Page 46 of Single-Minded
The drive to Tampa is about an hour, which gives me plenty of time to think about the insanity of going on a blind date, arranged by my gay ex-husband, with a twenty-one-year-old college student—and psych myself up for the evening. I need to check off the quarterback on my Naughty Nine list, so I put the fact that he’s unbelievably young—not to mention Michael’s idea of a good date for me—out of my head. As I pull in to the parking lot of his apartment complex, something dawns on me for the first time…I wonder what’s in it for him.A thing for older women? The hope that Michael will give him some airtime? I’m in no position to judge someone else’s motives, being that I’m only here to satisfy some silly requirement on the Naughty Nine list.
After climbing two flights of stairs, I’ve arrived at the door of 3K, Dane’s apartment. Thumping hip-hop seeps down from upstairs, there are pizza boxes and beer bottles on the stair landings, and the place has the sort of beigey, run-down, burritos, old cigarettes, and vomit aura of every college apartment complex you’ve ever seen or lived in. And can’t wait to escape the second you get your diploma.
What in the hell am I doing here?
I knock on the door and it takes Dane a good thirty seconds to answer. I’m remembering I saw a Waffle House on the side of I-75 on the way up here and fantasizing about drowning my dating sorrows in a double order of hash browns, just as Dane finally opens the door. Another ten seconds and I would have lost my nerve and headed back home.
“Hey,” he says, “thanks for driving so far.” Okay, good start. He’s polite. Well, polite-ish. He’s pretty tall, probably six-four, with the strong, chiseled chest and arms of a guy who’s been doing two-a-days since he was about five. He’s wearing a USF T-shirt and baggy athletic shorts. So, it’s not aformaldinner party. I’m feeling a bit overdressed in my wrap dress and heels.
Dane’s hair is dirty blond, and he’s got the patchy starter beard of a teenager. He motions for me to come inside, grinning adorably. Nice smile. Great teeth. He’s wearing some kind of headset, with the microphone pushed up. Like the kind coaches wear on the sidelines.
He steps back from the door, and I notice the clunky blue cast on his left foot.
“No problem,” I say. “How’s your foot?”
“Uh, it sucks. But the painkillers are cool,” he says, dragging his foot back to the couch. I follow him inside and close the door behind me. “You look pretty hot,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say, feeling weirdly self-conscious as I look around the room. Oh gawd,he’s so young.
The apartment is heavy with the gaminess of testosterone laced with pot, decorated with liquor bottles and dirty laundry, and dark. Bent white blinds drawn closed cover the windows. He sits down on a brown-and-orange-flowered velveteen sofa that predates him by a couple of decades, and props his cast up on a dinged-up coffee table with brass detail on the corners. I sit down at the far end of the sofa, and check out the apartment. The furniture is mismatched, banged up, and solely functional. But he has a huge TV mounted to the wall, another gigantic TV perched on a stand on top of a black entertainment unit right below it, a massive sound system, and three different gaming systems—it’s a virtual shrine to manly electronics.
“Are you a meat lover?” he asks casually. He checks his phone and then sets it down on the coffee table next to another headset like the one he’s wearing.
“What?” I ask. Gross. What is this, some kind of pervy frat boy come-on?
“Pizza,” he says. “Are you okay with the Meat Lover, or do you want something else, like cheese or veggie? Lotsa girls like the veggie.”
“Oh,” I say, embarrassed. “Anything’s fine, thanks.”
He picks up his phone and calls in the pizza order. Two pizzas, both covered in meat.
“You want a beer?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say. This date will go easier with alcohol. He stands up and hobbles over to the refrigerator, his cast clunking on the tile floor. He pulls out two bottles of beer, and now I feel guilty, I should have offered to get up. The poor guy has a broken foot, after all. He twists the caps off the bottles and hands one to me.
He sinks back down into the sofa, grabbing a remote off the table. The TV is on, and a buff, animated soldier loaded down with machine guns and grenades shifts back and forth on screen. The soldier looks antsy, like he really needs to find a restroom or something.
“We’re going to playCall of Duty: Advanced Warfarewith my clan,” says Dane.
“Clan?” I ask, horrified. “LiketheKlan?”
“Naw,” he says, “that’s fucked up. We’re playing with my clan, my crew, my boys.” I must still look confused. “My friends,” he clarifies.
I feel about seventy right now.
Dane hands me a headset, like the one he’s wearing, “Here ya go. Put it on.”
“Oh, I’m not really much of a video game player,” I say, fiddling with the headset.
“That’s okay,” he says. “We really just need a fill-in. We’ve got a ranked match tonight streaming on Twitch and Matty got carpal tunnel.”
The only three words I understood in that sentence wereokay,really, andmatch.Oh, andcarpal tunnel.What the hell is Dane talking about?
“Huh?” I say eloquently.
“Just put it on,” he says. “It’s cool, I’ll help you out. We’ll do all the work. We just needed another warm body so we didn’t get disqualified on this round.”
“That sounds important,” I say, “and I don’t want to mess it up for you.” Actually, it sounds pretty ridiculous, but I’m keeping my mouth closed on that one.
