Page 21 of The App Trap
“I guess,” I replied, hooking it with mine in ever such a lacklustre fashion.
“Keep in touch, you,” he said, followed by a tightly-pressed kiss on the lips.
Yum. Raspberry lip balm. Hmm, I think I prefer that to watermelon.
As he climbed into his Uber XL, I could feel myself drifting to the dark side and almost felt the Darth Vader helmet slide down on to my head, like in that old space movie (I forget the one).
Chapter
Eight
Aweek later, I was still thinking about Harry, 31. He was no longer playing the best supporting actor role in my perfect life fantasy, despite sleeping with the director as it were. I even messaged him just to check that he hadn’t made the mistake of a lifetime, but he was adamant that he was going to go out with that other clown he had lined up.
Screw it, then.
I emailed an army of potential love interests and joined a flotilla of different online dating apps. Harry made a cameo appearance on quite a few of these new apps I was using, so I took that to be the final nail in the coffin with regard to any further reconciliation talks. Damn, he really got under my skin.
Whilst I was trying to initiate a conversation with pretty much every active profile around, I thought I’d try and score another date with Ben to tide me over. I needed a pick-me-up date. As dangerous as he seemed, it felt to me like there was some unfinished business that I just had to, well… finish. A date was arranged for Saturday night, due to me not having any solid Friday night plans that would put me out of action for the weekend (I did tend to go a bit Ferris Bueller on Friday nights sometimes). Luckily, Ben needed to fill his dating diary too. Presumably he only had two or three dates that day, the poor sod?
Literally minutes after I’d secured the date with Ben, a fresh face that went by the name of Luke, 33 messaged me on one of my new apps. Ooh, he had that ‘new-profile’ smell and everything. I fancied Luke, almost on a par with Ben.
The messaging was rallying superbly, until I mentioned that he was my first match on that particular app.
‘Is there a prize?’he asked.
‘Yeah, here’s a dick pic!’I joked, whilst simultaneously sending a picture of Dick Van Dyke through the dating app.
The problem with that was that it arrived in Luke’s inbox heavily pixelated, because in order to be able to send pictures with pixels in a decipherable resolution, one had to pay a subscription.
A message came back:‘Disappointing.’
After a lot of ‘No, no, no’s’, I’d managed to smooth that little obstacle over, but another problem arose. We chatted further, and I was treading very carefully. Eventually, Luke told me that he would quite like to go out on Saturday night. So, I did the dishonourable thing and blew Ben off for what I saw as a more exciting experience––a date with someone brand new. I didn’t feel that bad, though, considering I knew that Ben definitely had back-up(s).
As I was chatting to Luke, I texted Ben in tandem to tell him that I was going to have to work late on Saturday night.As predicted, he didn't seem to mind, and like I knew, he had a couple of reserve dates stacked up anyway. A couple. Crumbs.
Fine. However, I still felt a slight shudder of unjustifiable jealousy flush my cheeks.
Luke and I arranged to meet somewhere that was supposed to be equidistant from each other, but when I finger-measured the distance on my Google map, I saw that the chips were stacked considerably in Luke’s favour. Cheeky bastard.
I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I wanted to get out of this date. I seemed to be going through the motions with this one. However, after the exciting initial couple of days, the message chat did actually start getting a bit racy, which kept my attention.
Maybe it was the thrill of the challenge of finding someone new to date? There was no real spark like there had been with Ben and Harry, but the fact that Luke looked like he’d be someone I’d struggle to keep up with sexually made me want to meet him.
My outlook on dating was already shallower than a beetle’s bath. Dating apps seemed to be getting a reputation as sex tools within my circle of friends, so a lot of users were focussing on that aspect, expecting booty calls to be the norm.
I had come from having almost no romantic contact for the best part of a decade, to having the opportunity of going out with a different guy every single night if I so desired. As I was fairly new to it all, I was understandably getting way too excited and just grabbing dates willy-nilly, like some kind of demented contestant onSupermarket Sweep. It was inevitable that eventually, I wouldn’t be able to carry everyone in my virtual trolley.
Saturday night.
It had been a quiet week on the dating front, so I was quite excited to meet this fresh face. The message pace between Luke and I had been stepped up during the week and it had come out that he, like Ben was quite into the fetish scene, so I figured at least we shouldn't run out of conversation too quickly.
True to form, I arrived early. Luke turned up on time and had texted his request for a pint of Peroni beforehand, so there was no awkward bar chat. I had gone straight to the table, where I practiced my welcome wave (in my head). For the record, I went for the ‘Luke Skywalker signalling to R2-D2 at the Sarlacc pit’. It seemed fitting.
Luke was sleight in build. He had a close-shaved head and neatly-trimmed stubble to match, his arms covered in a gallery of bright, fresh-looking tattoos. He had piercings in painful looking places such as through the stringy bit behind his top lip and even through the web between two of his fingers. He was sporting a flesh tunnel in each ear as well, with some home-made looking jewellery filling them up. It did make me wonder what else he had pierced
With that amount of body modification, I would have thought that he’d ooze confidence. That couldn't have been further from the truth. Luke was achingly shy and didn't really say much at all. In fact, the most noise that I got out of him was when he received a phone text and let out a short snigger without even bothering to explain why.
There was a bit of polite chat after a couple of drinks, but his mind seemed to be on something else, so consequently there was zero connection happening. I was in the middle of ripping the remains of the label from my beerbottle due to sheer boredom, when I felt the unmistakable vibrate of a text against my thigh. I didn't want to check it at the table just in case it was a stray number from a previous or future date, so I faked going to the toilet. It was from Ben.
