioned cheap curry and deliciously greasy poppadoms.
I arrived at the pub early and ordered a weak lager to slurp on whilst I waited for Ben. I didn't have to wait long. He turned up on time, dressed in his distinctive Steam-punk style and oozing sex appeal. I was loving his vintage vibe, jet-black hair, tied up in a springy, acceptable man-bun, dark, vampy eyeliner and one hell of a solid chest, teasing me with a peep through the slightly unbuttoned crisp, white flouncy shirt. He smelt like something you’d eat for dessert every day if you hadn’t just bought a three-month subscription to yet another diet app.
I was right. There was something about him that made him seem slightly dangerous and unpredictable, albeit in a playful way. Maybe it was because he was a few inches or so taller than me, conveniently positioning my eyes at just above chest height.
Luckily, the drinks arrived at the table to interrupt my creepy staring. A pint of craft lager for me and a Whisky Mac for Ben. God bless the ‘Spoons app.
Ben was straight to the point.
“You're my second date today, you know? Please lord, be better than the last one,” he said, jovially.
I genuinely didn't know how to react. I was not accustomed to this ‘doubling up’ that he spoke of so flippantly. I had to process this in my brain for asecond.
I realised that it was not like we were going out properly. He wasn’ttechnicallycheating on me, considering we’d just met each other, but still, it was just a bit of a weird opener. Thoroughly modern, but weird. So, although we didn’t have any sort of hold over each other, it still made me a tad huffy.
We sat down and Ben took his overcoat off to reveal his crisp, flouncy shirt clinging to his perfectly rounded muscles. He gave me a look as if to say‘I know’and I did my utmost to make out that I was looking everywhere except at his magnificent frame.
Out of politeness, I felt compelled to ask Ben how his previous date was, which was a sentence I never thought I’d be asking a potential love interest.
“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” winked Ben.
I laughed nervously.
We found ourselves a booth with high stools, away from the other seasoned punters with their bulbous, veined noses which looked like little Ordnance Survey roadmaps. Ben climbed up onto his stool, purposely showing me the rump of his thigh in his skinny jeans.
“You like?” he said in a delicious but fake French accent.
He took a slurp of his Whisky Mac and gave me another cheeky wink. The sight of his long eyelashes fluttering over those big puddles of brown that made up his eyes made me go all shuddery.
I completely fancied Ben from the off, and he was reeling me in more and more by the second, not least because he reminded me that he was something of a sexual deviant. From our previous conversations, I had already learned that he was a fetish scene enthusiast.
From what I could gather, this fetish scene seemed to me to be a kind of social arena exploding with someextremely open-minded types who were into alternative and quite frankly intriguing sexual practices. I had dabbled in this sort of thing in the past, but only at an embarrassingly novice level.
A guy I went to college with once tied me to my bedframe, utilising myTazandHomer Simpsoncomedy work ties. He also blindfolded me with aRupert the Bearstyle scarf. It was pathetic, really. I was hardly at ‘gimp’ level, not that that was something I aspired to be.
It didn't take long for Ben to divulge what kind of fetishes he was into. Some matched the sorts of things that had previously bought me moments of joy during two-minute clips I’d seen on the interwebs. Others just seemed downright terrifying.
“So, you thinkI’mcorruptible?” I said.
“In a good way. You just look like you’d be up for trying stuff. Stuff I like. Anyway, you got my attention because you were pretty much the only person not to have sent me a dick pic. Well, apart from the Dick Van Dyke one. I stole that joke, by the way.”
“You’re welcome to it, I stole it too. I’m a regular Robin Hood.”
“Are you saying I’m poor?”
Well, you haven’t bought a fucking drink yet,I thought, but didn’t say.
“Nooo,” I opted for instead.
He sniggered, still looking me over in that sultry, almost predatory way that was turning me on so much, then the topic of conversation moved on to what each of us did for a living––a topic that I had to say usually comes upbeforesexual preferences. Ben said that he was a master practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming.
NLP seemed to be quite popular these days—so muchso that even my mother had started to practice it. I always thought of it as something a bit like hypnosis, which made me wonder if that was why I didn’t really seem to care about buying all the drinks tonight.
As the evening progressed, Ben started to get more and more tactile, probably due to my outrageously flirtatious manner. The Whisky Macs had clearly made him a bit feisty too. Then he became serious. Really serious.
He pulled me close and whispered into my ear, asking me if I was okay with public displays of affection, albeit a couple of minutes too late. After a quick scan of the place and assessing how inebriated and into their own business people were, I nodded like a plastic animal stuck to the back shelf of a Nissan Sunny.
