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"I’ve actually had a few dates before this-"
"It’s not going to be long until you’re all used up," he continued, and my jaw nearly dropped. What thefuck?Was that what I had to look forward to now? This nasty attitude towards me, towards women in general...ugh. I winced, but before I could explain why, the waiter arrived to take our order and he loudly told him what we wanted to have. He stumbled over the pronunciation of some of the words and, tempting as it was to correct him, I decided it was best just to let it slide.
"So, what brings you back into dating?” He asked me, and I smiled and shrugged.
"I guess I’m just ready to find someone to settle down with," I replied, and he pulled a face.
"Can’t think there’s much good to settling down now," he remarked. "You must know how much fun there is to be had out there, right? You should go out and enjoy it. I know that’s what I’m planning to do..."
Under the table, I felt his slithering fingers brushing over my bare knee. I didn’t know whether he intended to do it or not, but nonetheless, I drew back from him at once. I had to repress a sigh of irritation. Great. Another guy who seemed to be after one thing and one thing only. That had been my problem with all of them so far, and frankly, I was getting tired of the boring innuendo and the assumption that I was looking for the same thing.
Nothing wrong with casual sex, but I had made it clear to all of these guys that I wanted something more. And they had just gone ahead and ignored that. No accounting for stupid, I guessed – even at this age, there were still some men who were thinking with their cocks first and foremost. Explained why they were all still single after all this time.
Though, in all fairness, one of them had actually forgotten to take off his wedding ring – he had tried to convince me that he was in the midst of a divorce, but I wasn’t sure that I believed that for an instant. He looked way too shifty when he tried to feed me that line for me to come close to believing him. He was a bullshitter, and he was trying to drag me in along on his bullshit, and I had no room for that in my life, not one little bit. Not any longer, at least.
We ate our food, and it was only alright, and he talked a lot about how he knew good authentic Indian food and that this was it, through and through. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had caught a glimpse of the packages they obviously heated up a lot of this stuff from in the kitchen when the door had swung open behind him. Maybe I should have – maybe that would have been enough to shut him up for a hot second, but I got the feeling that it wasn’t going to be anywhere near that easy.
When we had finished dinner, he insisted on paying, despite my protests; I had learned the hard way that when men paid for dinner, they usually expected a different sort of payment in return, and that was one that I had no actual intention of giving to him. Not in a million years. Even though he had been nudging in that direction since the moment he had walked into this place and laid eyes on me.
"My place isn’t far from here," he told me, leaning a little too close to murmur the words into my ear, to make sure that I reallygotwhat an amazing offer it was he was making me. Even if I had been looking for something casual, there was no way in hell I would have done it with him. Any guy that self-involved was going to carry that attitude right on over to the bedroom, and I was too much of an adult to put myself through the ritual humiliation of really bad sex these days.
"I think I’m just going to get a cab home," I told him firmly. His entire face dropped, like a kid who had just watched their scoop of ice-cream topple off the cone.
"But..." he tried to protest. I turned on my heel and swiftly walked away before he could make any further protests.Nope, nope, nope.I didn’t want to have to handle this. I didn’t want to deal with the baby-man-tantrum that I could tell he was on the brink of throwing. I knew it was coming, because I had already been forced to handle it a couple of times before this month, when I had apparently been giving offsignalsto the men I was with that had informed them that I wanted to go to bed with them.
Apparently, for guys this desperate, even the remotest amount of attention passed for signals, and I had figured out that the best way to get through to them was to be as blunt as I possibly could be.
No point getting their hopes up when I knew that nothing was going to come of this.
I made it back to my place before the sun was even down, and texted him to thank him for dinner but to let him know that I didn’t think we were a good match for one another. I blocked his number after that; I had already had to deal with some level of wheedling from the guys I had shot down before, and frankly, I didn’t have anything close to the energy to handle that right about now.
I took off my make-up and resented the effort I had put in to get ready when it had been a total bust. I should have just stayed at home, or called up Mallory and asked her to distract me for a while. I felt exhausted, and I had only been on five dates. But when all of them had been as rough as that, I felt like I couldn’t be blamed for feeling pasted.
Five dates. Five dates, and I hadn’t so much as kissed anyone yet. And damn, was there good reason for that; I could hardly imagine shaking hands with most of the guys I had met, let alone actually getting my face that close to theirs. Every time I found myself opposite one of them, I thought about whether I was reflected in this keen sense of desperation that I felt rolling off of them in waves. They might have been desperate for sex, while I was desperate for someone to settle down with, but maybe we weren’t too far removed, after all. Maybe we weren’t as far removed as I would have liked to think that we were.
Hopping in a quick shower before bed, I pulled the covers up to my chin and checked to see if I had received any more messages through the dating app while I had been out. Sure enough, there were a handful waiting for me. But I was too exhausted to think about replying to any of them. When I had started out on this a few weeks before, I had felt like I was riding high, reclaiming my mojo, coming back out and showing the world just what I could do. Now, I was considering joining a nunnery.
I slept in the next morning and texted Mallory to ask her to come out for a coffee with me; she agreed at once, and the two of us made it to our regular meeting spot, the Burgh, within a few minutes of one another.
"Well, well, well, if it isn’t the most popular woman in the city," she teased as she joined me.
"Oh my God, I wish," I groaned. "I feel like I’ve been stuck on these shitty dates like it’s Groundhog Day or something."
"So none of them have come to much?"
"None of them have come to anything," I sighed. "This guy last night, he made it pretty clear that he was just looking for someone to hook up with...."
"And did you?" She asked, leaning forward with interest.
"No!” I exclaimed defensively. "No, that’s really not my thing, you know that. I don’t...I want to know someone before I go there with them. And I didn’t want to get to know this guy for anything, seriously."
"That’s a shame," she sighed. "How many dates is that now?"
"Five," I replied, and I leaned my head on to my hands. I could hardly believe that I had made it to nearly a half-dozen dates without finding a single person who did anything for me. That felt like it had to go against some of the laws of nature, didn’t it? Or maybe the dating scene in Inverness was much worse than I had ever imagined it to be.
"I think most of them want a younger woman," I explained. "Someone they can actually see starting a family with. Or else...or else it’s just sex."
"Shit," she muttered, and she reached over to pat my hand. "You know it’s going to be alright, yeah? We’ll find you someone."
